How to Participate in Social Media, the Biggest Cocktail Party Ever

I was lucky enough to gain some great social media marketing insight from the four panelists at the Crain’s Chicago event I attended on Tuesday: "NetMarketing: Mapping Social Marketing Strategies."

Shout out to the panelists:

• Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich: @ginidietrich, Spin Sucks
• Matt Batt of Pipeline Media Relations: @StoryAssistant
• Diane Rayfield of Harp Social: @DianeRayfield
• Marty Higginbotham of The Stage Channel (if Marty is on Twitter, I can’t find him!)

Here are some of the key takeaways on how you can participate in social media, which was described Tuesday as "the online cocktail party we’re all invited to."

Before Creating a Strategy:

• Ask why you want to engage on social media (and if your answer is “Because everyone else is doing it,” then you need to rethink your approach)
• Start with your goals: what do you want to accomplish?
• Remember that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are tactics/tools for you to execute your business strategy through
• Identify the customer personas you want to connect with and which platforms they use most
• Understand the audience you’re trying to engage with
• Answer this: Are you willing to let go of control of the message? (If not, you’re going to have a problem—marketing is no longer about pushing out a message.)

What Makes Social Marketing Successful?

• Listen first
• Create compelling, valuable content and let the content itself do the marketing
• Engage with your most important audiences—employees and customers—first. Next comes your influencers, which can be filtered with tools like Klout
• Keep it short and sweet
• Show link love
• Ask questions
• Include lists instead of paragraphs of content
• Videos can be an extremely useful tool (no more than 2 minutes). As the panelists said: “YouTube is Google’s little brother, in terms of SEO/search results, and Google is always nice to his little brother”
• Make sure people can share your content in multiple ways: RSS feeds, share tools, etc.  

Social Media Advice That Can Apply to Everyone:

• You can’t do social media if you’re not passionate about what you’re saying
• If you don’t know what to talk about, ask your customers: Your audience will appreciate you asking how they want to be engaged with
• Social media is a form of networking – it’s a way to engage with people you’d never meet otherwise
• Social media is not just another distribution tool, so don’t use it as such
• Don’t silo social media; engage your entire organization (customer service, sales, marketing, legal, HR) in the process
• None of your social media efforts work without monitoring, responding and engaging

I’m a big fan of the online cocktail party that is social media and I believe it’s very useful as a marketing/PR tool, but there’s still one other lesson to keep in mind in the digital age we live in:

“The value of face-to-face will never be replaced. It’s still the best way to do business. Social media is a way to continue the conversation.” –Matt Batt