Our company is primarily based in a resort community whose driving demographic tends to be more of a inactive, spectator and only more recently joiner target audience. With social media being all the buzz we have had several clients come to us for a social media strategy. Here’s a generic version of the strategy we have recommended for some of these organizations:

1. Start with small steps
   1. Put a website infastructure in place that has a content management system (CMS) and that will allow for growth.
   2. Start a blog.
2. Get a presence
   1. Set up a Facebook page, and a plan for updates to that page that may include a RSS of your blog to the notes page. Facebook recently surpassed Yahoo as the #2 site in the US.
   2. Set up a LinkedIn company page and a RSS feed to your blog.
   3. We have not regularly encouraged implementing a Twitter account because of the time required, but if you have the staff time it should be considered. Recent estimates put Twitter at 75M active users.
   4. There are many other social media platforms that may be appropriate for specific businesses, too many for us to include. You can contact me directly at lmoore@kaleidosmarketing.com for additional suggestions.
3. Promote that presence
   1. Use existing marketing channels (website, brochures & e-mails) to send customers to your social media profiles and to build your follower and fan base. Use social media profiles to send people to your website and add new people to e-mail distribution lists.
4. Monitor & listen
   1. Set up Google alerts to see what is being said about your company, and be prepared to respond when appropriate.
   2. Set a regular schedule to search Twitter, Yelp and other sites relevant to your business for mentions of your business.

With all of this said, there are organizations who we have discouraged from setting up and dedicating valuable time and resources to a social media presence. Anyone can game the system and build up a follower/ fan base. But if those people aren’t real, or aren’t listening then your efforts are a waste. You must have leaders, staff members, volunteers or customers who are at least joiners and wiling to help get the word out.

You also need to understand and determine what your goals of these efforts are so that they can be measured. Do you want to drive traffic to your site, increase sales, bolster your reputation?

Now that we have provided a generic outline, we want to identify organizations that typically have inactive, spectator and joiner demographics who have pulled off more sophisticated social business executions. We have an example to share below and please share any examples you may have with us on Twitter @KaleidosMktg.

Last week we witnessed what we thought was a very appropriate, successful and innovative use and implementation of social media by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In general, classical music has a demographic that falls into a higher age range, and tends to be less active online. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra announced their 2010/11 season via live webcast. Invitations were sent out not only through social media networks, but also via e-mail to a broad audience. Two media professionals led interviews of the Music Director and Concert Master, while an ASO musician acted as social media moderator and selected questions from Twitter and Facebook to ask interviewees. Classical music organizations have put forth great efforts to lower the barrier between the musicians and audience through pre-concert talks and similar activities. This live webcast with questions submitted by the viewers achieved this same goal. And, I didn’t have to be in Atlanta to participate. I could watch from my home office in Austin, Texas. This was an advanced tactic that integrated social with live streaming. I don’t have inside knowledge of what the goals or success of this event, but do take my hat off to this creative tactic coming from a classical music organization. We hoe it was a success!

As we have become more engaged on Twitter over the past couple of months we have seen Twitter work its way up to our top traffic source. Our number of Twitter followers has increased and likely many of them are clicking through to our website link to learn more about us before deciding whether to follow. Also during the past couple of months we have been more dedicated to this new blog and seen it work its way up to the second most visited page of our website. We have posted links on Twitter to our blog posts and likely some of our followers have clicked through to read our posts. Hopefully they have found them informative!

According to Mashable, including a link in your Twitter profile is a “great way to drive traffic back to your destination of choice; although, the link does not provide any offsite reputation – a.k.a. SEO link juice – due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place.”

As an agency sometimes we forget to market ourselves as we market our clients. There are many times in this career where I have quoted the old saying that the cobbler’s son has no shoes. We are proud to say that in this case we are implementing some of the tactics that we encourage for our clients and seeing them work.

What we need to keep in mind both for ourselves, and for our clients, is that while these SEO and social marketing initiatives may help drive traffic and position us as knowledgeable, or maybe even experts if we are successful, it will require a tipping point to actually result in new business.

There are a lot of resources out on the web and it takes some time to sort through them all and decide which are most relevant to your business. We have a few websites that we follow for professional reasons and thought that we’d share these.

For Social Media

Mashable: This is a great site for quick overviews of anything going on related to social media. It contains short articles with tips for using social media channels and more.

For Public Relations

Help a Reporter Out: As a PR professional you can sign up to receive leads from reporters looking for sources. It is a lot to sort through, so for business may be best left to your PR agency, but interesting none the less.

Pitch Engine: This is a great site for getting your press releases out to bloggers.

For Marketing

Seth Godin’s Blog: These are Seth Godin’s thoughts on marketing related topics. We find it interesting and relevant.

For Article Publication:

Ezine Articles: This is a good site for publishing articles. We write articles and then submit them here for both our business and our clients’ businesses.

For E-Mail Marketing

iContact: We like iContact for e-mail marketing because it is affordable and offers the ability for us to design and program branded templates for our customers. They can then manage their e-mail marketing campaigns once we set up their template.

For Short URLs
bit.ly: If you use Twitter, you know you need to shorten websites urls when positing links. This is our favorite though there are several others with similar capabilities.

Enjoy!

There are many reasons for companies to consider adding a bog to their website. These reasons may include encouraging conversations with customers, positioning yourself as an expert in your field, a way to drive more traffic to your website, and for search engine optimization purposes. A blog must be authentic and provide useful information, and most importantly it must be updated regularly. This is where many companies fail at blogs. Kaleidos Marketing manages several business and personal blogs and provides blog writing services for clients. Our expertise is in the area of travel, tourism, children, business and more. Our services start as low as $40 per post for a 100-250 word article depending on the contracted number of posts. Do you have something to communicate to your clients but need help in putting it into words, or keeping up with it? Contact us at info@kaleidosmarketing.com for help.

Looking for more tips on writing a better blog yourself, check out this recent article at mashable.com.