Essentially, this graphic actually details the social graph and the effect that one strategic action can have all over the social landscape.  Online marketing folks take note. You are being watched, by your own will, that is. No big brother here. Welcome to the new age of marketing without boundaries.

The problem is that people have yet to “get” it. SMM is just one of the many channels in marketing, and each one of these channels does have a point of diminishing return. SSM strength lies in having conversation with your client base.

If all you want to to is converse with your customers to understand how your product is performing or to understand consumer behavior, then SMM is a great way of doing this. Otherwise, you need to have another engagement plan if your primary goal is sales or business leads.

Here are some thoughts on infiltration and intelligence gathering from the master strategist, Sun Tzu:

With advance information, costly mistakes can be avoided, destruction averted, and the way to lasting victory made clear. Subtly, very subtly, do not neglect the use of intelligence.

The five types of spies:

Wise rulers and capable commanders win because they have advance information abut the enemy.

1. Local intelligence uses natives to show the way

2. Inside intelligence uses officials in the enemy court

3. Counterintelligence uses bought-out enemy spies

4. Deadly Intelligence working to deceive outwardly and knowingly directs the spy to pass deceitful information to the enemy

5. Secure intelligence spy is one who returns safely to make a report to the king.

When all five types of intelligence occur together and none know what method’s being used, then this is called the divine intelligence, a valuable asset to any ruler.

None is more trustworthy than the intelligence force. None should be better rewarded than the spies and those who can work in great secrecy. Intelligence cannot be employed without enlightenment and intuition nor can it be used without humanity and generosity. The work of intelligence cannot succeed without subtlety and ingenuity. Therefore, the use of intelligence must not be neglected.

SMM is efficient only if all you wish to do is engage in light interaction and gather information about your firm, products, services and reputation. You cant just use SMM as an out-of-the-box tool.

Small companies can use SMM with relatively low cost as described in Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. There are however, certain costs and commitments necessary for executing SSM.

One big problem with SMM is that it is NOT scalable.  For mass message distribution, TV is still king, though online banners does have the ability to deliver to niche demographics and psychographics. Seeding SSM takes time and can be expensive depending how fast your want your community to grow. furthermore, the audience that may be willing to be a part of such a community is small, unless you bribe them and that might not be the best way to do it.

SSM is scalable and efficient in only starting a conversation with a brand audience for those who are willing. Treat this audience as your scouts/recon party they can provide good information. They are not your main army group and will not drive new markets expansion strategies or new product development. They will provide your market research team some great insights into their behavior, their purchasing rationale, their expectations and usage.

It doesn’t have to be like that. With the help of Whole Foods, let me give you a step-by-step approach on how to create a perfect and successful Facebook business page.

Whole Foods, with their wholesome products and clever marketing, has captured our imagination in more ways than just healthy food. They’ve been connecting with local communities, their in-store periodicals are neat, they have cooking lessons on site, they have a variety of websites, blogs, videos and podcasts where they try to enrich (and reach) their customers as much as possible.

And, of course, they’re on social networks including Facebook. A social network is a great way for a firm to aggregate all its online marketing programs. Facebook pages help you do just that. The Whole Foods Facebook page is an impressive marketing effort because of it’s completeness and precision.

Let’s understand the steps you need to follow to make your Facebook page as complete as possible as well as the steps you have to undertake to sustain your Facebook page and keep it active and energetic.

Step 1. Make your introduction stand out:

Let’s look at Whole Foods’ introduction page. It’s comprehensive and detailed. Note the outbound links to their web properties as well as a detailed introduction about the company and their core values. Describing your core values and principles is very useful on a social network as people are looking to connect with organizations that resonate with their own life beliefs.

Step 2. Fresh Wall content keeps everyone interested:

Keep your Facebook wall active. The number of entries on your wall is one barometer of success on Facebook especially for folks contemplating whether to join your page or not. If you’ve just posted a blog entry on your blog or just posted a video on YouTube or created a neat new landing page, post the same on your wall and even ask for comments. Your members will be happy to oblige.

With the Whole Foods Wall, there’s never a dull moment. There’s always new content on their wall to keep the page active and keep members interested. They feed in entries from their videos, various blogs and other online activity to keep the wall vibrant.

Step 3. Ensure that you have some Video inventory:

If you’re creating a page, a big no-no is to leave your videos section empty. So many businesses make this mistake.

If you do not have your own videos, try to invest in efforts to make some. These days, its relatively easier and cheaper too. Create videos that add value to your user base.

Whole Foods’ video section on their page is stocked with a variety of videos about how to pack a healthy lunch for your kids or the activities of an organic farm or a lesson on how to cook some delicious food.

Step 4. Use the Boxes to promote other web initiatives:

So, in addition to all the cool stuff you’re doing on Facebook, you may have a blog, you may have a Squidoo lens, you connect with your customers through email etc. There’s no reason why you cant promote your other initiatives on your Facebook page. Use the boxes section to do just that. For e.g. have a basic descriptor of your blog or Squidoo lens and have a link present if anyone wishes to check it out.

Whole Foods uses the boxes features to promote their blog as well as the Whole Planet Foundation. A  Flickr badge is placed strategically alongside the outbound links and the Whole Foods Foundation promos. Additionally, they also have an email capture present there.

From this, we see that Whole Foods promotes their blogs, their photo-sharing web initiative and are also inviting folks to join their email mailing list through the Boxes section.

Step 5. Ensure that your RSS/Blog feeds are current:

Ensure that your RSS is peppered with content from your blogs. If that’s a problem, find a blog that’s connected with the services or products you offer and RSS their feed into your page. Remember, the idea here is to create a page that is complete in all respects. Ideally, it’ s best to have content that created by you but, if that’s not possible, then use the above solution.

No problem here with Whole Foods. Apart from having feeds from their regular blog, the Whole Foods RSS section also has a feed from the Whole Planet Foundation blog. They’ve also utilized the RSS features of their page to keep their members abreast of any new podcasts that they create on a variety of topics.

Step 6. Clarify company/product issues on the Notes section:

If you require to clarify anything about your company or products (new launch that went bad, negative reactions from the marketplace etc) use the Notes section to do just that.

Whole Foods present opinions and ideas on current issues or topics within their Notes section. When their CEO committed a gaffe with his free-markets opinion of health care in the Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods’ progressive customer base was not too happy about it. While the CEO clarified his position on various forums, Whole Foods also used the Notes section of this page to clarify the same to their customers.

Things to Note :

- Creating a Facebook page is like creating one central space for all your online marketing activities to converge.

- Ensure that the page ‘Stays Alive”. At no point of time should you ever neglect it. It’s not a self sustaining organism. Treat it like a goldfish in a bowl. Sure, it’ll stay alive for a while, but it needs food from you to swim around.

- Duplication of the same content is not wise. Whole Foods could’ve used the Photos tab on their page and filled it up with the same photos from Flickr – they chose not to. In this way, they made sure that all the tabs on the top of the page were visible.

- Have fun and patience doing this. You have to have the right attitude while doing this. Once you’re positive about this, good thing will happen gradually. Good luck!

It’s as simple as that.

Process to measure your social media campaigns.

1. Determine the desired business result: What do you want from this exercise? More sales, more leads, more email sign-ups? Be clear about your end goals and state them upfront.

2. Identify and measure the social media activity leading to the result: Which social media platforms will you use to achieve the above business result. Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Twitter? Don’t fall into the trap of blindly going after the usual suspects. Make sure that the social network and your brand have a reasonably strong relevance and only then go ahead with implementation.

3. Report and analyze all such social media activity regularly: Use some of  the tools below to see how your brand or website is faring across the Internet. This will help you get a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

4. Tweak business results or shift resources to mediums that work, if necessary: If some of the social networks don’t seem to be working, then divert resources from them to the networks which are giving you results and helping you achieve your stated goals.

That’s part I. Here are some tools that can be used to measure your social media initiatives:

1. Addictomatic : A very cool (and useful) tool that provides you with an aggregate of your brand visibility across various social networks like Digg, Twitter, Bing etc.
2. Blogpulse: This is a Blog search engine that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. Contains a conversation tracker tool
3. Boardreader: This tool searches forums and message boards for information about your brand.
4. Buzzmonitor: A very useful tool in the form of a widget that measures the buzz your brand’s been creating on the web.
5. Compete.com: One of my favorite tools. This is an excellent site that provides basic metrics for any website or comparable websites. Don’t forget to check their blog for some useful analysis.
6. Facebook Lexicon: This will help you monitor the frequency with which your brands are being discussed on wall posts on Facebook
   
7. Google alerts: Here you can get email updates of your key search terms and brand mentions on the Internet.
8. Google insights: This tool will help compare search volume over time for your brand and your keywords.
9. Google trends: This tools helps you compare search trends for your business keywords.
10. Howsociable: Another ultra cool tool that provides you with your brand visibility metrics and calculates a social media score for your brand. Definitely gets a “two thumbs up” from me.
11. Newsflashr: Like Web Signal 2.0, it’s an RSS aggregator and will provide you with real time feeds from sites of your choosing. It has a neat search engine that searches the news for mentions of your brand.
12. Summize: This neat tool (which was bought by Twitter for $15M more than a year ago) helps you search for keywords in ‘tweets’ on Twitter.
13. Technorati: The master of all blog aggregators. A strong rank here does wonders for your website. It has an excellent search engine too.
14. Twingly: Yet another blog search engine.
15. Xinu: This tool provides a variety of metrics detailing the performance of your website.
16. Quarkbase: Get all the information you require about a website from this tool.
17. Website Grader: A neat tool from the HubSpot boys at MIT. Get some key website stats.
18. Socialmention: This is a real-time user generated content search engine.
19. Bit.ly: We’ve all used URL shorteners to post on Twitter. Bit.ly gives you more in terms of some basic analytics for your abbreviated urls on Twitter.
20. Backtype: Another brand visibility tool. I inserted it here because of its visually cool interface.

Additionally, there are other tools that you can use ( Like Yahoo Pipes which is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mash-ups using a visual editor.), but let’s be practical here. You only need one set of tools to measure the performance of your social media initiatives and along with that you require discipline and focus.

And, yeah, a little bit of luck!

Everybody and the kitchen sink has written articles, treatises, white papers, black papers on what to do with it and how to do it? Heck, with all this advice dispensed freely, why are people not able to understand what social marketing is & how to use the same to forge stronger connections with their customers. The problem is lack of discipline and lack of a tangible process.

So, what is Social Media Marketing?

Before defining this, let’s understand the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Web 2.0 apart from being the next generation of website design and online customer interaction came into being because of a cultural shift. This shift occurred among Internet users who were bored with being passive surfers (’90s) and transitioned into searchers (’03-’05) and finally into active content creators (‘o6 onwards). From a business’s standpoint, there was a clear shift from push marketing to a combination of push and pull through and it was easy to have two-way conversations with customers. Additionally, all the big search engines Google, Yahoo etc got on board the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

So, with all this background,  let’s try to understand what Social media marketing or Social Media Optimization (SMO) is  :

Social media marketing is the technique of using social media platforms and online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Why is it so important?

Today more than 150 million Americans research products online. Consumer forums have become even more powerful with raw feedback about products and services available almost instantly. Add to this, the fact that folks today trust word-of-mouth as the best source of information (90% today as oppsed to 65% back in the seventies) makes social media a very powerful medium of communication. Additionally, your pre-sale costs  decrease with the use of social media as you can use customers to sell your products, encourage self-service or peer-to-peer inquiries, enable demand generation through word of mouth and engender the creation of customer generated content. You increase brand loyalty by providing the benefit of a personalized experience and also increase sales, increase satisfaction, lower churn rate and are able to get direct customer feedback.

Finally, you can use these customers to conduct market research, obtain product feedback and increase conversion rates.

Another great benefit is adding continuously the sum of direct customer feedback and experiences to the organization tribal knowledge base. Traditionally, marketing, sales/support and product teams were key sources to the organizational tribal knowledge base but today you have the added benefit of direct customer feedback.

How has the marketing mix changed?

Immensely. See the table alongside for the changes in the marketing mix in today’s web 2.0 world. Interestingly, with the new mix your online brand identity is now shaped by customer chatter and feedback on communities and forums, views and thoughts on blogs or micro-blogs like Twitter,  experiences or visuals on Youtube and finally, product reviews on shopping sites or social network groups.

Any benefits of using social media in my marketing mix :

• Increase brand visibility
• Build brand loyalty
• Increase customer engagement
• Gain insight into the customer
• Influence communities
• Reduce service costs
• Increase website traffic
• Increase lead generation
• Get ideas for product improvements or new products

How to do this?

Step 1 : Understand the nature of the social network. On Facebook and mySpace,  users log in to connect with their friends and fulfill  their(online or offline) social commitments. If you go to Digg or del.ic.io.us, the users there are more functional and are looking for web resources in line with their interests.

Step 2 : Start small. Do just jump into the middle of the lake. Start with one product or if you want to, one product line. Depending on which social network you use, ensure that your brand message is delivered clearly and concisely.

Step 3 : Be comprehensive. When you create a profile on a social network, ensure that you provide as much information as possible. Fill out the complete profile. Use these networks to also promote your SEO efforts so make sure that your top 10 relevant keywords are used when penning down the description.

Step 4 : Seed your initiative. Connect with friends and ask them to join, say your product group or page on Facebook or comment on a blog post. Ditto for a Youtube account that you may have created.

Step 5 : Use linking well. Using the right anchor text, ensure that you have outbound links from these networks to your website. This will aid your SEO efforts to an extent (Google’s spiders have stopped giving relevance to outbound links to your website, Twitter has a no-follow rule in place).

Step 6 : Keep it active. Don’t just create a social network account and then sit back. This is an interactive medium. People want to communicate and get feedback. Engage the users or followers of your groups/accounts. Ask them questions about your products. Address their concerns. Poll them on the competition or to understand their buying or usage behavior.

So, as you can see, once you have a strong network of customers, you have a base from which you can get feedback about everyhting about your products or company. Using digital social media is a strong opportuntiy that should not be ignored or taken lightly, because you could be missing out on a tremendous opportunity to grow your business.