My first thought about the introduction of Google Buzz was simply  “Oh no, not another place to manage thoughts, links and photos.” For the social user it offers choice. For the business social media marketer, it offers additional reach. According to Mashable, Social Media networking’s #1 blog, Buzz achieved after being launched on 2/9/10, 9,000,000 posts and comments in its first three days, which is simply staggering.

As I experiment  with Buzz and seek opportunities to use it to market my clients products and services, one thing become very clear very quickly and that was the power of the integration of Google gadgets and the array of Google web-based tools may make Buzz into a leading contender for a sizable slice Social Media Networking market share. My initial thoughts of Buzz being of just another place to manage information quickly passed by when I discovered this Buzz comment http://www.google.com/buzz/arimilner/EZYXB8WviwV/Buzz-has-turned-my-Gmail-into-my-social-command I found that I could integrate Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Buzz into a single dashboard- checkout the screenshot below:

As you can see,  this is my Gmail browser window but with a web portal to my Facebook page; and you can see the link to my twitter page on the lower left hand navigation sidebar.

With the mass onslaught of new entrants into the Social Media Networking market and the dilution of the marketplace with more than 300 Social Media platforms, I really do not need, nor want, another Social Media platform. However, a new product that permits fully operation, multi-Social Media dashboard is long overdue and I suspect that this is only the beginning.

So, what does my crystal ball predict for Facebook and Twitter? With such a large market share I suspect that Facebook will survive the introduction of Buzz and my rationale is that Facebook is primarily a year book, and photo album; and news sharing is not one of Facebook’s primary strengths because even the most ardent of Facebook users only update their status a few times a day. However, Buzz is primarily a news sharer with great optional extras which put’s it squarely in the same space as Twitter.

Does this mean that Buzz will replace Twitter? I think it is too early to tell  after only 6 days but I would advocate that it will take significant share from Twitter.

Watch this space!

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One of the great failings that I see all too often in the use of Social Media as a marketing tool, is the lack of understanding of what it can do for the organic search performance of a businesses products and services. Why?  Because the Social Media user rarely looks beyond the communication services offered by the media. Take Twitter, and the world of micro-blogging as an example. The average user believes that the strength of Twitter is the ability to broadcast a marketing message or campaign to that users follows with the great desire that the campaign is so exciting that it goes viral through Retweets.

That is all well and good but Twitter, as a content-delivery media, can be hit or miss depending on how many of your followers see/read your tweets.

However, Twitter can produce high search engine rankings per this example below. I was searching for a recent photo shoot of the ‘RITCA Coaches meet’  and because I loaded these keywords into a Tweet, one of my search results came from Twitter. Great stuff!

Now that’s marketing, and it’s free! How does this work? It is simply an extension of your web site/ blog’s Internet keyword marketing strategy.   Carefully craft Tweets, which include the keywords that your prospective clients will search for while using Google, Bing etc.  While some of your followers may miss ‘that important Tweet’ we can use the search engines to make sure that they do not miss your marketing message.

The power of Twitter goes well beyond Tweets; it can push you up the organic search rankings.

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Viral marketing ( sometimes called word-of-mouth marketing) is yet another buzzword which adds a little glamor to what is effectively grass-roots marketing by utilizing pre-existing WEB2.0 / Social Medium networking marketing platforms. The concept is relatively simple… market an idea to one person, that person tells 6 others, and those 6 each tell 6 others and before long we have created a very strong brand with little investment through what is called self-replicating viral processes. When it works the return on marketing investment is tremendous.

The following was ranked the # 1 viral Ad in 2008 and is a follow-up to the Budweiser Ad ‘Wassuuup’ from the turn of the decade Eight years later the director of the original, create an ad for Obama’s presidential campaign, using the same but older characters whose life had changed. Whatever your politics, the humor of the Ad pulls you in. It’s viral, it’s catchy and you want to share it with your friends.

Note – you do not have to agree with a viral ad for it to be successful, you just need to talk about it and email it to your friends, post it on blogs etc. The word quickly spreads.

With over 7 millions views on YouTube – it got everyone talking and became truly viral.

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In order to achieve a high Google page rank, you web site must be seen to be popular amongst the users of the Internet and there is a very complicated algorithm that is used to complete the page rank calculation.

Popularity is often thought of as the number of backlinks (inlinks) to your site but there are other methods of increasing your site’s popularity ( off site SEO) and one such  method is delicious.com: a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking.

So, the more people that bookmark your web site on delicious.com the more popular your site will be; and this  is one important tactic to increasing the page rank of your site.

You can adopt a passive strategy and wait until browsers bookmark your site or you can adopt a pro-active marketing strategy by:

• Encourage all of your company employees to bookmark your site
• Encourage all of your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and myspace contacts to book mark your site
• Ask your social media friends to spread the good news about your site through their networks

Delicious should be a component of any social media networking marketing program.

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One of  problems associated  with Social Media Networking is that it can be overwhelming to a new user (marketer). However, there are tools that can be employed to automate the process. In my last blog entry I detailed the connectivity between Facebook and Twitter. When  Facebook and Twitter are connected, by updating your company ‘page’ on Facebook you will automatically send a tweet to Twitter. One data entry point will feed two Social Media networking platforms.

We can take a similar approach to connect your company blog to LinkedIn such that every blog entry will automatically appear on your company LinkedIn ‘page’.

How?

Set up a Feedburner account for your blog and  the simply add the Feedburner address to you LinkedIn account.

Simple! while on the surface this may not seem like much but the fundamental problem with Social Media Network marketing is keeping current with every platform. So, by reducing the data entry point to two, we can feed 4 elements of Web2.0 marketing media. The simpler we can make Social Media Marketing for the marketers who use it  on a day-to-day basis, the more effective the marketing programs will become.

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For businesses, managing the marketing process via Social Media Networking can simply be overwhelming but there are a couple of methods to simplify the process, here is one such method:

It is questionable whether Twitter is a truly a good platform for B2B marketing but one thing is for sure is that it should not be over-looked because of it’s reach. Reach, however, is not everything – any marketer who has ever worked a trade show, with thousands and thousands of visitors, will understand that we do not want to waste our time on ‘tire-kickers’ we want to find our ‘A’ class prospects.  Not easy to do on with a marketing media whose very foundation is the ‘shotgun marketing method’, whereas in the B2B world we really want to adopt a ‘rifle-shot approach’ and create a following from our target market segments.

To collect followers that is in your market space:

• Add a ‘Follow-me’ Twitter Icon to your company web site
• Add a ’Follow-me’ Twitter URL in your company’s email template
• Add a “Follow-me’ Twitter logo on all marketing collateral

By adopting these tactics, you will build a targeted following and as you build this following, not use Twitter to make your Twitter posts but instead use Facebook!

Sorry for switching gears on you!  But Facebook has connectivity with Twitter and we want to take advantage of this connectivity to expand our marketing reach and minimize our work.

In Facebook, create a Company ‘Page’ and then use exactly the same tactics as detailed above to create ‘Fans’ for your company Facebook page.

And here’s the rub…

Facebook provides connectivity to Twitter. Simply set up your Facebook Company Page to link to Twitter and, every time you update your Facebook page, Twitter will send that same information via a Tweet to all your Twitter followers.

Enter your marketing information once and distribute it via both Facebook and Twitter.

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