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

April 9, 2012

By Kevin McIntosh

Just what is “social media integration?” I bet you don’t know what you think you know.

“You don’t know what you don’t know.

Before I ask you to  check out my workshop on integrating social media, I have something I want to share.

There are things you don’t know about people, business, and yes, even how to integrate social media or what social media integration really is.  And in fact, you don’t even know about those things you don’t know about.

I know this isn’t a simple 5 things you need to know about social media blog post. It’s gonna take longer than 30 seconds to read. But it will be worth it. So please focus for a couple minutes…

Remember at that point in your life, probably some point in your teens or early 20′s when you were fairly convinced you had the world totally figured out. But for those of you who’ve moved a few years (or maybe just a few days)  beyond that, you soon discovered not only did you not have the world figured out, there were complexities to living in this world that were not even on your radar.

So here’s my question to you. What makes you think you have it all figured out now?

Moment of truth here… you don’t (hopefully that’s more of reminder and not a shocking revelation). None of us have it all figured out.

Going back to social media. Last week I saw a tweet saying “What is social media integration?” The tweet included a URL to the tweeter’s blog post of the same title. So I get to the blog and start reading this person’s definition of social media. This person by the way is someone who made a living advising clients on matters related to design and social media.

So the blog post shares examples of social media integration. The problem was, this designer/social media pro had totally gotten it wrong. She wasn’t even in the right ball park.

Now how did I find this individual on Twitter? Because early last week I started thinking about this topic of “You don’t know what you don’t know.” And it hit me. Social media integration is a part of social media that most people get wrong.They assume they understand it because if they’ve had any previous experience with concepts like “brand integration” they assume it’s similar, just with social media.

Nuh-uh. Nope.

So a quick little search of that term on Twitter and within seconds I had a catch on the line.

Right now, the big conversation among social media thought leaders for what will happen in 2012-13 with social media is integration. And a recent survey (sorry I don’t have it handy right now but can track down if you request) shows a very small percentage of companies that are actually implementing social media are actually integrating social media throughout the organization. My theory is they don’t even know about it. They too are probably assuming it’s similar to brand integration, thinking it refers to something like “put your Facebook page link on everything from your blog to your receipts.”

And thus, they are missing some of the greatest opportunities that social media marketing offers.

I wonder what will that CEOs of those companies will do when he/her discovers what social media integration really is. And I wonder what the conversation will be like between the CEO and the CEO’s individual who sold him on social media integration as putting the Facebook page on everything from the blog to receipts when the real truth of what integration is.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Think about it.

Do you know what integrating social media is? If not, then  I would encourage you to check out my workshop. It’s all about how to integrate social media – and it’s online and on-demand. Professional grade training. Check it out. And keep coming back here to the blog. Thanks everybody.

-Kevin

Every day, you’ll find social media workshops being promoted online. With so many social media workshops out there, which one should you invest your time in?

A good social media workshop will show you a system or a process for conducting a social media program. Why? Because a process is what keeps a social media team accountable. It gives them a vision for the course of work they are about to do.

There can be niched social media workshops, i.e. niched by industry, or generic social media workshops, where the principles are taught generically and must be adapted to your particular field.

A worthwhile social media workshop will focus on strategies as well as tools. Why? Because social media strategies are more stable than social media tools, which tend to change every week.

The workshop should discuss different ways to achieve different business objectives, from increasing brand awareness to creating more loyal customers. It should also reveal how social media marketing is different from other types of marketing in the sense that social media marketing is a 2 way communication channel, where the marketer needs to listen to the audience rather than simply blasting out sales messages to the audience. It’s what social media marketers often refer to “engaging” and “connecting.

A niched social media workshop should be very focused so that the attendees could leave with the information they’ve learned an immediately begin to apply that training to their social media programs. Attendees of a niched workshop are generally looking for cookie cutter solutions laid out for them.

For example, if the workshop covers the ins and outs of social media monitoring, the niched social media workshop should give specific examples related to the niche of terms to monitor for.

While you can find free social media workshops, you should expect that the better ones are going to cost money. The price of attending a social media workshop can get high when one considers also the travel involved. It wouldn’t be uncommon to spend $2,000 or more to attend a single day social media workshop if it’s held out of town.

Perhaps a better idea is to look for an online workshop, as long as it’s a thorough one.With an online workshop, there’s no cost for travel and the student can learn when he or she feels like it.

Please note that as the author of this post, I am the owner of The Social Media Road Trip Workshop, to which the link above goes.

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.

Well as you may have noted, my blog has been on hiatus for some time. So here’s the scoop.

I started working a ton of hours in July for a local client and really felt too overwhelmed to blog through the summer. Plus I had some other stuff going on in my life. I should have given an update on my blog to at least fill you in, but I really didn’t plan to be away from here so long.

Parmiter Antiques Southsea Luggage

Originally uploaded by geishaboy500

Then at the end of October, I went to work full-time for the headquarters of a global non-profit in their marketing communications department as a copywriter. Very excited about it and love the new gig.

Anyway, my goal for 2010 is to get back on track with regular blogging as my life is settling down again. Thanks for coming back to my blog.

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 love the idea of using paid search marketing for testing a marketing campaign with new audiences.

Whether testing headlines, visuals, promotional offers, whatever, through Paid Search, you can do so much in so little time and with a relatively small budget. And best of all, you can learn a whole lot. Theoretically, you can keep tweaking, testing and measuring until your heart is content.

Paid search is great for A/B testing or multi-variate testing.

1. The ability to quickly and cost-efficiently launch your trials.

2. The ability to quickly try different A/B tests or more complicated multivariate tests, especially if using a tool such as Ion Interactive’s LiveBall application.

3. Measurability through metrics tools. Obviously, reasons 1 and 2 would be meaningless without the added functionality of all the metrics reports than can be generated through Google Adwords, or whatever tools your online ad network provider offers.

4. Low cost for production and media compared to more traditional channels.

These are the top reasons that I can think of. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.

Kevin McIntosh is a marketing consultant in the Nashville, TN market. His specialties include branding, creative development and social media marketing.

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.

5 Ways A Social Media Program Can Help Your Church. This is a free PDF and can be downloaded by clicking here.

NEW: Online 1-hr. mini-workshop-$99*. “Where In The Church Am I?”

For mini-workshop details, click here.

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.