Internet Marketing Strategy Social Media Marketing Part 2 [+] Expansion Plus, Inc

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Internet Marketing Strategy Social Media Marketing Part 2

12/05/2007

In part one, social media was introduced with the reasons why it is an important part of a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

Preceding any good strategy is doing your homework. This involves research, surveys, searching and analysis. You would never think of building a house without a set of plans, so why would anyone embark on a social media strategy without good planning based on solid research and investigation? The basic steps in social media marketing are:

1. Research – called the ‘listening’ step
2. Strategy and planning development
3. Plan deployment
4. Engagement with your target audiences
5. Monitoring and adjustment based on metrics

This article covers the listening step.

The bottom line is that people are talking about your company, your executives and your brand. Are you listening? Does your company even know that there is an online conversation going on?

People are sometimes confused about what a brand is. It is a lot more than a logo or a list of approved fonts/colors or marketing materials. It is all about your customers’ perceptions and emotions regarding your products, your executives and your company. So how do you find out what people are saying about your brand?

Listen! Monitor the online conversations and evaluate what is being said about the industry in general and your brands in particular. Gather as much information as possible on what your target audience is looking for, where they are looking and what they are saying.

Unfortunately there is no magic search bullet that one can do to find out what is being said and whether or not it is good, bad or indifferent. You will have to dig in to find out what is going on and who is saying it. The good news is that once you are done, you will have a lot of very valuable information on your brand’s online footprint. Then your strategy development step is much more confrontable as you will have a lot of data and ideas to hand.

Tools to get started:

1. Set up an RSS (really simple syndication) reader so that you can collect data. Once you find some content (both good and bad) that you want to keep track of, subscribe to the RSS feed. That way you will automatically get notified when there is new content—no need to bookmark it and remember to go back to that site. Here are a few RSS feed readers that are free:

• Google reader

• My Yahoo

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has an RSS reader built into the browser

Once you have your RSS reader working, then you want to start searching for content and tracking it with your reader. You can start with Google which is the largest search engine by far.

2. Monitor This: with MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time.

3. Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs and presents detailed live-data about the current development in the blogosphere. BlogPulse Trends delivers the information about latest trends and can be useful for finding interesting subjects for your next blog posts, which will generate buzz around the web. And with Conversation Tracker you can observe, who when and what wrote something about a subject or a web-page.

4. Google Rankings lets you check the position of your web-site in Google and monitor your ranking free of charge. In the long run, if you store the information over few months, you can determine some tendencies and developments that are typical for your blog.

5. Technorati is the biggest blog search engine, which indexes over 60 millions blogs. If someone somewhere mentions your website, it will be tracked by Technorati. Watchlists enables you to receive the relevant information via RSS in case someone mentions your brand in the Blogosphere.

Things you should monitor:

• Product names/brands
• Company name
• Key company executives
• Patents
• Press releases
• Competitors
• Stocks
• News about your product or industry

It is vital to know what people are saying about your company, brands and executives across the web, in chat rooms, forums, social media sites, social bookmarking sites and the blogosphere. It is a key part of your overall Internet marketing strategy. By doing the listen step you are well on your way.

About the Author:

Doug Hay is the co-founder and CEO of Expansion Plus Inc, a leading Los Angeles-based Internet marketing and public relations firm. E+ was an early adopter of these new technologies while leveraging the principals’ multi decades of experience in marketing, public relations, sales and business development. For more information about Doug Hay and Expansion Plus, please visit Expansion Plus.

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing strategy, social media marketing, social media, RSS, RSS feed, really simple syndication, social media strategy