Starting in about 7 minutes…

Social Media Checklist
Before you build or expand your company’s social media profile, do you really know what you are getting into? Setting up a Twitter account or Facebook profile or uploading a YouTube video is the easy part. What’s next? This panel will examine practical issues you should consider when developing your brand’s social strategy.

Moderator:
Anna Maria Virzi, Executive Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Sean Carton, Chief Strategy Officer, idfive
Jeanniey Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer, Zinio
Heidi Cohen, President, Riverside Marketing Strategies
Brian Boland, Manager, Performance Solutions, Facebook

Starting in a few minutes…

Here we go…

Anna Maria Virzi is moderating this panel.

What is Social Media? We know it is more than Twitter…

Brian from Facebook said, “A fundamental shift in the way that people use the Internet.” It changes over time, but the fundamental point is that it is interactive.

Mod doesn’t know how to use PowerPoint

Sean said social media is technology that helps facilitate conversation.

Heidi Cohen has many definitions…

• Involves different levels of engagement, not just the people who put the content out there.
• Ecomoasses wide variety of content formats, such as text, video, images, pdfs, audio, etc
• Everyone is now connected in networks
• Speed of content and movement of that content is faster
• Conversation can happen in real time or old content rising up again
• It can be on desktop, handheld, etc
• It melds offline and online

Jeanniey said she hates going last.. Anything that is watercooler-worthy. Conversation has a chance of becoming succesfful in social media.

Mod apologized for PowerPoint slide handling…

8 Points Social Media Marketing Checklist

1. What is your overall marketing strategy
2. What are your marketing or business goals for your social media marketing?
3. What forms of social media wil you use and why?
4. How will you measure your social media marketing? What metrics are appropriate for your campaign and what do they tell you? How will you gather the info? What will you do with the data?
5. Are you currently listening to what is being said about your firm, brands and products?
6. What types of supporting marketing will you use to promote and extend the reach of your program?
7. What dedicated resources will you allocate to your social media programs, both financial and headcount?
8. Choose the right outlets

You don’t need to jump in, first figure out your goals…

Measuring these goals within social media is important…

See the feedback on your brands, see what people are saying about you and your products.

Your social media campaign does not exist in the vacuum, you can’t just post and pray it will come, you need to give it care and push it. Think about how do you integrate this.

You need dedicated people to manage this, and if you don’t – it won’t happen.

If you do not have dedication from people and money, it won’t happen…

Not using names, cause I can’t see who is saying what…. Sorry.

Brian said, “be relevant.” If it is a Facebook update, Tweet or even an ad – it is about understanding how you are relevant in that context (conversation).

Understand the many ways you can engage with social media. These are from distribution points, similar to SEO, with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs to paid ads or youtube ads, facebook ads.

Can you buy this? Brian said, yes you can.

You can use Facebook ads to drive response.

When ads have social context, you engage with them more, Brian said.

If you are trying to drive fans or get followers, it is important for you to define the value of each fan, each follower, each impression, each post and retweet. etc. We are good at measuring this on search, but now it is time for social media.

Because it is a conversation, you need to figure out how to continue that conversation.

Sean starts off by saying “Don’t panic! This isn’t new.”

We get too hung up on the specific technology, instead of what you want to use it for.

Someone just told her how to use the arrow keys to change slides. She said, “she is a Mac person.” But the arrow key works on a Mac also. Still not working, there it goes.

The computer seems very lagged….

Sean then explains about ‘dont be reckless.’ Have a systimatic way at going into this. You need a strategy.

Sean adds, ask yourself, why social media, espesially when you have a limited budget.

You cannot participate in this stuff unless you are willing to let go a bit. Allowing comments in blog posts, Facebook people can comment on your pages, etc.

Heidi is now up explaining that you need to look inside your organization for this.

When you go to social media, your audience is broadens to lots of new people outside of your customers, including gov’t, competitors and others.

Fresh content is required and you need to be there continouly for this content, interact…. She said.

You need to give people a reason to come back.

Make sure to set parameters for your employees. YOu need internal policies to tell what people can or cannot say, how they should be identifying themselves and so on.

Jeanniey is next up…

There will be new tools and much more going on with this in the future. No social media best practices are written for these new tools.

She said, “apps are the new web.” The average consumer has 6 web-enabled devices with access to 2 at any given time.

FYI, these are tweets from people in the audience now…

Measure the effectiveness: Use tools that will help integrated and measure the effectiveness of digital channels, including email, SMS, etc on a single platform.

Empower Consumers: Enable customers to choose what messages they receive and in what channels

She ends with “Yesterday’s Gone”, if you are following a best practice that dates back to 2008 or earlier, toss it away, it is now wrong… Things have changed.

They are now arguing about this point: ”

I disagree. U don’t give up control of your brand by doing social media. The outside has always shaped your brand identity. #ses #seschi“

Q&A Time btw… Session over in 20 mins..

Next up at http://www.SERoundtable.com/ at 1pm (central) include:

• Real Time SEO: No More Yesterday’s News covered by Barry Schwartz & Marty Weintraub
• Landing Page Optimization: The 7 Deadly Sins covered by Brian Ussery