Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The New SEO -> SMO: Social Media Optimization

The hot topic du jour is how to have your company's brand represented in social media. How do you engage your customers? Where are the customers, and where are the customer's that matter- the key influencers that will drive people by the millions to buy your product... if only you could find them.

Instead of Google at the revenue center - providing zillions of dollars of revenue opportunity through its targeted ads and search results, it's Facebook, providing access to a billion highly-segmented users.

As a few of us learned on the Silicon Valley trip - the amount of data and value Facebook can and does provide to its advertisers is astounding. There are two primary ways companies can target fb users - 1) Advertising (see those little ads on the side of your profile/feed) 2) Brand Pages.
The advertising is so targeted, that if you changed a couple of interests on your profile, you'd see completely different ads. As an experiment, I just changed my activities to things that were FB searchable (ie, reading books, drinking wine, entrepreneurship, playing with my dogs). My ads changed quickly from something about Chrome and Forever 21 to Chrome and some guy interested in getting me to buy his book about how to start the next google. Does anyone click on those ads? You know who knows - Facebook. Companies can pay more to have customers who more likely to click on those ads.

Brand pages are a bit hazy for most companies - they're used to engage customers in your brand or idea, but most of them have few followers - 77% have 1000 followers or less.

Entire conferences have been planned to help companies optimize their social media presence..
Next week is global Social Media week - with a conference planned in several cities around the world, aiming to advance uses of social media in the corporate, public and non-profit sectors. to There's some great lectures in NY btw- which you shouldn't skip class for, but....

Online blogs are popping up everywhere about how to optimize your presence on social media, like the Social media examiner, not to mention new companies battling it out to help these confused companies figure out their social media strategy. One of our classmates, Aditya Ghuwalewala, left his own cushy job at a tech company to start MavenMagnet, a social media tool for marketers.

The Social Media ecosystem is growing exponentially in size. There's a lot of potential to reach customers in new ways, but the real question is - does this "closer" relationship with your customer = more revenue?

Carolyn
@mbastartupgirl

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