Social Media Integration Tips

CM Comment: Some good ideas in this one.

March 31, 2009: summarized from ClickZ -- What's clear: everything we do online is getting integrated and intermeshed into a unified platform that can drive traffic, generate leads and sales, and encourage high-value brand interactions. Here are a few tips and tricks that have the potential to add a high level of social octane to any online campaign.

If you don't have a social media platform for your company, create one! Start with the basics: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and a blog. If you are a B2B (define) company you may want to add SlideShare to that list.

Wrangle up content that you already have and create a publishing schedule for the platform. Pepper the content mix with things that add relevance and fun. You know, things that you would not spend media dollars promoting but are important like industry news and facts, best practices, humor -- things that your target audience would find interesting.

Now that you have a platform, don't always feel like your media, paid search, and SEO campaigns must drive traffic to your site. Think of your Facebook page as a microsite, your YouTube Channel as a video microsite, and your Twitter account as your micro-blog.

Encourage viral social sharing by having chiclet-enabled calls to action in your banners, landing pages, and site. That includes things like "tweet this coupon" or "post this video to your Facebook page."

Promote your social media assets (channels, platforms, blogs, etc.) like crazy. Post them on your site, drop press releases about them in the wire services, and link to them from your site and in e-mail signatures.

Track things like profile and channel visits, friends, fans, followers, and of course blog chatter. You can track how much traffic and actions in general you get from the major social sites using a Web analytics application like Google Analytics. From these metrics, you can apply a real media value using average CPMs (define) and CPAs (define). For example if you generate 100,000 video views on your YouTube channel of a product demo, what would you have paid to do that buying 30 second pre-roll spots?

Full story at: http://tinyurl.com/cz77wz