People can’t buy your product or service if they don’t know it exists. That’s where brand awareness comes into play. We’re talking about cranking up the volume on your brand.

For smaller organizations and businesses, brand awareness can be one of the greatest marketing challenges. After all, increasing brand awareness has traditionally meant spending money on advertising. And buying media isn’t cheap.

Volume up

Originally uploaded by mikelao26

Of course, these days, with social media marketing, brand awareness can be achieved without spending money on advertising, though you may have to spend money on getting your social media content created and posted. However a blog post last infinitely-those magazine ads are good until the magazine lands in the trash can.

So, from my forthcoming online version of the Social Media Marketing Journey workshop, here are 5 social media tactics for increasing brand awareness:

1. Social Media Monitoring + Commenting - Find out where the conversations are online that are relevant to your product or service, and get involved.

2. Blogging + SEO - When you combine the power of WordPress plugins such as the All-In-One SEO pack with the ability to literally “share” your expertise (with share widgets) while building relationships online, I think the blog is one of the best social media marketing tactics one can employ to increase brand awareness.

3. Crowdsourcing - While crowdsourcing generally begins with people who are already aware of your brand, it spreads if you mix it up with other tactics, like having a contest built around reader votes.

4. Branded widgets - Granted there might be some coding that has to happen to create your own widget, but create a widget that is unique and useful, and you can end up in all kinds of places online.

5. Blog trackbacks - While trackbacks can be a little tricky, they can be a great way to get some extra awareness out there regarding your blog, especially if pinging back to high traffic blogs.

These are just a few of the social media marketing tactics I’ll discuss in my online version of The Social Media Road Trip Workshop which I’m currently working on. Let me know if interested by leaving a message here.

Christmas lights

Originally uploaded by dave416

By Kevin McIntosh

Looks like Social Media is getting closer and closer to Santa in terms of having some influence around the holidays.

ComScore Research in Virginia released a report from a survey earlier in December that revealed holiday shoppers were relying more on social media for recommendations on holiday purchases in 2009.

According to the report, 28 percent of those who had begun their holiday shopping this season indicated that social media had influenced their purchases.

Consumer-generated product reviews were the most common form of social media influence (13 percent), followed by an expert product review (11 percent).

Facebook fan pages attracted seven percent of respondents who said they’d followed brands on Facebook to take advantage of special offers and deals. Another 6 percent said they have been influenced by a friend’s Facebook status update referring to a particular product.

Five percent of respondents indicated they had followed a company on Twitter to take advantage of special offers and deals, while 3 percent said that a friend’s “tweet” about a product influenced their purchase behavior.

Who knows, maybe next year kids will just tweet their wish lists to Santa.

I’m seeing several universities jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.

Universities are taking advantage of the opportunity to use Twitter to promote everything from campus events to news and links to press releases related to current news items affecting the respective campuses.

Here are just a few of the universities taking advantage of Twitter:

TWITTER USER NAME – UNIVERSITY

MarquetteU – Marquette University

IUBloomington – Indiana University

princeton – Princeton University

EmoryUniversity – Emory University

Harvard – Harvard University

AuburnU – Auburn University

Stanford – Stanford University

TuftsUniversity – Tufts University

templeedu – Temple University

uiowa – University of Iowa

Is your university on Twitter but not listed above? Let me know and I’ll add it.

Is there a formula that tells you if it’s time for your brand to engage in social media marketing?

By Kevin McIntosh

If you know your audience is online and you’re wondering if social media marketing is for you, here are 10 questions you might ask yourself to see if you’re ready for the social media marketing journey.

1. Am I ready to participate in conversations with my audience even if the conversations aren’t aimed at driving an immediate sale?

Social media marketing differs in traditional marketing in that it’s less about “selling” and more about building relationships through online conversations and sharing of information. You’ll need to accept this truth if you want to increase your chances for success with social media marketing. The good news is, building relationships means building trust. And building trust with customers is more important than ever.

2. Am I ready to to let my audience have more and more control of my brand?

Once your brand is out there, you give up control. People can comment on it, and dice and slice your content anyway they want. However, that can be a good thing. In the process, what you learn can help you push your brand where it needs to go to be more successful. And the truth is, it’s already out of your control. People may be doing all of the above already. It’s just that with social media marketing, you’ll be aware of it.

3. Am I ready to listen to the opinions and ideas of my audience to truly learn from them and in that process, actually let their ideas impact my product / service?

Related to question number 2. If you’re learning from your audience, are you willing to implement what you learn into your marketing or operations to make improvements that better fit audience trends? The ultimate result is that you’ll create brand advocates who become your virtual marketing and PR team, telling others about your brand.

4. Can I see value in any other metrics other than actual sales, as long as the metrics indicate a trend of people moving closer to the sale?

For example, can  you see the ROI in changing an influencer’s sentiment about your brand? As stated in question 1, conversations in social media shouldn’t be aimed at making an immediate sale. So your metrics reports may show encouraging data that indicates that more and more people are moving closer to the sale, but just haven’t fully converted. Depending on what you’re selling, the process can take time. But with social media monitoring and other tools, you can measure results to see what impact your efforts are making before the sale and to see if you’re moving closer to that objective.

5. Am I OK with making mistakes and learning from them?

A while back, I was watching an online presentation by Charlotte Li of Forrester Research and author of the social media book, Groundswell. She made it clear that in social media marketing, you will make mistakes. I’ll add that the truth is, mistakes are made in all forms of marketing. But what makes social media marketing different is that your audience can easily remind you and others of your mistakes. In other words, if you posted some of your promotional materials online for viewers to comment on, you’d likely hear the truth that your promotional ideas may not be all that great. Still, when you use social media marketing to let your audience guide your marketing, the mistakes can still be minimal.

6. Am I ready to devote resources (i.e. employees, time and money) to a continual social media marketing program for at least an extended trial period?

Done correctly, social media marketing can be time intensive. However, advantages like no costs for media and the value of leveraging online word-of-mouth to your advantage can be well worth the time required. 

7. Am I ready to think about social media strategically, versus simply looking at all the cool, shiny tools?

If you simply focus on something like, “Setting up a Facebook page” or posting a YouTube video, you’ll likely be disappointed with the results. Social media is a strategic process that uses tools to accomplish specific objectives. The good thing though, is that there is a method to the madness.

8. Do I appreciate the value of identifying and engaging with a single person who can influence dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people in their purchase and brand behavior?

Because of the exponential power of influence, 10 pairs of eyeballs looking at your content in a social media context can have a lot more impact than 100 pairs of eyeballs looking at your content in other marketing channels.

9. Do I appreciate the value of being able to change attitudes and beliefs about my brand?

Sometimes, simply changing the attitudes and beliefs of an audience can be the biggest hurdle in converting them into customers. Social media marketing can be a great way to do that simply because you can often pinpoint those with the wrong attitudes and beliefs and with social media, you can engage with them before they spread their false ideas to others.

10. Do I believe that the cost of NOT participating in social media is greater than the cost of participating in social media?

Or to put it another way, is the cost of letting people say whatever they want about your brand online greater than the cost of defending your brand? Is the cost of learning what it would take to get people to spread the word about your brand greater than the cost of continuing to use traditional paid media?

Those are some of the more important questions I think marketers should consider when trying to decide if they’re ready for social media marketing. Any other questions you can think of?

-Kevin McIntosh

Kevin McIntosh lives in Nashville and has worked on the marketing campaigns of over a dozen Fortune 500 brands. His workshop, “The Social Media Marketing Journey” shows companies how to use social media marketing to accomplish a wide range of objectives.

Different Types Of Social Media Video
From The Social Media Road Trip Workshop

This blog post updated January 11, 2012

By Kevin McIntosh

Blogs. Microblogs. Photosharing sites. Video sharing sites. I know personally that trying to understand all of these different types of social media and how they work together can feel like trying to understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

I’m gonna try and keep things simple for us here, by focusing on the different kinds of social media rather than all the different ways to integrate social media into your organization. That’s really not something you can learn in a single blog post.

So clear your mind and throw all your baggage in the trunk. We’re gettin’ ready to head down the next stretch of the road on our social media road trip as we take a look at different kinds of social media.

Social networking – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+

Social networking sites allow users to add friends, send messages and share content. People on social networking sites group in communities of like-minded interest. IMPORTANT: 1) The other types of social media outlined here also allow for networking, though they’re typically more focused on content sharing. 2) Don’t assume your audience isn’t participating in social networking. The growth of Facebook for example is phenomenal. The rate at which it is growing with men and women in their 60′s even is staggering.

Social bookmarking – Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon

Social bookmarking applications allow users to share their favorite online content with one another while also creating online bookmarks that the user can refer to in the same way he would a bookmark created offline in his web browser. Bookmarks may also count as a vote, hence content with lots of votes can rise to the top of the page results in that community.

Blogs – WordPress, TypePad, Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger as well as non-branded blogging platforms

Blogs are online journals where the author can write (blog) about any interest he wants. The blogger can also use the blog to share content picked up from other social media sites (YouTube, Issuu) by taking advantage of the simple embed codes offered by those content hosts.

LEARN SOCIAL MEDIA ONLINE-click here

Wikis - Wikipedia

A wiki refers to content created online as a result of multiple users working on the same content, but at different times and from different places. The “Different Types of Social Media” video from my online social media workshop

Photosharing - Flickr, Photobucket

Photosharing sites are where people can upload photos to share either privately with only selected other users or publicly. Creative Commons licensing rights can grant permissions for others to use the photos by simply embedding the codes in their blogs. That is how I get most of the photos on my blog.

Geolocation-Gowalla, Foursquare, FacebookPlaces

Geolocation sites are typically accessed through the user’s smart mobile phone. These sites feature “check-in” capabilities so that users can, if they choose, share their location with their social connections. This is a fast-growing area of social media as it has strong possibilities for retail marketing.

Video Sharing - YouTube, Vimeo, iMemories

Similar to photosharing. Users upload video content to a site for sharing either privately or public.

Presentation Sharing - Slideshare.net, Scribd, Issuu

Files can be uploaded as PDF’s and they are then converted to work with the online presentation applications. You’ll notice these presentation tools include embed codes and email options as well, making it easy for the content to be shared online.

Meetups/Events – Meetup.com and Facebook Events

Meetup.com and Facebook event invites for example. These types of social media allow you to plan and organize events including sending out invitations through your social network and also receiving RSVP’s.