Will Marlow - Filed under 'Social media strategy'

August 24, 2011

This Is the Only Thing That's Free About Social Media Marketing

People often think that social media is attractive because it's free. But this is a simple misconception. Social media isn't free. Social media simply scales for free, but it won't scale at all without an upfront investment.

Just look at Rebecca Black, who is famous for performing what many people think is the worst song ever written, and the worst music video ever produced. Her mother invested $4,000 in making the video, and now it has made more than enough money for her to pay for college.

If you want sensational results with social media, you need to invest whatever is necessary for your particular social media program to begin to scale, because scaling happens for free, which means you can reach far more people than you'd be able to pay to reach through advertising.

The key question on everyone's mind at this point should be: how much does it cost for content to scale? The answer depends entirely on who you want to reach with your content, and the nature of the content itself. Proctor & Gamble has probably spent millions of dollars by now on its successful Old Spice Guy campaign, and they will probably continue to spend, because even though it may not be as successful as Rebecca Black's $4,000 video, it is no doubt generating more exposure than they could have paid the same amount of money to get.

At the other end of the spectrum, many people choose to go with a content only marketing approach on social media. This is similar to Seth Godin's "drip marketing," where you create new, valuable content on a daily basis for your audience, eventually building an online portfolio of compelling content that draws your customers into your universe and earns their trust. CopyBlogger is hands down the best source of information on content marketing, and despite never having spent a dime on advertising, the CopyBlogger Media company is generating seven figures in revenue with well-over 50% margins. Their upfront investment was in the form of design, hosting, travel, and conference costs. At this point, however, after six years CopyBlogger is now built on a solid foundation, and they benefit tremendously from free scaling.

For those of you who choose to pay for advertising in addition to having a social media program, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is treating those two programs as completely separate. I've worked with a number of clients who started by separating the two programs completely. But your goal should always be to bring in only NEW people through paid advertising, and once they know you, you should be able to interact with them freely via your preferred social media channels. If this isn't a part of your marketing strategy, then you're going to pay too much for your advertising over time, and your social media program will probably never scale.

I think that some people have resisted social media marketing all along because they instinctively believe that there is no such thing as free ice cream. For those of you who feel that way, I'm on your side. Social media marketing is fantastic, but only if you're willing to make the investment in time and resources to start to scale.

Will Marlow is a Public Relations and digital marketing specialist. The photograph of the salivating dog above was also featured in this week's issue of the A-Town Dog Blog.

Filed under // Digital PR Digital Public Relations PR PR and Social Media Public Relations Social Media Social Media Plan Social media strategy

Comments [2]

August 10, 2010

The most important thing about Old Spice's social media marketing campaign

If you produce a brilliant 30 second TV commercial, and people love it, you can always pay for more 30 second spots to show your commercial again and again. But if you produce an amazing social media marketing campaign with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, like Old Spice did, you don't need to repeatedly buy airtime. The Old Spice videos have been seen over 128 million times on Youtube.

However, there is a much more important point here, which is this: Old Spice controls its Twitter feed, its YouTube channel, and its Facebook profile. The campaign generated over 100,000 Twitter followers for Old Spice, and over 100,000 YouTube subscribers, and over 785,000 Facebook Fans for Old Spice. These social media properties will pay dividends to Old Spice for years to come.

Even if you don't hit a viral homerun like Old spice did, you can still steadily grow your social media properties. With social marketing, you don't buy from a media company. You are a media company.

Did you like reading this blog post? Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here.

Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant. He's the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Filed under // Old Spice Old Spice Guy Social media strategy advertising

Comments [0]

March 2, 2010

Can Twitter or Facebook really boost your search engine optimization (SEO)?

One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is. Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right? But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag. This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines. To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing.

I know this will be painful for some people to hear, but if you use Twitter and get retweeted 50,000 times and drive tons of new visitors to your website, your search engine optimization won't change a bit because of it. This means that you need to be ready to engage those thousands of new visitors so that they become daily or weekly or monthly visitors who love your site and products.

PS - Did you know that the word "Page" in Google PageRank does not refer to "webpage," but to Larry Page, the Co-founder of Google and creator of the Google PageRank system? Just another fun Internet fact.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Filed under // Facebook Google Google PageRank Larry Page Online myths SEO SMO Search Engine Optimization Social Media Optimization Social media strategy Twitter

Comments [3]

February 27, 2010

How to apply the so-what rule to social media goals

The thing that separates a good goal from a bad goal is this: a good goal is something that you can take meaningful action to accomplish, and a bad goal is something that you have little influence over. One of my jobs is helping organizations develop social media strategies, and one of the biggest problems I see is that people set goals like the following, "I want to have 10,000 followers in six months," or "I want to have 30,000 blog subscribers in a year." The problem I have with goals like that is not that they are too ambitious. Ambition is GREAT. The problem is that those goals can only be advanced by tactics, and you need to implement the same or similar tactics whether you want 10,000 subscribers, 20,000 subscribers, or a million subscribers. In other words, those goals may be measurable, but they are not actionable.

For an example from my own social media strategy, my initial goal with my Twitter feed was simply to create an online place where people could get all the most important news and analysis about online communications, fundraising, education, and entrepreneurship. I wanted my Twitter feed to be a type of "resume" that would communicate to my clients and investors that I was immersed in the details of my company. That's something that I have complete control over. And once I was satisfied that I had accomplished it, I was able to think about adding other goals, such as creating a new pipeline for speaking engagements.

To borrow a phrase from my hero Avinash Kaushik, after you set any goal you should ask yourself: "So what?" If there isn't an obvious answer to that question, you should find new goals. Your goals shouldn't just be things that you hope will happen somehow someday, they should be like those little flags that tell the slalom skiers where to go if they want to win the gold medal in Toronto.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Filed under // Social Media Social media strategy blogging online communications social media goals

Comments [2]

January 13, 2010

Results from Day 1 - Did Bots or People Disappear?

As this chart from Twitterholic shows, less than 24 hours after unfollowing 12,000 people, I was unfollowed by over 3,500 followers!

My first observations/conclusions are as follows:

1. So far, no one from the list of people I interact with regularly has unfollowed me.

2. There were LOTS of bots and spammers following me, who were only interested in a recipricol follow (which I'm happy to lose).

3. There is a big advantage to following back your followers, in that you can always tell if someone is following you just by looking at their feed. If I don't ever go back to a 1:1 ratio, not being able to know this will take some getting used to.

4. I am going to add the initial people back very quickly, because I miss the DMs that this group sends me (I don't miss DMs from spammers or bots).

and lastly,

5. There are many people who take the "follow back" ethic very seriously and personally. I received more than one email angry email suggesting that I was being very rude. If that's the case, I apologize. I tried to take precautions against this by warning people in the days leading up to this experiment (which served the dual purpose of telling me who is reading my Tweets). In any case, my reason for doing this experiment was not to be rude, but to learn more about the dynamics of following/unfollowing on Twitter, and for the next several days I'll be monitoring what happens.

(PS - Interestingly, although my goal was to make it down to zero before adding people back, Twitter's odd numbering system never let me get down below 92 people on my follower list, despite not having a record that I was following anyone. In addition to that, Tweets from people who I no longer followed continued to show up in my feed until I replaced them with newly re-followed people.)

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Filed under // Follower Count How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Plan Social media strategy Twitter Twitterholic Unfollow

Comments [0]