Social Media Marketing Pitch – Stone Soup

Updates

Industry Experience?
Andy recently had an article published in Search Engine Land, a premier publication in the Search Marketing industry.  The article was titled Do SEOs Really Need Direct Industry Experience To Be Effective?

Google Books: An Opportunity?

On April 8th, SEMPO Boston sponsored an event where Frances Haugen, a product manager for Google’s Universal Search platform, provided some great insight into how Google looks at integrating various content types into search results.

Frances’ particular area of expertise, and obvious passion, is Google Books.

If you have educational or commercial material, whether it is a “traditional” book or not, you can consider submitting the content to Google for free.

Get Your Google Gadgets Here!
Bill recently created two Google Gadgets based on our Pay Per Click ROI model (excel download here).  You can read more about the gadgets in Bill’s announcement post, and you can directly access the B2B Gadget & the B2C Gadget.

B2B PPC ROI Calculator

Most importantly – we have successfully used our own gadgets to provide value to our website visitors and create links to our site.  And we invite all of you to explore ideas with us for gadgets that can be created for your own businesses.

The Social Media Marketing Pitch – Stone Soup

PART I: DEFINING SOCIAL MEDIA

People all over the Internet are attempting to define what Social Media Marketing is, how it is used, and what the benefits are. 

The Conversation Prism graphic, seen below, created by Brian Solis, is one excellent way of thinking about how to organize social media outreach.

Someone recently said to Derek that Social Media Marketing is “The New Branding”.

As I started writing this article, I tried to decide if I liked the concept of “The New Branding”.

While Social Media is definitely gaining prominence as a branding vehicle, I don’t think that gives the medium its full due – Social Media Marketing is much more than that. 

I started thinking about all of the various things that social media marketing can accomplish, and tried to come up with an illustrative way of defining it.  Should it be rendered as a super robot with cool tools at its disposal? The dream athlete, with skills taken from a variety of stars? A toolbox?  A recipe? 

OK, I like cooking, but did not want to use anything too generic.  Then it dawned on me – Stone Soup!

Social Media Marketing is similar to the story of Stone Soup, where a wanderer came into a town and convinced the citizens of the community that if they all threw in one ingredient into the “stone soup”, that they would be assured of having some of the resulting soup. 

In this case, Social Media Marketing is very much like a collection of Marketing ingredients that can all be contributed to something that produces a result.  In other words, Social Media Soup contains ingredients and flavors such as Branding, Market Research, Direct Marketing, Customer Service, Promotional Marketing, PR, SEO, and other ingredients.

PART II: THE VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Partly because social media marketing is a very rich recipe of marketing (and customer service) activities & opportunities, the social media landscape can be very confusing to the un-initiated.  

And the big question surrounding this medium  – “is it even worth it?”

Of course I think it’s worth it.  I live and breathe social media every day.
 
One giant problem that I encounter when I am talking to a prospect or client about the social media marketing opportunity is answering the question of ROI.  As in:

“What can we expect in terms of return?”

In some sense, getting the question itself is a great sign – a sign that people finally understand that there is a return that can be measured in the search engine marketing work that we do.  

So, here is what you definitely get from Social Media Marketing (when done well):

• Brand awareness
• Links to your Website (think SEO)
• Visits to your Website