by Cheryl Tieken

So I read this interesting article today by Peter Shankman, founder of Help A Reporter Out. In it, he pretty much bashes social media experts, saying that “if you have a social media expert on your payroll, you’re wasting your money.” And while I didn’t quite agree with the tone of his message, he did hit some valuable points.

As it seems that hiring a social media expert is a now subject of much debate, let’s go over Shankman’s points – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Shankman starts out by saying that “being an expert in social media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.”

It’s a cute analogy and I get it. Yes, there are a ton of people out there who assume that just because they use Facebook and Twitter all the time they can now call themselves experts. And maybe this is who Shankman is referring to. He goes on to say that “we’re making the same mistakes that we made during the DotCom era, where everyone thought that just adding the term .com to your corporate logo made you instantly credible.” Yes, social media is trendy and when something is trendy, everyone wants to get on board. And there will always be people and companies that try to make a pretty penny on the next great trend by selling it themselves. Unfortunately, many of these people care more about making money and less about providing a good service for their customer. And as a customer, it may be easy to fall into their hypnotizing clutches. However, not all social media marketing companies are full of it.

Shankman goes on to say that social media is just a new trick in the hat of marketing. And, I couldn’t agree more. Social media is just another avenue to spread your marketing efforts. It just happens to be an avenue that allows messages to be spread at rates no other avenues can ever compete with. His point here is completely true – Social media marketing is “about generating revenue through solid marketing and stellar customer service, just like it’s been since the beginning of time.” If your target market is active on Facebook and Twitter, why wouldn’t you use this to your advantage?

He says next that social media marketing is “about transparency. It’s not about lying to your customers…” I couldn’t agree more. Set up a Facebook page merely to sell to your customers and you’ll lose them. Trust me – IT WON’T WORK. And social media experts who are worth your time and money know this and will tell you this. Be genuine. Show your target audience that you care about them and they will care about you.

Shankman’s next important point is about relevance. Anyone with marketing savvy knows that you have to understand your target audience – who they are, where they are, and what they want to talk about. If your target audience isn’t into social media, you are not going to see the same results as a business whose target audience is constantly tweeting away.

Unfortunately, Shankman jumps to the conclusion that all social media experts just try to push the sale of a Facebook and Twitter page, without ever trying to strategize the best methods for online and social media marketing. A good social media marketer will understand that they must invest time into researching a target audience and planning an effective strategy.

So that’s it in a nutshell. His argument that social media experts have simply jumped on the newest trend and will soon be deemed a waste of time and money is in my opinion, very narrow-minded. If you hire a talented and savvy social media marketer, you will never feel that way. Social media is here to stay. Marketing will always and has always been here. There are people out there who understand both concepts better than others. Social media marketing is too powerful a tool to ignore.

So don’t bash social media marketers. Find one who is a multi-faceted and savvy businessperson that understands the power of social media. Trust me, it will definitely be worth your time and money.

By Nicole Fletcher

As a follow up to yesterday’s post, I thought I’d go into a bit more detail as to why your social media might not be up to snuff and what you must do to see success in this area of your marketing plan.

1. First and most obviously, you created accounts and didn’t do anything with them. Sorry guys, unlike your website, you can’t expect social media success without consistent, fresh content. Remember, complacency killed the cat.

2. You’re updating frequently but you’re not seeing results. You might be talking at your fans, instead of talking to them. In order to execute a successful social media strategy, you must engage engage engage. Social media is a two way street. Treat your target market as it deserves to be treated. Certainly self promote and inform your community of what’s going on with you, but also talk to them. Find out what they want from you and finally, include interesting, pertinent, free information they might like to hear about.

3. Similarly, make sure your profiles have a voice and a personality. Determine what that voice sounds like and make sure that sings through your posts and updates. Don’t speak as the brand – speak as the person behind the brand. Making a personal connection between your customers and your company gives your clientele a sense of comfort and, subsequently, an increased sense of brand loyalty.

4. You have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a YouTube channel but they don’t have a presence on your website. I like to think of social media as a cloud of networks through which your customers can reach and interact with you. If they’re not connected, you’ve got a number of disjointed clouds and what good does that do you? None. Place these icons in a prominent location on your website. I recommend the top right corner as that tends to be the norm.

5. You think of social media as a quick fix, get frustrated and give up. Social media is an integral part of your long term marketing plan – stick with it, have fun and success will follow.

An Alexa ranking is every kid’s nightmare: a number that measures popularity. You heard me right, an Alexa ranking is a number that tells you exactly how many websites are more popular than your website. And you thought you left lunchroom dramas back in high school.

Obviously as the big wigs in the social web, Google, Facebook and Youtube take the cake as the ‘Populars’, while everyone else sits waiting and anxious for a chance to hang with the cool kids. The number is expressed in relatively big numbers and obviously, the more popular you are, the smaller Alexa you get. These number are updated often, usually daily, so with an exception of the big three, the numbers shuffle fast. You could be in with the in crowd one second, and out like moon shoes the next.

Metaphors aside, let’s get into the meat of what exactly you learn from seeking out your Alexa score. Our rank at Jacob Tyler is 283,640. That means that there are 283,639 websites out there in the world that are more popular than we are. In the US, there are only 115,318 bigger fish in the sea while in San Diego we’re moving up with a rank of 6,752. We’ve got 132 sites linking in and then we have a breakdown of demographics. According to Alexa, our audience is predominantly male, college educated, between the ages of 25 and 44 with other age groups represented and most are visiting the site from work. Most of our site traffic is from the United States and revolves around search terms pertaining to our industry: san diego web design, san diego ad agency etc. You can see pertaining search queries and in some cases, trafficking information….if you’re popular enough.

You can also compare different sites to one another and I’m proud to announce that Jacob Tyler Creative Group has the highest among the similar company sites I compared.  Other companies shall remain nameless to avoid tears.

You can also see where the traffic is coming from by clicking the Clickstream tab. For us, the top two referring sites are Google and Facebook and let it be known that Social Media Marketing has a HUGE impact on this score – so don’t miss the boat on the Social Media Revolution.

That, in a nut shell, is what the Alexa ranking can offer you so I encourage everyone to take a look at yours  and work on making that journey toward the top.

You would think it would be easy to tell whether your social network marketing plan was working or not. After all, you’ve either got hundreds of new contacts and a landslide of Internet orders or you don’t… right?

It’s not really that simple.

New revenue, customers, and contacts are the simplest way to gauge your progress, but the problem is they tend to show up relatively late in the game. It’s very possible to be making progress long before it shows up in your bank balance, or your e-mail list, which is why it’s so important to pay attention to some other relevant indicators before you decide to pour a lot more money into your social networking plan… or ditch it altogether.

Here are a few ways to get – and use – the right metrics for social media:

Put technology on your side. By all means, take advantage of the software and tools available for tracking hits to your website, registering traffic on your blog, finding out how people are coming to you, and so on. The more information you have, the more informed your future choices and investments will be. If you can’t tell where customers are coming from, or why, then how will you know which parts of your social networking plan to keep pouring time and money into?

Look at the situation from all angles. That doesn’t mean you can stop at simply looking at before and after sales numbers. You need a big picture perspective. For example, it would be easy to see a growing number of Twitter followers, and an increase in online sales, and conclude that things are going well. They might be, but it also could be a case of cannibalizing your offline sales by driving buyers online for lower prices, or enticing new customers with price cuts that you can’t sustain over the long term. These would be extreme examples, of course, but the point to remember is that you need to keep a close eye on how things are really going… not just the numbers of “friends” and sales you have.

Know when to pull the plug. As we hope you’ve gathered by now, nearly every business can use some level of social network marketing. That’s not to say that every business needs a ton of it, though, or that every online marketing firm you can hire is worth the expense. Keep tabs on your social network marketing plan and if it looks like things aren’t working out the way they should, don’t be afraid to pull back and go smaller – or even start over. The process takes time, but it only works if you do it the right way, so be ruthless in your desire to stop throwing time and money at activities that aren’t ever going to pay dividends.

Build and keep building. In the end, social networking always comes down to widening your net and broadening your reach. To that end, start with quality content and strong profiles, and then keep adding to them. I can promise you that, eventually, the payoff in your ability to reach potential customers and industry peers – instantly and with the full weight of a strong social networking profile – will be well worth the wait and effort.