May 2011- At One Umbrella Marketing we’ve been getting a steady stream of questions regarding social media from small business owners to Marketing VPs. They’re all asking very similar questions…do we need a Facebook page? Do we need a Twitter account? Do we need a YouTube channel? Do we need all of those things… and if so how do we aggregate them into one user interface?

We’re big proponents of social media marketing but we always warn our clients to be smart. While balancing the cost of social media against advertising in the daily paper or monthly trade journal the decision seems obvious, but all aspects of social media need to be considered. First you need an upfront warning; social media is a huge time drain. We know this from lots of experience. How many times have you logged on to Facebook or YouTube to look at a specific two minute video and a half hour later you’re still logged in watching the next interesting thing? When dealing with your business, it’s even more time intensive.

Now that you’ve been fairly warned to keep your eye on the clock (figure your hourly dollar amount and add it to your budget), you need to find the appropriate social media for your business. In the last few years the proliferation of social media has exploded. As a result each media has had to evolve by carving out a niche and become good at something. Each media has developed a tone and as a business owner you need to appraise whether the tone is appropriate for your business. You may want a one-size-fits-all answer but you won’t be targeting your market appropriately, and ultimately good marketing and increased leads and revenue come from being relevant to your target customer. The more relevant your messaging is, the more powerful and effective your marketing will be.

Briefly, here is an outline of the more popular web-based, user-generated interfaces…social media.

Blogging and Micro-blogging

To use long-form blogging to communicate to your customers, Google’s Blogger, open source WordPress and TypePad offer free or nominal interfaces with extensive templates and help resources. For the business owner, blogging has evolved into a means to communicate more complicated, legal or detailed information. It is good for a clientele with a longer attention span. If you’re still trying to draw traffic to your website, link your blog to your site and you’ll definitely help your search rankings. BLOG WARNING: If you’re not going to follow best practices you can do more harm than good. Be extremely consistent, create compelling, relevant content and monitor response.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter et al. are more condensed versions of blogging. The tones of each of these media are distinct. Twitter uses text-style abbreviations and language to maintain a 140 character limit. This has evolved into a modern telegram with every character being scrutinized.  It is casual and is used for companies and brands that travel, to promote events and create news type content. It has started to trend towards tech specific businesses. Twitter has become the irresistible apple of beginning social mediates. We recommend clients play around with Twitter a while, follow several different people, products, brands and see if their business and the person who would administer the account will be able to maintain best practices… be consistent, create compelling content and monitor response.

LinkedIn is a professional format where you can upload and update your resume, make business connections and join professional groups. LinkedIn has a formal tone. Recently they’ve adopted a Facebook style posting option which has confused some people into thinking that it has become more casual. This is not true. For LinkedIn, keep topics appropriate to your business and only post something that you’d tell a potential client. Update regularly so you will be included in the weekly LinkedIn Connections email that is sent out. 

Facebook and it’s long ago competitor, MySpace, are much more casual micro-blogging interfaces with a familiar tone. MySpace has evolved into a music oriented venue and Facebook has exploded with a current 600+ million users and has a real potential to reach a one billion by the end of 2011. With this kind of momentum, Facebook is rapidly becoming a must-do. Even if your business is of a serious nature, companies use Facebook to lighten up. Rather than posting a specific (perhaps boring) product spec sheet, companies are posting pictures of a trade show or of the product being used in an interesting way. Be sure not to ‘over post’, this annoys fans and they will soon hide your feed or ‘unlike’ your company. It’s tempting, but refrain from becoming noise to your potential customers by sharing too much. Additionally be consistent, create compelling content and monitor response.

Location Based Media

Location Based Media (LBSM) uses your smart device to triangulate your coordinates and then posts your location. Foursquare and Gowalla motivate users with game incentive such as points, badges and leader boards. Many small businesses have offered deals and coupons for checking-in to locations. In March of this year Starbucks celebrated their 40th anniversary by randomly giving out $40 gift cards to people who checked in on Foursquare. Early on, Starbucks adopted this media with mixed results and has fine-tuned it over time to create brand loyalty and buzz. In the past year Facebook has begun offering location based check-ins as well as location based deals. Currently they do not use points or game incentives to drive this part of their media.

Image Based Media

Multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo help you host and edit your imagery. These sites are often used in conjunction with blogging sites to link and tie images and words together. If your business lends itself to video or still photography it’s a good idea to get a free file sharing account. You’ll be able to store your large image and video files offsite and access them for use on your other social media.

One of the key elements emerging from Facebook is imagery. By this summer Facebook has estimated that they will be hosting 100 billion images. People like images, so include images in your posts. Be sure to edit them appropriately for the new Facebook picture format by centering and sizing when uploaded.

Aggregation

So you still want a blog, Twitter and Facebook account and want to aggregate them. We don’t recommend this as each media has its own personality and the message should be tailored to each tone. That being said you can use an aggregator such as Hootsuite, Threadsy or Brizzly which all have cutesy Twitter type formats with simplified user interfaces.

Beware…technology is evolving rapidly and what is true today may be passé before this article is saved in the c drive. Social media is still in its infancy and each interface will continue to compete for users.  Competition will bring exciting new feature and opportunities to market and sell your business. Be sure to follow best practices, be extremely consistent, create compelling content and monitor response!

It doesn’t matter to us if you are a past, current or soon to be client, if we can help answer any social media or broader marketing questions please give us a call at (408) 256-2985 or visit us at www.oneumbrellamarketing.com.

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