Social Marketing

Your Social Media Marketing Plan

By Terence on May 24, 2012 / Social Marketing / 3 Comments

Which comes first ~ the chicken or the egg?

How can you write an awesome social media marketing plan before being successful at social media marketing? How do you get to be successful at social media marketing without an awesome plan?

Simple: Ask someone who’s done it already.

This series of articles is written just for you ~ if you work in the Third Sector, want to create a Social Media Marketing Plan for a social enterprise, a more-than-profit company or a community organisation.

If you’re just in the business of selling more stuff to more people, this is still an excellent series of articles, but not for you.

I am going to provide you with a structured set of easy to follow techniques, processes, components and insights for social media to help you with your social media marketing planning.

With my help, you’re going to write an absolutely awesome Social Media Marketing Plan.

How to Create Social Media Guidelines

By Terence on May 10, 2012 / Social Marketing, Social Media Optimisation / 9 Comments

Tags: guidelines

Social Media Guidelines ~ have you got yours yet?

So why do you need them?

Because your prospective, current, and former employees, customers, supporters and vendors are already hanging out on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and many others.

What are they discussing about your organisation, your employees and your workplace? What are they sharing, right now, about you, your products, prices and practices?

And perhaps, more importantly, how are your people responding?

Having Social Media Guidelines and Policies in place doesn’t mean you can totally control your organisation’s online persona. But you do get to interact responsibly in the conversation which forms your image in the mind of your audience.

You can be helped, not hindered, by all your employees.

Why wait until a casual remark becomes a PR crisis?

Social Strategy – The Medium Is The Message

By Terence on April 10, 2012 / Social Marketing / 2 Comments

The medium is the message. ~ Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980)

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature who famously once said, “The medium is the message.”

What he meant was this ~

The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

Today, the meaning *is* the message. And the “message” of the Internet’s social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organisation.

Hopefully.

It promises radically more meaning ~ to make stuff matter again, in human terms, not just financial ones.

And that has never mattered more. Read More →

Social network-ing versus SEO

By Terence on March 9, 2012 / Search Engine Optimisation, Social Marketing / 2 Comments

Tags: SEO, social marketing

If you already have a website, and know anything at all about how to attract visitors, then you’ll know what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can do; even though you’re not an expert.

Social Strategy clients use both Social Media Marketing and SEO to bring visitors to their websites. There’s really no point in doing one without the other. But I have to tell you, SEO is not the key to success it once was.

Don’t get me wrong — SEO is something you need to implement properly to avoid missing out on all that organic search traffic — but these days most modern blogging platforms and CMS’s incorporate good on-page SEO principles into their basic design.

OK, it’s not quite as simple as that, but the theory goes, if you are prepared to wait long enough, all you need do is write and post interesting and relevant content, and as time passes you will build up a sufficient body of keyword-rich articles which will start attracting organic search traffic to your website.

Let me try and give you a fair appraisal of where SEO and Social Marketing have their strengths and weaknesses, and I think you will see how, these days, having a strong Social Strategy is more important than having strong SEO.