Creating Your Social Media System

Note: the next lesson and set of videos will appear under Session Content in the right sidebar every 7 days until you reach week 5.

Social media is not simply today’s trendy marketing play; it’s here to stay and has impacted every aspect of marketing and growing a business. In this course you will be guided step-by-step on the creation of your social media system.

This is not an exercise in theory, it’s a plan of action created by one of the leading small business social media marketing practitioners. The end result of this course is that you are able to effectively and efficiently integrate social media into your overall marketing plans.

Session One – Creating a Social Media Strategy – Before choosing your social media tactics you need to align your activities with your objectives. One of the best ways to do this is to listen first. In this session we will design your social media listening station.

Session Two – Optimizing Brand Assets – Social media sites afford a great opportunity to create outposts for your content. In this session we will look a the best ways to create and optimize profiles and other social media real estate.

Session Three – Blogging for Business – Maybe you have a blog, surely you’ve heard all about them. In this session we will dive deeply into why every small business should consider a blog the central hub of their social media strategy. Session will include discussion of best practices.

Session Four – Social Networking and Networks – Creating profiles on the major social networking sites isn’t enough. In this session we will cover the best practices for creating engagement on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Session Five – Managing the Beast – The burden of attempting to keep up with the set of actions required to participate fully in social media can overwhelm. In this session we will create your social media system in an attempt to bring it all together so you can balance input with ROI.

The Hierarchy of Social Media

As Maslow theorized, the ultimate potential of your marketing or human self-actualization couldn’t be achieved until the most basic human psychological needs – breathing, eating, sleeping, sex were first met. (Yes, I’m about ready to compare blogging to sex.) In fact safety, love, and esteem all come before transcendence. Now, before I edge too close to the deep end here, I’m simply comparing what I think is a bit like progressing up the social marketing hierarchy.

Most small business owners should look at the following progression or hierarchy as they move deeper into social marketing tactics. So, jump in, but do it in this order and don’t move on until you have the basics of each stage down and working for you.

Blogging – the foundation of the pyramid – read blogs (Google Reader or Bloglines), comment on blogs and then blog. This is the doorway to all other social marketing – WordPress, TypePad, Blogger

RSS – aggregate and filter content around subjects and use RSS technology as a tool to help you repurpose, republish and create content – Some tools – Feedburner, Google News and mysyndicaat

Social Search – this is often ignored in this discussion but I think it’s become very important for small business owners. Directories that publish reviews from customers – good and bad. You can participate and should stimulate and manage your reputation here. Insider Pages, Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Local.com, Judy’s Book, Yelp

Social Bookmarking – tagging content to and participating in social bookmarking communities can be a great way to open up more channels to your business as well as generate extra search traffic, but it takes work – del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, Small Business Brief

Social Networking – branching out to take advantage of the numbers of potential prospects that you might find in sites like Facebook,Biznik, LinkedIn, or MySpace will frustrate at least as a business tool if you don’t have many of the above needs met. These networks take time to understand and thrive on ideas and content. You’ve got to have much to share if you wish to build a business case. The good news is that industry and idea specific sites for everything from book lovers to green living are springing up every day. Here’s an enormous list of social networking sites from Mashable

Micro – I’ve lumped some of the more experimental social tools into the edge trend of micro, social, real-time communication that will likely only confuse most small business owners. The confusion is not because they can’t figure out how to make them work, it’s just not obvious why they would spend the time. I think Maslow suggested the self-actualization was a place that most might never reach and in social marketing terms Twitter, Thwirl, Plurk and FriendFeed might be some sort of sick transcendence.