While many people are finding it challenging to make time to manage multiple social networks, many businesses are faced with even steeper challenges. Connecting with friends is one thing, while managing customer service, marketing, consumer experiences, research and development, community management and more through social media is a larger affair. Managing these issues at a corporate level is an even more monumental concern.

The latest report based on research done by the Altimeter Group , and authored by Jeremiah Owyang, reveals that a “fire, ready, aim” approach to social media is leaving many enterprise level companies in tenuous situations. Through a study of 144 enterprise-class corporations, 27 vendors in over 500 fields and 71 industry experts, brands and vendors, Altimeter discovered that global corporations are trying to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts.

This unsustainable trend, though it includes many abandoned accounts, is rapidly increasing while companies are adopting new social technologies. The genie is out of the social media bottle and he’s creating new technologies and tools at dizzying speeds.

This article was originally published in Huffington Post.

With how fast the Internet and digital marketing are evolving, it can sometimes be difficult for traditional marketing education to keep up, as shown on this site that lists common marketing degree programs that are still organized around traditional marketing themes. For the best information on how to succeed in digital marketing, often the best place to learn is on the internet itself or from experts who are actively involved online.

I did a quick Q&A with author and marketing pro Aaron Goldman after the Pivot Guild launch event held on Sept 22, 2011 at Boulder Digital Arts. Get Aaron’s take on the most important thing a business owner can do to be successful with digital marketing strategy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To define our panel at Blogworld,  the other Blogging in the Age of Social Media panelists (Dave Taylor, Doyle Albee, Jeannine Crooks, Joshua Dorkin) and I wrote a post together on the panel title.  Here’s a short excerpt:

Ah, the good old days. Blogs were a world unto themselves and if we bloggers did anything related to social media it was purely to post URLs and hope that it’d help drive some traffic our way. With the continued rise of Facebook and addition of the surprisingly slick Google Plus combined with Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg and so many other social sites, however, a smart blogger’s gotta know how to manage the social nets, not just a blog.

Whether you look at personal blogging, business blogging, micro-blogging or how they overlap and support each other, blogs have become essential sources of self-expression, thought leadership, information, news, entertainment and community building in our social media age.  While 73.5% of the blogging population is under 35 and connecting on personal levels, companies that blog receive 55% more web traffic and 77% more leads than companies that don’t.

Though social media has become a catch all phrase meaning various things to various people, the heart of social media is that individuals have become the media, and blogs are where their stories live to provide the sound bites for Twitter and Facebook content.  As social media platforms continue to proliferate, the content that makes them interesting and builds their followings are often tied back to blogs.  Imagine Twitter streams, Google searches and Facebook feeds without links to blogs to serve up content that helps readers to dig deeper, connect further and laugh harder.

Read the full article here.

It wouldn’t be a prudent business decision to build any core aspect of your business on a platform you have no control over, right?  Yet in today’s world, having a Facebook Fan Page for your company is essential, and unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you don’t control anything Facebook does with it’s platform.

How will you feel if you have to abandon your Facebook Page one day after years of work to build up your followers, engage your community and have a strong presence on the #2 most visited destination on the internet?

Along with the many upsides to having an active Facebook Fan Page come some crucial downsides.  The reality is that having a Facebook Fan Page is both an indispensable marketing and customer service tool while simultaneously being the equivalent of building a gigantic castle on the beach that could be swept out with the tide without any notice. For example, company’s are currently  losing their Facebook Fan Pages after someone else gains admin privileges and deletes them as an admin to their own page.  This is a major issue, but like losing all of your unsaved changes to a 15 page Word document, your only recourse to this unfortunate event happening to you is to start again from scratch.

I believe in knowing what we can’t control, but focusing on what we can control.  Let’s cross our fingers that you won’t have to deal with your Fan Page being deleted or Facebook imploding anytime soon.  Instead, check out the Top Five ways to build your Facebook Fan Page to make sure you’ve got your bases covered:

1.  After you have 25 fans you should grab the custom username for your business page.

2.  Choose your Fan Page name carefully.  After you have over 100 fans you cannot change the company name on your fan page, so if you owned a business named “Buzz Coffee Shop” and later changed the name to “Buzz Cafe”, you would have to shut down the Facebook Fan Page for “Buzz Coffee Shop” and create a brand new page (with zero fans) for “Buzz Cafe”.

3.  Understanding Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm will help you to create content that is more likely to be seen by your fans.

4.  Create a custom welcome page to greatly increase your conversion rate of visitors who become fans.

5.  Build your community on your Facebook Fan Page by consistently using the Photos, Questions, Twitter, Networked Blogs and other customizable tabs to create a variety of interesting content to share with your fans.

This was too good not to share – So, we’re sharing…

This animated vid is re-purposed from a post on Social Media Timesby Megan O’Neill:  “Animated Video Points Out The Ridiculousness Of Hiring A Social Media Intern”

We couldn’t agree more with Megan. Don’t send a rookie in to do the work of a pro and expect to get the same results. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.  Just sayin’.

This article was originally published on Hip Chameleon

Image via Servitokss

There are three main aspects to social marketing that make it more than broadcasting information.  Strategy, tactical execution and integration to existing marketing systems (online and offline) are all necessary.  Behind these three aspects is a truth that is sometimes still overlooked – executing on tactics is not strategy, it’s a lack of strategy.

To prevent falling into the trap of thinking that randomly communicating, or only reactively replying, on social media platforms is an effective social media marketing strategy, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. What are your Top 3 business goals?

2. What are you doing today to reach those goals through social media marketing?

3. Are you structuring your online conversations, finding people, and following people based on strategies designed to help you to reach your goals?

4. What can you add to your social media marketing strategy to reach your goals better and faster?

5. How does your core messaging affect your social media communications?

We all know that there are many nuanced layers to effective business communications whether they are shared through social media, email marketing or any other marketing platform.  But getting in touch with your answers to the questions above and then communicating through a filter of ‘what’s in it for them?’ and ‘how can I make them feel special’ is a simple start to shining brighter than your competition.

Peter Shankman, founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and opening keynote for BlogWorld LA, will be in our backyard onOctober 11, 2011 in Denver in a much more personal and engaging format where you can spend an entire day learning from him.

Hip Chameleon, my marketing and media company, along with Social IRL, is very proud to be co-sponsoring this event that is attracting people from across the country.  Peter’s last presentation drew representatives ranging from companies as large as Sprint and H&R Block down to small business owners interested in learning from this legendary online marketing expert in an intimate setting.

You can grab a 10% discount on top of the discounted rate of $145 for the first 50 registrants (then it goes up to $245).

REGISTER NOW and get the discount before they’re all gone! Use discount code IRLHC.

Attendees will learn how social media can be used to engage customers and prospects, build relationships, earn trust and credibility, gain referrals, deliver amazing customer service, and create brand advocates.

The unique workshop like environment and limited registrations give attendees the opportunity to go well beyond the typical conference and experience a day of highly engaged and interactive learning.

The event is also very focused on connecting and networking. We actively encourage attendees to connect both online and offline and to stay connected and keep learning from each other well after the boot camp has ended. We hope to see you there.

Photo via http://gplus.to/billypan

News and speculation about Google+ is flowing faster than the  Boulder creek during this monsoon season.  We’re not even 3 full weeks into the release, you still have to receive an invite to get in, and Google+ users are already expected to hit 10 million by tonight and 20 million by the weekend.

Some people are wondering about privacy.  Spammers are asking people to click on links in the comments of popular posts.  Ford built a Google+ business page before Google released their own versions.  Early adopters are prematurely announcing the demise of Twitter and Facebook. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I gave a presentation to a class of executive MBA students last Saturday who hadn’t even heard of it yet.

As someone who thought Google Wave would have a major impact, before watching it crash - along with no one really using Google Buzz, I’m hesitant but overly optimistic that Google got it right this time.  The fact that millions of people are using it daily already, when Google Wave never got much traction, proves that we’re finding value and ease of use for the first time in a Google product aimed at social networking.

Photo via Dobromir Hadzhiev

Only time will tell how successful Google Plus will be, but the main factor will be how much time people choose to spend on it versus other social networks.  If you have to choose between reading news feeds from friends and posting on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ it could feel like too much time to manage.  In addition to this, there’s also the time you spend reading blogs and consuming other online media.  Of the people I’ve surveyed, Google+ is cutting mostly into Facebook time, but as quickly as Google+ hits 20 million or 100 million users, our habits and the amount of time we spend on each social network will certainly change.

If a shiny new technology object sees a great launch, the ensuing challenge is sustaining interest.  That probably won’t happen with Google+.  The main reason that they are the only company that has a chance of unseating Facebook’s social networking dominance is that Google has the resources, credibility and user base to make a major impact swiftly.

Google+ is already tied into Gmail, the 3rd largest webmail provider.  Google Apps is used by over 3 million businesses with over 30 million employees. Google Search enjoys over 34,000 searches per second.  With that many people spending time on Google products each day, mixed in with Google+ being a social network people like, and we may see Google take back the coveted mantle of where web users spend most of their time online.

This article was originally published in The Huffington Post.

I recently reviewed the social graph of a company looking to increase their Facebook fan and Twitter follower counts as quickly as possible.  What company doesn’t want that, right?

The truth is that any company can spend their way to 5k fans or followers through a PPA advertising campaign.  Without discounting this method, it’s worth noting that its results are limited if they aren’t working in conjunction with communication and marketing strategies based on your company goals.  Holistic approaches that build communities are the way to go.

In this particular case, the company had previously hired someone who brokered social media services that did not give them significant results, so the first mistake was not hiring a company that directly did the work and had a track record for producing great results.  Always research the companies you hire and explore their personal and professional social graphs if you’re buying social marketing services.

Hitting a number means nothing if that’s your only goal.  Once you have the followers, the most important questions is ‘How are you going to convert them into happy customers and develop relationships that make them high lifetime value customers or raving fans that spread great word of mouth promotion for your business?’

This company’s bigger problem was that they didn’t know how to communicate with the fans they already had.   Hitting a magic bullet of 5k Facebook fans and/or Twitter followers will not necessarily spike their sales.

The reality is that hard smart work and relationship building is the only magic bullet that exists.  You have to test and measure an educated communication strategy based on experience to effectively interact with your community.  If you’re not building relationships with your followers then you’re wasting your time and money, and it could tarnish your reputation rather than boost it.

In this case, they were close to 2,000 Facebook fans and had over 1,000 Twitter followers.  The Facebook page had been touting the virtues of the main product and they were giving away a very healthy contest prize.  Everyone who Liked the Facebook page was entered into a drawing to win a trip to NYC with some other benefits. …and still they couldn’t move the needle on their follower counts.

To highlight some mistakes you want to watch out for, let’s look at their basic social graph in a nutshell:

1)   The website home page did not even mention the contest.  In fact, their social link widgets were buried at the bottom left hand corner of the home page, way below the fold, so you had to scroll through the full page to even know they were there.  Fail.

2)   The Facebook page did not come up in a search of the company name on Facebook unless I hit ‘get more results’.  After clicking the company fan page name I was delivered to the ‘info’ page – not the Welcome page (which did not invite me to “Like” the page.)  Once I clicked on the Wall page I saw desperate posts asking for visitors to Like the page, with no valuable content besides the contest bribe mentioned above.  Why should I care?  You’re treating me like a number rather than respectfully giving me content that makes me feel special and aligned with your product.  Now I like you less than before I arrived on your Facebook fan page.  Fail again.

3)   The Twitter stream is one long broadcast of why the product is awesome.  Rule number one – your customers should tell me you’re awesome, not you.  You can have the greatest product ever, but if you say so it’s hype and if a customer says so it’s fact.  They had no conversations with anyone on Twitter; not even a Retweet or a Reply to acknowledge that they are trying to connect with a community of living, breathing humans rather than lifeless wallets with valuable money they want.  Fail for the third time – you’re out. …for now.

The good news is that since the internet is based on real time activities, you an clean up situations like these in a matter of  days or weeks of consistently doing the right things.

Getting visitors to do more than Like your Facebook fan page and never come back isn’t rocket surgery (as I read on a bumper sticker.)  If your company wants more fans and followers then make sure you’re giving good love to the ones you already have.  You will find that when your followers genuinely feel understood and appreciated they’ll tell their friends you’re awesome because you’re being awesome and because you’re product is awesome (if it is); which is much better, easier and fun than wasting time and money trying to convince people you’re awesome.  Numbers are a play in the game, but they’re not the game.

So if you know anyone in this situation, suggest they do their due diligence on who they’re hiring, even if they feel like this world is foreign to them.  Their gut will send them in the right direction and save them the pain this company experienced, and they’ll enjoy a faster road to social marketing success.

Photo by Orlando Photo Chic via Flikr

I’m probably not the guy you’re expecting to say that social media strategy is a myth.  But alas, I’m THAT guy.

There’s a huge misconception about the term ‘social media strategy.’  Social media is a tool.  Saying you have a ‘social media strategy’ is like saying you have a ‘shovel strategy’ or a ‘hammer strategy.’  Maybe that’s why almost anyone with a Facebook page or Twitter account can sell ‘social media strategy’ to people who don’t know any better until after they hire them.

What businesses are really looking for is a marketing strategy, and tips on effective persuasive communication, to use on social networks. …but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as ‘social media strategy’, does it?  The harder part is that a lot of times they short-sightedly think they just need a Facebook and Twitter presence without having a clue about how to effectively communicate on these social channels.

When I create social marketing strategies for companies they always interact with offline marketing campaigns and offline activities that don’t become marketing until you create content about them online.

A great social marketing strategy has three components: 1) It begins with how to reach the top goals of the business, 2) It leverages multiple offline and online channels, and 3) It builds a community for the brand based on ongoing and ever-deepening relationships with customers.

So if you’re calling yourself a social media strategist – stop!  You’re calling yourself a tool strategist; which is only one degree away from calling yourself a tool.  If you have a marketing education and experience then call yourself a social marketer or digital marketer or anything besides a social media strategist.  If you have no marketing education or experience, stop pretending you know how to help businesses operate online – what they do is different from what you do with your friends online.  At best, you’re a social media theorist, not a strategist.

If you think you want help with social media for your business then look for people and companies with great marketing experience who effectively use social media daily themselves. This way you get the benefit of their marketing expertise  in how to best communicate to people through social tools.  What struggling or growing companies need is great business strategy+great marketing strategy+understanding best practices for social tools to = reaching company goals.

Now it’s your turn, leave comments on your reactions to this post – including if you think I’m off base on this one.