- Create a Facebook page

- Blog 3 days a week

-Spend 32.6% of your budget on Google Adwords

-Spend 21 percent of your budget on content marketing

If there were one fixed recipe for online marketing success that stated the perfect blend of activity, medium, budget or things to do, we would all be as well known as Google, Facebook, Amazon or Youtube. There isn’t! Every company, brand, website or offering that you find online needs to go on a journey when it comes to digital marketing.

It’s a lot like trying to perfect a recipe. You add something, take away something else, taste, adjust flavors and keep working at it till you’ve finally come to the perfect recipe. There difference being…you need to keep at it or someone else will do it better.

There are always certain things that should be on your to-do list everyday to develop your online presence and that’s part of your fixed marketing plan. However, you also need to set aside time to try things that are outside the box because when you find something that works for you and add it to your recipe, it only adds to your marketing momentum.

Here is what we highly recommend to help you find the right recipe for digital marketing success

Try

There is just a sea of different options when it comes to online marketing. Aside from your staple strategies, always try adding something new to the mix or at least giving it a try. You can never know if something will work for you or not without trying it out or exploring the possibility of doing something different. Can creating an affiliate marketing program and developing an online partner network add value? Should we explore a paid Linkedin advertising campaign? Will a premium listing on a directory website help drive more targeted traffic our way? Can we benefit from partnering with other complimentary offering sites? Invest time and effort into looking at alternative strategies and options that could add a new dimension to your business or brand.

Measure

Most marketing efforts online are easy to track and measure. It’s important to be patient while trying and adding new strategies but it’s just as important to keep tracking progress and measuring the outcome of each effort or campaign to gauge effectiveness. Perhaps you’ve distributed a press release. How far was the outreach? Did it result in an increase in flow to the website? Or maybe you’ve recently joined a new community online that is relevant to your business and been participating actively in discussions there. Is it resulting in referrals to your site? How many people ended visiting your site from that community?

Fail -> Learn -> Correct Course

Failing is a good thing when it comes to trying out different options as long as we learn from it. You may have created an offer for your Facebook fans which no one seemed to respond to. What went wrong? Is it worth trying again with some changes? You could have spent a lot of time directly reaching out to other sites with an affiliate offer but they were just not interested in it. Why? Can we restructure or build more incentive for partners? It could have been an online advertising campaign that didn’t generate enough clicks. Was the copy bad? Was the targeting wrong? Failure is part of the digital marketing process. It helps you learn, identify what isn’t working and correct course.

Identify What Is Working & Do More Of It

This is how you perfect a recipe. Not everything will yield results. When you do see tangible results as a result of a specific activity, step it up and keep it as part of your digital marketing mix. Being actively participating on a specific Linkedin group or travel portal like Trip Advisor (if  you’re a hotel for example) may have resulted in a significant increase in inbound leads or bookings. Keep at it and dedicate more time to staying active there! Perhaps a specific pay per click advertising campaign for offbeat keywords yielded a revenue increase at a lower cost. Increase the budget on that until it’s optimized and keep it as part of your ongoing efforts.

Don’t Stop Experimenting & Discovering New Streams

The online marketing world is a turbulent one that keeps you on your feet and demands you stay a few steps ahead of the next change, next big thing or next development that rocks the boat. While you’ve identified what’s working for you and made that a part of your outreach routine, keep trying new things, play with new ideas, strategies and tools to see what else could add value. A site or content with visually appealing images or original graphic content can benefit tremendously by dedicating time towards developing a network on Pinterest. It could result in a lot more traffic and conversions. A local restaurant or retail store could leverage Foursquare or prompt visitors to update their networks on where they are to spread the word.

There recipe ideally suited for you is the one that you need to work at and develop through an ongoing process. Keep perfecting it!

Customer: How will you achieve this?

Marketing Agency 1: We’ll develop an engagement gradually by actively participating in social media conversation, publishing content, sharing and developing an all round presence to drive inbound traffic.

Marketing Agency 2: Don’t worry about it, we’re experts in SEO techniques, we’ll deliver 1000′s of links, guaranteed traffic and you will have quick results.

Customer: When can I see results? How much traffic can you generate at the end of the first month?

Marketing Agency 1: We may be able to generate a moderate few hundred to 1000 visitors through referral traffic in the first month but consistently build and later start seeing more traction from search traffic coming in from content that’s made an impact with users. 

Marketing Agency 2: We can get thousands of visitors in the first month, thousands of Twitter followers and thousands of Facebook fans…it all depends on your budget.

Customer: Obvious choice! Marketing Agency 2 knows what I want…you’re hired! 

Money can buy you traffic for your website, it can buy you quick marketing results and even the impression that you’re online marketing efforts are a success.What it can not by you is true online engagement.

When it comes to demand generation and online marketing instant results, quick traffic, rapid growth, small campaign cycles are words businesses and marketers like to hear. It’s all possible online just as it is offline, if you have advertising dollars to spend, attention can be bought. However, to keep that attention, you need to keep spending those ad dollars and when using these routes, one needs to remember:

Easy come….easy go.

Not that there is anything wrong with online advertising, banner exchanges, buying leads, traffic or fans but should that be the only strategy as part of the overall online marketing mix? The reality is, these quick result mediums are effective in getting attention but they work exactly as traditional push based advertising or marketing does.

There are no short cuts to the pull based or inbound marketing. It needs to be earned by offering something of value constantly but the results can be lasting. It doesn’t cost as much but it needs long term vision and commitment to grow an online marketing effort that draws traffic and customers towards you and getting people to talk about your business. It is the road less traveled, longer, more demanding but in the end….it leads to a better place.

Attention can be bought, trust needs to be earned and when you’re building a long term online presence that people can connect to, it’s working hard at building engagement and trust that will make all the difference.

A couple of years ago when we launched BuzzFactory.net there were a smaller number of competitors both globally as well as locally. We were not positioning ourselves as a social media agency or a social media marketing company back then, we were simply a content marketing / inbound marketing team using our skills at creating and marketing great content to drive audiences for our customers. We evolved into social media service provider or agency since we started expanding our offering and capabilities. Of course more recently, there are a lot more digital marketing agencies many of which are competitors and I get asked “doesn’t the spurt in the number of social media marketing agencies intimidate you?”.

Truth is, of all the ones I frequently come across, the handful that scare me are the ones I find publish some really awesome content.

• Great website copy with crisp messaging that talk to you & prompt you to explore further
• Personality that comes through the writing giving you a feeling you somehow know them and can connect with what they say
• Resourceful & engaging blog posts that tell you they know what they’re talking about …knowledgeable in their field
• Smart use of graphics and video clips to help you visualize a message
• Presentations, downloadable documents, demos, case studies, photos and other well crafted resources that help you evaluate and create an opinion of them even before you’ve picked up the phone or sent and email to contact them.

Online brand perception is formed even before you make any sort of contact with anyone from within a business or organization. It’s created through your content.

Don’t Cut Corners With Content Your Online Brand Perception Depends On It

That said… here are some pointers when it comes to content and your overall online presence strategy:

1. Don’t skimp on time or money when it comes to creating your content, the new Google algorithm updates are based on rewarding sites with higher quality content that get linked to and mentioned purely because they are that good and not as a result of technical SEO gimmicks.
2. Don’t look for short cuts, cultivate a following by delivering valuable content. Don’t buy bulk blog posts (the 1$ an articles types) from providers that piece together from others content and throw in a few keywords assuring you it will help boost links and search results. They will harm your site rather than do any good. Remember it’s now about quality not quantity.
3. Make sure you inject your / your brands personality into everything you publish. Audiences on the web form impressions on who you are from what they have in front of them. A boring web web page full of factual information, statistics and data may convey information but not personality.
4. With social media conversations, make sure those that represent your online voice are doing so the way you’d like your brands voice to come across. They are your voice after all and what they say reflects on your business.
5. Be creative, don’t shy away from being vibrant or different. In a world where millions of conversations and millions of pieces get published every single day, being different helps stand out, getting noticed and carving an identity. (Hence the Pink Elephant in our logo)
6. Become obsessed with the content aspect of social media marketing, it does define how others see you online so give it the priority it deserves.

The next time you check out a website, a video, a blog post or presentation that belongs to a brand or organization, consciously think about how you’re making associations, what it tells you about them and how they come across. It’s how others perceive you from what you put out there on the web. The scales are tipped in favor of those that communicate better online!

In my humble opinion…not much!

A decade to even five years ago there were businesses and brands that stood on the sidelines and others that took the plunge into social media marketing as an integral part of their outreach and marketing strategy. The reason being, social media was still considered an experimental form of marketing or perhaps even a fad that would pass eventually. Marketers would speculate on how long this fad of blogging, social networking and sharing content to draw people’s attention would last and many considered it smarter to standby, let the early adopters do the experimenting, get their hands dirty and when they’ve had enough…this trend will die out.

It didn’t!

You see, social media was not just a marketing tool, a marketing medium or bandwagon that businesses would just hop on to and play around with and therein lies the misconception that social media was an optional marketing medium that one could measure returns on and decide whether to spend time using it or not simply because the immediate results were not as tangible as other campaign options.

It’s critical to understand:

Social media is not just a marketing medium. It is a fundamental shift in the way people communicate with each other.

…and that changes the entire ball game. So the question is not really ‘do you want to use social media to reach your target audiences?’ It’s really not even a question! People are using social media to communicate with each other. They read blogs, share content, they emotions, opinions, discuss, comment, converse, learn, entertain themselves, work together, exchange experiences and communicate using social media.

When people communicated through letters, marketers used letters.

When people communicated using the telephone, marketers were on the telephones.

When people communicated through email, marketers sent emails.

When people communicated through social media…. (fill in the blanks)

Image by http://tomfishburne.com/

According to MailChimp one of the leading email marketing platforms here are the average click through rates and open rates according to industry verticals based on the data of thousands of email campaigns executed through their software.  Open rates are roughly around 15% and click through rates around 2.3% on campaigns run on EXTREMELY qualified and high quality target email lists generated through double opt-in methods and stringent quality parameters. In reality, most marketers make do with lower quality target lists and the result rates can be far lower.

Telemarketing is an even tougher medium to break through with especially outbound cold calling. The rates of being able to reach target customers, number of people who will listen to a sales pitch and eventually number of conversions or leads generated has reached mind boggling lows.

We’re learning to tune out marketing that is being pushed to us, changing our communication preferences and social media is the medium of choice. 

Image source: http://www.conceptad.co.uk/blog/?p=106

Those brands and bushiness several years ago that were thought to be experimenting with a fad learnt their lessons early, had a head start and used those years to build an engagement and level of trust with their audiences. Those that chose to stay on the sidelines are still adjusting to a new medium of communication and new playing field where the audience dictates what they want and chooses how they want to communicate with brands.

Social media is a communication medium just like the pen, letters, telegraph, telephone, email that preceded it. Which brings us to the question :  How much choice is there really?

One of the top reasons decision makers in B2B businesses put off social media marketing and spending on activity which can help create a web presence is “no instant ROI”. The logic: why pay someone to blog, publish content, share content, comment on others websites and spend time on social networks all day when it doesn’t instantly result in sales? It’s just an ongoing cost which can run for months without a directly proportional result in terms of sales that can be tied directly to this activity.

Most traditional business development decision makers would rather spend on advertising campaigns, email marketing campaigns, telemarketing or buying peoples attention rather than earning trust by building a relationship through social media which can be a much longer process. You wouldn’t be wrong to think social media and the content marketing approach is a slower path to converting attention to sales so it can be put off. However, it would be short-sighted.

You see, developing a content ecosystem and a social media presence is a long term investment much like brand building and not a short term marketing campaign spend like a telemarketing campaign.

So when you look at the term ROI on activities like blogging, sharing, content development and others related to developing an online presence, you need to look at it standing far back thinking what it can do for you several years down the line rather than looking at it up close like a 2 month advertising campaign where you count spend and conversions over this short period. Social media is a long term investment in creating brand pull around your business and that’s the perspective it needs to be seen in.

Real life case illustration

A couple of years ago  I was involved with the demand generation team for a B2B service. When it was launched, there were two major components to the customer acquisition process. An inbound marketing lead (just myself) and an outbound pre-sales team of 4 that would run email campaigns combined with outbound telemarketing campaigns to identify potential customers that supported a 5th sales manager that would actually close sales resulting in conversion when a hot lead has been identified by the pre-sales team.

Working of the Outbound Marketing Team

4 resources costing the company $3000 (made up figure) a month each at a total cost of $12,000 a month.

Together they generate approximately 120 phone calls each day reaching about 50  a day of which 2 warm leads would emerge. That’s about 10 warm leads a week of which about 1 would convert into a customer. This team of 4 would consistently deliver about 4 customers a month which was not bad considering this was a service where a single customer would be high value and contribute significant revenues.

The process was linear and the cost of sales constant. The only way to increase sales would be to increase costs.

Working of the Inbound Marketing Effort

1 resource costing the company $3000 (made up figure) a month total cost of $3,000 a month.

As a 1 person inbound marketing resource for a small business, I would spend my hours each day creating a compelling blog post, developing engaging content around the service like slideshare presentations, ebooks, PDFs etc. Promoting and sharing this content across social bookmarking sites, interacting with others on relevant communities across Linkedin groups, doing guest blog posts with industry thought leaders, building a following on Twitter, link building and developing awareness for the service and company.

The first two or three months there was very little traffic, a hand full of inbound leads mainly from decision makers stumbling across conversations and learning about the company. In the next three months we were reaching about 150 inbound visitors a day resulting in about just 10 form fills a month but converting into about 4-5 sales a month since the inbound leads were more qualified and came looking for what we offer. This was at par with the 4 person outbound team.

As the activity continued at the same pace, towards the end of the first year traffic grew steadily towards the website, form fills started to increase and inbound leads were continuing to show steady progress. Conversions were much better on these inbound leads since they came from visitors that had come across us online through our content or conversations, heard about us, reviewed and done most of their evaluation on the website with content provided there and then asked us to get in touch with them since they were interested.

By the end of the second year, the number of inbound leads from the website as a result of the social media and content marketing activity had far exceeded anything the 4 person sales team could come up with who were still at 4 sales a month.

The process took time and effort to yield anything. Once it did, however, it scaled and beyond a point, the returns far outweighed the costs.

Developing an online presence is not going to yield instant results but great brands were not built overnight. They were investments made with the vision that people will connect with them and when they finally did they paid off. Social media and online outreach is an investment. Invest early, reap the benefits long term!

Using Social Influencers To Get The Customers Attention

The morning started off at the Zomato.com office in Koregaon Park, Pune where the panelists converged and the got some time to connect with each other. Including some of Pune’s most active social media folks, the panelists were a great mix of individuals ensuring this was going to be a great session.

Introducing the panelists:

 Top row from left to right:

Sonali Brahma : Independent Strategist and Creative Consultant

Saurabh Sengupta : Business Head, Zomato

Radha Giri : CEO of Midas Touch Consultants

Dr. Parag Dixit : Co-Founder of Sheepstop.com

Neil Sequeira : Founder of BuzzFactory.net (that would be me)

Swati Maheshwari : Co-founder of Rustic Art (Moderator for the discussion)

Bottom row from left to right:

Shikha Pakhide: Co-founder of Social Media Club Pune Chapter (Organizer for this event)

Yash Sharma : Founder of Change Republic

Sandeep Saxena : Founder and CEO, Acton Biotech

Prasant Naidu : Co-Founder of Lighthouse Insights

Arun Prabhudesai : Founder of Trak.in

Social influencer’s are to the social media realm what celebrities and brand ambassadors or brand influencers are to the offline marketing world. They hold the attention and have the trust of their audiences whether through their blog, Twitter accounts or social networks and a single mention by them could help or ruin the reputation of a product, business or brand. As the panel discussion got underway, there were some terrific examples, experiences shared, points made, opinions brought to light and tonnes of great insights around the subject of using social media influencers and the use of social media for marketing in general. The overall learnings from  this fruitful discussion may just be to vast to review or list out in a single post but here are just some of the points the panel generally agreed on and made during the discussion which would be good takeaways to remember and chew on:

Takeaways

1) Using social influencers can be effective in promoting a business or brand however, social influencers have built their audience and reputations the hard way and won’t necessarily use their power/influence to promote or mention something pushed to them.

2) If you ask a social influencer to promote or review something, expect they won’t necessarily say only good things about you. Many won’t like being pushed to review or promote your product or brand especially if they don’t really know you. Others may agree to have a look at it but they won’t compromise their honest criticism or feedback .

3) There are indirect ways to catch the attention of a social influencer, get to know them or get on their radar. They’re more likely to mention you or your brand once they’ve gotten to know you and genuinely like the product or the brand on their own without being pushed into promoting it.

4) Brand evangelism and influencers can really impact your sales but you can gather brand evangelists only if your product/service is great or worth talking about. There are lot of little creative things you can do to make your product or service better and give people something worth talking about. If you do, they will do your promotion for you. A crappy product or service can not be pushed through social media channels even if you pay people to talk about it.

5) If you’re using social media and want others to talk about your brand in a positive light, be ready for negative feedback and reactions too. Don’t block people from being able to express negative sentiments instead, address every unhappy customer or user and try and turn that negative into a positive. A single negative that is turned to a positive on social media channels is worth more than a hundred positive comments because it shows people that you care!

6) You can’t just leave anyone in charge of your social media especially if they don’t have a clue about what they’re doing or they are not empowered to respond and act. For example, a company CEO doesn’t let some random employee reply using his email id, so why should he do that with his social media accounts. Cases when a CEO, business owner or an empowered representative of the company immediately responds to a comment, tweet, update or conversation and takes swift action showing the company is listening creates immense respect for that brand or company.

7)You have the technology, the audience and tools to take a conscious decision to become a social influencer within your field. It’s a process which needs constant interaction, activity, passion and dedication along with a systematic effort but any one of us can gradually become an influencer today if you invest the time and effort to doing so and you earn the respect of online users.

One needs to bring in personality into their social media presence since no one wants to interact with robots or even worse, humans posting like robots!

9)You need to identify how your social media interactions are working for you. In some cases, it may not be about bringing in more traffic or new customers, it could be to retain existing traffic and keep people coming back.

10)Identifying who the best social influencers are for your business is important and can vary a lot depending on what kind of business you are. For a small services business for example, it’s all about word of mouth and your existing customers can be your most powerful influencers if they talk about you to their peers. For some companies, their employees can be their best evangelists while others a highly passionate and influential customer can become your best evangelist.

11)Money is rarely an effective compensation for most social influencers and directly telling them to promote your product or write a good review will probably backfire. If you wish to leverage social influencers, the approach has to be much more inviting, creative, giving them an opportunity to voice their own opinion on something whether good or bad. It’s about creating an experience for them to talk about and giving them the freedom to do it their way on their terms.

Those are just some of the takeaways from this session which could prove invaluable to anyone planning on identifying and engaging social media influencers to evangelize their brands or businesses. All in all, a Saturday morning well spent with some interesting discussions, valuable takeaways and … scrumptious pizzas to top it off!

Social media is a powerful medium for brands and marketing. No doubt about it. Businesses spend a significant portion of their budgets marketing and it’s not uncommon to have budgets of millions of dollars kept aside for advertising, buying media space, filming commercials, putting up events and other channels. When it comes to budgeting or investing in online marketing (online advertising not withstanding) or social media media marketing a common response is :

But isn’t that free?

Or at least, social media marketing is associated with low cost options for marketing….which it is. The truth is, you can market a brand or business online for virtually nothing. All you need is a laptop, internet and understanding of social media and how they can be leveraged to drive traffic and awareness for you. Most sites that are commonly used will give you free sign ups. You can setup a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com for nothing. Create a Facebook page, a Twitter account, submit pages to directories, work on your search marketing all without having to pull out a credit card or spend money. Social media is free. So what are we social media marketing agencies really charging for?

Time!

Let’s rewind a bit and look at how you would go about starting to create some online presence assuming we just launched a new website. Creating a blog can be done for free if you choose to. Writing a first post will cost you about 2 hours assuming you need to do some research, editing, include some of your keywords and really put together something people would share. That post is not going to get noticed without promoting it so that will cost a couple of hours too. Submitting it to several top bookmarking sites, communities, social networks, groups and so on so that it may get at least a few clicks from there. Doing this once will achieve nothing! It needs to be done daily or consistently. How many hours is that?

Every one of those accounts whether on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, StumbleUpon, Digg, Tumblr etc are edge-less swords until you’ve built a social influence on each one of these networks. Creating a social influence on a single social site takes hours a week and even years of activity and working at it. If you have a new Twitter account and spend a few weeks having built a following of 30 people and share your website, chances are 0-1 person may just click on it. Being in a position where you build a larger following, know people within your network build an influence on Twitter which guarantees a few hundred or thousand people will hear what you say can take take hundreds of hours of dedicated activity on Twitter. Likewise, developing a following and influence on other accounts and communities cost hundreds of hours in time. This doesn’t include the time invested in conversations, networking, replying, commenting and several other activities which are an integral part of creating an online engagement.

Social media as a channel is low cost. It may not need a lot of investment in terms of money but it needs more investment in time than perhaps any (or most) other marketing activity and time is a valuable commodity.  

It could be your time, your employees time, the time put in a by an online marketing manager, a dedicated social media team or that of a social media agency. One way or another, to build a really great online presence and social media engagement you need to invest a lot of time and effort no matter who is putting it in. So is it really low cost or free?

Some say social media and online marketing agencies like us sell expertise but I believe there is little barrier to learning what we know and a wealth of information shared on the subject if you have the time to learn it all. I like to think what we’re really charging for is our time because we spend a lot of it doing what we do. The value proposition to those that engage the support of a social media agency? :- Save your time, buy ours instead because you’ll need all the time you can get to make social media marketing really work for you and when it does, you’ll know it was worth every minute.

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Plus etc are the the better known bigwigs of the social web and undoubtedly the first places that come to mind when you think about developing a marketing strategy online. Going purely by the volume of traffic they have, it seems obvious to spend more time and energy developing activity and outreach on the platforms that have the most traffic and give less priority to the ones that have comparatively less traffic. It seems like common sense that if you have target market of 20 million on Facebook, that’s where you should spend most of your online marketing focus and yet this isn’t always the case.

When it comes to online marketing and engaging people through different web channels there’s a lot more than quantity of traffic that comes into play. The same set of social sites and using the same outreach formula may not always work since every brand, business, target market and web user base has it’s own characteristics. Facebook may bring in 1000 fans and not a single conversion over 10 months. A small niche community site or online group on the other hand may bring in just 50 visitors in the same time frame resulting in 10 conversions. There’s marketing potential far beyond Facebook and the obvious social media super sites.

Just to be clear, we’re not saying don’t spend time on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and so on. We’re saying don’t restrict your outreach efforts to only these sites and look beyond the obvious choices because you never know what works best for your inbound marketing till you experiment.

Let me illustrate:

A new picturesque family getaway hill resort was looking to  increase their online visibility to drive more bookings and eventually to rely on inbound traffic and conversions to keep the occupancy charts filled. They managed to create a Facebook page and spread the word through family and friends touching 400 fans in their first 3 months however, there were only about 3 bookings that could be attributed to their activity on the Facebook page. Some weeks later, one of their customers submitted a review of the resort on TripAdvisor.com and resulted in someone else discovering the resort as a result of this review. From that instance, the resort decided to explicitly request their customers to add a review on TripAdvisor.com if they enjoyed their stay and customers did. The TripAdvisor reviews showed up well in Google search results for ‘places to stay’ related to the region and the bookings clearly saw an increase. Learning from the experience, the resort spent more time submitting their details to similar hotel directory sites, travel review communities and listings stepping up their activity on these sites and although the traffic increase was not huge, the conversion rate was growing and inbound bookings went up significantly as more people discovered the resort through their searches for staying options in the area.

A children’s clothing and apparel brand setup an online store in an attempt to break out of it’s local operations and look global for customers. They spent significant resources working on on-site SEO and creating accounts on Twitter, Facebook as well as setting up a blog which they could use to showcase their style tips and advice. They soon learned this is a very crowded and competitive space online and got frustrated not being noticed and getting the attention they thought they would. Their break came from getting actively involved on family and kids fashion sites like mykidsfashion.com, stylecaster.com, cafemom.com and others. People seemed to respond better to photos of their kids wear and gradually the purchases started happening. They were finally connecting to the right audiences in the right places and developing an influence there.

There’s a wide web of places online beyond the popular choices to develop an influence and reach out to the right people online and sometimes all it takes is a little will and effort to experiment and find out what works best for you. It can be a long process but well worth it in the end when you find the right mix and focus efforts on the ones that yield results.

A financial company had this big event planned which would bring down some heavy weight global investors as well as some key government leaders two months away. They planned to market this event in a big way to attract more attendees from the private sector and decided to use an integrated multi-pronged plan with email campaigns, a single newspaper advertisement, call in known press contacts for some offline PR and wait for it….social media marketing!

Now this could have been a great strategy to reach out and spread the word about the event inviting people to come attend but the catch was they didn’t have a social media presence or online engagement they could tap into so they decided to engage a social media and online marketing company that could help them create a web presence for them since they would be busy with preparations for the event. Now deciding to create a social media and web presence for your company IS a great idea. What was wrong with this particular case is the plan was to spend exactly 2 months engaging on social media, setting up a blog, a Facebook account, connecting with groups on Linkedin, Twitter…..and then STOP until much later in the year when another similar event was planned.

Social media can not be compared directly to television advertising or other offline media. It doesn’t work on the principle of flash a message to a known sized audience and pay accordingly (Online advertising does that but not social media engagement). It’s about constant interaction, communication and building that community / audience and that’s not a quick ‘put together’ and sell ….it’s build and nurture over a long time. Blog audiences are not built in a month or two, neither are Facebook groups or social influence on other sites. Not to say they can’t be done with a large budget and paid online advertising but you get what you pay for and to grow a social presence online organically and build lasting relationships with people online, that’s not a viable strategy.

Think of it as a conversation (which is exactly what it is). When you stop activity, stop publishing, stop updating, stop answering, replying or communicating online…..that is the end of the conversation. The other’s in the room with you have little option but to leave the room or move on. You can’t build a relationship based on a single conversation in any social situation online or not. Stronger relationships are built when you keep in touch, keep communicating and stay in contact. Social media and online presence is great for marketing – but it can’t be a seasonal strategy which can be turned on an off.

This company is not alone in their resolve to use social media and invest in online activity for a few days of the year only when it’s strategically needed for their marketing. There are sporting clubs and franchises that engage a million strong fan base for a few months of the year when the season is on and then cut off all activity when its done. Sure season is when the interest peaks and the sponsorship revenues come pouring in for the teams and clubs but what about the fans? Do they stop being fans once the season is over? Do they stop reading about their favorite players or not want to hear what is happening off the field through the year till the next season? There are businesses from every field occasionally dabbling in social media and then letting the activity slide like it’s a seasonal campaign but there’s no such thing when it comes to social media.

There’s always advertising to turn to for instant demand generation but inbound marketing and social media marketing is not about that and doesn’t fit there as a solution to short term demand increases. It’s about relationships and like any dating guru (or social media influencer) will tell you…you need to invest time and effort in any relationship and work at it constantly to strengthen it.

That said, there’s something quite amusing about Stumble. Something that all serious stumblers will know and would have experienced.

If you’re on StumbleUpon and are reading this. Have you noticed this?