Social Media Services

Developing corporate strategies for forward thinking businesses.

Marketing Is Changing

Social media is changing the way people find out about new products and services. Social Media Services helps very small to large corporations learn how to interact with their clients in the coming marketing shift .

Marketing With Social Media

This is going to come as a suprise to some, but Social Media is nothing new. Social Media is actually any system for the transport of 2-way communications between individuals. The key word in my definition is 2-way. Standard media, or industrial media as some people call it is a 1 way communication. Newspaper, Television, and Radio are examples of industrial media. After a news report, you can’t knock on the television and interact with the news anchor. How great would it be that after you read an editorial in a newspaper, you could respond back to the writer your disagreement?

Welcome to the world of Social Media!

It’s also allowed the average user to converse back with individuals, and thus made the world a whole lot smaller. With a few clicks, individuals from around the world can easily share pictures, music, video, and more.

But Social Media has changed marketing. While it hasn’t done so yet, it’s in the process of putting the main stay marketing companies back on their feet. They don’t get it, they don’t understand how to use it.

Please are sick of seeing over 800 ads a day for products they don’t care about. As a woman, why would you want to see an add for a men’s clothing? As a man, why would you want to see ads for maskara? When ads are targeted toward them, they are much more likely to respond. More importantly the wall that people have built up to broadcast advertising diminishes quickly.

While social media does provide children, families, and friends the opportunity to share personal information about their lives. But for marketers it offers the ability to target individuals for your product. If you want to find someone on the big island of Hawaii you can do that, men 18-23 easy, single women 18-24 no problem.

However, there is a right way to market and a wrong way to market. The key to social media marketing is relationship building and permission marketing. It’s a matter of carefully monitoring individuals that might be most interested in your product and building a conversation with them until they are ready to make a purchase. But the conversation isn’t about the product, it’s about life and how you can help that individual.

I recommend the 80/20 rule. Meaning 80% of all your communication using social media should be providing knowledge, assistance, and friendship building. 20% can be sales. When you start to cross that 20% threshold, you’ll have backlash.

There are some alternate benefits to this which we’ll discuss in a future post. But probably the most overlooked… the fact that price elasticity melts away with social media marketing. This means it’s possible to charge more than your competitors if you’re engaged in this form of marketing.

Tags: 80/20, marketing, social media

07 Jan 09 | Free Consulting | Read on | Comments (0)

Seminars – 3 Free

Today we officially launch our website and company to the world.
In celebration of this we are offering a great promotion! To get the word out about what we offer, we’d like to offer your group of 50+ the ability to receive the paid version of our seminar at no cost. (A $10,000 value) It can be provided in a condensed one day session or in a two day format. The seminar will be provided for free to 3 organizations around the United States. If you’d like this free seminar for your group, please fill out our information request form to the left.

Social Media Services will be providing its first seminar classes this week to a group of Realtors in St. Louis, MO. These seminars are a great way to get your group jump started on what social media is and how they can use it to sell more and potentially decrease their ad budget.

They will be receiving our 5 part class on Social Media:

What Is Social Media – The Power of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and More
Blogging and Search Engine Optimization
The Power of Video, Youtube, and VBlogging
Free Tools You Can Use
Lead & Client Management / Keep Up With Your Clients and Contacts

Each section features a question and answer session. The presentation will also be tailored to the individuals attending.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation example for our first group’s training. River City Real Estate is the group sponsoring this week’s presentation.

Here’s the fine print:

Must be mutually agreeable dates
Groups must be outside of the St. Louis area
Group must pay for travel and lodging expenses of consultant from St. Louis to their destination (Don’t worry we’re not requiring 1st class or anything like that)
Our company will have the right to sell our products and services to individuals attending your meeting
Seminars where attendees do not make buying decisions for their business are not eligible (i.e. a group of all employees of a company would not work)
We reserve the right to select the three groups

Tags: free, realtor, seminar, social media

06 Jan 09 | Seminars | Read on | Comments (0)

ROI of Social Media

The world of social media advisers is a small one.

Due to the new aspect of it, and that people are still learning how to correctly market using social media, there are few players in our market segment. There is one large principle all of us agree on: you must use social media in the coming years to effectively market your brand.

There are however many disagreements on items such as how to best use twitter, should you friend everyone on Facebook, how many and what social media sites should you engage in, etc. However, there is one larger item on which most of the other players agree and we disagree, namely that there is no way to track the return on investment of social media in a brand’s marketing at the present time. This specific topic is something that companies are forming to try to capitalize on.

Engaging in social media marketing is an art, not a science.

Individuals that do it well know how to move the conversation from family, kids, and activities to “Do you know anyone that might be interested in our product?” without harming that relationship. The more people you create a relationship with, the more potential customers you have, it’s basic sales 101. But many other individuals argue that with social media, people send links around and so you never really know where clicks and purchases are coming from.

However, there are plenty of tools out there that let the brand manager track where these “viral clicks.”

The first all encompassing tool is Google Analytics. This free service from Google allows any website administrator to track where their clicks are coming from, and what those users are viewing. It even offers a sales valuation system for tracking what someone has purchased. This tool alone offers almost all of the required metrics for tracking ROI of social media. If you know that someone visiting your website spends on average $50 a quarter and that $50 yields your brand on average $10 in profit, you know that each buying customer created $40 a year of profit. You can then track the value of each click around your brand’s website. This is technology that has been used for years.

The only other item necessary to help in tracking social media clicks is to use specific “transfer URLs.” For example, a Social Media marketer can create an account at www.BudURL.com . The site offers users a way of translating their clicks from long URLs such as http://marketwithsocialmedia.com/2009/01/04/video-get-ahead-of-the-curve/ into something shorter like: http://budurl.com/5lam

Most of the original idea behind services like BudURL is to make creating links easy in services like Twitter, where you can only use 140 characters. Consider that the above link took up over half of a potential allotted message where the budurl only took 22 characters. However, the real value to ROI trackers is the link tracking system. BudURL offers the ability for a user to see how many clicks that link has received, where the clicks came from (email, Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.) and in what geographic location the clicker is.

BudURL’s service can be free for the most basic users, but for just $12 a month, a user can received ultra detailed stats that are up to the second. These clicks can then be matched up with the data in Google Analytics to find out exactly what the value of them came out to be, both in the short and long run.

This process is just one way that ROI can be measured using social media. It’s not a 100% perfect solution, and it will never calculate the full value of the non revenue based value, such as goodwill, it creates for your company. There are other methods as well. When we put together a consultation package for a client we utilize suggest the utilization of these systems to track the value, because we are sure that anyone will see the ROI of using social media over ANY other media format even with paid staff in place to do nothing but monitor these sites.

Tags: analytics, ROI, social media

05 Jan 09 | Free Tools, ROI | Read on | Comments (0)

Social Media Services, a division of Alterity Marketing and PR, is a full service online marketing company. The company is primed to help companies from as small as one person to as large as 1000s learn the ins and outs of utilizing social media in marketing. We can assist with blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. We also help create and implement marketing budgets that usually result in a reduction of expenditures.