Our work in lead generation and social media marketing give us a unique perspective on two different dynamics that are at play in the world of interactive marketing.

The first is the idea of creating a brand online.  This is like going shopping for a new set of fancy clothes.  You start with the intention, I want to look good, and then you keep trying on clothing until you look pretty much the way that you want.  (Or, you think that you look the way that you want, but that’s another story…some of us can’t ever quite get there.)

For web marketing, this means getting the kind of look and feel, feature set and whiz-bang cool things that let you say that your web site is a pretty cool looking set of duds.

Of course, you factor in practical considerations.  After all, just like when you go shopping for clothing, you’ve got to stay reasonably close to your budget, and you’ve got to be able to sit down in it.  But, when push comes to shove, you are going to err in the direction of your heart.

The second is the challenge of converting online visitors into prospects and customers.  This, after all, is the paramount benefit of the internet, that you can provide prospective customers with the kind of information that they need in order to determine whether to work with you or buy your product.

This is nothing like buying a suit of clothes.  This is like trying to find recruit athletes to a Division III college.  You can’t give them a scholarship, you can’t influence admissions, but you need them to believe that you can give them a better experience than anyone else.  It’s about capturing interest, holding on to it and closing the sale at the right time.

That’s an entirely different kind of web experience.  Your web site isn’t designed on the basis of aesthetics; it has to be designed on the basis of data.  What are the images, information points and links that cause your users to take an action that is of an economic  benefit for you?

For most of us in business, that action is a phone call or a visit to our place of business.  And when the prospect already has gotten information that is important to them and decided to reach out and contact you, you have the highest odds of making that  prospect a customer.

As we’ve worked over the past year and a half with local businesses, we’ve discovered that there is a tremendous lack of understanding as to how to use a web site in order to create qualified prospects.  And, as we’ve  built social media footprints for our clients, and developed broader distribution of their content that has elevated their natural search traffic, we’ve found that very few have reliable processes for tracking and capturing those users.

Where do you start as a small business?  With taking the time to understand the simplest attributes of web tracking.  Anyone in business can use the Analytics tool from Google in order to track the activity on their web site.  That is your starting point.  If you are able to answer how many people are visiting your web site, what kind of things they look at most frequently, and how many of them are sending you additional inquiries, either in person, by phone or on e-mail, then you have the beginning of the information that will help you decide how to make your web site more than a pretty set of clothes.

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the one that puzzles marketers the most. The typical observation is that they don’t get it and can’t figure out why it’s important.

EMarketer shared some research recently from ExactTarget that provides an easy answer: Twitter gives you a way to reach people who have loud and active voices online. Once you’ve gotten their attention around your message, you’ve got a good chance that they will redistribute that message somewhere on the web.

How’s that work? ExactTarget shows that the 26 million monthly users of Twitter are three to five times more likely to comment on blogs, post to forums, participate in view sites and blog themselves than the average Internet user.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The conclusions suggest that the time spent investing in an audience on Twitter is likely to have an exponential impact. This is the crux of social media marketing, and provides a simple justification for using a service that at first seems fragmented and chaotic.

I do.

The first time I got this question, I was surprised and took a second to answer.

Of course I write it, I thought. My name is on it.

When I asked people why they asked, they said that they loved the blog, but figured that I had other people writing under my direction. I was a CEO, after all.

The question prompted two thoughts.

First, we all have different styles of thinking and communicating. I write, so when I hit on something that I’m interested or puzzled about, my inclination is to try to get it down on paper and see whether it makes sense. I can go through my old files and find documents that I have written at different key moments in my career that laid out what I was seeing and how it sorted out.

This blog simply offers a platform to share some of those things. I write it because that’s what I do…write.

The second thought stems from that last point: a lot of people have things to say, but they aren’t people who write. There’s nothing wrong with that; we all have our different styles.

Those people who have things to say but aren’t people who write shouldn’t be left out of the power of using content and social media to communicate. And, people don’t expect them to be left out. When people asked me whether I wrote this blog or not, the question wasn’t pejorative. They don’t expect CEO’s to write, but they do expect them to have something to say.

Two years ago, when I began seriously exploring how businesses were using social media tools to market, I was struck by this basic inequity: the benefits of social media accrued to the people who could write, not necessarily the people who were the best at doing the work of their business. People who were facile with content and technology could stamp out daunting digital footprints, taking mindshare and traffic away from other, potentially more expert and more deserving businesses.

This was the problem we decided to try to solve when we launched the DigitalSherpa line of services: Can you make content marketing using social media tools accessible to local businesses? The purpose was to help level the playing field, to give people who had something to say but lacked the skills to say it a toolkit.

We’ve had some success and are learning along the way. I’m constantly struck, though, by people who look at businesses and say, If you don’t do social media yourself, then you’re not doing it the right way. That statement has an elitist and exclusive air. The real question that all of us should be trying to contribute solutions to is how to make the power of social media marketing available to any business, regardless of how good they are at writing and interacting and sharing.

Any small business looking at social media ultimately has to ask, What business benefit am I going to get from being active in this media? No matter how compelling the user statistics are, any commitment of time for a small business needs to be rewarded with results.

I thought it would be useful to share a detailed case study on how one small business has leveraged a content marketing and social networking strategy to drive measurable business results.

Situation:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. Established in 1994, the agency has developed a particular expertise serving accounts in the financial services, lifestyle and media sectors. TMG is focused on creating broad-based communications programs that convey the distinctive attributes of brands and help drive business results. [Disclosure: The principal of TMG Brand Communications, Tami McCarthy, is my wife.]

The company’s purpose is summed up on its website.

The thrill of developing a brand’s personality, giving it a voice of authority in the market and having it resonate and drive a target audience to act or think differently inspires everything that we do at TMG Brand Communications.

Over the past several years, TMG has developed a suite of skills in internet and social media marketing. One of its most notable initiatives was the integration of social media with a live webcast to launch the Citi Forward card from client Citi Cards. (A description of the project from social media maven Mack Collier can be found here.)

Not surprisingly, TMG had not developed a plan to leverage its social media marketing expertise to elevate its own profile. Tami was an early adopter of social media platforms, with an active presence on Twitter and profiles on services like Facebook and LinkedIn, but had not developed an integrated strategy for using these tools to benefit the agency.

Like many of its peers, TMG did have an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and a sample of its work. However, the site was lightly trafficked. Most of the visitors came directly to the site, driven by TMG’s distribution of its URL on its business cards and stationary.

Tactics:

In the last quarter of 2009, TMG decided to develop an integrated strategy to use social media marketing to elevate its brand presence.

The strategy was designed to add a content marketing component to an already active social networking presence. In addition, the strategy linked personally-branded social networking activity on platforms like Twitter and Facebook with the digital identities of the overall agency.

In order to accomplish the strategy, TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, buzzcloud.tmgpr.com, was set up using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application was used to distribute blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.

A general content outline was developed in order to give focus to the blog posts. Tami is the sole author of the posts. The purpose of the posts is to share observations and suggestions about topical communications challenges. The content only peripherally touches on TMG clients. In addition, the content plan assumed that new posts would be created every two weeks or so, so that the burden of creating content didn’t weigh down an already highly-productive team.

Results:

Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud was launched in November 2009. Results for the subdomain buzzcloud.tmgpr.com were tracked separately from the results for the www.tmg-media.com domain so that the impact of the new content strategy could be accurately measured.

That impact was immediate.

In the six months following the launch of the blog, TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%.

Hidden within this gain are a couple of data points that demonstrate the impact of a well-executed content marketing and social networking program.

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period.

After launching Buzzcloud, TMG became much more visible on search engines, particularly Google. TMG became visible because it began to publish original content with more frequency. Each of those blog posts were distributed into TMG’s digital footprint, and as people clicked through to the site, or redistributed the content their own digital footprint, TMG began to develop a broader network of digital breadcrumbs, all of which led Google and other search engines back to the TMGpr.com web site.

Increased web traffic to the agency site was not the only indirect benefit of the social media marketing program. The digital footprint of both TMGpr and Tami McCarthy expanded dramatically, generating increased brand heft and awareness.

The easiest way to assess the heft of a brand’s digital footprint is to type the name into Google. The phrases “TMGpr” and “Tami McCarthy” both return relevant results that dominate the first page of Google.

Most people who are interested in you or your company are likely to search for you on the web. A Google search that returns a page filled with relevant links creates an aura of credibility and authority for your brand. It isn’t enough for those links to exist, however; behind them there needs to be useful and relevant information, the kind of search outcome that is Google’s brand promise.

This program has not required an incredible amount of time to execute. The most time-consuming aspect is creating the original posts. Maintaining the social networking presence is a matter of intermittent focus; TMG uses Facebook and Twitter to share interesting content, give personal updates and re-distribute content that other people have created.

What’s fascinating about this case study is how important the creation of content has been to driving overall web traffic.

During the six-months ending November 2009. TMG executed its social networking program actively. It did not, however, have an active blog. As a result, the social networking had virtually no effect on the company’s web traffic.

Launching the blog and publishing content drove a tremendous amount of traffic.

One lesson is that social networking without content marketing will not drive clearly measurable results for your business.

Of course, the big question is whether this activity has any impact on your business results.

For TMG, social media marketing has helped to drive increased visibility, more business inquiries and ultimately more account. Go take a look at the agency’s blog to see just how much.

While the buzz about social networking has shifted to the hot new thing, mainstream consumer adoption and usage of social networks is exploding.

eMarketer this week shared some of its conclusions from a recent research report defining the scale and opportunity of the social networking category.

“There is no doubt anymore that social networks, reaching more than 50% of the total US Internet audience, are an essential part of the Internet experience,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Social Network Demographics and Usage.”

The research points to broad usage of social network among all demographic categories and continued expansion in the market.   eMarkerter forecasts that two-thirds of Internet users will participate on social networks every month by 2014.  Williamson comments that “the connections and interactions that social networking makes possible didn’t even exist a few short years ago.”

An analysis of the growth in Facebook‘s US users since this past January underscores the robust growth in the social networking category.

iStrategyLabs has been using Facebook’s ad targeting system to track the growth of key demographic cohorts on the service for the past couple of years.  In 2009, for instance, US users of Facebook gained 145% — an incredible explosion.

I was curious just how strong growth was in 2010 and went to the ad targeting system to update the iStrategy figures.

In the first five months of 2010, Facebook’s US users gained 22% to more than 125 million.  The rate of growth is remarkably strong, following the explosion of the past year.

Usage continues to grow more rapidly among adults, with the 25 – 34 cohort increasing 23% over the past five months, and the 35 – 54 cohort increasing 25%.  Interestingly, the number of adults 55+ appeared to decline over the past five months. The net effect of these trends is that the average age of a Facebook user continues to increase.

The service is remarkably mainstream.  And, as the usage data that Facebook shares indicates, remarkably utilized.

Facebook reports as of the end of May that is has more than 400 million worldwide users.

Half of Facebook’s users log in every day.  They interact with 130 friends on average and are connected with 60 pages, groups and events.  Each user is creating more than 2 pieces of content a month:  a photo upload, a status update, a link share, a comment.

This is a truly social phenomenon.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the potential impact for marketers and media brands.

If each user has 130 friends, that means that their first degree of influence is 16,900 friends…the friends of their friends.  Their second degree of influence is 2.2 million friends …the friends of the friends of their friends.

Each time a user interacts with a page, or a group or an event, that interaction is broadcast to her 130 friends.  The interaction can be clicking the “Like” button, or becoming a member, or commenting on an update, or sharing a photo or a post.  If one of the 130 friends then interacts with that page or group, that interaction is broadcast to his 130 friends.  The multiplying effect of interactions with content expand with every Facebook user.  Each of these instances of sharing are a moment where a brand inserts itself, within the context of each users identity, into the awareness of other users.

This is part of the power of marketing on social networks.  The skill is in creating instances of content that people interact with.  Remember, the interaction isn’t just about “engagement.”  Clicking a Like button or sharing a piece of content is just as powerful as leaving a comment.

The Facebook universe is one powerful indicator of the mainstream character of social networking, and the dynamics of user activity underscore how potent this new marketing platform can be for large businesses, small business and media brands.

A couple of months ago, Adam Japko and I sat down with two of our top editors to discuss the impact of social media sharing on the traditional magazine editorial workflow.  The conversation was stimulating and I thought it would be useful to share some of my notes, since the observations from the meeting form a practical framework for implementing a content-sharing model within a traditional magazine team.  (For background on the content-sharing model, you can see this post from last year.)

Clint and Diane commented that the “sense of connectedness” was  different. Things are more interactive: they get comments and ideas from a community that is enormously positive.

As editors, they are seeing more and more overlaps among the ways that they distribute information, and are thinking about new ways to integrate things.

In order to continue to draw benefit from this social sharing activity, the editorial teams would benefit from increased access to the results that they are driving, both in terms of audience to specific posts and sections of the web site, as well as the relative value of this audience to any advertising customers.

In the future, the editorial and sales teams will also need to coordinate the amount of audience that needs to get driven into specific sections of the web site and towards specific customer groups, so that the potential number of conversions to client activity is lined up with the expectations of the clients.

Conclusion:

An editorial team needs to implement four steps in order to increase the consistency and effectiveness of their social media sharing program.

1. Assess and improve traditional planning and workflow:
   Many editorial teams can create incremental time by being more structured in their long-range planning and in creating their larger features with a longer lead time.
2. Set specific monthly goals for your social media content
   1. Feature magazine content in individual posts
   2. Guest bloggers
   3. Featured blogs and comments
   4. Online-only features
   5. Community engagement
   6. Traffic/audience
   7. Fans
3. Set up a weekly content plan
   1. Establish a social media content schedule
   2. Assign specific elements or days to individual staffers
   3. Communicate content schedule to entire team
   4. Have monthly meeting to review social media assignments and results
4. Track results & feedback

Over at Junta 42, Joe Pulizzi has put up a great post on how publishers leverage social media tools to grow their online footprint.  Recommended reading for everyone in the publishing business, as Joe has synthesized a number of different perspective and added his own unique and experiences point of view.

The key issue is defining your goals correctly and aligning your teams around those goal. Says Pulizzi:

If you believe that your core business is publishing, then you are competing with the entire world (we are all publishers today). As a publisher, you need to rethink your business (are you in the business of providing engaging experiences for your niche customers?).

In the post, Joe linked to one of my posts from last July where I laid out a model for content-sharing that we had begun to implement with our regional home design magazines.

We’ve been working this content-sharing approach for close to a year and it’s had measurable impact on our consumer engagement, market presence and revenue opportunities. In this post, I share some of the ways that our top editors have integrated content-sharing into their workflow.

For those who are interested, here’s Joe’s presentation:

When you are using content to influence consumer behavior, the context that the content is delivered in has a big influence on how consumers respond to the messaging. This maxim is an important factor in designing content marketing and social media programs. Experience suggests that consumers impute authority to two types of content: content that is considered and structured; and content that is personal and authentic.

Take recent research from SheSpeaks and iVillage that was reported on in eMarketer this week.

The survey examined how women interact with brands on digital platforms. The big headline was that while women follow brands on different social platforms, brand content delivered on those platforms has relatively lower impact on purchasing decisions.

I was struck by the relative weighting of different kinds of online content in influencing shopping behavior, and the degree to which context appears to have an impact on influence.

For instance, three categories of content had consistent impact on female consumers: reviews on message boards; articles on general interest websites; and content about products on brand websites.

Each of these three venues has assumptions built into the context that the content is delivered in. Messages boards and review sites have a self-policing nature, where reviewers gain credibility by their relative weight in the social group. General-interest websites present the same kind of editorial independence that traditional magazines have long benefited from. And brand sites have an underlying regulatory framework, since consumers understand that brands are required by law to make supportable claims about their products and services.

Each of the three categories has an foundation of trust that creates a positive context for the content.

The survey suggests that social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are less credible sources of information to women shoppers.

This assertion assumes, however, that the primary purpose of the social platforms is to communicate information about the brand.

Within a well-structured social media marketing program, social platforms serve two important purposes: content distribution and consumer engagement. In each case, the purpose of the program is to create awareness and to give the consumer easy access to points of contact and information.

The brand web site — and by extension, a brand blog — are the appropriate distribution points for brand content. Consumers are more inclined to trust content that lives within a trusted context.

Social media marketing is the integrated execution of two different marketing activities that are supported by content and engagement. Consumers will respond to authentic content, but not when they encounter it out of context.

An Emarketer analysis this week of two research studies concluded that social media was going to be a big focus on web marketing expansion by small businesses.

Our experience on the ground selling our DigitalSherpa service confirms the direction of the surveys.  Once we get into a discussion about how content marketing and digital networking can help their firm, local business people quickly move past questions about “why” to questions about “how?”

There’s a fundamental problem, though, that the research doesn’t get at.  Local businesses don’t have an interactive strategy that is geared to acquiring and converting qualified leads.

In most aspects of local business marketing, the lack of sophistication around leads acquisition and conversion isn’t that important.  But in internet marketing, it’s critical.

Take a look at the research first.  According to the “Third Annual FedEx Office Signs of the Times Small Business Survey” (that’s a mouthful), use of social media is the fastest growing tactic small business owners cite in their marketing planning.  The primary area of focus continues to be improving online presence, signaling that SMB owners consider this an area where improvement can is needed.

eMarketer then cites a Constant Contact study that shows that websites and e-mail marketing are the two most prevalent tactics or tools that SMB owners rely on to market their business.

The high penetration of Facebook makes for an attention-getting headline, but the nuts and bolts of the marketing program are in the website and continuing contact to the prospect and customer database.

The challenge is how these SMB owners are making decisions about the effectiveness of these tactics.

It doesn’t sound hard:  track web traffic, measure leads and conversions and then select the most efficient sources.

But making these kind of analytical decisions are challenges to the largest businesses in America.  Another recent survey concluded that the biggest obstacle to effective web tracking at larger companies was finding the talent to do the analytics.  If large companies can’t get to the answer, how can small companies expect to?

In traditional marketing campaigns, these kind of analytics were not as important.   A local marketing initiative drove the consumers to one of two places:  a phone number or a physical location.  At the other end of the interaction was a real person, who would ask questions, engage and impart information.  The interaction was more discursive and exploratory, and the experience of the person representing the business in adapting answers to the knowledge and personality of the person asking was critical to driving sales.

With web marketing a primary goal of the program is to drive a person to a web site where they can get information that will inspire them to either act directly or reach out for more information.

If that web site isn’t designed the right way, then you’re not going to get the return on your investment that you should expect.

One of the things that we’ve learned in our business is that creating a web site that can drive conversions is a science, not an art.  Like any science, it requires constant experimentation and adaptation.

The challenge facing SMB’s is not just putting focus on internet marketing; it’s figuring out how to find partners who have the knowledge, expertise and interest to help them participate in a science that challenges even the largest firms.

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