Social Media Channel

Last week I laid out the Top Five Elements to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy.  As important as it is to utilize all of those elements, their reach is limited without the secret sauce we'll look at today.  This secret sauce is not only a crucial ingredient to your social media marketing efforts, it's so fundamental that you'll wonder how people forget about it.

There are two main ingredients in the secret sauce.  The first ingredient is defining your overall business goals. It's amazing that this is overlooked so often, but that doesn't change the fact that it is overlooked.  Here are the most powerful questions you can ask before creating or launching a social media marketing strategy.

Do you remember life before fax machines, email and searching online? Do you remember making an appointment to see your doctor to get an opinion without being able to Google professional and everyday opinions on your computer first? It's like a movie you watched years ago with a plot that's vaguely familiar but has no relevance to your current life.  That's how you'll think of the current web versus the social web that's expanding daily.

The epicenter of the social web has become Facebook. You already know that over 500 million people use Facebook. Did you also know that people spend over 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month, or that Facebook just surpassed Google to be the #1 site on the internet?

It's Google and Facebook's world today and we just surf it. As a Facebook or Google user you win no matter what because they're building better products, but this world has not been peaceful since Google and Facebook have unofficially declared war on each other over the past few months. Most people have not noticed that it's even happening, but it will affect all of our online habits in the future. It will also affect the advertising you consume and the availability of your private information.

The larger a company is, the more it may feel it has to protect itself.  This is a valid first reaction, but don't let it keep your company out of the conversations that could be building your brand.  If Ford, Starbucks, Pepsi and even Old Spice can find ways to win by reaching out to consumers online, then you have everything to gain by jumping into the waters of social media marketing.

The largest perceived threat of social media to companies is loss of control around content.  The reality is that there is no control over content created outside the company that shines either a positive or negative light on the company.  But monitoring, listening, and engaging in the conversations about your company, your industry and your community pays ongoing dividends that only help if negative conversations ever arise.

 Even as more and more companies hire Community Managers to give them a social media presence, the general attitude towards social media is, "Everyone's doing it, so we need to do it too."  If this is where you're coming from, you're most likely to cover the tactics with little strategy and mixed results.  A better way to go about it is to follow these Top Three ways to build a kick ass social media marketing presence.

In 2009 Google Wave was heralded as a giant evolutionary step in how we would communicate and collaborate online. I admit to being one of the disciples of buzz who ate the hype and imagined a paradigm shift in how online communities would interact.  We were all wrong, but who knows what bricks Google Wave laid down for innovation towards the evolving road of how people use the Internet.

HTML5 promises to allow users to experience rich multimedia ads without ever leaving their browser. The question is: can HTML5 finally allow the user to talk to the advertiser? Let’s hope.