Why A Social Media Strategy Is More Powerful Than You Might Ever Imagine

It can be very hard to have a complete vision of what a social media campaign can do for you without having lived it.  So we thought that it was time to put our own story together so that you could see how it all works synergistically in powerful ways.
Prior to getting into the details, it is important to point out the lessons learned so that they can be identified and provide a greater level of understanding of why certain activities were undertaken.

• People Buy From Experts
• People Buy From People
• People Buy From People with Confidence
• People Buy When The Risk Has Been Reduced
• People Buy From People Who Walk The Talk
• People Buy From People Who Understand Them
• People Buy From People Who Are Successful

What does this have to do with social media?  Read through the following story and you be the judge.  The story is about the development of Practical Social Media.

The Practical Social Media Story

As with every company, there is a beginning.  That beginning usually starts with the creation of the company and a set of deliberate moves to get the company launched, noticed and generating revenue.

For Practical Social Media, that meant that we were going to introduce ourselves by virtue of adding tons of value to our entrepreneurial prospects.  And I mean add value in the way that we have always talked about from a social media perspective.  Give more than you ever have before in order to establish meaningful, loyal relationships.  This is very similar to what successful bloggers do every day.  Many are consultants who would have charged you $200-$300 an hour ten years ago.  They are now giving away much of their intellectual content for free online in order to attract and establish relationships.  It also starts to seed their level of expertise.

We started out doing the same thing, but instead, our delivery mechanism was large presentations.  We used the Biznik community to reach out, to test our hypothesis on the need for a Practical Social Media-like company.  We developed presentations in powerpoint on a number of subjects and held two hour seminars.

We spent a lot of time on our content, so that it was not only extremely actionable, but positioned us as experts in that field.  Our reputation grew online and off within the Biznik community.   Presentations were regularly capped at 100 RSVPs.  We showed our own successes doing exactly what we recommended, spoke with confidence, were accessible and displayed a great deal of understanding of what each entrepreneur needed in order to give their business a boost on little to no budget.

The foundation of expertise, validation, early adopters and service features were established.

With this underpinning, it was clearly time to move into a national playing field through social media.
The rest of this article is going to talk about how we keep reinforcing this early foundation through social media, while continuing to build an online marketing program that scales.  It not only scales your presence in the marketplace, but scales your time.  Everything that we do, we do with the greatest amount of efficiency in mind.

Spreading The News

I am going to start with steps that each of us can take in our own businesses.  We started by putting together a presentation that shared our expertise.  That turned out to be a significant event.

That same presentation was not only used at my Biznik events, but at other speaking engagements, webinars, on our website and through YouTube videos.  Let’s just say that it was used well.
YouTube videos from presentations are also really easy to create.  All you need is a piece of software called Jing.  Jing costs just $14.95 a year and has the capabilities of turning your desktop into a movie with narration from your external microphone.  That movie can then be shared on YouTube, other video sites, your blog and through Twitter, Facebook, etc.  In it’s powerpoint form it can be put up on SlideShare, your LinkedIn account, other profiles and submitted to directories within your industry that aggregate industry content.  I also place videos and powerpoints into blog posts that are submitted to a number of unique directories in the social media world.  And those very same blog posts have been optimized with plugins for WordPress that we have recommended to make sure they get noticed in the search engines.
Those search engine results keep coming up, months and months later (see the YoutTube 101 article as a reference).
We also used the in-person meetings to video tape attendees and then loyal subscribers about their experience.  That lead to more videos, blog posts, etc.  Then we used the good will from those meetings to ask loyal attendees and subscribers to place their reviews for our company up online with Yelp.

Yelp gave us third party validation of our expertise.  It also allowed us to display it for all to see on our website.  And the best part of all, it comes up when you do searches on Google for the company, lending even more validity.
These early presentations are really helping us spread the news.  And by having those presentations listed online, they now come up in search engine results as well…because we carefully thought through our keyword strategy.
We have now taken that same presentation and are being asked to speak at larger venues, getting in front of more potential customers.

And then we took all these resources and make sure that when we blog, tweet or create Facebook updates, that the messages automatically populate other social media accounts.  This is just another example of how doing something well once will continue to work for you.  Please see the article on Ping.fm within this issue.

What Does All This Mean?

It means that it is worthwhile putting effort into the value that you create.  It is worth while taking the time because the upside is so enormous.  Creating the right content (your online currency) leads to the right reputation enhancers, the right content to share online and a scaleable, social media action plan.  Make sure you do something significant in order to start, get in the game, build your brand and share online through social media.  And remember that  social media is the best way to scale your ability to create relationships online with those people that buy based on everything we talked about on the first page of this article.