Secrets To Effective Social Media Marketing For Your Business.
Posted by Jody Raines
Are you listening to your customers? Do you know what's being said about your company - good or bad? Are you Tweeting? On Facebook? Linked in? What's the last story you thought was Delicious?
The scary fact - a viral derogatory message can be shared across the Internet faster than a 140 character re-tweet!
Case in point: consider the recent viral Facebook trend where bra colors were suggestively referenced in several women's profiles. The fun part of the post - no one said why or what it was, simply a color. Staggeringly, some men, who didn't understand what was going on also posted "nude" or "eggshell" without a clue what they were referencing. As more and more people jumped in on the action, random bra colors started ranking in the top ten Google searches!
What does this mean for your business? You don't sell bras? Imagine that it wasn't bra color, but something about your business that was being shared. Something unsavory. That you are not happy about. Being Tweeted. Facebooked. Virally.
Who would have thought bra colors would be so viral?
And of course, you remember the Domino's Pizza incident - where a couple of renegade employees posted a derogatory video that went viral and caused the company an incredible amount of damage - lost sales and lost customers.
Unfortunately that scenario is not farfetched.
In a time when Social Media is measured by your Twinfluence and Facebook has over 400 million subscribers, not understanding the tools is risky business.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) has become a necessary tool for marketing today's business. Utilizing the principals of inbound marketing a social media marketing consultant can help you increase the effectiveness of your website by complimenting it with Social Media Marketing. The Internet as an effective way to reach an audience through "Inbound marketing" has evolved where it becomes a tool to level the playing field between big business and smaller businesses.
Rutgers University is hosting a Roundtable on Social Media Marketing to be held on Tuesday, March 23rd at 8:30 am. I'll have the distinct pleasure of speaking to a group of Family owned and privately held businesses about the power of branding through the Internet and how to harness it's power to speak with your customers. (there are still openings, and you can still register)
Small, privately held companies have an advantage when it comes to Social Media. A dynamic small business can be responsive to their customer and can effectively create an online presence or respond to an online menace. Especially because the decision cycle is shorter than the large conglomerate, the small business owner who grasps the strategy is way ahead!
The group at Rutgers will learn secrets and strategies to effectively use Twitter, Facebook, blogging and LinkedIn in conjunction with their website to position their business, achieve greater visibility through search engine ranking, and tips on how to make their website a lead generation magnet.
Registration for Rutgers' University Social Media Forum featuring Jody Raines, WebMarCom
Rutgers University
Family Business Institute
Waterfront Technology Center
200 Federal Street
Camden, New Jersey 08102
March 23rd, 2010
8:30AM-10:30AM
Conference Room B
WebMarCom is an Internet strategy and Web Marketing Communications Agency based in South Jersey and Philadelphia.