With millions of users logging into Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis, many marketers are looking to start utilizing social media platforms in their marketing campaigns. Forbes recently released a checklist of preparations that a marketer should make before entering into a social media campaign.

Forbes recommends that businesses first do a "social media audit." That means finding out which employees, competitors, and customers are using social media, and preparing plans for each category of user.

Next, a business should design an organizational plan. A business should be creating new positions for the part, training their employees on proper social media usage, and making a measurement strategy.

Finally, a business owner should be prepared to fail. Like a real-life relationship, interacting with fans and developing a sense of trust will take time. Social media is a new platform, so keeping an opened mind is a must.

Many businesses are still having trouble using emerging platforms to market their products. According to a recent survey from Omniture, only 14 percent of businesses utilize video, mobile, and social media marketing to advertise their products.

Source: http://www.creativedepartment.com

Monitoring your business' social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to people talking about your brand and understand how people view your company. However, a common concern is that it takes up too much time.

Here are five free, easy steps you can take to get things started. Do each task in the morning when you start work, and you should be good to go.

1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company: Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. To check once a day, set up an RSS feed for a specific Twitter Search to go straight to your Google Reader. Do this by clicking the little RSS icon after you complete a search. Now, ongoing search results will be sent to your reader.

2) Scan Google Alerts: Check your Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3) Check Facebook stats: Visit your Company Page's Facebook Insights. This can be found by clicking "more" under the page's main photo. Scan your fans and page views count. If you are a member of a group, check to see if any new discussions started.

4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions: Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website.

5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others: Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!

It’s been long thought that social media is a major time suck, causing many B2B companies – small to enterprise – to ban social media sites from their offices. Employees can no longer check Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or even LinkedIn in these cases, causing them to be disconnected from their personal networks.

This is meant to be a good thing. But is it?

Sure, if your employees are spending all their time on Facebook playing Mafia Wars or Farmville and not getting any actual work done, it’s a good idea to not allow them to access that site at work. However, there is a lot to be said about social media websites and tools for effective team building, communication and collaboration, and we should all be aware of these benefits.

Increased Channels of Communication
It’s true that in business, there are a handful of communication channels, including meetings, phone calls and emails. But how effective are these? Sometimes things get forgotten from meetings and phone calls, and looking for information in a sea of email can be a bit challenging after a while. By using social media websites and tools, you are increasing the channels of communication you can use, but also their effectiveness. Just think how easy it is to send someone a tweet or instant message and get their response right away. Now you don’t need to wait hours for an answer to that question, and can get your work done more efficiently and effectively.

More Collaboration = Better Outcome
It’s been said that two heads are better than one. So then three heads are even better, right? When you encourage your team to collaborate on projects and their workload together, the outcome will be greater than what an individual could have created. By using social media tools, you are allowing your people to generate and share ideas, to offer feedback on tasks and documents, and to hold a piece of the project and business success.

Staying in Touch With Thought Leaders
When communicating and collaborating with teammates, you will be increasing the overall effectiveness of your team. So it makes sense that increasing the reach of your professional communication and collaboration can increase the overall effectiveness of your business, right? If your team already has connections built with their own social profiles, allow them to leverage their networks for your professional gain. They can communicate and collaborate with thought leaders in your industry, stay up to date on the latest news and connect with these people to bounce ideas off of them. These connections with others will help your people, and thus, help your business.

Familiarity Breeds Easy Integration
The people in your business are most likely familiar with these social media tools anyway, so why not use this familiarity to increase the ease of integration of these tools? They will know the basics of communicating online, and can help others learn how to use social media tools for collaboration as well.

And if you’re worried too much about increased outside chatter and conversations having nothing to do with work, then by all means don’t allow popular social sites like Twitter and Facebook in your office. But don’t hinder communication and collaboration either.

Find a team collaboration solution that integrates social networking communication features to increase communication, collaboration and team productivity. The benefits to these types of solutions are substantial, and can effectively increase your business succes.

Original Post: http://socialmediab2b.com/2010/05/b2b-benefit-social-media-workplace/

Though social media marketing is rapidly advancing in terms of adoption and sophistication, many marketers and business executives still struggle with it. They wonder if their organizations are doing enough, if they are doing things right, even if they should be involved in social media at all. This confusion is partly due to some still-common misconceptions about social media marketing.

1. Social media is so easy we can hire an intern to do it. Because social media is fundamentally about conversations, the individual(s) behind your social media activities is often perceived as the public face of your company. This person is answering questions about your products and/or services, responding to or redirecting complaints, sharing interesting content, providing more information…you’ll probably want to be a bit careful about who gets this responsibility. ->

2. Social media marketing is really hard. True, there are techniques that work better than others, guidelines that are good to know, rules of etiquette to follow and common mistakes to avoid, but the general skills called for aren’t all that uncommon, and the specifics are teachable. It helps to be creative, curious, articulate, friendly and helpful. Okay, so not just anyone can do it, but it’s not rocket science either.

3. Social media is only for the young. Argh, no! On the consumer side, the largest cohort of Facebook’s user base is the 35-54 age group, and the fastest growing is the 55+ cohort. On the producer side, the most important attributes are interpersonal skills and industry knowledge. Age is irrelevant in social media usage, and life experience is a plus for social media marketers.

4. Social media is free. Um, no. While recent studies show that about half of marketers say that social media reduces their overall marketing costs, it is by no means without a price. The primary budget effect of social media marketing is to shift costs from media buying to labor. The tools of social media are (mostly) free, but the time, effort and expertise required to make social media marketing effective has real costs.

5. Since social media marketing is labor-intensive, we should offshore it. Ooh, not a good idea. While offshoring works well for tasks like IT consulting services and software application development, it tends to be less efficacious for market-facing activities. Thoughtful companies keep their SEO efforts local (to avoidlink-spamming, for example) and after evaluating all of the costs, many are even moving call centers back onshore. And see myth #1 above.

6. Social media marketing success is all about rules and best practices. Not really. True, there are guidelines as to what works well (being sincere, helpful and knowledgeable) and what doesn’t (trying to use social media sites as one-way broadcasts of your marketing brochures), but the field is new enough that many of the “rules” are still being written. While there are some techniques that seem to work well and are worth replicating, and others that should clearly be avoided, there’s also a great deal of space for creativity in this rapidly expanding and evolving area.

7. Social media marketing has no rules. Now, just because there isn’t an established cookie-cutter approach to social media marketing success doesn’t mean there are no rules. Don’t be excessively self-promotional, don’t try to automate everything, be sincere, add value—there aren’t a lot of rules, but these are a few very important ones.

8. Social media marketing gets immediate results. Almost never. Sure, you may run across an example somewhere of this happening, just as you may hear about a couple who got married three weeks after they met. It can happen, but isn’t common and shouldn’t be expected. Social media is about building relationships and influence. It takes time, but the payback can be much more lasting than a typical “marketing campaign” as well.

9. Social media marketing is too risky. This fear is most common in the medical, financial services, and other regulated industries. And it’s certainly true that there are situations where a company has to be somewhat cautious about its social media participation and content (another reason to keep myths #1 and #5 in mind). By all means, be aware of your specific industry and regulatory environment and put necessary safeguards in place. But people in your marketplace—customers, prospects, analysts, journalists, shareholders and others—are talking about your company and/or industry across social media channels right now. The real risk is in ignoring those conversations.

10. Social media marketing is new. Not really. Certainly the tools are new: Twitter has only been around since 2007, Facebook since 2006, and even blogging has been popular for less than a decade. But social media marketing is fundamentally about participating in and influencing the direction of conversations about your industry and brand. Those practices are timeless, but social media has increased the velocity and magnitude of such conversations.

11. Social media marketing doesn’t apply to my business. There are isolated niches where this is true. For example, if you build weapons systems for the U.S. military, you not only don’t need social media marketing, it would probably be best to avoid it. And there may be a few other such situations. For virtually every other type of business however, someone, somewhere is discussing your brand, your industry or your competitors in social media. You’re missing out if you’re not listening and participating.

Original Post:

http://webbiquity.com/social-media-marketing/11-myths-of-social-media-marketing/