Social Media Marketing: Alerting Customers

Social Media Marketing can be explained in many ways and most are very complex for someone who has never used it or been in the space. With so many new tools, like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, articles, backlinking, message boards, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Vator, Pod Casts, Video, YouTube, it can be very overwhelming for anyone.

I spoke to Wally Wang, author of the “Dummies” series last night on our radio show and he said it himself, “It’s something I know I have to do to sell more books, but it’s too much for me. There aren’t enough hours in the day”. Now, Wally may know more than most, because he’s an accomplished author and comedian, but he’s just part of “the norm” when it comes to business people in 2010. In my next article, I’ll outline the steps to take to build run a campaign and orchestrate its activities, but for now let’s look at a brief analogy of how it works.

The parking lot

A long time ago I lived a block north of Wrigley Field in Chicago with 4 of my groomsmen during my last year of being single, before I married my wife. We had a great year. We were one of the only houses in the neighborhood and we actually had a backyard, with a grass and a porch! This is a true rarity in big cities like Chicago. We were looking forward to a great summer of cookouts and Cubs games (I’m not a Cubs hater, but I am a White Sox fan, for the record), but when it came time to make a decision About the pool, I realized more and more that people were making a killing with neighborhood parking fees. So, being the entrepreneur that I am, I decided on other backyard plans.

So, I went to Home Depot and bought all the necessary tools and rented a dumpster and before we knew it, we were laying gravel and getting ready for the next game with excitement. We had turned our backyard into a parking lot, what? We did the math and found that we could all pocket our entire paycheck each month because we could charge $25 per spot and now we had 15 spots!

Well, the next day the Cubs played the Pirates and there weren’t many people at the game. Two of us had taken the subway back to the neighborhood on our lunch break and stood on opposite corners of the street signaling stragglers from the other lots to our spots. We ended up buying 6 cars and only making $20 a piece, what a disappointment! This went on for a week and after the parking lot was gone at each game we walked to the other parking lots and noticed they were full. What did they have that we didn’t? They had 6-9 flaggers with bright red flags and signs telling drivers where to park. They had every corner covered and their lots were marked with names and colors.

So, we went to the police station and asked them where the busiest corners were during Cubs games. We hired more flag bearers and gave them some bright (yellow) signs and offered a free beer to anyone over the age of 21 who parked with us. For the next game we had more cars than we could fit and we were making $35-$45 per spot! Now we had this good coverage and the right clientele on our way, all because we had brilliant flagmen in the right places, who couldn’t miss, pointing and guiding drivers to our lot. See below for actual coverage:

Social Networks, the New Neighborhood

So as I got into social media and learned how to use it for business, I started thinking about the easiest ways to explain the way it works to those who don’t already know about it. Of course there are a million ways to do it, but I try to keep things as simple as possible. Now, most people understand the following things about the Internet and their business: they need a website, they need email, they need the Internet, they need someone to do “SEO” for them, and they need HELP!

What they often forget to think about are all the things that go with these basics, such as: website, loading speed, great content, calls to action, a blog, and Web 2.0 connectivity to social sites. . These essentials are for the website only, which I’ll call “the parking lot” for this section. Your parking lot has to be good or people won’t pay anything for it. There must be something that makes it better than all the other parking lots out there. Offer a free download in exchange for an email address to stay connected with your visitors, just like a free beer for parking.

Now having the lot and offering free stuff to keep people informed is great, but the most important thing you can do is get people to park, right? Having a great website with all the bells and whistles is a wonderful thing, but not as important as it used to be. Remember that the Internet is just a virtual world and everything has similar functions to the real world. So if this is true and your website is like your parking lot (or a direct representation of your business), is it more important to have a flashy design and little content or shades of good new content? The answer is easy, content is king, always. So make the place where people come to park fruitful and rich in information about you and your business so they want to learn more and spend money. The Web 2.0 generation is all about educating and creating informed buyers.

With a great content driven website we now have to get something that 99% of the world can’t understand, targeted web traffic and demographic. There are two ways to get into this arena, launch an inflatable bouncer on the rooftop or have people come out and say hello to people. You actually need to do both, however most people can only afford one or are afraid to try the other.

Well, you can spend $10,000 on a great SEO package (the Inflatable Bouncer) and expect it to work. But what is the incentive for the visitor to come see you? Is it because you appeared first on Google? They’ll click on it and check it out in all other areas of the web right after viewing your site, trust me. They will check that you have a good reputation and that you have done something besides flying a gorilla. They want CONTENT. So the other way to do it is to hire those flag bearers! These flag bearers will be everywhere they look, even if it’s in the opposite direction of the gorilla! They’ll be wearing t-shirts displaying your message, hats displaying when you were last in the news, pants with photos of your business or family or both, and they may even be listening to a stereo with your latest podcast or radio appearance on it. he.

The breadcrumb trail of social media

The other way to think of these flag bearers, or any flag bearers, is to think of them as breadcrumbs that lead to your website or parking lot. Now, breadcrumbs are not given for work, of course, but they are very useful for hungry visitors to find their way. The way this all works is simple, use your own experiences in the world to think like your consumers. What do you do when you are looking for something to buy or a place to go or someone to hire for a service? Like 80% of the country, you probably go online and type a keyword into Google. Once the results show up, you click on 5-6 sites and read 18% of the page, get bored and move on to the next one. If you have the option, watch a video instead of an article, instead of a website, a third-party endorsement instead of a website, etc.

Since this is the case, we need to think like our customers to start finding them! This means we need to play the game they play and be better at it. Social media can also be thought of as a trail of breadcrumbs that leads to you and what you truly stand for.

Imagine starting on the south side of town and trying to find a parking spot on the north side of your lot. To save time, let’s assume they start at the bottom right corner of the image below. In the example of the breadcrumb on social media, the crumbs are also flag men. They attract hungry readers and point them in the right direction. In this example, the hungry visitor or parker sees something you Tweeted on Twitter (hopefully followed you too) and it caught their eye. From here they took your username and found you in a chat room and started reading your blog.

The information they found drew them in and urged them to dig deeper, so they clicked the Facebook button on his blog and it took them to his Facebook page, where they read about the great things he does, watched videos, and even they connected with you. They also saw a link to his podcast and clicked on it so they could hear him speak. Let’s say they heard you doing your own online radio show about your industry and were surprised at how professional you sounded. Then they went back to Google and wanted to find more, read what they liked and ended up on her Flickr page or watching her videos on YouTube. After following your social media breadcrumbs, they eventually park in your lot, which equals money in your pocket.

The importance of being available

As you can see in this case, a good visitor to your website is one who comes ready to buy. They come with information about you and what you stand for and intend to do business with. People no longer look for websites like fish look for shiny things, they’ve seen it all. What they do seek is information, content and attraction. More important than what they are looking for is the fact that they are looking for. More than 50% of Facebook users on the planet are 38 years or older, this is the generation that created wasting time on the web and broadcast it. The average Internet user increases the time they spend on the web by more than 10 minutes a week each year. The fact is that they are looking and what are you doing to be available when they are?

By Eric Rice
President, Boom Media
San Diego Social Media
http://www.mymediaboom.net