What I've Learned About Social Media

I was asked recently to pull together some thoughts on what I've learned while working with Social Media. It was meant to serve as a "how do you engage," and "what are some of the pitfalls." This is very basic social media 101. However, I figured I would share it as either a refresher course or an introduction for anybody that's interested. Feel free to comment or add to it. Here you go...
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What I’ve learned about social media:
For years, I’ve been experimenting with social networking and other web outreach media. If I’ve taken away one catch-all lesson, it’s that if there is a group of people together and communicating, there is a marketer wondering how they can best inject their message into that conversation.

Whether it’s sponsoring a 5k race, advertising at a ball game, commercials on TV, ads on a website or now injecting their message into web 2.0 media, marketers are always looking for an entry. Social “media” is no different.

For years, people have been networking through social sites like Classmates, MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook. Never has it been so easy to mass-update your friends yet still “keep it personal.”

With the newfound ease of managing large groups of friends, it has become easier to also grow your network to even more new friends that share common interests or objectives. The common thread of these networks is the desire to share or observe. As the phenomenon of social networking grew, so too did the sites and tools trying to tap into this rage. Specialized sites developed trying to tap into some of the most popular aspects of social networking such as opinion sharing, photo sharing, video sharing, audio sharing and even status sharing.

Some of these sites continue to try to do it all, like Facebook and MySpace, while other sites look to tap into a specific niche, such as:

• Blogging: WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal
• Photo Sharing: Flickr, Picassa, Webshots
• Video Sharing: YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler
• Information Sharing: Wikipedia, wikis
• Status (microblogging): Twitter, Plurk, identi.ca

It was only natural that communicators/marketers wanted to tap into these veins and begin sharing as well. But there was a lesson to be learned in this new arena. When people are sharing their personal thoughts and having personal conversations, the traditional “party line core talking points” seemed wildly out of place. Thus, social media is born—a way to share and communicate to the masses as they share their lives without looking like a blatant spammer. Not to mention, it seems to give communicators a good excuse to play on the Internet.

So, what is Social Media? There are a lot of experts that will try to tell you that they know what it is, but in reality, it’s a moving target. The approach that was cool yesterday has become cliché today. Yet, at the same time, some of the base fundamentals and traditions of communications/marketing still hold as well.

The “viral video” was once the Hallmark of a successful social media campaign. The viral video was something quirky that amused people and compelled them to pass it along to those that they felt would be amused as well, only to find later it was a hook into a commercial or subtle ad for a product.

Today, a successful social media campaign can involve getting favorable microblog mentions, people to share your bookmarks, people writing favorably about your messaging, people using your images or video or any combination thereof.

Droves of companies now pay top dollar to manage their social “image and brand.” This social management is much more than just what you’re going to say, it’s also watching what people say.

As numerous companies have found, you are never more than a misquote away from a flash-mob social backlash. As hard as companies can work to spread positive messages and spending countless hours to get one positive thing said about their product, a simple misstep can lead to a social media firestorm.

The common element among the vast populations of social networks is that they want to be a part of something bigger, they want to be the ones that share, they want to feel like they are on the ground floor of all things new.

So, how do you engage in social media? I’ve seen one-person campaigns generate as much success as big-dollar agency campaigns. Your ultimate success can be impacted by a key influencer being on or offline. Your success can be impacted by another unexpected trending topic. But, most of all, your success comes down to core communications skills like knowing your tools, media and audience.

Before engaging in social media, it’s important to know your goal. A fast path to social irrelevance is adding a bunch of followers and going out there and floundering around with no message and posting direct links to your site. The key element of social media is SOCIAL. As I referenced above, people are sharing aspects of their lives. They don’t want you bursting into their conversation and shouting to visit your website.

Rather, a sound strategy is to start out small. You need to identify people that are talking about topics that relate to your key strategy. You can join discussion groups, you can participate in conversations, you can search out blogs of relevance, but most of all, it is important to establish yourself as an individual that is engaging in conversations.

Granted, there are people that will follow your messages without being engaged, but most likely those people are predisposed to your message or brand (see Ashton Kutcher, CNN, etc..). In those instances, you’re not really gaining ground, you are just giving people that were predisposed to your message another avenue to tap into your messaging. If that is your definition of success, then the bar is low.

If you’re looking to make inroads to new audiences, the strategy becomes more involved. Where do you start? How do you find people that might have an interest in what you have to say?

Finding an inroad comes back to mastery of tools. There are a number of social media tools that will help you identify where to start. The current critical mass and prom queen is Twitter. Twitter is the quintessential microblogging site where users broadcast 140-character updates to their followers. From corporations, celebrities and musicians on down to the solo individual, people are listening and sharing more than ever through Twitter.

How do you engage these masses? A good starting point is to search current conversations. Popular tools to search Twitter conversations are search.twitter.com, TweetDeck and Seesmic. These tools let you enter key words that are related to your objective and engage the people that are active in that area. TweetDeck is a powerful tool that you can use to have multiple searches active at all times, allowing you to proactively engage conversations as they are happening. By engaging these individuals, you are gaining their attention and possibly the attention of their followers that presumably share their interest.

As I indicated above, an underlying desire of many people engaged in social media is to be in on something bigger. Users of social media are looking to share. So, your objective as a social media practitioner is to give them something to share. You, as an individual have a much larger reach if your followers are sharing your information to their networks, and so on. You only need to be the initial source, not the singular source. Give your followers ownership of your information. Letting your followers own the information gives them brand loyalty and taps into their objectives for engaging in social media.

Another strong strategy is searching the blogs. Many of the most popular search engines are able to search blogs. But, an even stronger tool is making use of news alerts. Both Yahoo! and Google have news alert services that will email you comprehensive searches of news stories and blogs mentioning the key words that you’ve identified. News stories are a great conversation starter among your newfound audience and the blog searches are a great way to find people that are writing in long form about your chosen topics.

You can also use tags to find people that you are looking to engage. Tagging is a powerful tool for drawing people to images and videos and other content. It is also powerful for you to find people who are engaging in your areas of interest. Image searches and video searches are often-neglected aspects of social media outreach.

So, you’ve found your audience, congratulations. Now what? What is your call to action? Do you want them to buy something? Do you want them to find even more information? One common strategy is to drive traffic to a website.

Driving traffic to your website:
It’s assumed that you have more to say than you can inject into a social media arena in a single tweet or ad. So, let’s assume one of your goals is to drive traffic to your site where you are able to more verbosely support your core messages and objectives. What strategies work?

The audience that you’ve identified is already having conversations related to your topic. So, a simple first strategy is to provide a link for additional information on the points you are making when you engage in a conversation.

An even more sound strategy is to provide tools within your website to let those people share your information in their chosen medium. There are numerous tools that will let users push your information into blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon and many other social media outlets. Their endorsement or ownership of your information is much more effective than you tooting your own horn.

Engage blogs that are discussing your topic. Bloggers are a great resource with a built in readers and networks. They are also great areas for you to provide comments and feedback, as well as links back to where they can find more information on their topic of interest.

Bring the conversation to you. Another under-utilized tool is controlling the conversation. Have the forum on your own website. Provide analysis of your information and let your visitors provide feedback that can be seen on the site. Users love to see their name on sites and will drive people to the site to see their contributions. Likewise, build sections on your site where you can quickly post images or information relevant to a topic, archives of key conversations, provide lists of people who have interests in the topic or link to great blogs on the topic.

Another powerful way to control the conversation is to create a group—not necessarily about just your brand, but more broadly on your topic. That way you are the conversation starter. You are the owner of the conversation. You are the home team where the conversation is taking place.

How do you control the conversation that reaches beyond your website?

On the chance that the conversation is happening without you, or the conversation is getting away from you, you need to engage. Countless social media wildfires have been extinguished by simply letting people know that you are listening. When bad things are being said related to your brand or topic, follow the participants in the conversations. You do not necessarily have to correct them or say they are wrong, but let them know you are listening and that you are engaged in the conversation. Most people will change their tone when the conversation becomes two-way.

How do you create new conversation?
The easy and obvious way is to post a question to your audience. Let them tell you about your topic and you can clarify key points. But the objective here is that you are getting your audience to have a conversation about your topic in front of their networks.

But, what about reaching beyond the conversation starter? How do you reach into traditional media metrics?

You cannot forget the “media” portion of social media. An increasing number of traditional journalists are monitoring and engaging in social media as a part of their reporting. Additionally, an increasing number of citizens are engaging in citizen reporting. Social media is a transitional area between traditional journalism and new media.

To help ease this transition, tools like the social media release are becoming increasingly popular among social media communicators. The social media release combines aspects of traditional press releases, but also incorporates new aspects of social media, including relevant microblogs, blogs, sound, images, video, bookmarks and other related streams. The social media release provides resource for web content, print content, audio content and video content. It gives new media and traditional media journalists resources and comfort alike.

The easier you make it for the writer to make the story, the better your results will be—plain and simple. An increasing number of companies engaging in social media are creating social media “newsrooms.” These newsrooms house all the resources that new and traditional journalists need to write the story. One powerful tool that is emerging is PitchEngine, which builds and indexes the newsroom for you. Not only do resources like PitchEngine create a central, searchable repository for social journalism resources, it also feeds the information to more traditional search engines so that your resources are highly visible among the most common search media.

So, now you have your tools to find people, your audience, your objectives, your media, and your messages, why aren’t you engaged? A common fear is that you’ll mess up. You will mess up. It happens in traditional journalism, it happens in public relations, it happens in social media.

Fortunately, the Internet is a dynamic medium and you can clean up or come clean about your errors. But, even beyond the biggies—insulting your audience, misinformation, and technical faux pas, there are other common mistakes that you can make with social media, including:

• Insisting on being the source: One of the biggest mistakes in social media is that the people engaging in social media want to be the source. You do not have to be the source to engage in a social media campaign. You simply need to provide people with the information and resources that they need to have a conversation on your behalf.
• Forgetting social media is SOCIAL: Not everything has to be on message. Again, this is social media. People are sharing. Social media is a conversation. Participate in the conversation. If everything you post is on topic, you are not really engaging in the social aspect of social media.
• You won’t always win: You can’t control the New York Times and you can’t control a blogger. People will say what they want. People have their own agendas. All you can do is provide your information accurately.
• Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill: If a person with 5 followers badmouths your topic, don’t give them more attention than they deserve. Your simple acknowledgement of them draws attention to their message and most likely doubles their followers.

So, now you know enough to be dangerous. Get out there and engage social media. This is by no means a comprehensive guide. In fact, it’s the tip of the iceberg. But, social media is fluid and there are things that you will learn as you go along. This is just enough to get you engaged and begin learning from your own experience.

Feel free to contact me with any questions. After all, this is social media and feedback is part of the process! If you have any interest, let me know, maybe I'll take it to another level and write some more.