How to Roll Up Your Own Social Media Plan

The term “social media” is all over the place.  Everybody’s using it to do everything.  One of those things social media can do is help businesses communicate their message to a much wider and more targeted audience, and do so at a lower cost. Sounds pretty sexy.

But there’s a catch:  most of us have no idea where to even start.

If you fit into that category, there’s good news. You’re far from the only one.  And, there’s further good news (yes, even more).  This article will give you the background you need to start squeezing some potential out of the social media craze, will provide you with a sample plan, and will show you that it’s not even that hard.  Bold promises … let me try to deliver before you get antsy.

Before we start, let’s kick things off by reviewing …

Some Background

Back when traditional media was the only way to get your message out, the choices were very limited.

You will no doubt have noticed that, along with it’s many wonders, the Internet is an untamed messy and confusing mess, especially when you’re trying to make it bend to your will by, say, getting a small fraction of its zillions of users to visit your website. Since that particular challenge is the one we would now like to address with social media, let’s make a list of all the possible ways that people can make their way to your website:

• Direct. Typing your site’s URL into their Web browser (or clicking on a bookmark).
• Referred. Clicking on a link to your website that is on some other site.

Well, that’s pretty much it, isn’t it?  We’re simplifying things by looking at really low-level stuff, but these really are the only common ways to get to a website.  We won’t talk much about direct visitors here, not because it’s not worth discussing, but for the sake of limiting our scope.  But let’s take a closer look at referred visitors (people who come to your site from links on other sites).  If we make a list of possible link sources, it turns out to be a lot longer than the short list above:

• Spidering search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!)
• Search directories (dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, about.com)
• Local search engines (Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, MapQuest)
• Social Networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook)
• Microblogging services (Twitter, identi.ca, Jaiku)
• Social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg)
• Blogs
• RSS feeds
• And the list goes on …

Suddenly, we have what feels like an infinite number of choices.

These are just places where a link to your website could be, so we could write a LOT more of them.  We won’t go into the details here, but some of these things even reinforce each other, for example, the more links exist to your website in general, the better your site will do in the big search engines (part of how they determine how well you’ll do in search results is based on how many other websites link to your site … very smart, sort of an informal vote on how good your site is).

So, the more links there are to your website, especially links in relevant, targeted places, the more people will come to your site.  Assuming your website is GOOD (good design, navigation, information architecture and, most importantly, content), this is probably what you want.

Many of you may have noticed that a great deal of the places listed above, from which we’d like to see links to our website, seem to fall under the category of social media.  Ah ha!  Now we’re getting closer to the topic of this post.  Here’s what a little Googling tells us that social media is composed of:

• Concept (art, information, or meme).  This is  your content!‏  Think of this as the passenger we are delivering.
• Media (physical, electronic, or verbal)‏. We’re talking about the Web, so our media will be electronic.  Think of this as the highway that will deliver that passenger, your content.
• Social interface (intimate direct, community engagement, social viral, electronic broadcast or syndication, or other physical media such as print).  ‏This is the vehicle that will deliver your passenger, your content.

The first item, the concept, is up to you.  It’s the content you want to deliver.  For our discussion, the second item, the media, will be electronic, web-based media.  So, that leaves us with the last item, the social interface, the vehicle in which you’ll be delivering your content, to consider.  In fact, every one of the link sources we listed above that you identified as social media is a different social interface, and there are a LOT of them (check out AddThis’s services page for their latest list, most of which fall into the social media category).

Let’s tally up what we’ve got so far:

• We want to deliver our content by creating lots and lots of links to our site.  Links from places that are relevant to what we want to do and that fall along a spectrum of ways of accessing our content are preferred.
• There is a huge number of social media services that can do exactly what we want, and people are using the crap out of those services, however …
• It’s all too much, how do I pick where to focus my limited time?!

Let’s get to work on that last question with …

A Basic Social Media Strategy

We want to employ every relevant service we can to get our content out to the right people.

In the old days, the choices were limited on how to get your content out.  Now they are nearly infinite.  Let’s outline a plan that will narrow those choices down in a rational way:

1. Prepare your content.  First thing’s first – you’ll need to figure out what you want to deliver.  How to do that well could be the topic of a lot of discussion, but let’s assume you have a primary content vehicle.  For the sake of this example, we’ll call it a blog, but it could very well be a company website or even content on another website (maybe you’re trying to promote your YouTube account page, for example).
2. Pick your social media tools.  Picking the right tools requires knowing something about your audience, a little research, and a little time.  Resources such as AddThis’s services page (which was mentioned above) can help you learn what’s out there, how much various tools are being used, and how the social media landscape is change.  We’ll use some of the more popular services here as examples (the specific services are discussed below), which will be good starting points, but you’ll need to continue researching this constantly changing area.
3. Prepare your social media tools.  Many tools require some usage both to get familiar with them and to create an account with enough activity to make you a credible or effective user (for example, social networking sites require connections with other users, social bookmarking sites should have a few bookmarks setup in your account, and so on).
4. Launch your campaign.  Once everything is in place, it’s time to use the services you have chosen and gotten ready in order to focus on one thing: getting links to your content in front of as many different, relevant people as possible.

Example Social Media Campaign

Let’s give this a try with a hypothetical example.  We’ll assume that you are launching a new blog for your organization, and that you’ve done your homework preparing good content and getting the thing in order for the world to see.

Now you’re ready to prep and launch your social media campaign.  We want to implement the strategy above such that it does the following:

• Employs other blogs, microblogging, RSS feeds, social networking and social bookmarking to deliver your content.
• Can be turned into an efficient process.
• Can be performed by members of your marketing staff who do not necessarily know everything about the business.
• Is effective!

Step 1: Prepare

For this example, we’ll pick popular services that fall into each of the categories above and take a quick look at each:

• Other Blogs. Part of your campaign will include posting replies on blogs that are relevant to your content which 1) are useful contributions to the discussion, and 2) occasionally link back to your content as a resource. It is crucial that you do this well, such that you are never seen as posting simply to create links, so you’ll need to stay involved in the conversation even when you do not have content to link to. We have found that the best way to do this is to get an RSS reader (if you don’t know what this means, check out the tour on http://reader.google.com/) and sign up for blogs that are related to your industry.  This is also an excellent way to keep up with your field, so it’s a double value.
• Microblogging.  Although there are other tools out there, Twitter and Facebook (Facebook does much more than just microblogging, and is also very popular social networking tool that I’ll discuss below) seem to be on top of the field now.  Create accounts for each (you’ll need to create a fan page in Facebook, not a regular user) and get familiar with how they work.  In Twitter, it is important to use the tool as you wish it to be used for your content … seek out relevant business profiles and “follow” them.  Chances are, many of them will follow you, and these will be the people who get your “tweets.”  Tweet about interesting business-related things, such as links to upcoming events your organization is holding or links to interesting, relevant articles.
• RSS Feeds.  Make sure your blog’s RSS feeds (all popular blogging software has RSS feeds built in) are signed up with popular services such as Feedburner that will help you get the feed out to as many people as possible.  If you need to brush up on RSS, just search Google for “rss tutorial”.
• Social Networking. I mentioned creating a Fan page for your organization above on Facebook, which is a good idea.  The other social networking tool you’ll use is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which is a great tool for anybody in a position that’s even remotely sales-related.  LinkedIn has become the social network tool for businesses, and you’ll be surprised to find out how many of your contacts are using it.  Create an account, find out how to automatically show your blog’s posts in your account, and start building your network of connections.
• Social Bookmarking.  You’ll pick a couple of the more popular social bookmarking sites, Digg and Stumbeupon, get signed up, and get familiar with them.  In fact, you’ll get the whole staff to create accounts and get familiar with them, because you’ll need their help when it’s time to launch our campaign (be careful, social bookmarking services are somewhat addictive … you are guaranteed to find some interesting, silly or obscene links to send to your friends after just a few minutes).

There are a lot of references to various social media tools above, and not enough space to even scratch the surface of each one here, so you may need to do a bit of research until you’re comfortable with them.  Once you’re ready, let’s move on to …

Step 2: Launch

Now that everything is in place, let’s launch this campaign.  Since our primary content vehicle for this example is a blog, we’ll assume that you’ve just published a new blog post, and will use each of the tools above to promote it:

• Other Blogs. You’ve done a good job keeping up with relevant blogs in your industry, and you’ve been participating in an intelligent way that contributes to the discussion.  Now you’ll continue making contributions by finding issues being discussed on those blogs that your content answers, and replying with a link back to your content.  Remember, you MUST keep these posts useful and relevant.  Anything less and you will quickly move from contributor to spammer.
• Microblogging.  You’ve been adding followers and tweeting about interesting things.  Now you’ll send a tweet about your latest article on Twitter, and make a status update on Facebook with a link to your latest work.
• RSS Feeds.  Your new article should be automatically available on your RSS feed, which you have carefully registered with services like Feedburner such that they get out to the largest audience possible.
• Social Networking. You’ve got your network of connections built up now, and you’ve got your blog hooked up to your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts such that new articles are instantly visible to your whole network.  So, if all goes well, your new blog post will show up here automatically.
• Social Bookmarking.  You and your co-workers have been using one or two good social bookmarking tools, creating bookmarks and looking at others.  Now it’s time to create a publicly available bookmark to your latest article, or to give it a thumbs up in Stumbleupon.  Get everyone to do this, and hopefully others will find your content just as you’ve found theirs.  Remember, in tools that allow others to rate your bookmarks and show them based on popularity (which most have some mechanism to do), a bookmark to a bad article will be seen by very few people, so you need to have confidence in your content.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve successfully used the Web’s newest and most popular tools to do a little work for you, no doubt you’ll want to keep it up, monitor your success, and get better at it.  Here are some tips:

• Put a process in place. In order for you to keep it up, somebody must be in charge of your social media / online marketing campaign, and they must have a clear list of things that they do on a regular basis.  Here at NuRelm, we have an employee who is in charge of implementing a strategy that is very similar to the one above.  She sends around a weekly report telling us exactly what she did in each area noted in the bullet list above.
• Monitor your success.  Do you have a good way to monitor traffic to your website, including visitors, which websites they came from, how long they stayed on your site, what geographic region they came from, and so on?  If not, check out Google Analytics, which is a free tool provided by Google that provides extremely detailed website tracking (somebody must install it on your site, but this is quick and easy).

We’ve just covered the basics of what it might take to fire up a social media campaign in your organization.  Please feel free to provide your two cents in terms of feedback, suggestions and comments below.