!  Social media is a great way to connect with your network, but it is also a great resource for connecting with your customers. Young professionals bring a wealth of information to the table especially when it comes to Web 2.0 and social media channels.

This session will give you pointers on being the best social media advocate for your company and how to sell that to your boss so that you can get started.

Questions for the Audience

!  Who is involved in social media for business

!  Who isn’t but would like to be?

!  Who in this room is trying to sell sm to the higher ups?

!  What are the objections?

Anticipated Objections

!  Blocked at work

!  Time waster

!  Don’t understand SM

!  Expensive

!  Can’t prove ROI

!  That’s not where my customers are

!  Negative stories

Social media defined

!   Internet-based tools used for sharing and discussing information among people

!  Activities that integrate technology, social interaction and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio

!   Information depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities

- Wikipedia

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Shift of power

The power to define and control a brand is shifting from corporations and institutions

to individuals and communities

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Social media is a conversation

Social media is a conversation online

!  Look who’s talking: !  your employees !  your critics !  your fans !  your competition.... !  anyone who has Internet

access and an opinion.

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Social media is a channel

!  The conversation in Social Media is not: !  controlled !  organized !  “on message”

!  The conversation is: !  organic !  complex !  speaks in a human voice

!  Social media is not a strategy it’s simply a channel

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Why you should care about social media

!  87% trust a friend’s recommendation over a critic’s review - Marketing Sherpa

!  3 times more likely to trust peer opinions over advertising for purchasing decisions - Jupiter Research

!  1 word-of-mouth conversation has impact of 200 TV ads - BuzzAgent

* Slide courtesy of Digital Influence Group

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How do people make purchasing decisions today?

Information gathering through …

“The Internet makes information available. Google makes information accessible.”

- Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

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Social media

!   Social Networking

!   News & Bookmarking

!   Blogs

!   Microblogging

!   Video Sharing

!   Photo Sharing

!   Wikis

!   Geo Location Tools

!   Virtual Reality

!   Related: !  Podcasts !  Real Simple Syndication (RSS) !  Social Media Press Release

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More than just a trend

Social media sites are the fastest-growing category on the Web, doubling traffic over the last year.

!  73% of active online users have read a blog !  45% have started their own blog !  39% subscribe to an RSS feed !  57% have joined a social network !  55% have uploaded photos !  83% have watched video clips

Universal McCann’s Comparative Study on Social Media Trends, April 2008. 17,000 respondents from 29 countries

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The Power of your Website

!  The influence of professional services websites on purchasing decisions has increased significantly over the past four years.

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider.

Raintoday.com survey

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Reasons for Social Media

1.  Listening & Research to your customers to find out their wants, wishes and pain points. We live in a Web 2.0 world, if you’re not a part of it you’re missing out on a lot of information.

2.  Communicating with your customers and prospects, not just about your products and services.

3.  SEO: Social media is more than just communications and connections, it is a powerful business tool.

4.  News & Information: Consumer habits have changed, people rely on their social networks and other Web 2.0 sources for news and information.

5.  It is in line with the business objectives.

Listening

!   It is important to listen to your audience.

!  The media in Social media by nature means to communicate, but there's a time and a place for talking. Listening is important

!  Real time information on your brand 24/7/365

Listening Example #1

Listening Example #2

!  Comcast & Dell

!  They have brand managers that do nothing but listen & Help

!  Social media is a perfect tool to find out exactly what people are saying about your brand

Interaction with customers and clients

2-way conversation

How to Engage in SM?

!   Connect to your Audience

!   Ask Questions that Invite Discussion

!   Be transparent

!  Be yourself

! Don’t pretend

!   Know your followers; keep

in touch with them…

!   Highlight content generated by your followers

“Search Engine Optimization !is the process of taking a page built by humans and making it

easily consumable for both other humans and search engine

bots.” !" " " "!

- SEOmoz, www.seomoz.org"

As more and more people use search engines to answer their questions online, companies needs to surface as a resource to provide answers to those questions.

A successful SEO strategy will require a robust back-end (keywords, meta descriptions, tags, etc.) and a front-end that is rich in relevant consumer-centric content. Once the foundation is established for SEO on the back-end, content on the front-end needs to be targeted and strategic to optimize search engine results.

All too often people think the job is complete when the back-end is set up, but that is just the beginning. Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo crawl the sites for keywords and tags (backend) but are increasingly placing a greater emphasis on the content (front-end). Therefore, both components play a critical role in any website development project.

The mechanics of SEO

The exact algorithm behind search engines is unknown. The reason it is unknown is to protect consumers. If the algorithm were known, anyone and everyone could take the appropriate steps to optimize their website to rank higher in search results. Without knowing the exact algorithm, a few things are known to impact SEO.

1.  It changes daily and therefore so does your site 2.  Traffic to your site 3.  Inbound links 4.  Relevancy of information 5.  Keywords 6.  Social graph metrics (social media usage) 7.  Bounce rate (stickiness of site) 8.  Domain registration (how long

have you owned your URL? And is it a .com or .info, etc.?)

Search engine bots

Google and other search engines use “bots” or “spiders” to search web pages. These bots continuously search web pages to index and rank sites. Obviously, you want to make your website as easy to read and navigate for these bots as possible. While the bots are not as complicated as they seem, they have become more sophisticated to read the content on your site as a consumer would. Meaning, they cannot read images so you must tell them what the image is of (through keywords and descriptions). They read the content line by line and when they encounter a link they send another bot to that site to see if it is relevant to the previous content, if so, your page rank increases.

1990s: search engines mostly relied on the backend of sites to tell them what information was contained on the page: meta keywords, tags and descriptions

2004: More importance was placed on the frontend than only on the backend, because search engines were being deceived by inaccurate keywords and tags.

2010: Things changed again with the rise of social media. There is now more importance placed on the “humanness” and frontend of the website rather than the backend. What search engines deem as most important is the relevance and importance of the content. Because search engines are technical bots they are relying more and more on how people (humans) are sharing, linking and using the content contained on a website.

4 Functions of search engines

1.  Crawling websites

2.  Building an index of sites crawled that can be called upon later when someone performs a s earch.

3.  Calculating relevancy and rankings of those sites and information contained within the site.

4.  Serving results

Search engines look for two things when indexing sites

1.  Relevancy: Based on what the consumer is searching for, what sites in the index best fit the search query.

2.  Importance (popularity): Based on the relevant sites, which are the most popular (received more traffic, have more links to the site, more outbound links, etc.)?

5 O’Clock News

!  How many people in here watch the 5 PM news??

Why not?

We no longer wait for the news, the news finds us!

What started it all – Social Media Driving the communication

!  Who remembers this picture?

!  Flight 1549

!  Hudson River

!  Twitter had the Scoop 1st

!  NOT CNN, FOX MSNBC -Majors NO ONE!!!

Janis Krums who Twittered it from his iPhone, and posted via TwitPic.

Major news stories

Japan quake

Social Media Backlash - Gap

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