Digg with the French for Social Media Success?
The time investment required for success in social media can be pretty intense. There are thousands of good possible places you can concentrate on to promote your cause but it is impossible to utilize them all. Which is why having a vision for what you want to accomplish and a plan to get there.
Chris Winfield of SearchEngineLand recently published a set of things you can do this year to achieve social media success. It’s called, “10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008″ and I have his list re-iterated here for your convenience. However you may want to visit the article and read them in more detail to get a more applicable use for these activities. The one that caught my attention was the idea of bookmarking posts you like but in another language. In other words, doing the translation essentially on behalf of the original poster to ultimately benefit you at the SEO level.
Here is his list along with a snippet and estimated time you can expect performing each action…
- Connect w/ Others (1 hour per week) – Add 2 contacts per week to your profile on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
- Master a Discussion Forum (2 hours per week) – Become a regular masterful voice on a popular forum that interests you.
- Trim Your Feed Reader (5 hours per month) – Narrow the selection of blogs you read to just a few and comment on them each.
- Meet a Digger a Day (15 minutes per day) – Contact someone on Digg that interests you and form a bond.
- Publish Company Video - Create a video to represent your company and build links to it. (Excellent Idea).
- Think Globally (10 minutes per submission) – Translate articles you Digg into another language
- Focus on Results – Not all social sites produce fruit. You want to closely monitor how each impacts your traffic and stop using the ones that do not produce.
- Answer Questions (15 minutes per day) - Answer 5 questions a day in your niche on Yahoo! Answers.
- Join the Conversation (20 minutes per day) – Find out where and what others are saying about you and join in on the conversation.
- Year in Reviews (15 minutes per review) – Create reviews on the sites where your company is presented.
Excluding the reviews idea and the company video, this equates to approximately 10 hours per week of recommended activity you can expect to perform in order to achieve success in social media. That is no small chunk of time.
Notice there is no mention of producing content. The time required for researching topics, formulating a thesis or an opinion and then writing on a subject is demanding too. Even when you have people writing for you you still want to research topics and review what is being written.
This form of online brand marketing is no joke. You can’t take it lightly. You can’t expect results simply by creating a profile and posting some photos to it once in a while. You have to divulge yourself into it and engage virtually with those you encounter. Social Media success is no small feat.
The fallacy of social media networking
People often equate social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook to an untapped land of opportunity for marketing purposes. While there is indeed tremendous opportunity for marketing in the online social arena, the formula for success is commonly approached with misconceptions.
For instance, this recent article on Digital Dealer states,
Probably the biggest, most important technique that successful social marketers use is networking. Networking with the community should be common practice for dealers. There are hundreds of blogs on automotive reviews, consumer auto shopping, OEMs, and vendors, along with other car chatter on the internet to comment on, link to, and network with.
Not to suggest that there isn’t opportunity for networking on social media, but is it really “the biggest, most important technique”? Obviously that is a hypothetical suggestion that is open for debate.
I would argue that for the sake of ROI, especially for car dealers because of the nature of the Auto Shopper, that SEO is a more important aspect or benefit with this sort of online brand marketing. To achieve SEO benefits with social media, auto dealers, or any business for that matter, can outsource the work to experts and have professional grade content designed to promote the dealership at the SEO level pumped to their profiles. The formula to accomplish this can be defined, executed, and measured. The dealer could additionally utilize their profile to do some networking but the SEO rewards would essentially be on auto pilot, thus cost-effective.
Think about the time and effort required to benefit at the networking level in social media. If you approach it with automation then you have to design and maintain an effective CRM process custom tailored to each social profile you run. That is time-consuming. Alternatively you could take your networking efforts with an ad-hoc approach, but would this be fruitful numbers-wise? Is it worth spending 20% of your day networking in hopes to pick up an extra sale or two a month?
Networking benefits with social media do exist but they require long-term commitment and vision, two seemingly difficult concepts to apply in automotive retail with high turnover and the weighty emphasis on monthly sales. The SEO rewards however prove more bang for your buck.
Social media for your profit centers
In a recent article by Bobby Malatia of Kain Automotive titled, “Creating Your Internet Dealership”, Malatia identifies several things for dealers to consider when attempting to utilize the Internet for sales in all profit centers versus just car sales. One of the items he presents is the idea of using “landing pages or microsites” to promote the different products in your business. Malatia suggests that they do not have to be “branded by the dealership itself”.
Malatia is right and it brings up a good point.
Consumers are more interested in your product than they are your commodity. Your product is the unique value your company creates, e.g. your brand, by helping customers gain the most utility from your commodity. In the case of car dealers, your commodity is not just automobiles for sale but other things such as service of course and your financing programs, car parts and after market items, rentals, etc.
Within each profit center you often have more than one market audience. Because of this, you might be better off creating a variety of landing pages and microsites to reach out to each of these different consumer audiences.
This is where social media sites can come in to play. In fact, using social media for each profit center and for each consumer audience could be an extraordinary way to accomplish this form of online brand marketing.
For instance, MySpace is probably not the best place to promote high line or luxury vehicles, however it is very fertile land for after market parts and accessories of some economical performance vehicles such as Mazda and Subaru. You could create create multiple MySpace profiles to represent each of these particular market niches, this giving your dealership, or retail center, several representations of its business across numerous social media sites. The primary work entailed to accomplish this is the setup of each profile, but once you have integrated it with the sales process of each profit center then from there it is simply a matter of promoting it via content and SEO.
Imagine a future where automotive retail is not just a physical showroom with a corresponding website but a diverse array of physical and virtual representations of each unique profit center in the dealership that has an automated sales CRM process built into it custom tailored to each specific market niche. That would be applied technology.
