More than Just Lines on a Map: Best Practices for U.S Bike Routes
Secrets Of Social Media Marketing Trade Book Review
1. Secrets of Social Media Marketing By: Paul Gillin Presented By: Sarah Kemp
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Editor's Notes
Gilln has spent more than 25 years in editorial experience, as well as advise many marketing and business executives on how to improve their social media and online channels. He also is a prominent speaker in this field using simple concepts and humor to help the audience engage and understand the materials The New Influences was wrote in 2007, which discusses the changes in the markets because of the new media of podcast and blogging. Gillin’s work has also appeared in several prominent literature such as, The New York Times, Advertising Age, and The San Jose Mercury Gillin serves on this Advisory Board, and is also a “Research Fellow”. He also co-chairs the social media cluster for the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Obviously he is from MA, and he is known to love the Boston Red Sox's, but he is a very well qualified scholar in the social media field.
Gillin states that marketing is much more effective when using social media tools and traditional marketing, such as a TV commercial that advertises a website could potentially send the view online. Also research is said that most effective campaigns use conventional marketing to start a campaign and also restart one when activity gets low. It is important not to sole use social media for campaigns and marketing just because it is cheap! There are many Categories of social networks for age groups, interest, geographic, etc. It is important to determine the general broad group of areas. Gillin suggest groups such as general purpose, vertical networks, social bookmaking, recommendation engines, social shopping, mobile, and international. There are several things that each of these groups do to make these categories, but overall the main common interest is open enrollment. Especially with the economy, free with and email address is going to get members. But another important aspect that social networking sites share is relationships. There are friends, followers and 86% of users say that they participate to see what there friends are doing. Blogs are the new potential marketing, pr and outreach idea to consumers on a large scale. Companies were skeptical to start their own blogs because they were afraid to be accountable for everything that was being stated on the bogs, and as comments. The companies now that have blogs are able to communicate to their fans and consumers, as well as have a way to reach them for promotions and to create credibility, and brand alliance with these customers. Measuring results can also be important for marketers and pr promotions on line. Gillin suggest that “Visitor paths and repeat visitors are two valuable but under-appreciated measures of success”. You can also track page views which is a quick hit of how your page is doing, returning visitors, which is the monitor of returning people to the site (most important to Gillin), and pages per visit. All of these will allow you to track how your site is doing and adjust your changes to what you feel is needed.
I was very surprised when I got to this chapter, and saw that there are sometimes when you do not need to use social media. Some examples are with branding, channel relations, and direct marketing. Because executives are used to using marketing to reach large audiences, using social media to create a recognizable brand, such as Nike would have been difficult with just a Facebook group, and a blog. With channel relations communication with channel partners still are requesting the use of face to face communication and phone calls. In the next few years this could change, but for right now using social media can still be used, but not for that primary reason. I was not a very heavy user on MySpace, so I was very surprised when I saw how many large companies use MySpace for large campaigns. Coca-Cola used MySpace in 2007 to relaunch Cherry Coke and Cherry Coke Zero and had 32,000 friends in the first 24 hours. They used a submission process that would allow the most creative submission would get to use the homepage for the day. They suggest for MySpace advertisement to be fun, competitive, and get bragging rights. This all can relate to the young audience that is associated with MySpace. Podcasting is a cheap and easy way to produce a ideas that can be downloaded and shared online. In 2006 “podcasting” even got its own definition in the dictionary. Research shows that 11-13% of podcast users have advanced degrees and an income of over $100,000. The podcast audience is now at 18.5 million.
It was very interesting to read about the customer complaints online. Now if you have a problem you can tweet about it, write a blog post, or write on consumer advocacy sites such as consumerist.com, and ripoffrepot.com. This allows consumers to have a voice about issues and concerns and it is interesting how the companies are utilizing social media to check on their consumers thoughts and feelings. It would be interesting to see research done on the effectiveness of a consumer client and how fast a company gets the message through certain sites, or blogs. Flickr is the leader in online photo sharing. I have used it before, but after reading about some of the advantages besides photo sharing I found it very interesting. Marketers can create groups for free or sponsor branded groups. Groups can have over 2,000 photos to showcase, so it gives consumers a great variety to look, and use photos. It is very also to navigate through the website and has tag words to help search for photos. The book included some other lesser-known social medias such as Gather, Jigsaw, and Meetup. I had not heard of any of these sites, but I found Gather pretty interesting because it is similar to social network sites for National Public Radio (NPR). It was created by a NPR executive to build a community around public radio. The publics generally included: “over 35, educated, with interest of political and cultural world around them” according to Business Week. The website has attracted Volvo and Charles Schwan for ad revenue in the recent years… this is something to keep our eyes on!
I think that the book would be great for new team leaders and managers of promotional, or marketing departments to read. It gives a simple overview of the steps to take to gain knowledge on the big time social networking sites, as well as the up and coming sites. Gillin gives great advice and “secrets” throughout the chapter that point out interesting information. He speaks from experiences and uses company examples that have occurred mostly in the last 5 years. The only downside is that because social media is always changing and reinventing itself, I do not know how much longer the books facts and quotes will be completely relevant.
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