Social Media Strategy News & Articles

If you had to trace the trajectory of the social media strategist within the enterprise, you’d either get a spike or a sharp decrease -- depending whether your company has embraced social media as a tool to improve customer relations, business processes and product innovation, or if it has reacted fearfully to its presence.

If there were a way to know how many Facebook fans or Twitter followers were needed to convert a sale, social media wouldn’t be such a hard sell to companies. Yet, as we know, social media is much more than Twitter and Facebook, and your return on investment is much more than dollars earned.

We all know that optimizing content is often the key to unlocking your company’s potential. Good content can make it easy to sell widgets and improve the customer experience as well as make it easier for others to find your content. When it comes to SEO, content is the king. But when it comes to user-generated content, how does it influence SEO and what can you do to leverage it even further?

Starting in January 2012, I will be assuming the role of adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Md., where I will be teaching Social Media Marketing as a part of its new Business of Art and Design program. The program aims to provide a comprehensive, highly concentrated education in business management specifically for artists, designers and related professions. Lest you think that artists and other creatives are the only ones in need of social media marketing 101, I’ve decide to adapt my eight-week course into a weekly column addressing social media marketing for the enterprise.

In an ever-changing social landscape, it’s only fitting that the latest thought piece about mastering the elements of the social enterprise has been published as an eBook. The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing by the folks at Awareness attempts to challenge the way CMOs and social media strategists think about organizing and optimizing social marketing. Lewis and his team presents a Social Funnel that helps to lay out the steps and best practices to get the most value from social media investments.

Breaking news: Social media is not free. Sure, Twitter and Facebook and a slew of other social networking platforms don’t cost anything to sign up. But they do steal your time and energy.

A recent infographic outlines the specific costs associated with implementing social media in an organization. From staffing costs to advertising campaigns to tracking tools, it all adds up.

Many different elements can influence a social media strategy. Most of them rely on anecdotal evidence -- often the result of trial-and-error initiatives. While there’s nothing wrong with using experimental outcomes to plan how to use social media to reach customers, it also helps to use actual data.

Recently, SmartBrief and Summus released the The State of Social Media for Business 2010. It provides a snapshot of how, why and what businesses are doing within the social media world.

Gartner predicted that over 50% of online communities created for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) purposes would fail in 2010 alone. Why? Because clearly defined values were not established at the onset of a social strategy for both the customer and the company. A new study helps us understand why social media project failures occur.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Twitter Finally Cracking Down on Spam
• Mobile Web Traffic Centered Around Social Networking
• Stats Provide Insight Into Twitter User Behavior
• LinkedIn Gains Its 50 Millionth User