Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing Campaign Strategies

Okay, you have a website that's been well designed and SEO’d for your keywords. Other On Page SEO has been implemented and your site is Indexed in Google and the other major search engines. Your content has been optimized as well as validated. Your backlinking strategy is in place and continuously being improved. What about Social Media?

There are hundreds or thousands of social media websites out there. Which ones should you choose? Facebook? Linked in? Twitter? MySpace? YouTube? Yahoo Buzz? Google Buzz? Mixx? Reddit? Digg? Sphinn? Technorati? BlogCatalog? Stumble upon? Scribd? Twaango? De.li.cio.us? Squidoo? Leapfish? Orkut? I think you start to see the problem.

The Social Media Jungle

THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MIX - PLANNING

Do you have a PR department? Most small businesses say no. But we say, yes you do. Your Public Relations department is every owner, partner, employee, customer, supplier, and person who knows about your business. That’s the beauty of Social Media.

Your Social Media Marketing mix is the combination of the Social Media sites that you use and the frequency in which you use them. Any good campaign starts with a plan, this is no different for Social Media Marketing or SMM. Looking deeper into Social Media as a strategy is Social Media Optimization or SMO. Before we analyze any sites we must first look at the resources at hand that can be leveraged for your campaign. Once you have a firm grasp of the time and talent you're willing to dedicate then you're ready to move on to analyzing your audience.

When giving a speech, the first rule is to know your audience. This is key in social media as well. What forms of social media does your audience use? Running a Twitter campaign when your target market is all on Facebook won’t help nearly as much. Are there trade specific forums available? This is information you should already have. If you don't, just look at the main keywords you use for your advertising. Your customers themselves can be a valuable tool as well. Just ask them.

Marketing and Advertising on the Internet through Social Media is still based on sound fundamental principles. Good customer service, responsiveness, and a clear and consistent message should be the main themes of any marketing or advertising campaign. Just remember, unrealistic expectations ruin marketing campaigns. Be prepared to invest plenty of time and energies and you will reap the rewards.

Blackball Online Marketing specializes in social media campaigns for small businesses in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. We also provide social media consulting to help you get started or to take your use of Social Media to the next level.

Facebook and MySpace Privacy End Around

Image Courtesy Of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review

I don't know about you, but I would just as soon somebody tell me the truth than lie to MY FACE. (pun intended) On Friday May 21, 2010 Yahoo! News released this story - Facebook, MySpace caught releasing user data

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100521/tc_ynews/ynews_tc2189 . Here’s an excerpt, “The report says that the companies have delivered user data to major online advertising companies such as Google's DoubleClick and Yahoo!'s Right Media, despite explicit pledges to protect such information.”

This makes complete sense. Facebook and MySpace have no interest in protecting our data. They say so right here http://www.facebook.com/terms.php , especially when they can make money giving away our data to developers of Facebook apps, advertisers, and other direct marketing networks. The currency is the data that we've all provided for free. This encourages developers and marketers to pay Facebook and that's their bottom line and their allegiance.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, this is the link to the Facebook API developers documentation -

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Users.getInfo#Description.

A synopsis of the previous link is listed here:

“Description

Returns a wide array of user-specific information for each user identifier passed, limited by the view of the current user. The current user is determined from the session_key parameter.

Use this call to get user data that you intend to display to other users (of your application, for example). If you need some basic information about a user for analytics purposes, call users.getStandardInfo instead.

This call no longer requires a session key. However, if you call this method without a session key, you can only get the following information:

• uid
• first_name
• middle_name
• last_name
• name
• locale
• current_location
• affiliations (regional type only)
• pic_square
• profile_url
• sex

You can call this method as soon as a user authorizes your application. If you do so, you can get the same information as you can without a session (see above).

User Privacy and Visible Data

Important: Depending upon the user's privacy settings (including whether the user has decided to opt out of the Platform completely), you may not see certain user data. For any user submitted to this method, the following user fields are visible to an application only if that user has authorized that application:

• meeting_for
• meeting_sex
• religion
• significant_other_id

In addition, the visibility of all fields, with the exception of first_name, last_name, name, pic, sex, current_location, affiliations, and uid may be restricted by the user's Facebook privacy settings in relation to the calling user (the user associated with the current session). “

The long and the short of it is this – your name and location data, regional affiliations, pictures, sex, religion and any other data you have provided may be exposed and free for the taking. Worse yet it may already be distributed despite setting the privacy for your page. Remember the Facebook privacy glitch a few weeks back that reset the privacy settings when Facebook upgraded their policy? There you go. A glitch? Or a 52 fake-out to make your info public?

If this doesn't anger you after you've been told that your data is safe and private, I don't know what will. The Facebook and MySpace services are not that important to me to give away my private data. If someone wants to sell me ads I would like to see them have to work a little harder.

With all the Facebook privacy changes lately and all the bad press they have been receiving, one would think they would take a more active role and be more public in their disclosure of these problems. That's just not in their best interest and why this post calls their tactics an end around.

Pittsburgh Online Marketing Services by Blackball Online Marketing tries to inform its readers about the privacy and security issues of their social media experience. Our motto is “Helping People is Good Business”. Please tell us what you think…

Meet the New Corporate Boardroom – But Not Yet

As a result of the Web, Social Media and all its parts have taken us by storm. They’ve caused an unprecedented shift in transparency, ease, speed and reach in the distribution of a message in almost any form you want. But I think the biggest shift is in the level of transparency that’s come out of it. So powerful is this shift that all the brands we know so well are feeling the heat to comply to survive and grow by being a “part of” rather than “aloof to” the consumers and people in general – and really mean it. They had to change.

All Great Causes Begin as a Movement, Degenerate into a Business, and then end up as a Racket.

Like most other enterprises in the beginning, these hyper-successful Online products and services ala’ Social Media were not the makings of a corporate boardroom. Then somewhere along the way they thought they should develop a corporate board.  In came the Venture Capitalists with the boardrooms and the meetings. The different and radical thinking that got these startups to where they are gave way to acting like all the other guys.

The transparency that has “gingerly” nudged brands into conducting themselves with more responsibility and sensitivity in regards to the consumer has yet to reach the boardroom level with the old school “behind closed doors” approach to things. Money changes everything so things can stay the same – but times they are a changing.

Because the speed, reach, and transparency of a message is only going to continue to accelerate and evolve , I believe an entire new breed  of Venture Capitalists are going to emerge that’ll look through different eyes and take different risks and find a way to use the transparency and everything else to their advantage. They’ll adapt and change out of sheer survival.  In other words they won’t fight this paradigm shift created by Social Media and they won’t want to. They’ll leverage it.  They’ll think like the very people that created these game-changing products and services. The end users will become the boardroom.

Understanding the name itself, “Social Media” tells the tale. It is “Social” meaning involved, part of, engaged, responsive, mindful, and eventually transparent. All parts of a solid relationship. One Tweet can alter a business’s approach drastically in action – or non action at their peril, (depending on if they are even paying attention.) The corporate boardrooms are holding on for dear life to protect the status quo.  But how long do you think before the boardroom has to do the same as other aspects of their brands and become Social on a level I don’t think they want to look at yet?

Blackball Online Marketing provides SEO Pittsburgh Services and Pittsburgh Online Business Consulting services.

Facebook, the New MySpace

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had an article today about Facebook's privacy concerns titled Privacy concerns worry some users of Facebook. While this is nothing new, it spotlights the growing concerns of the general public about Facebook and privacy. There was also a segment on the Early Show not long ago about this very thing.

Yogi Berra said “No one goes there anymore, it got too popular.” With all the publicity that Facebook was getting about temporarily unseating Google as the number one trafficked site on the Internet, along came growing concerns about Facebook's privacy policy. Facebook users have swelled to over 400 million and growing. All the while, Facebook has been lifting restrictions on privacy.

Will Facebook becomes the new MySpace? Users on MySpace, the once popular social network among teens, left in droves over advertising and privacy concerns. Will the same thing happen to Facebook? It very well could if these issues are not addressed immediately.

Blackball Online Marketing has chosen a wait and see approach before investing time and energy on Facebook from a business perspective. Our Facebook experience to date is that it has no rhyme or reason. Their implementation and changes are too complex or intricate to understand easily for the average user. We also want to see Facebook address their bipolar attitude towards privacy on their popular social media site before we jump on board.

While very different platforms, a good case study would be Twitter whose microblog is another social media giant. Their approach to privacy has been swift and decisive. Facebook needs to implement a measured and thorough revamp of their brand and their message before usership and advertising dollars go to the next best biggest thing, just like what happened to MySpace.

Blackball Online Marketing provides Pittsburgh Online Business Consulting Services at an affordable cost.

We have been hearing for some time now about blog posting frequency and the value of traffic generation. Warm and fuzzy statistics and pretty pictures broken down to the nth iteration of data on how traffic goes up and blah, blah, blah. This is nothing new, but we never hear about the deterioration of content that happens when firms try to post beyond their means or what happens to reader abandonment rates as a result.

At Blackball Online Marketing we value your time and don’t want to produce useless and pointless posts for the sake of posting. The Internet is saturated with this kind of content already. There are those of you who may say this is a pointless post. LOL and that’s OK. We just want to say Thanks for reading our blog and ask you to sign up if you’re new.

I bet if the analytics crunchers did a study on the frequency of blog posting as it relates to the value of the posts they would find the content has a severely declining curve. Devalued content would then most assuredly lower the conversion rates; and the conversion rates are after all what we’re in business for.

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