Social Media Marketing – BlueGlass LA

Welcome to Social Media Marketing with Brent Csutoras, Social Media Marketing Expert, BlueGlass Interactive, Michael Brito, VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital, and Tony Adam, Sr. Manager, Online Marketing at MySpace. We’re mostly going to be talking about viral marketing here so sit back and enjoy.

Michael @britopian is up first. He’s a recovering online marketer. He gets a laugh but he says he’s serious. Preparing for this presentation, he took a look at which brands he was loyal to. What will he pick up at the store by preference?

There’s a difference between being loyal and being an advocate. Being an advocate is more than being loyal. He won’t tell you Shell is the greatest gas station but he will tell you In-N-Out is the best burger.

From 2008 to 2009, Americans use of social media to interact with a brand has grown from 59% to 78%. It’s about the people, not the tools. Tools change all the time. Myspace, Friendster, Plurk, etc., they’re going away. Consumers’ expectations aren’t changing. In fact, they want more out of brands. That’s a good thing.

What do consumers want out of a brand: KickAss products. Does Apple need to join the conversation? He doesn’t think so. They need to keep creating amazing products.

Authentic Community Engagement is key.

People buy things from brands that listen. Charlene Li looked to see how brands were engaging with their consumers. She found that “Engagement correlates to financial performance.” Brands with high engagement saw an increase in revenue. Brands with poor or no engagement saw a decrease in revenue.

The cycle has changed. The purchase funnel is now a circle. There’s still awareness, consideration, preference and purchase but now there’s advocacy as well. If you love your customers, they will love you back and tell others.

Who is credible? Stock or industry analysts, articles in business magazines, conversations with employees. What’s not? Advertising. We know this, we know people don’t trust advertising. Empower your employees.

How to create a customer advocacy program:

• Top-down support from executive management
• Employee activation
• Training
• Internal collaboration
• Social CRM planning
  • Infrastructure
  • Process
  • Governance
• Social media “Rules of Engagement”
• KPIs

Tony Adam is up next. Jordan Kasteler takes a moment to tease about MySpace: “How many people here are on MySpace?” versus “How many people are on Facebook?” Hee.

What is virality: The adjective or adverb viral and the noun virality may refer to any viral phenomenon, that is, an object or pattern that is able to induce some agents to replicate it, resulting in many copies being produced and spread around.

Taking one action and turning it into many.

Get things out there by creating virality in your stream. Push it out into your social networks. Encourage sharing. He prefers sharing to liking on Facebook. It shows up in your news feed and in your top stories.

Make the user share your content. “We noticed you liked this. Tell your friends!” and give it to them in an automatic “just push the button” way.

Make content go “viral”. It starts with great content.

What’s great?

• Ripoffs — what’s the biggest rip off in your industry?
• Comedy — Oatmeal is king of this.
• What’s Trending?/News

Case Study: Old Spice

[What’s that? Have you heard of this? I’m confused… ]

• Know who your influencers are: Kevin Rose, Ashton.
• Take advantage of it — @ohDoctah capitalized on the trend
• If you make it sharable, they will share it. Embed codes, social buttons

How do you become an influencer? You can’t just be a robot. You have to get involved and stay active.

The use of virality is to create visibility. Ask how this will get you users. Use smart link text in the embed codes without being spammy. Promote stuff that will get you users, not just traffic.

Tony’s hiring an SEO manager if you’re in the market for a job at MySpace.

Brent Csutoras is speaking last and he’s talking about what the upcoming Digg V4 means for marketers.

For him, viral is getting extreme amounts of visibility outside of your niche.

What’s the big changes? Kevin’s back and Jay is gone.

The last major change was in 2006.

The Diggbar is going away. Subcategories and upcoming are gone. It’s become very Twitteristic. Recommendations = My News.

List of changes:

• Power users, rise or fall?
  • Digg says they’re Influencers. It’s not submission-based anymore.
  • Less focus on user recognition
  • New power users
• Publisher accounts
  • Custom feed for Digg
  • Title/Description lacks control
  • Digg says okay, but what about users?
• Duplicate submissions
  • No more URL change submissions
  • More duplicate topics
• Networking
  • IM still effective
  • Twitter/Facebook integration, build them out now
  • Cutting out the Diggs
• Banned?
  • Not anymore, they’ve been lifted on domains (but not users, in Brent’s opinion)
  • Silent bans — they don’t know if they’ll still exist

Final tidbits:

The majority of users don’t register or login. Many of the changes depend on adaptation. All those who put in work… lucky you! Power users are gods now.

Susan Esparza is former managing editor at Bruce Clay Inc., and has written extensively for clients and internal publications. Along with Bruce Clay, she is co-author of the first edition of Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.

See Susan's author page for links to connect on social media.