Juicing Up Your Marketing With Social Media
While social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can seem like a virtual popularity contest they don’t have to.
Just like in real life, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have online, it matters what their quality is. That was part of the message delivered by Harry Gold, CEO and managing partner of the Boston-based marketing firm Overdrive Interactive, at a recent gathering of the Society of Professional Communicators in Worcester.
Friends are important, Gold said, but they aren’t the end-all be-all of a successful online marketing campaign. You can have 1,000,000 Twitter followers for your business, but if those followers don’t convert over to customers who spend money with you, they really aren’t that useful.
Special Sauce
So, if social media isn’t about building fans, what is it about? According to Gold, it’s about sprinkling a little social media marketing into everything you do.
In other words, make your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media pages part of everything that your business does.
Do your business cards have an invite to look you up on Facebook? What about your e-mail signature? Do you promote your Twitter account on your website and invite people to link content from your site to news sharing sites like Digg?
One of Gold’s buzz words is “chiclets,” which describes those little tiny icons that link you to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Over the last six to nine months chiclets have started popping up like crazy. They’re showing up on every major website and even appear at the bottom of the screen at the conclusion of the Nightly News with Brian Williams on NBC. And to Gold, they are the “unsung heroes of social media” because they connect your brand with all these sites, giving your business the chance to reach thousands or millions of new potential customers for zero cost.
But strategic social media marketing is more than just tiny icons. It’s about a new way of thinking, one where customers and potential customers become part of a brand and are involved in the creation of content and — most significantly — its promotion.
Fire Up Your Engine
For example, Gold told the audience about a project his firm did for motorcycle maker Harley Davidson. For the 2010 Harley catalog, the company invited customers to submit photos of themselves and their hogs. Thousands of images were collected and included as a tiled mosaic on the cover of the catalog. People featured can go online to a special microsite (www.harley-davidson-mosaic.com) and find their photo and share it with their friends. Print versions of the catalog were distributed at dealerships and went flying off the shelves as the people featured wanted a keepsake of their 15 minutes of cover fame.
The mosaic cover, with its elements of user-created content, is a great example of viral marketing that further enhanced the Harley brand and its already strong connection with customers.
Now, most companies don’t have the resources that Harley Davidson does. But every business creates some form of print collateral. Maybe there’s a way your business can take a page out of the Harley book and invite customers to submit photos that could be featured in your brochures. And then you can post your brochure online and include easy links for people to share that brochure with their friends on Facebook. With that simple scenario, you’ve just increased your connection with your highly engaged customers and potentially reached a group of prospects through Facebook. Not bad, right?
Now, Gold is the first to admit that Facebook and Twitter can’t replace traditional marketing like print advertising or direct mail. If those methods work, you should keep doing them. But, he said, now’s the time to start thinking of how you can add social media elements to those traditional marketing pieces.
“What you really need to get your head around is how you can infuse your marketing with social media tactics that give it a little more octane,” he said.
It’s easier said than done, of course. And you’re not necessarily going to see an immediate impact from adding chiclets to your website. The thing with social media marketing, he said, is that it takes time. For an immediate bump in sales, a big TV buy is probably still the way to go. But if you’re looking to build long lasting ties to your customers — and reach new ones — steadily weaving social media marketing into the fabric of your brand is the way to go.
Got news for our Digital Diva column? E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments