The 5HITS

With Twitter going mainstream and the number of social media experts, strategists and consultants on the scene, I thought it was high time to interject with some thoughts, seen as everyone else is. If you read my previous post “Brands on the rise” this ties in closely. Getting your brand socialised will become increasingly important in the future, for Internet Marketing.

So what should you consider for your business from a social media strategy, other than the need to show a return and the potential difficulty in measuring a return, be it financial or otherwise?

Also, while many agencies use social media as another channel for creative ideas to generate brand awareness or sales, this is not about campaigns using social media as a channel. This is about companies engaging with social media in a well thought out strategy. Setting up processes with the objective of increasing brand awareness and sales through ongoing relevant and value adding interaction with customers and potential customers. If you do have a campaign, you would these social media processes to deliver on the campaign and own them, not let your agencies own them.

Key activities to include in your social media strategy include:

1. Social media policies
2. Social media audit
3. Social media strategy
4. Social media operationalisation and ongoing monitoring

1. Social Media Policies

Have you got any guidelines, advice, communication for staff as to how they may or may not interact with online media while on company time, through the company network or as an ambassador of your brand. If you have people in your workforce under 55 years old, in fact if you have people in your workforce, trust me they are engaged somewhere, be it LinkedIN, FaceBook, FlickR or Twitter.

Do you have formal advice for them on:

• Whether they can represent the brand, e.g. commenting on an industry issue n a blog as a member of your company
• Whether they can mention customers, e.g Twittering about a new pitch or a customer experience
• What internal information can be discussed, e.g. Blogging about staff cuts
• Privacy e.g. including pictures from the office party of drunken colleagues in fancy dress in their public FlickR account Read more…

Merry Christmas to all 3 of you who read my blog. I hope you all enjoy what I’m sure is a well deserved break, a Merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas as I do and have a blessed new year.

Now, where would we be without forecasts for the new year and what might arise. As any good SEO would I turned to Google rather than think for myself and looked at the first result for search predictions 2009. Who knew Craig & Janes world predictions for 2009 would be #1. From them amongst other things including Victoria Beckham getting pregnant and many top companies going bust, there was nothing related to search other than what Im sure will be searches, if nothing else.

Moving further up the tree I found some digital marketing predictions. Some interesting takes on this included:

• Twitter providing unprecedented access to corporate personnel
• Listening programs through social media to “feel the pulse”
• Having less but more meaningful digital friends (quality v quantity)
• That social networks will be leveraged with the current budget squeeze

OK, enough nonsense, maybe lets try the proverbial horses mouth, Mr Cutts from Google himself. He reckons in 2009:

• Pay less attention to ranking
• Universal search will continue to expand
• That there will be improved indexing of engagement objects, specifically video

As Bruce Clay has also reiterated, analytics will become increasingly important, and after all, has always been the true measure of success. Is your traffic going up? And of course lets see what the shiny new Google spider brings forth in the new year when engagement objects become more integrated with the ranking algorithms.

Don’t brace yourself though, from past experience Google Australia is highly cautious with search results Read more…