January 16th, 2009 — Todd
I just came back from a social media and search engine Meetup in D.C. – I found out about it through the Meetup website and have been going to a lot of Meetup groups in New York, which have been wonderful. I’ve been looking at some of the Meetup groups in Baltimore, and they don’t seem to be as well attended as the ones in New York. Surprisingly, I found that there are several decent Meetup groups in D.C. as well. So I drove down, headed to Dupont Circle, and from there I went to the restaurant where the meeting was held in a back sitting area. It was a good group of about 30 people who either worked for the government and were trying to figure out ways to do more social media in the government, or they had a day job and then a night life where they maintained some separate website and were curious to learn more about search engine optimization. It looked like I was the only developer/consultant on how to do implementations of social media frameworks or how to do search engine optimization for clients. The interesting thing that came up was a question posed by the organizers of the group: do you think Twitter is a good marketing application? Then there was a round robin discussion about it. The question reminded me of a discussion I had earlier with one of my clients, who posed a very similar question. My client asked what was the best way to tackle all the new social media outlets and grassroots marketing opportunities like LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and all of the different options to set up and individual account, join or create a group, and so on.
The answer I provided was that these social media outlets really do three things. First, you need to identify where you make your money. If you’re a consulting company, you make your money when people contract with you for consulting services, and you essentially want to drive them to that contracting form on your website so you can get that face-to-face or over the phone conversation with them. Then, you can start tracking them as new business and hopefully try to get them into your consulting services cycle. That’s how you make your money – by driving people back to your site. If you have an e-commerce site, that’s a no-brainer – you want to drive users back to your site so that they’re purchasing something from you. So your end goal is to drive traffic back to your site. If you’re Nike, for instance, your website is not your only means to creating revenue. You have a product in stores, so it could be that the primary goal of your site is to build brand and product awareness. Maybe you just want to advertise that buyers can get a discount on your shoes in the department stores that sell your product. Therefore, your end goal might just be to drive brand awareness rather than to drive users back to your website.
So the very first thing you have to find out is, how do you make money? If you make money by driving traffic back to your website, then that’s your goal. If you make money by driving brand awareness and marketing where people can buy your product, then that’s your goal. If you work for the government as a communicator and you don’t sell products, then you just want to make sure you keep getting investments. That mission statement will help drive where and how you get your message across. You have to identify how you make your money or what constitutes your return on investments.
The next thing you have to do is assess this web of marketing opportunities, whether it’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, posting on other people’s discussion boards, creating your own social group, and so on. You have to assess what of all of these avenues are going to lead to the best ROI in relation to how you make your money and what your mission statement is. So that’s the next step – look at the web of opportunities that are out there for getting your message across, then create a matrix that looks at what resources you have to work with. Let’s say you’re just one person. One person will have a hard time maintaining a company blog, Twittering all the time, searching the web and dropping links on all relevant discussion boards and websites, going to trade shows and conferences and talking your business up – that would be a full-time job right there. And if you’re a one man shop, you also have to worry about doing whatever it is that actually makes you money. Obviously, there just aren’t enough hours in a day. So you’ll have to look at your resources and figure out a) what resources you have, b) what their primary job function is, and c) how much of their time you can devote to getting your message and brand across to different resources?
Mindgrub is largely a consulting company and we have a few different products. We have a new product, the Edualizer, which is a definitive product that we sell licenses to. We have some partner products such as viaPlace and EdInfo, and these are also products that we make money off of, so we want to drive traffic to those sites. We also provide consulting services on top of our location-based services frameworks, so we want to drive traffic to our consulting as well as our framework websites. We can get our word across, we can talk about how great Mindgrub is, but we need to get that user to visit our contact forum – it doesn’t matter if we have brand awareness because they can’t go to a department store and buy our product.
So Twitter, for instance, is a good avenue to talk about what we do. However, it’s ultimately a benign outlet unless we focus on driving traffic back, and Twitter is really good in regard to search engine optimization. At least one or two of our Twitter links show up in our main Google search results. Therefore, it’s really good to use Twitter and get some links out there about what we do, but ultimately we want to get traffic back. One of the ways we do that is by creating tiny url’s on Mindgrub’s website instead o f just posting long url’s that are loosely related to us and then allowing Twitter to create a tiny url for us. By using Mindgrub to create that tiny url, we drive traffic back to our website. For instance, I mentioned a Fortune Magazine blog that talks about which industries are making money, one of which is for profit education which our product, the Edualizer, falls under. So I wanted to link to this blog post and mention Mindgrub and the Edualizer. To post to that link, I created a tiny url created via Mindgrub. This way, Mindgrub is getting hits back from Google, and those hits include this Mindgrub-specific tiny url. It’s like getting two hits in one. This paired with our Twitter hits will raise our ranks up on Google so that when someone searches for Rich Internet Application development, which is one of our primary consulting focuses, our link will probably appear above our competitor’s link. So we use Twitter as a marketing outlet and the goal is to drive traffic back. It’s the same with Facebook. We have a Facebook profile where we constantly drop information about what city I’m going to next, who I’m meeting up with, or some new blog posts about one of our products. If I’m Nike, I could create a Facebook group and tons of people would join because they adore Nike.
Alan Wolk gave a phenomenal presentation at the meetup called “Your Brand is not My Friend.” For example, if I started blasting my Facebook friends about what we do at Mindgrub, they won’t care. Mindgrub is not their friend, so they’re going to tune me out. But someone like Nike might actually be someone’s “good personal friend,” similar to the way people follow sports teams. So Nike will probably directly benefit from creating a Facebook or LinkedIn group to get their name and brand across, and their friends may be moved to buy a Nike over an Adidas shoe when they’re in a store. A company like Mindgrub isn’t big enough that people will join a LinkedIn or Facebook group simply because it’s a Mindgrub group. But we happen to do social media implementations, so it would behoove us to create a social media group on LinkedIn, get a lot of people to join, then drop information in that group whenever I speak at a conference, Mindgrub gets a new contract, and spread awareness that way. So, I indirectly drop that Mindgrub does social media implementations, which may be a solution to a problem for those who joined the social media LinkedIn group. Seeing Mindgrub’s name in the group may lead them to visit our website, and then we get business. If I’m Nike and can directly raise brand awareness therefore directly raise sales, that’s wonderful. But smaller companies like Mindgrub really have to analyze how we’ll benefit from these groups and what our resources are to maintain our presence in them – it takes a lot of effort to maintain these different marketing tools.
So, it’s a really a very indirect return on your investment – direct marketing on Twitter just isn’t direct marketing. If I put $110 into LinkedIn, I’m not going to get all of that back in direct profits. These avenues are really just a way to inexpensively market your company. I don’t benefit from these avenues the way Nike may, but I do build brand awareness over time by linking users of these different groups back to Mindgrub’s site. You want to be able to spend a minimal amount of time maintaining these things, and maximize your potential for indirect returns.
There are a few things you need to identify, the first being: what makes you money? Getting the word out about your company so people recognize your brand in a store, or so that you can get people to visit you website? Then, look at all the different avenues that will help you get your word across in as many ways as possible. Lastly, identify your resources. Who will be building brand awareness? Who’s best suited for Twittering and blogging, for going to conferences and talking your company up? Put together an approach for moving forward, and then implement it. Analyze how beneficial your plan has been after a period of time, adjust as necessary, make amends to the plan, and think differently in order to improve your plan for the upcoming month, quarter or year.
