Question 4: Which are the common misconceptions about conducting social media campaign and establishing social media presence?

Scott Buresh

Most myths center on the ideas that a campaign is easy, implementation is short, and, as they say, “if you build it, they will come.” However, the campaign will most likely take much longer than expected as the users will need to learn to communicate with each other on the new platform and will need ample amounts of direction. And despite that most people believe users signing up on a new social networking site will be almost instantaneous, there will need to be active efforts to get visitors to come the site and sign up for an account.

Roger Janik

I think one of the most common misconceptions about a social media campaign is that it is quick and easy.  Yes, you can strike gold early on, but like most marketing, it takes a good plan of action and a lot of perseverance.  Obviously, you shouldn’t expect enormous success early on.  For instance, if you place your content on Digg or MySpace, don’t be surprised if it isn’t on the homepage the first day.  It does take a long time to become proficient at social media marketing.  In addition, just like your website should be correctly optimized, so should social marketing content that you distribute.  Make sure you follow the rules of each site and don’t cut corners.  Another misconception is that social media marketing is a substitute for other forms of marketing such as PPC, press releases, etc.  Social media marketing should be part of a comprehensive SEO strategy and not the sole focus of a campaign.

Hugo Guzman

I would say that most common misconception is that social media is a pure direct response channel. While there are ways to deliver tangible ROI measurements for social media campaigns, marketers need to understand that a lot of the benefit comes in the form of brand affinity as well as SEO value. Another common misconception is that social media is a purely promotional channel. This is the cardinal sin of the industry in that companies that attempt to shameless promote their wares without truly engaging with the community, they will quickly be ostracized and phased out altogether.

Alan Rabinowitz

That it is a necessity for Search Engine rankings, on its own NOT. It can be added to an SEO campaign and should be considered from possible employee marketing. Since social sites tend to personalize, it may not be the best corporate solution.

Milind Mody

Many people forget that social media marketing is not about technology. It’s about people. I have seen companies waste millions of dollars in creating virtual worlds in second life (without getting any tangible results). Another misconception is to go after lesser known social media sites (because they think its easier to get results there?). The problem with such an approach is that you are wasting your time on a less known site. Spend some more effort on one of the top sites and you will get much more traffic.

Brian Reiff

I think one of the common misconceptions around conducting a social media campaign is the “well at least we have a Myspace page” principle. I see a lot of businesses get started by building for example a Myspace page and then leaving it dormant for months at a time. The reality is that nothing will happen by doing this and it is almost better to wait until you’re fully committed to having an active presence in social media before creating pages within the communities.

Question 5: How do you measure success in social media? How would you justify it to a client?

Scott Buresh

Social media sites thrive on participation, i.e. the more people on the network the better. A few determinants ensure success, including the quality of writing from participants and ever-increasing interaction between participants over time. Justification for success can come in many different ways as each company will have different criteria and goals in mind; however, increased site awareness, targeted traffic, and links to the site through the community are good indicators.

Roger Janik

Social media marketing is utilized by SEO campaigns for a wide variety of reasons. 
Some campaigns are looking for direct traffic, others are looking for building links and rising in the search engines, others are looking to develop a brand name and so on.  So the first thing I would suggest when measuring success is to look at your original goal and focus on that aspect first.  It should be noted that like many other aspects of SEO, there are quite a few metrics available which can easily be viewed in reports.  Whether it is viewers of a specific piece of content, the amount of comments left on a blog, the amount of times a video is viewed, emailed, sent or posted and on and on.

It should also be noted that while some metrics can be viewed or reported immediately, others take time and are less quantitative.  For instance, link building and rising higher in the search engines and receiving page ranks.  For these types of measurements, expect a longer period of time and in some cases less definitive information about how effective a specific piece of your comprehensive campaign has been, since the overall success of your website rankings, page rank, etc can be due to a wide variety of factors and not just one single resource. 

However, I believe that for the most part, social media marketing is a clear strategy that offers a wide range of benefits.  This strategy used within a comprehensive campaign shouldn’t be a hard sell due to the amount of benefits that can be easily justified.  While not for every company, if the company would like an online presence, build a brand name or feature a product or website, social media marketing has effectively shown in the short period of time it has been around that it provides value and that it is well worth the time, expense and effort to implement it into an SEO campaign.

Hugo Guzman

If you’re talking about a straight media buy in one of the large networks like Facebook or Myspace, the success metric is fairly straightforward. However, with some of the more organic initiatives, such as social bookmarking campaigns on Digg.com or Delicious.com, it’s much more difficult to establish conventional ROI. I think that the key is to engage in this discussion with a client, so that all parties involved are very clear on what the success metrics will be prior to engaging in any social media campaign.

Alan Rabinowitz

We treat this differently as we would not offer straight out Social Media campaigns because some clients may not get the best benefit from it. Conversions generally tend to be lower from traffic coming from social sites then from search engines. We recommend it for clients who have such a great product or service that bloggers would respond greatly to it and in turn write about the products/services - that is, if they know about it.

Milind Mody

Success is a relative term. Success of a social media campaign should not focus only on quantity but also quality of engagement. To measure quality of success, I would ask clients to ask themselves:
Are we able to take part in conversations about our company and its products?
Are we able to build better relationships with our audience?
How are we perceived vs. our competitors?

Apart from this, measure number of users who have joined client’s communities on various social networks as well as number of conversations which are started on these networks. Measure comments generated on client’s blogs or on community websites like Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Technorati etc. For video sites, how many people have viewed clients viral videos, comments generated, ratings for the video. As mentioned earlier, we also use TubeMogul to track videos across different websites. And of course measure how much total traffic each social media website has send to client’s corporate website.

Brian Reiff

Social media is now everywhere. What we look at is the overall development within the social communities and traffic/conversions reporting on the client’s main website to determine the overall effectiveness of the social media and the direction in which to continue the campaign.

Question 6: Do you think there could be negative consequences for the companies that don’t have a presence on social media sites?

Scott Buresh

Eventually, I would imagine that companies not on a social networking site may be feeling a bit behind the times, and clients will likely wonder why the company does not have a noticeable online presence. At the very least, a client without a presence should be even more proactive to understand what’s going on in the social marketing and networking world.

Roger Janik

Yes.  For the vast majority of companies looking to create a brand, get the word out on their products and raise their rankings in the search engines, social media sites can be extremely effective.  Not to take advantage of this resource can be harmful for your business in the long term.  While it should be noted that not utilizing social media marketing won’t particularly harm you site or product, the negative consequence will be that you will not benefit from the effectiveness and positive benefits that social media marketing can provide.  Social media marketing is not a homerun for all companies, however in the long run it is better to have used it then to have completely abandoned it in a long term SEO campaign.

Hugo Guzman

Definitely, especially when you consider that recent studies (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006404) have shown that the majority of consumers today engage with some form of social media element when making a purchase decision.

Alan Rabinowitz

Absolutely not. We have clients since the late 90's still holding top positions and not a single attempt to make a social media connection.
(Except for some of our work).

Milind Mody

Companies that do major business through internet, should have a presence on social media sites. Because chances are that their competitors are already present on social media websites. Why would you like your competitors to score brownie points over your company by not being present on social media sites? For traditional companies, I don’t think there are negative consequences if they don’t have presence on social media. But things are changing pretty quickly.

Brian Reiff

For companies that wait to start a social media campaign instead of pulling the trigger, most certainly could be a candidate for suffering dire consequences for some type of unpleasant product/service/brand exposure. It is true that social media can get the Search Engine’s attention quicker than more traditional Internet Marketing like SEO for instance, but waiting until your company has negative reviews out there is a reactive mode and we like to put our client’s in a proactive method when approaching social media. No one can predict the future, so there is no harm and everything to gain by launching a social media campaign before you might need to put out a fire.

Question 7: What are some of the opportunities in social media that marketers are not taking advantage of?

Scott Buresh

Most marketers use other networking sites and do not create their own, which would give them the opportunity to moderate content and conversations. There is little to stop competitors from posting negative remarks about a certain company, product, or service and inflammatory messages may run rampant whether true or not.

Roger Janik

I think that right now video can be an extremely beneficial tool for helping companies market their site and products online and especially within the confines of social media sites.  Since most companies don’t utilize video in any way, creating an effective video that provides some value to the viewer can be seen as an excellent way to create opportunities on the web.  I would also suggest marketing  to smaller niche sites.  Of course sites such as MySpace, Digg and others are excellent sites, but there are plenty of smaller sites that provide great niches for the right company.

Hugo Guzman

I think that one of the opportunities that is often overlooked is also one of the oldest; forum marketing. Forums are the original social network, and there are countless general and niche forum communities that are filled with active and engaged consumers. If a company is planning to engage in social media, they should not overlook the one social media format that existed even before the term “social media” was invented!

Alan Rabinowitz

Targeting the campaigns to be keyword based in performance. They go after trends or sites like digg where links are blog based and sometimes trackbacks.

Milind Mody

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is something that comes to my mind. Traditionally marketers use Public relations to inform people about CSR initiatives of a company. Marketers can use Social Media to show that “companies care”. Apart from marketing, I feel companies can also use social communities to listen and get feedback about their product and services.

Brian Reiff

I think many companies still aren’t utilizing the very basics and literally cost-free social media tools made available by such key players like Myspace and Facebook. The social communities give businesses an easy way to promote themselves with little or in some cases no money at all. Granted, I believe that time is money, however fully investing in a social media campaign should remain a long-term goal for any company looking to compete nowadays on the Internet.

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