This week's lecture notes covered key topics in social media communication from Chapters 1 and 2, including defining social media, differences from traditional marketing, types of social media platforms, and the importance of skills, creativity, and high-quality content. Content is emphasized as a competitive advantage, and 11 rules for effective content creation are outlined. Long-tail SEO is discussed as a strategy for targeting niche search terms with low competition.

1. Week 1 Lecture Notes
COM 370 Chapters One and Two

2. This week’s content aligns with the following learning outcomes:
 Understand key effects of social media on users’ communication behaviors.
 Understand the factors leading to the success and to the failure of social media
campaign efforts
 Based on Chapter one and two of Content Rules

3. What is social
media?
 Social media is media used for social
communication purposes by consumers
who produce as well as consume the
media information.

4. How does social media communication and marketing
differ from traditional marketing?
 With social media, the user is the publisher as well as the
consumer
 In traditional media, the publisher determines the content and
the timing of the release of the information.
 Consumers use social media to reach other consumers,
compared with producers using traditional media to reach
consumers with a messages.
 The audience for social media can be broad or restricted,
and the reach of a message can be world-wide or regional.

5. Types of Social
Media
 Social networking
 Photo sharing
 Audio
 Video
 Microblogging (open text communication)
 Livecasting
 Virtual Worlds
 Gaming
 RSS and Aggregators
 Interpersonal
 Mobile
Each of these social media types reaches a different
audience with a different impact.

6. Types of social Media
 Social networking are platforms used to connect people for a wide variety of reasons.
Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of social networks.
 Photo sharing programs such as Instagram allow the exchange of visuals. Podcasts are
an example of audio social networking, where as YouTube is audio plus video.
 Open text communicating such as Twitter is an example of microblogging where the
sender reveals snippets of action in small communication blasts of 140 characters. These
brief messages are precise and similar to old century telegrams in how they are
structured.

7. Types of Social Media
 Livecasting means a camera broadcasting 24/7 so that the viewer sees the actual world of
another.
 Virtual worlds creates fantasy worlds that exist only in digital form.
 Gaming allows many consumers to participate in a virtual world or individuals to compete
against software programs.
 RSS is Really Simply Syndication notifies a user when there is an update on a topic of
interest to that consumer. A mobile social network is a social network where people with
common interests meet and converse using a mobile phone or a tablet.
 interpersonal social media tools allow companies to connect with customers, such as a
webcast for crowds of consumers.

8. Skill and Creativity: Skill
 Using social media to reach consumers and a target audience requires both skill and
creativity.
 Skill is needed to find the audience out there among all of the social media outlets.
 What communication modalities will this target audience see?
 Where does the audience expect to see the company’s info at a time the audience
will give attention to it?
Skill is needed to understand the target audience
 Skill is needed to craft a message that audience will see and understand.

9. Creativity
 Telling your story” requires creativity and
skill.
 Web content aims to create an
immersive experience that encourages
people to jump in and participate with
your brand and become a shared story.
 Creating a world across social media
for consumers to inhabit requires skill,
preparation, evaluation, and constant
attention.

10. Listening Dashboard
A monitoring of social media channels for mentions of your product
 Set up a listening dashboard that tracks
a competitor for a few days to discover
how that company is using social media.
 Set up a listening dashboard for any
company you need to follow.
 instructions for a listening dashboard
are in Chapter 9, pages 115-117.
 See the article Social Listening: What
it is , Why You Should Care , and How
to Do it Well
 https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-
listening-business/

11. Pitfalls of Social Media Communication
 Will the audience resent a message on a particular social media modality?
 Will the audience find the message among the millions of messages pushed across the
social media outlets?
 Read the Wall Street Journal article revealing the best and worst social media marketing
of 2014. In the Lakeland library, locate “The Best and Worst of Marketing in 2014” by
Suzaanna Vranica from Monday, January 29, 2014.

12. The major shift in how companies are marketing
themselves
 What is that shift? Companies are no longer going to interrupt consumers with
advertising or marketing messages. “Customer behavior and expectations are shifting
(p.4).”
 Instead, the company responds to an information need initiated by the consumer.
 Consumers use Google to search for a product or service, a major change in how a
company gets it’s message out.
 The cost is cheaper and the reach is wider!

13. The key is the content
 Content refers to “anything created and uploaded to a
website, including the words, images, tools and other
things that reside there (p.6).”
 Frequent and regular content builds a relationship with a
customer, which is the point of social media marketing.
 Bad content builds a bad relationship, so all content
must be carefully considered and planned across all
social media.

14. Content
 Content Marketing should not have an expiration date
 Content marketing should generate Web traffic
 Content positions a company as a reliable source of information
(not just selling stuff).
 Content can..
 attract customers and educate your buyers
 overcome resistance or address objections
 establish your credibility and authority, and tell your story
 Build buzz and a base of fans and Inspire impulse buys

15. Is content the same as copywriting? No!
 Copy unlike content is written with the explicit intention of
selling something. Some forms of copy (like direct mail)
are pretty straightforward about the selling
 Web content is search-engine optimized, meaning there
must be a careful consideration of keywords and and how
sharing and linking to the info will amplify the content.
 Blog posts
 Websites
 Social media posts
 Meta descriptions
 PPC Ads

16. Content is a Competitive Advantage
 If it provides more valuable, helpful and remarkable
content to consumers than competitors
 If it avoids stuffing content full of keywords without
providing context and value.
 If it can be located using a long-tail key word
 A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that
contains at least three words
 They're more specific and less competitive than
generic keyword terms

17. Long tail SEO
 Long tail SEO is a technique of targeting highly specific niche search terms (long tail
keywords) that usually consist of 3+ words and are much easier to rank due to low
competition.
 Short tail keywords are search phrases with only one or words. Their length makes
them less specific than searches with more words.
 See this article: The Hidden Value of Long Tail SEP
 https://blog.hittail.com/2016/04/21/the-hidden-value-of-long-tail-seo/

18. 11 content rules
 1. Embrace being a publisher
 2. Insight inspires originality
 3. Build momentum
 4. Speak human
 5. Reimagine, don’t recycle
 6. Share or solve, don’t shill
 7. Show, don’t just tell
 8. Do something unexpected
 9. Stoke the campfire
 10. Create wings and roots
 11. Play to your strengths

19. References
 Handley, A & Chapmann C (2012). Content rules. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons
 The hidden value of long tail SEO. Hittail, Inc. Retrieved from
https://blog.hittail.com/2016/04/21/the-hidden-value-of-long-tail-seo/
 Vranica, S. (Jan.29, 2014). The best and worst of marketing in 2014. The Wall Street
Journal. Retrived from http://www.wsj.com/articles/best-and-worst-ads-marketers-pitch-products-
in-new-places-1419815169