CMN 1100 first article alea cardarelli

Article 1: How to Make a Marketing Strategy for Social Media
http://www.business2community.com/social-media/how-to-make-a-marketing-strategy-for-social-media-0140792
I really enjoyed the concise overview of this article. It gave me a framework for what I should aim to learn in depth in this course- each point is something I need to investigate and learn in depth.

1- Have a pitch. Be able to describe yourself, your product, your services in 120 words or less.
2- Make a point and stick to it. We need to use social media with purpose, not to spout random facts or retell old jokes and spread memes.
3- Know your audience. We need to research who are the people that use our service and the related social media, and what their needs are.
4- Be human. Having a super ‘corporate’ tone is a turn off when everyone knows there’s a real live person there posting in real time. The Lord Elgin Hotel does a great job on their Facebook page of maintaining a human, engaging tone. (https://www.facebook.com/lordelginottawa)
5- Track your success. Get a snapshot of where you were when you started and at intervals, check or keep Google analytics.
6- Start small. Don’t use all the social media plat forms. Pick one or two that most suit your audience. Some businesses rely entirely on Linkedin for networking- it would not make sense to put everything into Twitter when you know your audience is on Linked in.

So much of the article above relates to my experience working in Social Media and Web Outreach at my old job where it was all about throwing content at the masses without knowing why. Management was so enthralled with tools- they wanted to create an app, and simply put cultural content on it. They had no idea what they would do wit hit, they just wanted to be the first ones to build an app. It was an app without purpose, measurable goals, or even a target audience. In the end, the content couldn’t be agreed upon so the app died.

I’ve also noticed that creating social media strategy for Cultural content is very different than a strategy for the business sector that is geared only to profit. In the culture sector, a successful social media outreach is shown by a vibrant engaged and active online community. In the business sector, successful social media is measured in dollars.

I was approached for a job in the business sector to develop a profit generating social media strategy and I had no idea what to do! I knew how to do museum outreach but I had no idea how to generate dollars through social media, nor how to measure it! In the world I came from, successful social media was attracting archivists to create detailed metadata for anonymous archival images, having members of the public contribute their own archival images to a Flickr photo stream on Karsh, and reaching a certain number of YouTube video views per month. My organization was not reliant on making Social Media efficient, and so we made most of these gaffes regularly.

Social media for profitability means generating revenue through your blog. It includes holding contests, coupon redemptions, incentive giveaways, squeeze pages, to a product. Users can be encouraged to leave a comment or feedback on a product to be eligible for a prize. They can be enticed to purchase e-books in order to get a free extra bundle of e-books. They can signing up for a 5.00 all access intro fee to a service, and then automatically renew as a monthly subscription for 30.00.

For generating revenue through social media for service based businesses- you want ongoing subscription fees, not one-off contracts that you continually have to generate. You want to create a steady base of passive funds being generated. For products, you can offer sale items available only online, a reduction in product price in exchange for customer review, and bidding on items.

I don’t have actual experience in generating profitability through social media, I only have experience in bringing people together to create community for cultural content. I guess actually that’s the biggest reason why I have joined this program. I don’t know how to define which social media channels would create profitability for different kinds of businesses, I don’t know how to measure what that profitability should look like, and I don’t have an understanding of basic foundation strategies to maximize the effectiveness of each type of social media. I go on instinct, and that’s all I have. I want to know how to do this properly, which is why I am here.