Social media is all about relationships. Engage and encourage participation. Build relation-
ships. And think of it from the aspect of “what can I give?” instead of “what can I get?”.
Choose a theme related to your core content that is actively being discussed online. And
stay within that theme. Include articles, webcasts, videos, or whatever else works well with
your theme. And try to look at the theme from different angles. That’s the key to opening
discussion, dialogue, back links, and all the things that go into making someone want to
pass on what you’ve got to offer. If you choose something no one is talking about, you won’t
have any results.
Approach social-media optimization as an individual. You can’t approach others in a social
network as a corporation. Corporations automatically garner suspicion (as in, “I know you’re
here only because you want to sell me something”).
Develop content that will appeal to the networks in which you participate, both from an
audience perspective and from an information perspective. If you are trying to market to
a 30-something soccer mom, having the 50-year-old male CEO trying to get her attention
isn’t going to work. But you can hire a 30-something soccer mom who will have the right
perspective.
Consider hiring bloggers or other social-media participants. If it makes sense to use social-
media marketing for your organization, you may have to devote a large chunk of time to it
each week. If you don’t have the time to commit to that, consider hiring someone to do
it for you. At ComputerWorld (http://www.computerworld.com) a whole staff of
freelance bloggers helps to keep news current and related to the industries in which it
appears. If they can do it, you can, too. Hiring a blogger isn’t usually as expensive as you
might think. You can usually pay them anywhere from $10 to $50 per post, depending
on the industry.Measuring Social-Media Optimization
If you’re participating in social media, you’re going to want to know how it’s working. But before
you even begin to measure your success, you need to know what you’re measuring it against. Define
concrete goals for your efforts. Those might be to increase your web-site traffic by a certain amount
each month, to increase conversion values, or some other goal. Whatever those goals are, use them
as a guide as you’re planning your social-media optimization efforts.Once you’ve decided what you want from social-media optimization, you can measure the results
that you’re gaining from your efforts. The most obvious indicator is web-site traffic. If your traffic
begins to climb, it’s a pretty good bet that your social-media efforts are working.But if you don’t want to rely solely on site traffic as in indication of your success, there are several
other elements you can look to in the effort to determine how successful your social-media opti-
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