With so much hype surrounding the enormous benefits for businesses to  reap with social media, many have eagerly (and expectantly) jumped into the social landscape with a Twitter account and maybe even a Facebook profile or fan page built around their brand or business.  The problem happens when these expectant businesses look around and say, “Now what?” How do I get followers? How do I use these sites to generate leads? How do I justify social media? How do I find the time? What else is there? Why are we even here? …and so on.

If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions, or are less than enamored with the success of your social media campaign, try these social stump-blocker solutions below:

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While on the hunt for meaningful metrics tools, Erwin Hendriks, creator of Social Website Analyzer, brought his insightful resource to my attention.

Simply put, Social Website Analyzer is a one-click snapshot of the state of your website’s or brand’s social media presence across the top 20 social media sites.

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The client wants to know if their social media campaign is working! They want to understand how social media marketing will meet their goals before they commit to a budget allocation for a “mythical campaign”.  Social media marketing companies like other marketing agencies need to back their claims with statistics and provide metrics to prove effectiveness.

Granted, it is a relatively new game with the rules of engagement (sorry couldn’t resist it) still evolving, but there is a sizable number of reliable tools in form of plugins and apps that can be used in combination to measure different features of social media channels. There is no magic pill with one-tool-measure-all functionality yet and measurement is not esoteric like it would be, for say a PPC campaign, but social media experts can assemble a more or less effective group of measurement tools that best fits the business goals.
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Welcome to the era of Socialism in Communication. While social media is liberating brands and opening up new grass-roots level channels for connecting with the consumers, it is also posing new challenges for companies in terms of managing and controlling all that free flowing external communication. While wide social media participation offers innumerous advantages to companies and brands it also requires constant monitoring and the need to provide clear guidelines to all participants to protect both the employees and the company. Companies are struggling to achieve the balance between liberating the employees and avoiding all the risks and pitfalls of unmonitored conversations.
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It was my extreme honor to be a guest in yesterday’s tele-seminar with the International Social Media Association (ISMA). My topic, in case you missed it, was “Propel your Social Media Marketing to New Heights: Strategies to Ensure a Winning and Engaging Social Presence”.

Below I recap some of the highlights from the hour long interview:

This is part 1 of a 3 part series…

ISMA:  What do you mean by “an Engaged Social Presence”?

Brian Solis describes engagement as:

“Engagement is essentially the first step in building a relationship between your customers and your brand.”

Brian goes on to explain that initially, early on in a brands social media experience, that it’s more about establishing a presence and less about strategic engagement and the engagement resembles traditional broadcasting of messages.

In it’s most simple explanation, an Engaged Social Presence is when you are actively participating in the social media platforms in which you belong.

More specifically, however…engagement encompasses two strategies.

Re-active engagement and Pro-active engagement, both necessary for  a truly engaged social presence.

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This blog post is the second in the 2 part series on brand monitoring. In case you missed the first blog post,  here is the link: Monitor Your Brand Online.

Online Reputation Monitoring can be as simple as creating alerts on Google or as comprehensive as subscribing to a syndicated monitoring service like Radian6 that  gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web. You can hire a Social Media Monitoring company who will not only use syndicated or subscription tools like Radian6 and employ a combination of techniques and report on what’s being said but will also formulate effective response strategies and implement reputation management techniques.
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