Social media usage has exploded over the last few years, but marketplace uncertainty still exists about how to best monetize this tremendous potential traffic source.

It’s About the Audience

Whether starting a new site or adding new social media features to an existing media venue, you must think hard about your audience. The user is at the core of every social media site. Assess the following issues:

Who’s your audience? Spend time defining your target market. Think in terms of the these factors:

Demographics. What attributes describe your market, such as household income, geography, age, education, profession, or household composition?

Psychographics. What other traits does your audience have? Are there special interests that influence their actions? These can be work-related, such IT, or hobby-related, such as knitting.

Behavior. How do users’ online actions reveal their interests? Do they use specific products or content? Do they read whitepapers or watch videos?

How do you want to the audience to participate? Make it easy for users to contribute and share, in addition to providing site capabilities that are intuitive to use. For example, rating content or uploading photographs often takes less effort for users than expressing themselves in words.

What’s the benefit of participating, both passively and actively, for users? The reader is thinking, “What’s in it for me?” Is it being part of a community, getting feedback, having a public forum, earning respect, being heard, or some other reason?
Allow participants to give you feedback about site functionality. This is particularly important during early stages of site development, when your participants can tell you what they want and need from your site as well as complain about what doesn’t work.

Points to Consider When Adding Social Media

Create a strong process for site moderation with well thought out and established guidelines for what’s acceptable. ITtoolbox’s George Krautzel points out that this must be done subtlety; it doesn’t mean becoming an obvious presence on your site.

Have a willingness to fail publicly, because social media requires a level of transparency. For some companies, this can be difficult to accept. Transparency is important to understanding what works and how you got to your current offering.

Understand the speed of change involved. Every day brings new changes and challenges as your site evolves. This can be difficult for some offline media companies to comprehend.

Commit to making it succeed. Social media isn’t “build it and they will come” functionality. It takes ongoing work to nurture and keep the community expanding and evolving.

Recognize that building a social media site is an iterative process. It requires continually testing new ways to improve the site. According to Spiceworks’s Jay Hallberg, it often takes three attempts to get a piece of functionality to work properly for the community.
Different Revenue Models

Social media provides publishers with a variety of revenue models, including:

Advertising. Despite publisher concerns, social media, especially for niche or B2B (define) markets, provides well-developed niche opportunities that can evolve into a variety of offerings. Among the advertising opportunities: banners, sponsorships, lead generation, and behavioral targeting that can be sold directly or through third parties.

Subscriptions. Subscriptions can be offered in a number of ways. For example, they can be used for additional functionality, as with LinkedIn, or they can blur the line between print and online, as with the site for “Engineering News-Record.”

Other forms of revenue. Given social media’s evolving state and the strong online advertising market, many companies haven’t fully explored such options as revenue shares or affiliate-type sales, research sales, and data sales (without revealing personal information). (For other content revenue generation ideas, see “Develop Supplemental Content Revenue Streams.”)
Measuring Social Media’s Impact

Many marketers continue to use older metrics to assess a campaign’s impact. In part, this is because they like having metrics that are consistent across campaigns and that they understand. But other, less traditional metrics are also important. Among the salient factors to consider:

Pageviews. While this is an established indicator, it can put your social media efforts into perspective. For example, McGraw-Hill’s Dora Chomiak pointed to a roughly two- to three-fold increase in pageviews per session from the newer social media sections of the publisher’s site. For an advertising-driven site, this translates directly to the bottom line.

User involvement. This can be measured in terms of time on site as well as activity. For example, how many comments or photographs are added each day, week, or month? Has user time on your site increased due to involvement with these sections?

Advertiser interaction. Does the site enable advertisers to participate in a dialogue with their consumers? For media entities concerned about advertisers that receive negative customer feedback, it’s important to put this in perspective since the conversation is already happening. And these newer formats enable them to address these issues head on (albeit in a public forum). Note: this can also be useful for editorial team members who, until this point, may have only had a one-way communication with readers.

Revenues. As always, assessing revenues and positive cash flow are critical components of any campaign.

Costs. It’s important to track costs associated with these efforts. Remember to consider expenses broadly, because it may touch a number of your organization’s areas.
While adding social media to your site can be a difficult decision, the most important step is starting. Social media features aren’t a quick fix for a boring site. But many online marketers have found they’re great tools for expanding reach, building involvement, learning from visitors, and, yes, even bringing in new revenues.

SEMPDX hosted their 2nd annual SearchFest yesterday. Speakers included Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ, representatives from Google and MSN as well as a host of talented Search Marketers from around the country. I was pleased to see some local friends from Hood River and I met a lot of new people, either learning about search for their company or their own agency.

The conference focused on search strategies such as link development, social media marketing, website usability, analytics and even international SEM. It was fun to see how some local entities are using search marketing to grow their businesses. Dan Harbison of the Portland Trailblazers shared how they’re using their website to increase visibility of the team, improve public perception of players and even sell season tickets.

I presented on Marketing 2.0 Issues including Online Reputation Management issues that occur using Social Media Marketing. Though all three panelists have vastly different client bases, a lot of our recommendations were shared-spend time researching the social networks you’d like to engage, have thick skin, have fun, be a good community member, don’t spam, give more than you take. Marty Weintraub of AimClear had great advice for dealing with bullies, while Janet Johnson shared insight into helping companies with B2B focus leverage the power of social media marketing.

For those of you who missed it, shame on you and plan to go next year;) but know that SEMPDX holds great networking and educational events year round. Check out their upcoming schedule.

Also, big thank you to Benjamin Lloyd of Amplify Interactive and the whole SEMPDX team that made the event possible!

Though I’ve attended Search Engine Strategies conferences since 2001, I’m really enjoying and learning from Danny Sullivan’s search series, SMX, Search Marketing Expo. I attended SMX Advanced in Seattle this year and last week attended the SMX Social Media series in New York. We’ve been talking about social media marketing for about 3 years now, it had been pre-dominantly embraced by the 18-30 year old male demographic. It has now become a powerful venue for communication in niche and micro communities and people are coming up with some really smart ways to leverage the medium. Of course there are spammers who muddy the water and try to turn social media marketing into just one more unwanted advertising venue. Here are some topline items of discussion to help you start thinking about how to use SMM to raise awareness of your site.

The Good:
The web is such an enormous place and Social Networking sites have made it very easy to locate sites, blogs and communities that share your interests and needs online. Say you like wine (okay, let’s say I like wine;) and we have a wine client. I spend time at blogs such as wine camp and social networking sites such as corkd. These communities are superbly rich with wine content that is unique, interesting and helpful. They share wine reviews, recipes, wine events, harvest information and wine tasting recommendations. It’s enormously helpful to go to a handful of sites or blogs and get updates on wine scores, up and coming vintners, new recipes and events. It’s a great way to aggregate all of the best there is for wine content. This is the good of social media marketing. The good allows us to be privy to the best, most relevant, most illuminating content on the web.

The Bad:
Social media marketing is an open forum for discussion, content and links. Because link popularity is an important element of search optimization, it can also be a free for all of links to obscure viagra and cialis sites that have less-than-nothing to do with the social networking site you’re visiting. That’s the bad. Shame on them, propagators of this kind of activity should all be flogged. That said, think about your intention when you become involved in a social networking site. I have an interest in wine communities, I represent a wine client and if I spend my time on wine blogs pushing my client and their special of the week, I would be next for flogging. But if I spend time reading blogs, commenting fairly on cork’d about the 07′ harvest of Oregon Pinot Noir or sharing my grandmother’s pumpkin shrimp saute recipe (that by the way pairs beautifully with my clients’ 06′ Pinot Gris) then I’m being a good member of my community. Social networking is much like starting a friendship. What do you want from me and how can you add value? If you meet me in a coffee shop and start telling me all your problems and ask me to help you move I’m probably not going to get to know you, but if you meet me in a coffee shop and we’re friends for awhile and you add value to my life as a friend and you need help moving, I’ll be there for you. The bad is when people leave comment on social networking sites with total disregard for propriety and good manners.

The Ugly:
Okay, now I’m taking the gloves off. Spammers and black hat SEO’s should be flogged (did I mention that?) I have a corporate client for which we do monthly press releases. This last week, one of our releases was hi-jacked. This entry appeared under a tail search term for my client:

Avery® Print and Mail Center Announces ‘Direct Mail Dish’ Blog …
This site may harm your computer.
Avery Print and Mail Center (PMC), the direct marketing group of Avery … How to Self Direct Retirement Funds Into Real Estate (PR Newswire via Yahoo! …
blogged.sbmarketingservices.com/blogs/ how-to-direct-mail/112554/avery-print-and-mail/ -

Okay, couple of problems. Notice Google addition to this entry This site may harm your computer. not a message a company with an exceptional reputation wants to be associated with. Though the title even shows the registered mark, this BS marketing blog tries to create a relationship between our direct mail blog and some real estate scheme. Legal departments are involved and it will get resolved, but let me ask-what is the point? People aren’t stupid, this company has less-than-nothing to do with retirement real estate. How can hijacking someone else’s unrelated content be helpful to you?

Vertical Response, a very highly respected Email Marketing Program, had their site hi-jacked and were pummeled with some very bad PR (because someone thought this spammed up, hi-jacked site belonged to them). They are a classy outfit and handled the situation quickly and graciously, but what a nightmare.

The internet is still relatively new and all of these hi-jacking, spamming, trademark issues are just beginning to have real world solutions and frankly it’s a nightmare if you’re ever on the wrong side of the spam. This kind of ugliness is reprehensible and unfathomable. Social media marketing, blogs and other easily editable sites have opened the door to content hijacking and all forms of desperate marketing ploys. This is the ugly. The ugly is when you ask for everything and you’re willing to give nothing.

The Fun:
Now we can talk about the fun. An agency representing Comedy Central presented at the show. In a session for Wikipedia, he outlined how Comedy Central leverages comments and additions to Wikipedia for South Park. They let brand evangelists share the message and Wikipedia and its’ guest are the better for it. Consumers trust the information because it isn’t coming from some big PR firm, it’s coming from the guy who has faithfully watched the show, gets the characters and shares fact about the program. This is the fun! How refreshing to see social media marketing at its’ best.

The take away? Let’s do our best to be good social networking citizens, just as we work to be good friends. Comment fairly and appropriately, be a good friend online and your friendship, good content and fair intent will be rewarded.