Seven North Web

The idea of Social Media Marketing, as I interpret it, is to get other people to happily do your work for you. In this spirit, and with sincere appreciation for the work and thought that went into it, I present this excellent blog entry from “Viper Chill” by Glen Allsopp. It is itself a compilation of how-to-leverage-social-media articles and tips:

Here is an excerpt:

MySpace Tips Summary

• Look Around – Really get to know all the options available in MySpace before you start comment spamming. Messaging can be a good option and there are also paid advertising spots.
• Target a Niche – If you are going down a ‘spammy route’, don’t just try to target the whole of MySpace. Look into people in niches for example women or members of certain groups.

Read How to Get Traffic from the top Social Media Sites from “Viper Chill” (Cool name, huh?)

If you are reading this piece with a beginner’s mind right now, then you are probably very lucky. You have probably not cobbled together a social web presence higgledy-piggledy, signing up for various services as they arrived on the scene with various identities, agendas and degrees of commitment. You have a chance to put together a social media strategy that will present you or your business in a unified and coherent manner across the web. (Actually, it’s never too late to start fresh, but what to do with all that accumulated juice, eh?)

As usual, I’ve found an article from someone who is a lot smarter than I am, and I offer this excerpt to whet your appetite.

Begin with the End in Mind

Strategy isn’t the goal. It’s the path you plan to take to get there. So, let’s put some goals out, and then talk through how to build a strategy to reach them. Here are a few sample goals. Feel free to add some to the comments, if I don’t cover yours.

Increase customer base. Generate leads. Drive sales. Build awareness. Make money from your content. Establish thought leadership. Educate customers. Customer-source part of your product development. Reach new channels of customers. Improve internal communication.

Read the rest of Chris Brogan‘s article “Starting A Social Media Strategy.” His is another blog one might consider subscribing to.

… and a new breed of organization techie. Skip this one if you are still struggling with basic concepts, but it appears to be a little peek into the future of small-business IT-guy-dom.

A good I.T. person, though, knows how to interpret “user-speak” and present them with the tools they need even if they didn’t know how to ask for them in our language. If anything, they’re going to be more likely to say something like: “Sending out an email newsletter seems outdated – I wish there was a better way to communicate with our customers,” or “I wish there was an easier way to keep up with the industry news,” or “Wow, how many different versions of this documentation is saved on our intranet, anyway?” The old I.T. guy might mumble and turn their head, but the I.T. 2.0 guy knows to say “Blog! RSS! Wikis!” instead.

Read the whole story on RWW here.

You can repurpose your blog posts, submitting them to the appropriate directories or republishing them in your personal/business social media sites, and have them attract traffic back to your original site.

When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your article too. With the copyright terms of your articles, the URL of your website will still be intact and will subsequently direct more traffic to your website.

from “The Official Social SEO Guide Blog” (How’s that for a string of keywords in a site title? Yow!)

It is important to remember that splogs and certain dubious robotic bloggers are going to copy your content anyway, assuming it is of value; you might as well beat them to it and leave a trail of backlinks as you go.

SEOBook is a very useful site. This article from SEObook gives a few clues about what should be a post and what should be a page. Very brief and breezy, this little piece is obviously meant for the “post” category. Here are some suggestions for preparing page-type material:

focus the idea around a topic you feel you should be able to own

give it a title that shows ownership of an idea

spend a couple hours getting feedback

create a logo for it and put graphics in it to make it look different than text heavy blog posts

spend a couple hours marketing it by mentioning it to friends in the industry

feature it aggressively on your site

And here is the buried lead:

Average content with an aggressive launch and great marketing outperforms great content with no marketing.

Read the whole (brief) article here.