Social Media Marketing: Mashup of Old and New - The Last (?) Six Rules
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Loren Baker added a couple of rules that help to put the rest in perspective.
Don’t forget your roots, be humble. If you do get to the point of becoming some kind of social media star, don’t forget the folks who helped you get there. A little respect for them goes a long way. I’m not even going to point to marketing parallels when a large percentage of Hollywood movies have this as their theme.
Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh. Your need to try something new may have attracted you to the social media space in the first place. Like everything else on the Internet, you can bet that it isn’t going to stay the same. The Internet itself was around for quite some time before the World Wide Web came along; the Web existed for a long time with mostly static web sites before blogging came along; and even then, blogging was around for at least a couple of years before someone came up with the technology to make podcasts practical. When you see something new, don’t run from it; think about how you can use it. Sure, there’s risk – but there’s also a huge risk in standing still.
Lee Odden contributed the next three rules. You could literally substitute “SEO” or “marketing” everywhere he used the term “SMO” and his rules would still read the same. That’s not a bad thing; it simply shows the general principles that tie SMO to other forms of promotion.
Develop a SMO strategy. It’s all well and good to get into SMO, but you have to do it for a reason. Know what your goals are; define them, and keep them in mind as you engage in SMO. Do you want to increase your sales? Reputation? Traffic?
Choose your SMO tactics wisely. Once again, the Wal-mart fiasco is worth pointing out. Odden points out something he learned at a “Marketing and Social Media” session at a Search Engine Strategies that’s worth noting: one percent of those involved in social media will create content, 9 percent will enrich that content, and the other 90 percent will just consume it. That’s a lot of influence wielded by relatively few.
Make SMO part of your process and best practices. This actually goes back to the first five rules. “Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the ‘template’ level of document creation and as part of information distribution,” Odden explains. Don’t make SMO an afterthought.
Rohit Bhargava gives the seventeenth rule of social media optimization. In fact, when he opened up his blog post to suggestions for other rules after the first five, he showed that rule in action: don’t be afraid to let go of a message or idea and let others own it. While consumers have been "owning" marketing messages for years (just think about how long parodies of various kinds have been around), many if not most companies have not been comfortable with it. Fumble this and you will lose a lot of credibility and goodwill among the very community you’re trying to reach.
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