Social Media Marketing: Mashup of Old and New - The Next Six Rules
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Jeremiah Owyang came up with the sixth and seventh rules. Here again, you’ll find some familiar ground.
Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you. Think about Google and authority sites. Remember, if you help users find what they’re looking for, even if you aren’t the source of the product, they’ll tell other people by posting a link to their social site(s) and tagging you as being helpful in your field. This is another case where content is king, and rules that hold for SEO also help for SMO.
Reward helpful and valuable users. Owyang thinks this might not be strictly SMO, but it’s a great way to “keep the most valuable members of a community closer to your site.” This is an old school marketing tactic – it isn’t even limited to marketing, actually. The principle is to reward the behavior you want to encourage. Only the rewards are a little different. You reward users with thank you notes, visibility on your web site, increases in their ratings, and similar incentives. For example, social search engine Searchles, among others, rewards active users and groups by linking to them on its home page. Our own SEO Chat forums reward moderators, top posters, and spam reporters by giving them a temporary virtual badge acknowledging their efforts.
Cameron Olthuis came up with the next four rules (and coined the term “Marketing 2.0,” as well as the more useful term “pull marketing”). He recognized that SMO “includes all the new marketing techniques that are becoming popular rolled into one…” His suggestions ring with truth for anyone who has been actively involved in social media for awhile.
Participate – Join the conversation. If you’re trying to reach the community of people involved in social media, you can’t talk AT them as you would when advertising in traditional media. You can’t even really talk TO them. You have to talk WITH them. If you belong to any kind of social group, especially one centered on a passionate hobby, you’ll understand this instinctively. Think about how you feel when someone who really isn’t familiar with the hobby tries to sell you something. You create the same impression – or worse – if you try to plaster your message around without really participating.
Know how to target your audience. No, your product or service does NOT appeal to everyone – and even if it does, there are going to be certain groups of people who are more interested in it than others. I’d like to think my articles appeal to everyone, but realistically, I know my audience for the articles I write on SEO Chat is SEO professionals, so I write with them in mind. Likewise, find out who is most interested in your product, and where and how to reach them. That’s not just SMO; that’s good marketing sense that goes back to the days before the press release.
Create content. Maybe you make the most boring product or service in the world. There is some way to jazz it up, make it funny, write a white paper about it, or otherwise make it of interest. Then you can use social media to spread that content and drive traffic back to your web site. You may have to experiment to find out what kind of content works best – but you should be used to this idea. It’s another variation on the SEO insistence that “content is king.” And don’t be so sure that there isn’t some kind of humor in or about your field; even one of the grimmest jobs in the world (mortician) yielded more than 59,000 hits in Google when paired with the word “jokes.”
Be real. Remember the Wal-mart fake bloggers? Enough said. Or as Olthuis bluntly put it, “The community does not reward fakers.”
Next: The Last (?) Six Rules >>
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