Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

“Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.” Bette Davis

The basic recipe for marketing your business with social media tools goes a little something like this:

1. Setup a blog.

2. Open a Twitter account.

3. Setup a Facebook Fan Page.

4. Publish content on your blog (A lot of it!).

5. Tweet interesting stuff (including your blog content).

6. Engage in conversation with people on Twitter.

7. Retweet stuff posted by other people so that they in turn might RT you back.

8. Comment on blogs

9. …

10…

I’m all for simplicity and these ideas are worthy of being in a Social Media Marketing for Dummies book but you don’t really need that because there loads of blogs out there spreading this gospel. Problem is they’re all best practices now, so how do you differentiate?

By starting to uncover some insights into your audience’s online behavior like where they hang out, what they do there, how much time they spend there, who they talk to, what they talk about, where will they jump to next and then asking ‘WHY’.

So what’s the first step in social media marketing then? Listening.

Listen and then talk

Listening is not the same as hearing. We all like the sound of our own voice and it often stands in the way of understanding the person we’re talking to (your customers). If we really want to understand people we have to pay attention to what they say and do and once we do that we’ll stand a better chance of influencing their behavior. Nothing new with this statement, repeated often but rarely practiced as I repeat again we like the sound of our own voice.

You need to give a damn about what people have to say to do social media properly and only deep empathy translates into insight.

You need social monitoring tools

If you aren’t familiar with social monitoring tools, here are 26 social listening tools to add to your arsenal, here’s a full presentation. There are both free and paid tools but most of what you need to get started is already on your website in the form of comments, analytic stats, RT’s, Twitter trackbacks, newsletter stats. These will provide you with some good data and information before you move on to the external tools.

I like to say that every business should strive to know their customers better than they know themselves, this takes a lot more effort and goes way beyond the ‘I want them to buy my product and shut up’ mindset most traditional businesses have. Luckily social media tools let us have a 1 to 1 conversation with customers and enables us to get under their skin to uncover those hidden insights that might just give us a new idea for a new service or product.

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Google pulled out all the stops with this video to promote the speed of it Chrome browser. Google tested the speed of its Chrome browser against lightning, sound and a potato cannon all in slow motion. Just watch this!

As they say, actions speak louder than words!

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If you’re not familiar with the use of Hashtags, I recommend you read that post by Mashable on how to use them for business purposes and them come back here.

How do I make it so my blog posts don’t get lost in a sea of Tweets?

Do you know how scientists put an electronic tag on an animal they wish to study to keep track of it? Well something similar happens on Twitter but here the electronic tag is a hashtag (#) and people use them to track/search for information tagged under a specific hashtag.

An elegant solution but with an inherent problem.

The problem is most people on Twitter will research hashtags (#) for tweets that interest them instead of individual people. Why? Because it’s a lot more easier to scan a category as opposed to looking through everything you’ve tweeted including stuff they don’t care about. So unless you’re an established source of information (like Mashable) for a specific category (#socialmedia) then you won’t have this problem but if you’re not you’ll have to accept it and counter it to make sure people see your tweets long after you’ve publish them.

One way to counter this human problem, is to just add a categorical hashtag at the end of your tweet. For example if you have a blog about cooking recipes, add the hashtag #recipes or #cooking at the end of your tweet and voila! your blog post will appear with all other posts tagged with those hashtags.

Nice!

Another option that works if you’re more experimental and publish posts directly to Twitter from your blog (which I’ve been experimenting with here), is to add the hashtag directly to your blog post title like I did with this post: Unconventional #blogging advice.

I haven’t seen anybody else try this and haven’t really noticed a negative response to doing it this way. Finally, you should also publish your posts maybe 3 times at different intervals during the day (with the hashtag!) so that people who where not online at a certain hour can see your post when they are.

Closing thoughts…

Hashtags were born out of the necessity to filter information and have grown to have many more uses which makes them very valuable. Add them to your blog posts and experiment with different types of hashtags as well as putting them directly in your blog post.

Help people find your posts!

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If you’ve ever traveled to Mexico I’m sure you’ve heard of Micheladas, any beer prepared with cold ice, salt and lemon juice. It’s a damn good mix that’s easy to prepare and have become ubiquitous in bars, restaurants, clubs in Mexico.

Well this past weekend I was across the border in Tijuana to visit a prospect and afterwards I went to visit an old stopping ground from my college days: Chabelas.

Chabelas is a little store in a corner of a street that prepares a combination of Michelada with clamato + tabasco sauce + a dash soy sauce and a piece of salted dehydrated plum to-go. This drink is called a Chabela.

Chabela’s always has people coming for a drink, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is and most of these people come from long distances. What Chabelas’s gets right is that they focus on doing one thing only: Serving the best Red Michelada out there, it’s that simple!

This little store was the first of it’s kind in Tijuana and soon other others just like it started sprouting all over the city, they’re no restaurant and no bar, they make Red Micheladas to-go. Others have tried different strategies to unseat them but have failed in doing so because Chabela’s has won a permanent place in people’s minds by maintaining that focus on just serving Micheladas.

The point I want to make is that they’ve conquered their market by being the most at preparing the best Red Micheladas.

What are you doing to be the most at something?

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Want to stand out? Want to be known for something? Want to be ‘THE’ instead of just another guy no one knows? Want to be THE GUY everyone wants to be?

Remember, ideas not content? If you don’t, click the link and then come back over here.

Great to have you back! I spotted a couple of tweets from Jane McGonigal (@AvantGame) that reflect this simple principle:

Applied towards your online brand experience the point is: Your content marketing strategy should be focused on ideas with a purpose for action not for consumption.

So if you’re planning on starting a blog about cooking, think about ‘why?’ you’re doing it (purpose of your blog) before you decide ‘what?’ content you’re going to publish on it. You stand a better chance of your content being shared and therefore being talked about if you create content for action not consumption. This simply means that, as Jane so clearly puts it, your content should help people achieve some goal that makes their life a lot more interesting.

Here’s a BIG idea again: It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

P.S. If you don’t know who Jane McGonigal is I recommend you watch her TED video below, I guarantee it’s well worth your time!

Does this resonate with you? What’s the BIG IDEA behind your content?

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