MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

WARNING: This post is not for the “good enough” minded. Why stop at good enough when you can push for great, lever­aged, or bet­ter yet, inte­grated?

I started toy­ing around with social media early back in 2005. I didn’t real­ize it at the time, but I was just hav­ing fun throw­ing aim­less punches blindly in the dark, in mis­guided hopes of hit­ting the jackpot.

Stu­pid me, it never hap­pened. I lacked direc­tion and had no sys­tem in place.

But I per­sisted, and learned from my many mis­takes. Even­tu­ally, one thing led to another and I ended up work­ing with Mind­Val­ley. Not to men­tion, along the way, I also got invited to new media related con­fer­ences, includ­ing ones co-organized by Har­vard University.

Long story short, I gained a good amount of expe­ri­ence and insights into the world of social media. And now, yours truly, the Social Media DJ, is about to reveal to you a few of his key learn­ings, so please… pay close attention.

What I’ve Learned from 4 YEARS of Stu­pid Painful Screw Ups

1. Base Your Efforts on the Triple B Formula

Social media mar­ket­ing is mainly a long term affair. It won’t bring you sales overnight like PPC-driven affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing for exam­ple (although there are some excep­tions). It takes time and per­sis­tence. Hence, the need for passion.

Burn, baby burn.

Pas­sion is your fuel, your sense of direc­tion, and ulti­mately your vision. Plus, it will help you deter­mine how you’re going to use social media, bet­ter shape your mar­ket­ing mes­sage, and pick the rel­e­vant allies to net­work with who share sim­i­lar passions.

More impor­tantly, when you’re pas­sion­ate and gen­uine, it shows in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion with oth­ers. You’re like­able. You’re fun, and that my friend helps your mes­sage spread fur­ther and makes it more well-received.

That’s pre­cisely one of the crit­i­cal rea­sons why deeply pas­sion­ate guys like Gary Vayner Chuck do well with social media.

Keep it real. Keep it human.

Now, if you don’t know what your pas­sion is yet and need to know, that’s ok. My friend, Chris Attwood explains how you can dis­cover it and start liv­ing it in his NY Times best-seller, The Pas­sion Test. Check it out if you want to.

Alrighty then, next.

2. Don’t Sprawl the Mall

Social media is a broad game. You’ve got Twit­ter, Blogs, YouTube, Face­book Pro­files, Face­book Groups, Face­book Fan Pages, Stum­ble­Upon, MySpace, Ning, Digg, LinkedIn and the list goes on.

All have their weak­nesses and strengths. Which will you pick?

See, you won’t know accu­rately until you clearly spec­ify your intended busi­ness goals. Oth­er­wise, it’s going to be dif­fi­cult to select the appro­pri­ate social media chan­nels for your unique needs and mea­sure the ROI of your efforts.

Here’s what you can you use social media in busi­ness for:

1. branding
2. com­mu­nity building
3. attract­ing new prospects
4. net­work­ing with poten­tial JV partners
5. gen­er­at­ing buzz and unleash­ing the viral monster
6. involv­ing your cus­tomers in the prod­uct cre­ation process
7. lis­ten­ing in on cur­rent con­ver­sa­tions about your offer­ings to gain valu­able feedback
8. boost­ing rela­tion­ships with your cus­tomers to increase reten­tion and life-time value

Select­ing from the above what you desire in a pri­or­i­tized fash­ion will deter­mine which social media chan­nels you should pick, focus on more, and inte­grate together.

Mov­ing on.

3. Prove. Improve.

Try not to rein­vent the wheel. Go for proven strate­gies, and once you’ve imple­mented them suc­cess­fully, improve upon them.

Hence, prove, and then improve.

The fol­low­ing are three sim­ple exam­ples of proven social media mar­ket­ing strategies.

STRATEGY #1 — Use Blogs to Increase Interaction

Old news. Noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary here. Blogs are lovely flex­i­ble pub­lish­ing plat­forms that cre­ate inter­ac­tion. For more on using them effec­tively, read this:

• Posi­tion­ing, “Social Polar­ity” and Vibrant Blog Communities
• 7 Ways to Increase Your Blog Comments
• Blog Mar­ket­ing: Mon­e­tize The Com­ments On Your Blog

STRATEGY #2 — Use YouTube to Attract Traffic

Being one of the top 5 most vis­ited web­sites on the planet, YouTube is a seri­ous source of traf­fic, so if you’re not mar­ket­ing your­self there, you’re miss­ing out on sig­nif­i­cant eye­balls. To use YouTube in cool prof­itable ways, read this:

• How I Made A Dol­lar From Every­one Who Watched My YouTube Video

STRATEGY #3 — Use Face­book to Build a Community

There are count­less ways Face­book can be used for effec­tive mar­ket­ing, if you do it right. Here’s one that’s bound to spark some cre­ative ideas in your head:

• Face­book Mar­ket­ing: How Smart Restau­rants and Bars are Using “Birth­day Mar­ket­ing” on Facebook

Okay, so now that I’ve quickly demon­strated three strate­gies, let’s go to the fourth step.

4. Inte­gra­tion — The “Pop­eye Spinach” Effect

Aha, now here comes the fun part. This is where many experts have short-comings, because they’re too focused on a few social media web­sites and miss the big picture.

Thing is, the three afore­men­tioned strate­gies are good. In fact, for many experts or so-called experts, they’re “good enough.”

Not for me.

Yours truly, the Social Media DJ, doesn’t want to stop there and doesn’t want you to either. Throw in some “Pop­eye Spinach” and watch the magic unrav­el­ing before your eyes.

Inte­grate the three indi­vid­ual tac­tics strate­gi­cally. There are obvi­ously a num­ber of ways to do that. Here’s a sim­ple one you can use if you’re an inter­net mar­keter with an email list.

1. pub­lish a blog post that includes:

• some use­ful text-based content
• your own opti­mized YouTube video
• your Face­book pro­file badge

2. blast the blog post to your list
3. sit back and enjoy!

Your blog post should look some­thing like this. The exam­ple below is from a MindValley-owned web­site with Burt Gold­man aka The Amer­i­can Monk. It lever­ages a lot of inte­grated social media marketing.

Here are the ben­e­fits of inte­gra­tion and the “Pop­eye Spinach” Effect.

1. You inter­act with your email list via the com­ments in your blog post.

2. You instantly cre­ate thou­sands of views and momen­tum for your opti­mized YouTube video. This pushes the video higher in rank­ings, mean­ing it will con­tinue to attract many more views for months, if not, years to come, which nicely trans­lates into more tar­geted vis­i­tors to your web­site via your YouTube links.

3. Con­vert­ing more of your list sub­scribers into Face­book friends, so you can bet­ter inter­act with them and have a closer relationship.

It all works. Here’s proof. Have a look at the num­ber of blog com­ments (42), YouTube video views (22,575), and Face­book friends (1,294) in the screen­shots below:

Are you begin­ning to see the power of inte­grated social media mar­ket­ing? The “Pop­eye Spinach” Effect is yours for exploita­tion. Use it, my friend. Use it!

5. ROI. Tweak, Tweak. ROI.

Your ROI is a crit­i­cal impor­tant num­ber. It doesn’t really mat­ter if you have 5,000 “friends” on your Face­book pro­file, unless you can mea­sure the ROI of your social media mar­ket­ing efforts. How do those true friends or so-called friends impact your business?

Come up with your suit­able stan­dards. Mea­sure. Tweak to improve, and then mea­sure again. That way, you won’t be aimless.

Now go, and have some fun.

Aim for max­i­mum impact through the strate­gic inte­gra­tion of your social media mar­ket­ing efforts. Are we clear, my dear friends? If not, drop your ques­tions, and the Social Media DJ will answer them.

If you enjoyed danc­ing to my beats, I urge you to stick around. You’ve only just seen the tip of the ice­berg. And for those of you on Twit­ter, the Social Media DJ has just joined the party there. Add me @passionomics for more prof­itable meat.

See you at the Land of Tweets.

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About the Author

Having been invited for conferences co-organized by Harvard University and attended international ones, Amir is a blogaholic and a passionate observer of the blogosphere who's built a number of successful blogs. On top of that, he's obviously a full-time web junkie at MindValley where he focuses on blogging, SEO and social media marketing trends.

Check out other posts by Amir Ahmad

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