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Social
marketing is the new search engine optimization. Reciprocal voting is
the new reciprocal linking. It offers a fairly low barrier to entry,
and the opportunity to drive a TON of traffic in a short period of
time. Even more importantly, social media has become a cornerstone of
the strategy for launching sites, or improving their link popularity.
 What is social media and why do we need it?
Wake up and smell the series of tubes. Here’s social media in plain English. You’re banned from using the company email and internet until you read the Cluetrain,
and can name at least 10 social media sites, and which 3 are likely to
drive the most traffic. If you’re in a corporation that won’t listen,
or change anything because of what lawyers say - you deserve your
miserable cubicle dwelling existence for not standing up and pitching
things better. I hope your 401k makes it out the door before your idiot
executives bankrupt the company drinking fine wine and Cristal on their
executive retreats to Tahoe. Redtape sucks, and generally only exists
to screw people. Find a better company, and keep learning how to pitch
the novel idea of treating your customers and web visitors with
respect.
How to Pitch Social Media Marketing Internally in 6 easy steps:
1. Create Positive ROI on keyword set for a PPC campaign.
2. Explain lifetime value of a converting customer that came from that keyword set
3. Sell the value of SEO as a long term, less expensive form of PPC on above mentioned keywords. Here’s some help.
4 . Demonstrate the need and importance of links to search engine rankings.
5 . Explain the value and process for obtaining links (and how much these would cost).
6 . Introduce the idea of linkbaiting and social media marketing.
I know, I know, that sounds a whole lot easier than it is when
you’re facing the red tape in your company. Build your case slowly, and
plot your strategy to be executed over time. More help to build your
case below.
9 Reasons you NEED social media marketing in 2009
1. Your competition is doing it.
 Most
of the competition that’s doing it, you didn’t even know was your
competition - UNTIL they started showing up for your best converting
search phrases. Why are they showing up you ask? Well, they’re
leveraging social media to build global link popularity and brand
awareness. You’re customers know who they are now, and know that
they’re faster, smaller, more efficient, and will keep them happy.
They’ve implemented the technology to minimize overhead, and are
treating customers better.
2. Your customers are using it (though maybe indirectly)
 No
matter how non-technical your customers are - social media impacts
their consumption decisions. Social media’s impact on traditional media
is increasing on a daily basis. Newspapers, television, and radio, are
realizing that digg, reddit, and twitter, are sometimes even faster
than the AP newswire. This impacts which news is presented in a
traditional sense. The geeks, webmasters, the trendsetters, and other
folks who are on the bleeding edge are now watching social media
outlets and republishing to the channels that your customers are
consuming from.
3. Your vendors and partners are using it
 You
know who’s NOT using facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit,
myspace, stumbleupon, and other large traffic social networks well?
Automakers and Banks. Luckily, they can get billion dollar bailouts.
Try getting your modem rebooted over the phone with comcast - then ping @comcastcares You can thank them and I for the time savings later.
Has your site been on the homepage of digg or reddit? Has your site
been stumbled? Do you know what it is? Do you think your no overhead
web based competition from the Silicon Valley knows what it is?
4. More Social = more Search.
More Search = More Customers.
More customers = More business.
 Duh.
The web is more de-centralized than ever. After we do our initial
searches through the Google, we start looking for communities of
likeminded people. Your best customers are the ones that are passionate
and want to have a conversation about you, your product, or something
related (news, pictures, whatever). You need to be there to have the
conversation WITH your customers. Otherwise, they will have it behind
your back. You might not be able to rank right away on search engines
anymore, but you can get to the top of a news or industry specific site
for a few days with good content.
 5. Paid search prices are rising.
PPC consulting
is still a great solution to improving your ROI, and decreasing your
CPC - but the market is getting tougher. It is great to be able to buy
your keyword phrase to your targeted audience - but everyone is
becoming wise to that fact. Those awesome high conversion, high profit
keywords are slowly having the ROI sucked out of them by rising click
prices. This makes organic search a must have long term proposition.
Any self-respecting search marketer is going to tell you that you need
natural links. And the best place to get natural links is???!?!?! You
guessed it Chachi - Social media linkbaiting.
 6. SEO isn’t easy anymore
Man
do I miss the days of buying run of site text links and ranking top for
any search term. Like Jim, I would never buy links anymore (okay, maybe
I’d TRADE for them if it was SUPER relevant). The days of the little
guys ranking well in google is slowly coming to an end, and a glorious
era will go down in history. Pretty soon, however, it will be big
business as usual. Those same big businesses have a while to catch on
to social media FOR SEO, but they’ll do that eventually too.
Personalized search is the next big thing (and yes it’s now REALLY
almost here). You need lots of people coming to your site, staying on
your site, and bookmarking your site for later to prove that you
deserve to be on top of the search results.
 7. You can’t buy links anymore
The communists have won the war. We have declared defeat. Of course if you listen to SEO’s and search engineers for too long, you will think that there are NO links that pass value.
Well, at least we can pay to create viral content, and pay for
optimization in the distribution channel, and HOPE that people link to
us. The content kings have one, and it’s time to get writing. You might
as well start talking to your customers and actually giving them what
they want. Since bounce rate is now a significant factor for search results, it’s gonna hurt you to dupe your users with crap content anyhow.
 8. Your website is only a billboard
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa.
Just ask all those big corporations who paid millions to have their
beautiful flash sites built, and forgot to hire a SEO. You launched
your site, and now you need traffic, or it’s been there for a long
time, and you need MORE traffic and exposure. You listened to the
search engines, and created great content! (after all, content is
king!) But you still don’t seem to have much traction, and only your
Aunt Frita, Uncle Merv, and 6 other people are visiting your site every
day.
 9. Great ROI on the Marketing Budget
With the DIY route and use social tools,
social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of the
web. Social media is building future communication empires at the
moment with the likes of facebook, digg, reddit, digg, delicious, as
the distribution points for web communication. They are the portals
that every dot-bust era strived to be. Social media is seperating the
old guard from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embrace
the technology. Do you?
Bonus #10: It’s a distribution point.
Social media is a way to reliably disperse your message to a group
of people who want to hear what you have to say. When you have
something good to say - you TELL them through your selected channels.
At minimum, companies are becoming aware that they need to have
conversations with their customers somehow.
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