Making it Work: Social Media for Any Brand

After attending the outrageously successful Social Media for Business conference last week (#SMAZ for all my tweeple), I was inspired to share 5 key ideas that might help to make sense of online marketing and social media, and how you can make it work for your brand.

  1. Social media programs are not necessarily intended to directly create sales and revenue, but rather, to participate in a conversation with your niche in order to position your brand/organization as reputable and accessible. Gaining trust is key, and social media is more about positioning than selling, which means more in the long run.
  2. Goals are important. Decide on what you hope to achieve with your social media strategies (more sales? more customer contact? increased awareness?) so that you keep your intentions clear, your efforts focused, and your expectations reasonable.
  3. Stay true to your brand and keep your audience in mind when utilizing social media! Don’t expect your audience to respond in huge numbers if you don’t have widespread appeal. Are you a small local business that sells gardening tools and knows every customer by name? Don’t expect ten thousand twitter followers sharing your links. Keep your fans few and true, and you will continue to gain respect in your niche. Watch the short presentation on this Groundswell page, and use the interactive tool to understand social media behaviors based on demographics.
  4. A successful social media program involves interaction with humans. Good social media is not something that you can automate, and you shouldn’t think of it as free advertising or cheap marketing. It takes time to implement correctly, and time really does equal money. Decide if you have the talent and resources (now and in the future) to allocate for social media marketing.
  5. Video: the next big thing. Remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine and MySpace was the cool new thing? Times change, sites dissolve, and tools evolve. Will you be ready to move with the cloud? A discussion panel of successful social media users was asked “What are you excited about for the future of social media?”. The response was video. Video can mean any number of things for your brand. Think about that, mull it over, and make it work for your brand.

Thanks to some of the #SMAZ speakers and participants who inspired this post:  @KathySacks @CindyKimPR @Jaybaer, @cedwardbrice, @ElizabethHannan

-JD Morley @sensorybranding

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