What Is Your Social Media Hub?

Sergio Balegno, Research Director for Marketing Sherpa, is a recognized thought leader in Internet marketing best practices. He gave a superb guest lecture in my social media marketing class last week. There was one thing in particular that he articulated much better than I’ve been able to do. It has to do with organizing your ‘traditional’ Internet and social media marketing around well-defined hubs.

It’s clear that any Internet marketing effort needs to have an activity hub. In the early days—before social media—it was equally clear that the hub was the website. All marketing efforts, PPC and display advertising—pointed there and Internet marketing objectives were achieved there. Objectives might have been driving traffic to retail stores, providing content for customer acquisition and retention, conducting ecommerce, or others as appropriate for the enterprise marketing strategy. Whatever the Internet marketing objective, the website was needed to achieve it.

Enter social media and our efforts to understand how to integrate these networks effectively into our marketing strategy. What is the correct centerpiece of for this marketing element? Social media efforts can point back to the website, and sometimes that may make sense. But often the efforts on public networks are best pointed back to the corporate blog. Sergio used as an example the Cisco Collaboration program that I wrote about last week.

Why should social media point to the blog and not to the website? The main reason is that blog content can—and should be—updated frequently with content that supports the social media efforts with precision. By its very nature, website content is updated less frequently and often is less precisely targeted to particular user segments and/or interests.

That led me to a second ‘ah-ha’ moment--the importance of recency in achieving prominence in search engine results. I hadn’t updated my thinking from the era (a couple of years ago) when things like keywords, number of incoming links, and number of clicks were only determinants of rankings in organic search. Here’s a summary of rank determinants; click through for a mind-numbing list from seo experts. With the addition of things like news, images, and videos search results pages provide the most current as well as the most relevant content. Search any current event and see for yourself!

The take-away is this: Your website is the hub of your ‘traditional’ Internet marketing. To be direct, it’s where you can sell things or acquire sales leads. An increasing number of the people who become leads or customers are going to find you, learn more about you, and develop trust in you through social media. The blog provides timely content and connects to activities like your YouTube channel and other social networks. It points readers to your website for conversion when their time is right. Their time, not yours! That makes your blog the hub of your social media marketing.

There’s still a lot of work to do in integrating all this activity. But a clear understanding of this key principle is necessary to an efficient strategy with marketing effectiveness!

A Facebook Experience

I may be the ultimate multitasker. I always have TV, usually live news, on in the background while I’m working. I often just turn a video up loud so I can listen without bothering to mute the TV. It works for me. . .

Yesterday, I read on a blog or heard on TV something I considered unusually nonsensical about alternative energy and the (non) positions of our political candidates. What strikes me is that none of them are willing to state the basic truth; it took us a long time to get into this mess, and it’s going to take years to get out, even if we have broadly-based commitment, which we clearly don’t have at the moment.

I’ve heard the TV ads of T. Boone Pickens. They make sense, and I had looked at the Pickens Plan website, which I thought was impressive. But yesterday, something made me mad enough to go there and sign up, right in the middle of writing my blog post. I didn’t want to spend much time, but I did decide to register and add their icon to my Facebook page, frankly not knowing exactly what was going to happen. With very little effort it went onto my profile page; if I could have gotten it onto my home page there, I don’t know how. Doesn’t much matter anyway.

When I noticed a picture of one of my former students and her beautiful children, I decided to say hello, so I sent her a quick Facebook email. The Pickens Plan icon had been added to my email template—fascinating, but I needed to finish the post.

Today, I wanted to explore further. I checked my profile page and see that there’s a feed with one piece of current news from the Pickens site. I discovered that the link that shows on Facebook, www.pushpickensplan.com, is the personal page of the site, not the home page. I was there, so I filled out a profile; just what they intended, I think. They ask more questions and allow for more detail than most profile pages. That level of detail will help other members who want to organize something, which seems to be the main objective. Maybe some human attention will be paid at “Pickens Central.” That remains to be seen. I was member number 157330, so they can’t spend much time on each one! He’s already maxed out his Facebook friends at 4921!! (If you have a Facebook account, you can log in and see it. If you don't--why not?). But you can still invite your friends to his own community, and there are multiple opportunities to do so. You can also see other members by zip code. “Cape Cod” also worked for me, which suggests a robust search engine, since it’s not a zip, town or state.

So the community building efforts look good. It also has a MySpace app. It has email, RSS and supports Twitter. It also supports a blog that is apparently open to all registered members—not that common in my experience. Like Facebook (it looks as if it may use the same wall application) I can upload photos and videos to my personal page.

I successfully added a “member” badge to this site; see the right bar. It has a link to my personal page on the Pickens site—cool! They have other widgets that have news feeds.

At this point, I’m a bit tired, and I don’t think I’ve fully explored the capabilities of this site. It occurs to me that if I was spending a lot of my own money on this campaign, I’d want the best, and that’s what he has, although I can’t find out his agency of record or site developers. But they are good!

It also occurs to me that what I initially considered the quick addition of an app to my Facebook page—mostly to see how it worked—led me on quite an odyssey. It inspired me to set up my own personal page and to see who else in my area was involved. It also offered me opportunities to spread the word—some of which I took; others of which I want to think about.

My personal opinion—a smashing use of Web 2.0 techniques in the service of a critically important public issue!

Online Events Extend Reach of Events Offline

Marketers who want to get more mileage out of events held in the physical world should consider linking them to a parallel world in cyberspace. Last week when new media maven C. C. Chapman visited my class at Emerson College he told us about another installment in the Verizon FiOS block party series.

Verizon has an interesting approach to making a local event into a cyberspace happening. They can only expand the super-fast FiOS network in a particular area one neighborhood at a time. What they are doing is using the block party rubric because it’s essentially a local event. But by creating an event space on the web they give it greater reach and longer life. The event is modeled after the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition series on ABC. Verizon selects a family in the neighborhood for a “media makeover.” When it’s ready they invite both the real and the virtual neighborhoods. If you’ve watched the extreme home makeover shows or Trading Spaces on TLC, you pretty much know the drill.

The basic components (at least the ones I’ve found) are:

•The MyHome 2.0 website. It has serious information about the FiOS network, an introduction to the makeover specialists and a section featuring the families that have been selected for the upgrades.
•A Facebook group
•A Flickr site
•Tie in with FiOS TV
•Blogs and vlogs all over the place.

When I tuned in to the Pittsburgh party about noon on Saturday, C.C. Chapman was broadcasting live from the Zaharko home as everyone geared up for the party. His video gives a great sense of what was happening. I also noted an invitation on Yahoo! Local and I’m sure there were lots of other things I didn’t find that were aimed at drawing attendees.

At that point I had to leave and go Christmas shopping—sorry, C.C! I caught up today—watching videos, reading blogs, and looking at some of the pictures.

And that’s exactly the point. This neighborhood block party in Pittsburgh left its footprint all over the web. Verizon has gotten a lot of mileage from the event and the promotion. It will last long after the last cup of coffee has been drunk.

One blogger was already hoping the promotion would next take place in Delaware. She wanted friends to be able to apply. The buzz is the real outcome. You might want to keep an eye on the Be The Next Reality Star page—they hold auditions.

Or you might want to think about how you can give your next promotional event a life of its own on the Internet!
Sphere: Related Content

Using the Tools

It’s always a pleasure to receive an email from your daughter, especially one that has a picture of your adorable grandson. This one was special.

Her family signed up to participate in the Walk for Animals sponsored by MSPCA and Boston’s Angell Memorial Hospital earlier this month. The email included a link to their personal page complete with a picture, personal fund-raising goal and a link to their bulldog group web page. The scrolling list of donors indicated that various people and pets had already contributed.

Sure, I would have made a contribution anyway; they are my kids. But this made it easy for me. Even better, it made it easy for them. It was personal and appealing but very soft sell. Because it was a simple text email it was easy to forward. I did, and my friend’s cat made a contribution also. The system also provided an email template for participants to thank their donors along with the standard email acknowledgement by the MSPCA.

I wasn’t there, but I’m told that people, dogs, and a pair of ferrets had fun. The cats on leashes and the parakeets in birdcages strapped to strollers didn’t look as happy. But, according to the MSCPA, they raised over $330,000 with this event. Every communication provided links to the website and the HTML ones included a lot of the site functionality.

All this was powered by Convio’s TeamRaiser fundraising software. That made it easy to replicate some of the MSPCA home page components on the personal pages. It also interfaced with the MSPCA donor database, capturing new names and updating donor records.

The participants are an integral part of an event like this. Using interactive tools to improve their experience and produce desired results for the organization is a win-win.