After a long break I’ll be giving a course on social media marketing for businesses on Sept. 23 and 30. The course had filled up already, but we’ve moved the venue to a bigger room so we have 5 spaces left for anyone interested. The course will take place in the Sandisk offices in the Kfar Saba Hi-Tech park. Each session will be four hours, and we will get hands-on at every stage with tools and techniques for optimizing your social media activity.

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com.

Agenda

Sept. 23: What exactly is social media, and how do I use it effectively?

Part 1: What is social media marketing? (1 hour)

• What makes something social? What is Web 2.0? We’ll look at the most important elements of social media today: RSS, Video, Widgets, Tagging, and more to get everyone on the same page.
• The importance of social media in your marketing activity
• Case studies: companies and organizations that have successfully and unsuccessfully used social media

Part 2: Planning effective strategies for social media activity (3 hours)

• Elements of an effective social media strategy
• Setting goals
• Important considerations before starting
• Research your space
• Implementation
• Monitoring & engaging – how, what
• DO NOT neglect the other “boring” stuff: SEO, email, advertising, etc.

Sept. 30: Practical techniques for implementing your social media strategy

Part 1: Overview of important social networks – what they are, how to best use them for marketing (3 hours)

• How to use twitter for marketing: setting up profiles that work for business, building up community, promoting your profile, what and how to write, monitoring, measuring, the best tools, etc.
• Using facebook for business: profiles, Pages, applications, events, etc.: critical differences between each of them, how to choose the right ones for your purposes, setting up a facebook presence that works for marketing and promotion.
• YouTube and other video sites: why video is the next generation of web marketing, what to keep in mind when working with video, ideal length and content, how to promote your video to achieve your marketing goals
• Blogs – “old fashioned” but crucial: blogs are the hubs of an effective social media presence. What to keep in mind, how to set it up, how to integrate it with your other social media activity, ideal frequency for updates, what to write, how to write, how to promote.

Part 2: Personal branding (1 hour)

• What is personal branding?
• Why everyone should work on their online personal brand today
• How to create a successful personal brand with social media

Summing up: Where to go from here (0.5 hours)

• Key points to keep in mind when branching out into social media
• Putting it all together
• Working with (skeptical) upper management

About the speaker – me, Miriam Schwab

Miriam is the Friendly CEO of illuminea, and has been speaking and teaching about social media and blogging for business for over two years.

illuminea is a marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses and organizations use the social web effectively as an integrated part of their marketing mix. illuminea has extensive expertise in designing, developing and strategizing business blogs, and using these blogs as the hub for launching successful social media marketing activities. Part of illuminea’s day-to-day activities involve keeping up with the latest developments in the social web so that we are always able to offer our clients the best solutions for their needs.

Among illuminea’s clients are some of Israel’s leading companies and personalities, including Comverse, Commtouch, Natan Sharansky, and more. Click here to view testimonials from illuminea’s clients.

Here is a list of the conferences and events that Miriam has spoken at:

Wordcamp 2007 – moderator http://english.wordcamp-israel.info/ and the schedule

WordCamp 2008

Elephant

Techshoret 2007

Affilicon 2008

Affilicon 2009

Marchshoret, Nov. 2, 2008. Presentation is here

Partnership 2000, Nov. 12, 2008

Pradler Institute

SSVN, hosted by IBM on July 8, 2009. Read reviews. Presentation.

ISOC Israel:How to create a personal brand by using online tools- MP3 of lecture; presentation; article on The Com (Hebrew).

MEET Alumni Conference, August 4-5, 2009 Istanbul Turkey: “Blogging Secrets: Tips for marketing your business online.”

For more information about costs, venue, topics, etc., please contact us at (02) 5660297 or via email at info@illuminea.com. Hope to see you there!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Have you ever wanted to follow what’s being said about a certain topic around the internet? Well, it’s not as hard as you think. Monitoring tools are the primary way to track buzz about a given topic online. For someone conducting an online social media marketing campaign this is especially true. To properly promote something, you have to continuously follow what people are saying about it. Monitoring tools can be broken into two primary categories:

• Background Tracking
• Conversation Tracking

One of the best social media monitoring tools  is Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, you can receive weekly, daily, or even “as it happens” alerts whenever your search term is mentioned on the web.

Don’t be afraid to enter multiple phrases that mention your brand; this can only yield more and diverse results. In addition to delivering relevant links to articles, blogs, video, etc., Google Alerts is also a great spring board for learning more about where your brand is being spoken about.

Probably the best feature of this service is that you don’t have to keep checking for the most recent mentions on search engines. Having the alerts delivered directly into your inbox allows you to keep tabs on where you might want to comment on a blog post or follow the development of a news story.

The major drawback about Google Alerts is that it doesn’t cover social media sites, such as facebook. To become a part of the “conversation,” you must use monitoring tools that focus on discussions, media (such as video, audio, photos, etc.), and just about anything else. If you are conducting a social media campaign, you absolutely must know if people are already talking about your brand. Sites like Twitter, Digg, and YouTube are the some of the many featured sites on Addict-o-matic, which is the site to find “the latest buzz on any topic.”

Addictomatic screenshot via flickr from Maestro Alberto's photostream

Other sites such as Daylife and Silobreaker are also great for processing recent quotes, graphs, trends, and lists of recent articles or blogs that mentions your topic.

Long gone are the days of missing what someone said about you behind your back. Utilizing effective monitoring tools will help you to truly be part of the conversation in every corner of the web.

First, a story:

Almost a year ago, I met with representatives from one of Israel’s leading television and media networks, who had the backing of a prominent philanthropist to implement a social media strategy for Israel’s 60th birthday. Someone had recommended that they meet me, and I prepared a comprehensive presentation about what I called “Israel 2.0,” where we would create and implement a strategy that would celebrating Israel’s accomplishments with a diverse, wide-reaching web presence.

Notice I call it a “web presence”; that is because the web is no longer about just creating a website. It is about using the web and all its potential to promote your business, organization, or ideas with the greatest results possible. It is no longer sufficient to depend on your website alone, particularly since

“a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site – through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices” (from ReadWriteWeb)

Anyway, there was one guy in the room listening to my presentation who actually knew some of the terms I was using, like RSS feeds and the like, and I guess this made him feel like a social media expert. So when I finished my presentation, he said “Why do I need all that? I’ll just create a facebook group.”

I made a facebook group; so why am I all alone here?

What? Is he kidding me? I tried to explain until I was blue in the face that creating a facebook group is not a social media strategy, but it’s really difficult to explain concepts to people who have no knowledge of the field you are talking about, so they all believed the facebook-group guy, and that was that.

Needless to say, no all-encompassing web presence was created in honor of Israel’s birthday, and I don’t know what happened to that philanthropist’s offer.

A real social media strategy starts with goals, not tools

To create a serious web strategy, you should not start with the tools. “I’m going to create a blog,” or “I’ll join twitter” is not a strategy, since these may not be the right tools to use to achieve your goals.

I would like to build a house. These look like good tools to use.

Here’s an outline of the general steps needed to create a successful web presence:

1. Identify your goals: what do we want to achieve? Who are we trying to target?
   Part of this stage is benchmarking: analyzing current statistics; identifying what you hope will be different as a result of your social media efforts; defining parameters that you want to change most and least.
2. Next, work out the strategy: how are we going to achieve these goals? Where do we need to be to reach our target audience, i.e. based on their demographics, where are they hanging out on the web? What type of content will they like? What manpower considerations do we need to be aware of (i.e. the need to hire a Community Manager, etc.)? Do we have legal considerations?
3. Once all of that has been prepared, then and only then can you choose tools and technologies. A facebook group may not be the best strategy for your goals, or it may be appropriate, but maybe it won’t work on its own. Tools and technologies are just the medium, not the message (sorry McLuhan). For example, in the world of print marketing, you know a rollup is exactly what you need to get your message across at the upcoming trade show, but you’d look mighty strange schlepping it to pitch a new client at their office.
4. Implementation. Now you get to have fun with your shiny tools, because they’re the right ones.

Forrester has laid out a similar approach to creating an effective social media strategy by putting technology last, which they coined as POST: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. (Here’s a link to the original blog post, but it looks like Forrester is trying to wipe out any memory of Charlene Li since she left, so you can only access the cached version on Google.)

Like most things in life and business, you need to know what you want to achieve before you decide how you are going to achieve them. And that is why a facebook group is most definitely not a strategy.

Lonely girl image from willgame on flickr

This past Thursday, our new media site, israelplug, reached digg’s home page. As we watched in disbelief, tens of thousands of readers flooded our site (and brought it crashing down in the classic “digg effect”). This was both exciting and frustrating. We learned a lot from this experience, and I would like to share some of these lessons with you.

First, here’s some background: we started to officially launch our new site on Thursday. As part of our launch strategy, we began to bookmark articles on the major social media sites, including digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. Within minutes, one of our articles was picked up by diggers and the number of diggs began to rise.

At first we thought the diggs must be coming from friends. But the diggs kept rising, until they began to rise at a furious rate. The article landed on digg’s home page.

Now, for those of you who are not familiar with digg, here is a short explanation of its importance: digg is a site where people “vote” for articles. These votes are called “diggs,” and the more “diggs” an article gets, the higher its popularity rating. Articles that land on digg’s home page are exposed to zillions of digg readers, and this usually results in an onslaught of traffic to the article. And this, my friends, is what web site owners dream of.

This trip to digg’s home page has been an interesting learning experience, so I would like to share my lessons with you:

1. If you want to build traffic to your site, bookmark your articles. By bookmarking your articles on digg, del.icio.us, and other community sites, you will make people aware of your article. Once they are aware, others may start bookmarking it too. You never know which of your articles will take off, so you might as well do this.
2. Have your site on a serious dedicated or virtual private server. My sites are all on shared hosting. That’s ok on a usual day, but it can’t handle the “digg effect.” As soon as our site started rising up the home page, the servers crashed and the site went down. That means that at the greatest moment, nobody can see your site. I called our hosting provider and begged them to get it back up – I told them to name their price, just to get it up. They said “Sorry ma’am, there’s nothing we can do. You should consider a dedicated server.” (Which is a service that they don’t even provide!) Of course, they could have borrowed some server juice from someone else for that short time that I was exceeding my CPU, but they wouldn’t budge. Very bad service. So if you want to get to digg’s home page, and reap the benefits, make sure your site is on a server that can handle it and has decent service.
3. Have a killer title. It seems that articles that make it to digg’s home page are those that are dugg by digg devotees. These are people who invest a lot of time and effort in digging articles that they deem worthy, and monitoring certain other key diggers to see what they digg. I think that a large percentage of them don’t even actually read the articles they are digging. They just look at the title, see who else has dugg it, and digg it too.
4. digg devotees like science/tech/geeky articles. Articles on technology, science, and other “geeky” subjects are loved by digg devotees. They also seem to like American politics.
5. diggers don’t like blog spam. Blog spam is when you write a short post about someone else’s article or post with the goal of gaining visitors off of the success of the blog/article you are writing about. If diggers suspect that this is what you are doing, you will be shunned. They want original content.
6. digg comments are a culture unto themselves. People can comment under every link that is dugg. This becomes a whole conversation unto itself, but what’s even more amazing is that the commenters can digg up other comments up or down! This is like a rating system for the comments, and if a comment gets dugg up, it means people liked it, and if it gets dugg down, it means people think it sucks.
7. To make money from ads, you need to monetize your site smartly. My site is monetized with Google Adsense. Although thousands of people clicked, I made something like $2. I made almost as much from two clicks on my other blog, WordPressGarage.com. I don’t know why the click rates were so cheap, but that really sucks. Your visitors will click on ads – just try to make sure you’re making money from those clicks.

The site is still getting traffic from digg, and the number of feed subscribers that shot up during the digg effect is now coming down. Therefore, I have yet to see whether this traffic can be maintained in some way, or if all those readers will disappear as quickly as they came.

Anyone have any other words of wisdom for those who aspire to achieve digg stardom?

LessAccounting is an online, web 2.0-type of application that allows small businesses to track income, expenses and invoices. Since I am always on the lookout for tools that will make my small business life easier, I signed up for the beta and was therefore informed of the launch via email.

The website has a clean look and feel to it, and the following introductory text:

Things We Aren’t…

• We choose not to function, act or even smell like Peachtree or Quickbooks.
• Wesabe is great, we just aren’t anything like it. (But we do import from it!)
• Freshbooks or Blinksale: we invoice, just no robust calendar time tracking functionality.
• Not a robust CRM by any means, just check out Highrise by 37signals.
• If you need a sales management component that is built for a large sales teams, try Salesforce.
• We’re not an address book or a check registry.
• No Calendar here, try iCal or Google Calendar.

On the one hand, I can see what they were trying to do here. They wanted to take a different approach that would get our attention. It got my attention alright – It made me wonder why all these other applications are better than LessAccounting, and what I would be missing out on by using LessAccounting. This is especially the case since I actually use one of the services they mentioned above: Highrise. I love Highrise, so if LessAccounting isn’t as good as Highrise in the CRM department, it makes me wonder what they’re lacking in the other departments. And they keep saying they’re not robust! Why? We want things that are robust, not half-baked!

Basically, a move to differentiate themselves by saying what they aren’t will probably leave many potential customers wondering why they should bother with them.

LessAccounting can save themselves by taking the above and making it into a table with two columns labeled “Things We Aren’t” and “Things we Are.” Then they can say “We aren’t anything like Peachtree” in the first column, and then explain their advantage in the second column, which could be something like “LessAccounting is a lightweight, online application that won’t weigh you down with a zillion extra options or features you don’t need.” Then the user can see exactly why they’re not like Peachtree – it’s not just because they can’t be, it’s because they choose not to be. And they need to say that they are robust – it’s just in their own useful way. (I never used their service, but if they’re trying to sell it, I’m assuming/hoping it has its strong points.)

Tom Chandler over at The Copywriter Underground explains how this principle is not just effective in the world of writing, but also in everyday life. He describes an incident where he had to report an injury to someone’s wife, and he foolishly started off with the bad news. My kids teachers’ are all very aware of this principle, and if they ever call in the middle of the schoolday, they start off by saying, “Don’t worry, so-and-so is alright.”

Bing Crosby knew what he was talking about in his song “Mister In-Between”:

You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

It was true then, and it’s true now! Use positive words that exude benefits when talking about your product so that people associate it with good things only. Sound confident that your product is useful and that people will benefit from buying it. Don’t be negative, and don’t even be half-baked – watered-down text that is In-Between can cause you almost as much damage as negative words.

On July 30 I wrote a post asking whether we are reaching the saturation point for social media sites. The reason I wrote it is because it seemed to me that with the growing number of sites that exist that depend on ad revenue for profitability, there can’t possibly be enough advertising dollars to go around.

A day later a study was released by the University of Texas and Chitika that shows a different problem in the ad revenue business model: the top 1% of blogs are getting 20% of the revenue. In 2006, the top 15% drew in over 80% of the revenue. This means that the huge majority of monetized sites and blogs is fighting over a tiny piece of the pie.
Many are criticizing this report for its unprofessionalism and even bias by involving an advertising company in the study (Chitika), but even if these results are off, it still indicates that a disproportionate amount of advertising revenue goes to a small group of site owners.

Which yet again brings me to the issue I addressed in my previous post on this matter: how can new companies have brilliant ideas about how they’re going to build up a community, but have no idea how make money off of it except with advertising revenues?

Social media is hot. It’s what VCs are investing in, and bright entrepreneurs are looking for investment in.

It seems to me like there are three groups involved in this brave new world of media:

1. The new New Media companies that are popping up every minute, each hoping to be the next MySpace or the latest hottie, Facebook.
2. The people who use existing platforms to create and lead a community: the bloggers, the Ning community builders, the forum managers, etc.
3. The audience: those who join the communities, forums, etc. and enjoy the ease with which they can publish online.

Group 1 wants to make money. Group 2 also wants to make money, although there are many out there who create communities around blogs or other media for casual purposes. Group 3 wants to have fun.

So how are Group 1 and Group 2 planning on making money? 99% of them are betting on ad revenues. I am continuously exposed to business plans as well as existing sites that, once they finish telling you all the brilliant ways they will create a community, break the news that they are depending on ads for their revenue.

I don’t know why this doesn’t make more people nervous. Here are my concerns:

1. With more and more people building communities, the potential for ad revenue is decreasing. Even with the growing numbers of web users in developing countries like China and India, if you consider the ridiculous number of new blogs being launched every day, and the fact that people in China probably prefer Chinese sites, you’ve got too many sites for too few visitors (unless your site is in Chinese, I guess). In short, most new communities will not build up a large enough user-base to generate significant ad revenues.
2. Why can’t these companies come up with a more creative way to make money? Why is everybody going for the community building-ad revenue model? If they’re so creative with the way they build their community, why does their creativity stop there? Can’t they actually sell something? It just seems so…”me too.”
3. Has anyone taken a look at whether any rising stars are reaching stellar levels lately? Today’s big guys got into the business five/ten years ago: Google, FeedBurner, Facebook, MySpace, TechCrunch, Technorati, Read/Write Web, Boing Boing.
   Update: Mark from TechCrunch stopped by to comment that TechCrunch is 2+ years old, and Facebook is less than five. He says: “these established players may not be all that old – which is probably why others think they can achieve glory quickly as well.” So perhaps there is hope for a new star…I’d better get to work.
   

New media is fun – group 3 has got it right. But while I am no expert investor, this has all the signs of a bubble to me. A lot of excitement over a quickly shrinking space with diminishing potential.

One thing’s for sure: with everyone betting on ad revenues, it’s clear who’s going to emerge a sure winner in this social media trend…

Google Adwords and Adsense! Google is king of the world.