This week we were tasked with training a new hire for one of our clients. This company understood the importance of Google+ Pages for their business, and also wanted to revamp their LinkedIn presence. (Thanks in part to Lisa Barone). They knew it would take more hours to keep additional profiles updated and were looking to save money by hiring somebody internally.

Before we go into the details of the training, it is important to highlight the differences between having a social media consultant and starting an internal social media department. Each have their own pitfalls, but together, you get the best of both worlds.

Immediate Setbacks with Social Media Departments

These are the most common hurdles we experience when helping clients that already have a social media department:

• Not knowing where to find content within their business
• Trouble knowing where to post such content
• Understanding and engaging different platforms appropriately (Twitter vs Facebook vs LinkedIn, for example)
• Finding industry-specific networks/communities to interact with

And, even with departments that have been around for a while, the common phenomena of social media silos (the sm department becomes isolated) hurts their performance.

See also – Your Social Media Silo X Your Social Media Source [Conciliation]

However, there are important benefits to an internal department that you need to ponder when hiring a consultant.

Obstacles To Overcome When Hiring a Social Media Consultant

These are somewhat obvious, but we’ve had clients fail to understand:

• Being away from the office (sometimes in a different country), consultants will need a point of contact that is able to provide the resources needed
• Consultants will need help understanding the structure of the company and who to contact in order to clear proper content
• Successful campaigns such as live tweeting or a Reddit AMA are extremely hard to pull off remotely

And just to be clear – the obstacles I listed above are not impossible to overcome. They just require more time, which can make a campaign more expensive. So, how can you make the best of both both worlds?

Get Your Consultant To Install Your Social Media Deparment

This week, we didnt really install anything. We set the foundations to what will become a full-on social department in 12-18 months. We found applicants that were web savvy, had excellent writing skills, and were willing to work part-time, at least initially. We had amazing applicants, actually. But that is not about them.

For those of you that are affected by TL;DR, get this: Our agreement with client remains the same – no increased charges. As part of the agreement, we create a plan that suits their structure. They hire somebody part-time, hourly, to execute such plan. They get our know-how, but save considerably on labor.

In the end, we’re still fully responsible for the success of the campaigns – which makes us in charge of the part-time helper. But we save on travel time, because that part-time help can act as an “arm” for us. The company doesnt need to fear a part-timer screwing things up.

Would that apply to your company? The comments are yours – let us know how you maximize your sm department.

Related posts:

1. Your Social Media Silo X Your Social Media Source [CONCILIATION]
2. Is Your Company Stuck With A Social Media Silo?

It’s been a hectic week and with Halloween on a Monday, it’s easy to say this week will be crazy. But as the entire office was anxious to leave for Halloween, I started noticing that everybody updated their own profiles, completely ignoring our fan page or any other “corporate” profile.

Keeping the fan page updated, they say, it’s the job of the social media department. There are excellent reasons for it:

• Getting the tone right
• Knowing what can be made public
• Keeping up with appropriate frequency & schedule

See also: Is Your Company Stuck with A Social Media Silo?

But the biggest challenge is that the social media department is not the one producing content. WHAT???

Your Social Media Deparment Doesnt Make Products

Just like the Marketing or Customer Service departments are not directly responsible for product development – yes, they provide detailed feedback, insights, demographics, etc.. -, the real people behind what makes your company successful are usually social media “faceless”. Your sculptors, designers, engineers, technicians, and salespeople are way too often disengaged and oblivious to your corporate presence online.

Today, because of Halloween, this became extremely obvious as one engineer posted about turning one project he’s been working on into a costume. His social circle loved the idea, and had a manager not seen it, we wouldn’t have used it on our page. To make it a bit more personal, we tagged that engineer as the mind behind the idea and turned him into a Facebook celebrity (for a couple hours at least).

There are companies that suffer from social media anxiety, and despite doing awesome things, fail to communicate them. When this happens, it’s not because the staff isnt “savvy”; most of the time, as makers, they fail to recognize the public interest in what they’re working on. Clearly, this is not the case when they’re working on something that cant be made public yet. But we’ll get there.

See also – How Can Social Media Marketing Work For B2B Companies?

Your Social Media Source Fuels Your Silo

In the beginning of the post I mentioned a few issues why social media requires a certain level of training. The worst of those issues is a leak. Allowing sensitive information to be made public can lead to horrible PR nightmares and even lost deals. But there are ways around it.

1. Reach out to Product Managers

Product managers are able to tell you specifics about product development for a cool “behind-the-scenes” post, and they know exactly what can or cannot be made public. For snapshots of development or design, they may be able to put you in contact with a specific designer in charge of the project.

2. Come up with a Development Schedule

With the information gathered from your product manager, you’re able to compile a schedule and base updates and create unique content around it. This becomes an even more precious asset when combined with step 3:

3. Conciliate Development Schedule with Sales

Want to make your entire company happy? Once you compiled the development schedule, conciliate it with the Sales team to see what they’re looking to push, to whom, and when.

If you’re able to increase the buzz around a product launch based on carefully selected “snapshots” and funnel this buzz into a lead capture page you’ve just achieved social media nirvana.

Rinse, Repeat

To optimize the entire process, you can work with other managers to institute an internal shared server, and overtime, educate the staff to add snapshots under the “social media ready” folder.

Of course, this is a longer-term battle. We’ll address it more in depth in the near future. In the meantime, work on your schedules, and become an asset to every department in your company. If social media is an open communication channel, you need to be as well.

Have questions? Comments? Let us know!

QUICK PITCH

The SocialMediaGuerilla.com parent company has started a weekly “free SEO Tips” series where they share a complete SEO blueprint right on their blog. Since Social Media & SEO become more entangled daily, you should definitely check it out. And if you want your company reviewed, you may leave them a comment too.

Related posts:

1. Is Your Company Stuck With A Social Media Silo?
2. Social Media Marketing for an Online Store?

This post will talk about social media on a bigger level than we often do. We’ve mentioned examples and strategies to make social media marketing work for sandwiches, indie films, and we talked about some huge social media fails. All in all, these companies dealt with customers directly.

Everybody that has “social media expert” on their twitter profile knows how social media is perfect for engaging your customers. Dan Zarella, in his book Zarella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness calls these folks “unicorn-and-rainbows marketers“ . They love “making friends” and “participating in the conversation”, which is basically what I’ve been trying my grandmother to do on Facebook. Not necessarily how I’d generate business to enterprise-level companies.

Why Should B2B Companies Even Bother With Social Media?

If your company sells software to integrate packing and shipping processes, you shouldnt expect 1 million fans on your Fan page.  But it doesnt mean you have no audience.

A recent CMO Survey for the American Marketing Association amongst 250 VP-level marketers from Fortune 1000 and Forbes top 200 B2B companies showed that Social media spending will increase 3% in the next 12 months and 9% over the next five years.

The first opportunity that social media offers the enterprise is the chance to solidify their reputation as experts.

Corporate Blogging Comes Into Play

When you think of Oracle, you may think of Forbes’ richest people list, with its CEO competing with Bill Gates for the #1 spot. They’re definitely not in the same level as Zappos or JetBlue when it comes to Social Media, but their Oracle Mix blog was created to bring customers, employees, and developers together.

Oracle’s blog offers, in a very social way:

• Peer-to-peer Customer Support
• The chance for employees to showcase their knowledge
• Staff integration – see that Melbourne meetup post? There are more similar posts

Having access to this tool can change the mind of an IT director looking at Oracle vs open-source software.

Research, Development, and Feedback Using Twitter

Sticking to the Oracle example, if we run a simple Twitter search for Siebel (one of their products), we see what customers need, what developers think, and Oracle can use that data to launch smaller campaigns.

For example – there were at least 4 or 5 “help wanted” posts from Middle East companies looking for Siebel experts. It’s not good for Oracle when companies want to use their software but cant find a developer that knows how to. So they may very well set up a Middle East seminar with one of their in-house experts. These companies all have an IT department that can learn, and local developers can attend it as well, get certified, and then apply for those job openings.

B2B Social Media Marketing Reaches Their Customers’ Customers

By helping their customer’s customer, B2B companies are able to directly impact their sales. An apparel wholesaler that sells to Wal-Mart, for example, might not need to engage Wal-Mart customers. But by monitoring a simple twitter search, they’re able to know if the end customer is dissatisfied with their products.

That customer will yell at Wal-Mart, who will then suspend orders from the wholesaler. By addressing the issue directly with the end-customer or by providing Wal-Mart with the tools to make that customer happy, the wholesaler guarantees their precious spot on the shelves.

How Can It Help Your Company?

Do you work for a company that is still floundering in social media? Simple solutions go a long way. Take 5minutes and run a relevant twitter search. Show the results to your boss along with suggestions.

It may not be worthy addressing a single customer’s issue if it’ll take 5 employees off their current assignments in order to do so. But if you find a pattern, or a chance to reach out to multiple users, that single action can then generate traffic to a retailer store, or improve the performance of a group of employees that use your software.

Let us know how you can better help your company in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Killer Social Media Marketing Software For a $1 – Synnd Bonus!
2. Is Your Company Stuck With A Social Media Silo?
3. Social Guerilla Marketing Done Right: The X-One Mug

On my last post I talked about how to extend the life of your social media links with SEO, and one of the tips I shared was to have an attractive and easy-to-use Social Sharing plugin. Today, we’ll go over my two favorite social sharing plugins for WordPress. As you know, we’re huge fans of WordPress for SEO because of the extensive plugin availability and its flexibility.

1. AddThis

AddThis is available free, for any website, not just WordPress. Their API allows social media integration with pretty much any community, and they have a list of 338 services (and growing).  If you’re a developer, it’s a paradise. For us WordPress users, they have their own WP plugin. You need to have an account with them to enable the full set of features for the plugin, but it’s super easy to customize the look and feel of the buttons, it’s placement on the page (above, below, or both), and which services you want to show your users.

Their coolest feature, however, is the free analytics dashboard they provide. It tracks every time somebody uses the plugin, in the form of “shares”, and then it tracks how many clicks that shared link received, so you know what was your site’s ‘VIRAL LIFT’.

To give you a better example, let’s say a user clicks the “tweet” button and another clicks the “like” button – you now have 2 shares. Once the link goes to Twitter, it receives 3 clicks. The Facebook link receives 5. You now have 8 clicks out of those 2 share actions. Finally, AddThis calculates your Viral Lift, giving you a percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks.

Reasons why we like it:

• Very helpful Analytics
• Weekly email reports!
• Extensive list of services
• Easy to use

Reasons why we dont use it all of the time:

• It conflicts with a few other plugins in WordPress – not every wordpress plugin is tightly-coded, and sometimes we see errors. Always check your site after implementing a new plugin.

So, AddThis is awesome. It’s my favorite Social Media plugin thus far. I recommend it to anybody, specially if you have a bit more experience with code.

2. Tweet, Like, Share and Plus One

Another plugin I’m proud to recommend is the Tweet, Like, Share, and Plus One.  Despite its name, they offer 5 main buttons -Twitter, FB Like, Google +1, Linkedin and FB Share. On their homepage, they state, rightfully so, that 99% of social sharing is done with these services, so why bother with the other 1%?

TLSP1 also has a great support page and a few other neat plugins – I’ve used the scrolling version of their plugin in one of our sites, and it works very well.

Reasons why we like TLSP1

• It does its job extremely well
• It allows great developmental flexibility
• It’s super fast to load
• Rarely there’s any conflict

Why dont we use it all of the time?

• It doesnt offer analytics

WordPress Social Media Plugins Roundup

Between AddThis and TLSP1, you have everything you could possibly want from a social sharing plugin. Give them both a try, and let us know how they fare in your Guerilla. Leave a comment here with your findings. And if you have a favorite plugin, we want to know about it. Is it better? Why?

Related posts:

1. Jeff Johnson’s Cool (and free) Traffic-Getting SEO Plugin For WordPress
2. Warning! Jeff Johnson’s WordPress SEO Plugin Needs A Quick Fix!
3. What’s your excuse for running a free blogger blogspot blog?

I’m currently in Brazil in a sort of vacation, trying to enjoy life without a smart phone (damn you, Verizon’s outdated CDMA network!!), and when I finally get to skim over my Google Reader, I was surprised to see a post by the great Pamela Vaughan talking about the Shelf Life of Social Media Links.

What On Earth does Social Media Shelf Life Mean?

Pamela based her article on Bit.ly’s original research on how long will people pay attention to links shared through different social media outlets. Shelf life, in this case, is how long a link is considered active after it’s original appearance. Bit.ly is perfectly suited for this, since they track every URL shortened using their amazing API for almost forever.

The research showed an average engagement time of about 3 hours for links shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Email. Links on Youtube had a longer shelf life, of about 7 hours. Here’s the breakdown:

• Mean half life of a link on Twitter – 2.8hrs
• Mean half life on Facebook – 3.2hrs
• Mean haf life of links shared thru IM, Email, or any other “direct” source – 3.4hrs
• For links on Youtube – mean half life of 7.4hrs

Here’s Bit.ly’s densityXtime graphic:

So… All My Hard Work Producing Content Evaporates After 3 hours?

Here’s an awesome answer: IT DEPENDS.

Bit.ly’s research calculated the Shelf Life of a link about a “baby otter being befriended by orphaned baby kittens“, which was about 70 minutes long. However, when they tracked the half-life of a link for “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia” its half life was only 5 minutes.

So, when you share stuff about kittens and baby otters, people seem to pay attention longer than when you share about natural disasters. Go figure.

But the real reason it depends is because even though Social Media can drive a gigantic amount of traffic (RTs, Shares, G+s, etc…), it’s certainly NOT your main source NEITHER will it determine the end of your content’s life.

How To Immortalize Your Content Using SEO

Let’s say you write about something a little less entertaining than baby otters and orphaned kittens, and a little more long-lasting than an earthquake. You may get a half life of about 30 minutes.

Let’s say in 30 minutes you receive about 100 visits. Engaging these visitors as quickly as possible can guarantee they’ll come back AND make sure THEY HELP YOU RANK. Here are some ideas:

• Spend Sometime on Your Headline to make it intriguing and exciting
• Have your main bullets, graphs, or images show up above the fold
• Have a newsletter signup box easily identified – preferably, above the fold
• Make use of Social Sharing buttons that require little work – G+, FB Like, and Tweet are my favorite. Digg & Reddit are good too, depending on your content.

Let’s say out of those 100 visits, you get 3 newsletter subscribers, 4 likes, 3 tweets, and 2 G+.

Your new subscribers will receive content straight in their inbox, and the social “clicking” will help push your half-life a bit longer. But, it will also boost your rankings.

Social Activity Strengthens Your SEO Rankings

I will write more in depth about this, but search engines are now seeing tweets, likes, and G+s (so weird to write this!) as personal recommendations. So, if somebody you follow tweets about a page related to your search, that page may show up higher in your results.

And as you know, as long as your site is up and your content is relevant, you’ll continue to receive traffic. Way longer than 3.2 hours.

So, the more social activity you get, the broader your content will reach. I promise I will write a more detailed post about this. Do you promise you’ll read it and then click on the social buttons? wink wink

Let me know if you think this research seems accurate to you. I feel sometimes that I see the same link being RTd over and over, for much longer than just 3 hours. Do you? Leave a comment

Related posts:

1. The Social Media Analytics War Against ROI
2. OAuth and T.CO and How They Affect Twitter (And You!)

As a great content skimmer that I am after midnight (actually, all the time), I told him his guide was still too long. And then I gave him my 3-second guide:

Put family in the family circle. NEVER share you lolcatz or +Robert Scoble ‘s discussions with them. Put friends in the friends circle. Put co-workers in their own circle. Follow the same advice for every social circle you can think of, and then forget where you put JOE and share all of your content in PUBLIC mode

Isnt it just perfect?

Yeah, I’ve just posted about small businesses using Google+ , and of course, there’s a lot more to it than my 3-second guide shows. Clearly.

Jay’s guide is a great start to get your G+ Geek Mode on. Make sure you read it, comment on it, and then add him to your circles on G+.

Not on G+ yet? Leave me a comment below (use a real email!) and I will send you an invite. If you’re on G+, find me there.

Related posts:

1. Should Your Small Business Invest On Google+?

But should your business be on Google+?

The obvious answer is …. MAYBE. WTF? Yeah, I know it’s a ridiculous answer, but bear with me. There are 3 main things to consider before jumping on board:

Google Told Us Not To

Yeah – Googler Christian Oestlien, who’s directly related to the “revenue” part of Google+, posted on his profile asking business to wait because G+ is not yet ready for businesses. According to Christian, asking Ford for his (or her) gender was a bit awkward.  Despite the obvious awkwardness, however, Ford Motor Company has been added to more than 6000 circles and they’re clearly investing some time on the new platform.

Google+ Is Not An RSS Feed (Hear me, Mashable?)

Publications such as Mashable have ignored Google’s advice and created a business page of their own as well. If you check them out, you’ll see a long list of their blog posts on the page. Exactly like their Facebook Fan Page or their Twitter.

The entire proposition of Google+ is to “share just the right thing to just the right people” – that’s why they spent a lot of  money and brain power to create CIRCLES. Clearly, most people continue to publish posts in “public” mode, which beats the purpose, but for YOUR BRAND, there’s no “me too”. If you’re going to follow Chris Brogan’s advice and “be the first to market“, what exactly are you going to share and with who?

Which leads us to the 3rd point:

How Can Google+ ADD To Your Social Media Presence?

If you’re thinking of adding your brand to G+, consider its amazing new set of tools (hangouts, circles, sparks), and start brainstorming how they can help you ADD value to your campaigns, to your daily management, to your staff interaction.

Our guerilleros have just begun using Hangout for quick video conferences. It’s much faster than the buggy Skype tool for Facebook, and it also beats the Skype desktop client in a few home tests we ran. We are also using sparks to find great content, in almost real time, for several of our clients. There are MANY applications of Google’s newest set of tools that can positively impact your social guerilla. Dont just be another one. (Did you get the joke with +1/another one?)

I Conclude With Google’s Promise

Yeah, you have a profile on LinkedIn because you have to. The same applies to a few other social plaftforms. But Google has been very clear – aggressively clear – that they’re fully committed to G+. What this means is that whatever they have designed for businesses is likely to integrate every little product in their mix.

Google Places? Yeah, absolutely. Gmail, of course. Adwords? You betcha!

Here’s what I suggest – jump on Google+ IMMEDIATELY, but under your own name. Get used to circles, hangouts, explore the possibilities. Establish a few connections, follow a few power users in your industry.  When it comes time to have a real business profile on G+, you’ll have a giant leg up. That’s the real advantage here.

P.s – if you need an invitation, just leave a comment with your preferred email . You dont have to put the email in the message field – duh! The email field hides your email from anybody but me

Related posts:

1. An Idea: Social Media Guerilla For Small Brick & Mortar Business
2. The Importance of Building a Blog Community for Your Business
3. Does Your Business Suffer From Social Media Anxiety?

The reason why I’m actually writing this post is because of the way Tom Tom’s online team approached me, which is exactly how we outlined in on a previous post.

See “How To Turn Guerilla Marketing Viral – The Viral Effect”

Forget The Pitch, Look To Flatter

Quite obvious, when I get emails that say “hey, would you please write about our awesome campaign?”, I often ignore it. It’s not like we dont have enough social media marketing content to talk about, right?

But the Tom Tom people actually said “Hey, we read you blog, and really loved post ‘x’. We feel like your readers would appreciate this”. Ego-stroking works with me. Works with a lot of people online too

Alright, Their Campaign

Like a good viral campaign, the focus is not immediately clear – as you watch the video, you relate to John Cleese’s whining, you laugh with him, but you dont get to see any product placement.

Great job, Tom Tom!

You only recognize it’s a Tom Tom commercial once you see the link to their Facebook page – and even then, the call to action is not “buy from us”, but “watch more John Cleese videos”. They get it – people laughing on Youtube want to continue to laugh. They maintain that relationship totally money-free to engage users in a social environment. The sale may not come immediately, but establishing a connection with your users expands the reach of your social graph, which increases your customer base and motivates them to buy from Tom Tom instead of using their free Google Maps navigation. Oops…

Wait, Social Graph What?

You’re lucky I didnt say “Klout”

Social Graph is fancy for “all your Facebook fans, twitter followers, youtube subscribers, and foursquare friends put together”. Think about it – I may not buy a GPS from Tom Tom, but as I post the video on my FB profile or tweet about it, I’m increasing the odds a person in my social graph will.

And that’s the whole point – get people talking, sharing, and socializing – so they feel more comfortable opening their wallets, not just once, but as long-term customer.

We’ll talk about socially-driven brand loyalty some other day

Enjoy The Video

Ah, I almost forgot – the Tom Tom people were so nice that I’m even going to post the credits to this genious (!) campaign.

Credits

The videos and campaign are created by Pool Worldwide. (http://www.poolworldwide.com/). Dutch media agency MEC (http://www.mecglobal.nl/) is responsible for media tactics and planning. Content and Motion (http://www.contentandmotion.co.uk/) created the global social media and pr strategy.

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The Ultimate Local Promotion – Online!

Our goal for Quiznos is to increase local awareness through online resources. We always try to keep our costs down by using smart advertising, and even with our fees, it’s been a relatively inexpensive campaign for Quiznos.

Aside from the usual custom landing page on Facebook and a Twitter account, we also focused heavily on using Google Maps, Foursquare and Facebook Places.

Google Maps + Offer + Boost Ads

We started by getting Quiznos to actually appear on Google Maps. Google Boost was pretty helpful, offering a set it and forget it approach to ad generation and integration. You can also place a coupon in your Maps listing, which gives added incentive for people to choose your business. And as the business “owner”, we ensured that all the images were high quality.

Foursquare Venue Coupons

With Foursquare, we took full advantage of their coupon offer as well. They have a GREAT selection of potential offers dependent on various criteria you select based on the number of people checked in and their status.We also did a similar tactic for Facebook Places. Not everyone uses Foursquare.

A Great Social Media Campaign

With Quiznos, we had a lot of savings offered. Coupons were available from Google Maps, Liking them on Facebook, or signing in on Foursquare or Places. We have effectively used QR codes in the campaign as well. There are signs throughout the store with a QR code that links to the Fb page.

The social media campaign items are ranking well on Google as well, so there’s no reason any should miss any of the deals.

We’re pretty excited with the results, and the owner has seen a marked improvement in sales, so he’s pretty happy as well. And with the low price of the campaign, we were able to offer an affordable solution that worked. While this wouldn’t work for every business, it’s well suited to representing the local branch of a national chain, and it’s low maintenance while bringing in a sustained revenue stream. It’s win-win for everybody!

Related posts:

1. The Impact of Google TV on Social Media Marketing
2. How To Use QR Codes in a Marketing Campaign
3. How to Boost Your Facebook Fan Page Using Tags!

Hesher

Hesher stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (3rd Rock from the Sun, G.I. Joe), Rainn Wilson (The Office) and Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta, Black Swan) and will be released in theaters in May. The plot is about a man who lost his wife and his son who are both suffering from the loss until Hesher shows up and changes their lives.

While it may sound like a heart wrencher, it’s not. Hesher is a foul mouthed pot head who lives by rules that aren’t entirely normal. The soundtrack is half Metallica, and even the title font is done to look like the Metallica logo.

Defacing Photos

We’ve been working very closely with director Spencer Susser on the social media campaign, and it has revolved around taking normal pictures and videos and “Hesher-izing” them. Popular videos from Youtube and pictures of famous people have all been tagged.

Originally, fans could post their pictures to the Hesher personal profile and the director would tag them all. Now, however, the official Hesher Facebook fan page has an app to let you deface your own pictures with some Hesher graffiti. The app is the Hesher De-Facebook, and I’ve included an example with my cat, Demon.

Demon Before

Demon Defaced

Naturally, we’ve also started a Hesher Twitter campaign, and we’re very active on both the personal and fan pages on Facebook. It’s generated an overwhelmingly positive response, and we’re eagerly awaiting the release of the movie. It’s been a lot of fun working with everyone involved. Rainn Wilson and Metallica, as well as others, have made mention of the movie to their fans, and we get a large amount of traffic from related sites. So when Hesher releases in May, make sure you go see it and help support our marketing campaign!

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2. How to Boost Your Facebook Fan Page Using Tags!
3. Attracting Fans on Facebook (How to Get People to Like Me!)