Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

We’ve seen that clients and prospects ask for and want a secret ‘recipe’ to start a social media programs that they can ‘plug and play’ into their business without considering the ‘why’ of their business, this leads to ‘more of the same’ strategies that lead nowhere.

To help you answer the ‘Why’ we recommend you read Jay Bear’s 7 step process on how to develop a social media strategy and then come back here.

Thanks for coming back, now on to the ‘How’.

Framing the challenge

Since we’re always in the ‘let’s shake things up’ mood we’re testing a new approach to develop strategy, here are some questions to help you ideate a social media strategy around the most important things:

• In what ways might we spread the word about our product or service?
• In what ways might we create a following on Facebook and/or Twitter?
• In what ways might we create content?
• In what ways might we publish content?
• In what ways might we create engagement?
• In what ways might we help people subscribe to our newsletter?
• In what ways might we help people share our content?
• In what ways might we help people take useful action from our content?
• In what ways might we show people the benefit of doing business with us?
• In what ways might we prove to people the benefit of doing business with us?
• In what ways might we make our product or service be talked about?
• In what ways might we convince our customers come back?
• In what ways might we convince our customers to tell their friends about us?

These questions are meant to open your mind and create a list of possible options. The next thing you have to do is get a group together of no more than 5 key people and brainstorm around these questions and stop once you have enough answers for each question. At this point you have all sorts of ideas and now it’s time to start making choices depending on your strategic goals.

*For another approach check out Steve Koss’s comments below and clickthrough to his website for more depth.

Strategy should be unique to you

Next, to get really creative instead of going out and seeing how other businesses within your industry would answer these questions, think about how businesses in other industries would answer them. Why? Because all the good ideas in your industry are already taken and they’re called best practices.

The whole idea of strategy is not to replicate what your competitors do but to create a strategy that’s unique to you. 

We’d love to know what you think? What’s your approach to developing a social media strategy? What questions would you add?

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Is organic content relevant anymore?

This is a question I get asked a lot and it usually comes accompanied by an Alexa ranking remark: My Alexa ranking says I’m at 1,890,898 and last week I was at 2,589,723 but nothing is happening…Correct!

Link Building, the part of SEO that gets valuable inbound links to your website, is very time intensive. Most of the top websites have complete dominance over certain keywords because they’ve been linked to hundreds of thousands of times with those keywords. You would have to replicate that same output to try to rank in the top 3 results in Google, there are many ways to do this but it’s incredibly time intensive and the results are not immediate.

SEO is quite relevant still but the game has changed and:

As most things, SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that following each and every single point here will only get you so far as other factors come into play such as competition for your keywords and the amount of competition your up against.

With the rise of social media it’s not surprising to see most websites get the most of their traffic from social networks such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook where factors such as immediacy and freshness play a bigger role.

SEO has matured, the game has shifted to social media and the benefits are superior.

Alexa is just a measurement tool that compares you with the rest of the web based on it’s criteria, but it’s not something you should use to measure success. It’s really easy to lead most people to think that Alexa is what you should monitors as opposed to looking at your search results, twitter mentions, blog comments, etc…I’m not saying Alexa is wrong it’s just not that relevant anymore as a yardstick.

Unless you have a big search advertising budget to pay for keywords, what really matters is the social media engagement metrics I mentioned above.

Again:

Your best bet is to optimize your website with these factors in mind but focus most of your marketing efforts in creating relationships, bonding with your audience and giving the best possible brand experience, social media makes this possible in ways SEO can’t.

One last thing, the basic formula to follow for SEO is: Publishing more = organic traffic from search results.

But:

It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

Are you link building or relationship building?

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Attention is scarce because trust is scarce. And why is trust scarce? Because everyone is out to maneuver people into attention by throwing as much content as possible at them without putting some thought into what their problems might be. Think about it, do you trust your friends to give you thoughtful advice? You probably do and that’s the key. As a brand, ‘friending’ your customers doesn’t mean you got the keys to the castle, it just means you have an opportunity to become a real friend. How you go about doing this is not that tricky…

So how do we go beyond attracting attention to building trust?

By changing from a consumption mindset to a take action mindset. We want people to consume our content (attention) but do we really care if they take action on it (share/implement it)?  To build trust we have to care what they do with our ideas, I think that’s the key. This takes time but then again Rome wasn’t built in a day and real relationships take months to build.

With some much content getting pushed out there we have to be mindful of people’s time, so the question is: are we doing enough to help them solve their problems?

Ask yourself: Would I trust myself?

What say you, are you out there to grab attention or build trust? Which comes first?

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Here’s an accompanying video of Duncan Watt’s ‘Is the Tipping point toast?’ article where he argues that targeting the so called influencers is a total waste of time and instead marketers should target everyday people who are more receptive to new ideas. You should read the full article at Fast Company, it’s well worth your time!

I found the above video as well as 2 other perspectives on how ideas spread through networks via @ariegoldshlager and also wrote about this a few days ago that to spread ideas go to the edge where people are more receptive to new things.

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So where do you place an idea so it spreads through networks?

There’s some network research from MIT that trumps the notion of the influencer: the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people.

The truth is we don’t really know specifically from where an idea/trend will spread from, we only know that the weakest links (the people we never think of) have higher spreading power than the strongest links and these people are found at the edges of a network.

So what’s a marketer/innovator to do?

Influencers don’t care about you

There are some theories but the one most everyone focuses on is reaching the influencers made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book the Tipping Point. Well good luck with that because most everyone including your competitors is doing the same thing, the race is on to reach the so called influencers and they can barely keep up with all the ideas they’re being asked to spread.

Imagine being the care taker for the President of the United States and you get all sorts of letters from people who want to say something to the President and your job is to filter out the one’s that are most relevant for him to read and take action on. Well that’s exactly the battle you have to fight when targeting the influencers, everybody knows them so why would your idea come first?

People will ONLY ‘spread an idea’ if they think it’s worth remarking about, not because you paid them for their attention.

The fringe is much more friendly

New ideas and trends come from the fringe, from the edge and not from the mainstream, and spread from the edge to the center and then the process repeats itself. You stand a better chance of catching that ‘fire starter idea’ by going out to the fringe (where nothing is settled) instead of looking for ideas where everyone is looking (the mainstream) and then focus on making your idea take form with people at the edge.

In conclusion here are a few things to remember to help your ideas spread:

1. Go outside the mainstream where things are changing and look for ideas there.
2. Do algorithmic innovation: generate a lot of ideas, figure out ways to try them out cheaply and quickly, and then scale-up the ones that seem most promising.
3. Your idea needs to be buzzworthy. Ask yourself: Would anyone tell a friend about this?
4. Feed it to the fringe.
5. Make the influencers come to you.

What do you think, what’s your experience with making ideas spread?

Collapse theory graphic by BlackCoffee

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