Yesterday, Kama posted about how the spring weather we’re finally seeing here in the Ohio valley is getting her excited about gardening.

img "strawberries" courtesy swirus71 on sxc

My mom was an avid gardener as well, and gardening makes a great metaphor for your social media efforts.   Site selection, when you’re gardening, means finding the space with the best combination of elements to grow the results you want.  Some plants prefer sun and dry soil, others prefer shade and lots of moisture.  Planting the right seeds in the wrong place can make your efforts a waste of time.

It’s no different when you’re planning a social media strategy–except the “site” you’re selecting is a website, not a particularly lovely part of your lawn.

Certain websites are better suited to show growth for particular results.

If you’re looking to create a mass following, you’ll need to select the social websites with the broadest reach–sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.

If you’re looking to engage deeply with a very narrow niche audience, you may need to use tools like PostRank, RapLeaf or Flowtown to find lesser-known sites that are go-to spots for that crowd.

Or you might create a panel of enthusiast experts, whose tribal knowledge, to quote Avinash Kaushik, can point you in the right direction.

The important thing to remember is to begin with the end in mind.  Plant your efforts firmly in the ground best suited to produce the harvest you’ve set as a goal.

Work diligently, and odds are good you’ll be enjoying some tasty results sooner than you think.

img "Green Elephant Garden Scuptures" by epSos.De on Flickr

There are many reasons I love spring (being able to wear sandals again, dining outdoors, Waterfront Wednesday concerts are just a few examples), but I also really look forward to gardening.  Yes, gardening.  There’s something really awesome about tiny seeds developing into big, healthy plants.

But before you get to work, you’ve got to do a bit of planning.  Serious gardeners are checking out the seed catalogs in January and February, trying to figure out what this year’s project will be.  They’re making sure all their tools are in the shed and ready to go.

To me, social media is a lot like gardening.  You start small, with a blog post here and a Tweet there, and grow into something bigger gradually.

So if you’ve been a little hesitant to jump into social media, spring is the perfect time to explore.  Check out Twitter and see what all the fuss is about. Visit PostRank.com to discover the most-read blogs in a variety of subjects and to get ideas for your own blossoming blog.

And if you do plan on doing some gardening in the coming months, don’t forget to wear your Bionic Gloves.  They’ve been featured in a variety of publications, including Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal.

(I just couldn’t help a little shameless client promotion!)

…because we’re not using the “b” word (personal brand).

Earlier this week, David wrote about Spring Cleaning Your Social Profiles.  I’d like to offer a slightly more personal take on the subject.

When I was in college, I wrote for our student newspaper.  As a young and eager reporter, I covered many beats, from business to campus to the arts. The experience of working in a newsroom turned out to be a tremendous asset, and has helped me a great deal in my public relations career.

A few years later, while doing some job hunting, I decided to type my name into Google to see what links popped up.  I found the usual stuff—links to articles I’ve written for various publications, online petitions I’ve signed, and so on.  But one link in particular caught my attention.

I had written a short, informational article about getting prepared for Spring Break during my last semester of college.  A website that specialized in, shall we say, ‘spring break fun,’ decided to include the article on their news page.

I was concerned that a potential employer might see this and be offended, so I sent the web site editor a polite message asking to remove the link.  He obliged without hesitation.

The point of this story is that you never really know what’s out in the internet stratosphere…or who might be researching you. It pays to do periodic check-ups of your name on various search engines.  If you see something fishy or potentially damaging, contact the site editor and see if it can be taken down.  By keeping your online social networking profiles up-to-date can save you from problems as well.

After all, if you don’t care about your online image, who will?

"compass" courtesy digital_a on sxc

A few short years ago, my former boss went to Todd Spencer, the CEO here at Doe-Anderson, with a simple request to leave the safe sanctuary of PR and explore the relatively new (to advertising agencies, anyway) frontier of social media.

Meanwhile, I was at a local interactive agency, poking my nose outside the door of banner ads, paid search and email marketing and considering whether the world of blogs, forums and Myspace I’d been immersed in at a personal level had any value for my career.

But that was then.  This is now.  2010.  A whole new decade.

Are there still companies who haven’t entered, at any level, the social web?  Sure. But they’re so far to the right of the adoption bell curve, we’ve effectively entered the territory of the Amish.  They might make awesome baked goods, but don’t know diddly squat about marketing a brand in the digital age.

I have a friend who is a social media consultant.  He spends a large portion of his time writing social media policies and response plans.  While that’s admirable work that fills a need now, I warned him that there’s a limited shelf life there.

Social media has lost it’s new car smell, for many if not most companies.

What’s not going away any time soon?

Content strategy–especially channel- and platform-agnostic content strategy that thinks about mobile, social, email, and yes, print content assets as much as the corporate website or blog.

Media relations that includes publishers of blogs, ezines, podcasts, vlogs forums.

Reputation management that recognizes that stories break on Twitter and then migrate to traditional media, not the other way around.

Community management.  Brand curation. These are things we’re just starting to explore, and will be for a while to come.

I’m doing something with this post that we try not to do here at The Social Enthusiast.  I’m talking to my fellow social media professionals.  We try to keep the editorial focus aimed at brand marketers: CMOs, marketing directors, and others for whom social media fluency is necessary but not central to their work.  People who need to develop enough social fluency and mental frameworks to effectively interact with the people who are at the level of mastery and specialty, to be able to judge good ideas from bad ones.

We’re busy doing work in the field–good work.  We see smart, experienced marketers still struggling with this, and we still struggle to communicate with them, and we’re trying to use what we learn from those struggles to create a sort of Rosetta Stone.  That’s why last month’s posts were so allegorical and brief–we were using the common tongue of metaphor and relationships to communicate the universal aspects of social media (and other marketing disciplines) instead of getting bogged down in the tech of it all.

We could court wannabe social media professionals and get a lot more readers.  We could engage more with the fishbowl, and talk amongst ourselves with other social media professionals, and probably get a lot more comments and traffic.  I don’t know–maybe we should do those things.

But the truth is, courting the wannabes, participating in the fishbowl, and even building a Rosetta Stone for marketers who don’t get social media are things that have a limited lifespan.

I’m breaking an editorial mandate, here.  One I myself set up, along with David.  So I may as well deliver something more than another navel-gazing fishbowl post.  I may as well provide some actionable value here.

I ran across this post linked by someone in my Twitter stream.  Apologies–I can’t remember who, or I’d credit them properly.  It outlines exactly how to install Google Analytics on a Facebook Fan page.  Helpful stuff, if you run a Fan page for clients, and they’d like to know if it’s doing well.

http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/

The one thing that has really frustrated me with Facebook is that their “Insights” often fails to load, or the data export just refuses to download the file.  There have been a couple of times when people have wanted stats on their page, and I just flat-out can’t provide them for a day or two till I can get FB to unclench and let go of their data.

The days of social media being something clients are exploring, without any expectations of business results, are pretty much over for all our clients.  We have to be able to provide hard data that we’re moving a needle of some sort, somewhere.

Way back when we were convincing companies that they needed a website at all, we talked in hits.  Analytics nerds the world over are pretty unanimous that hits are an awful measurement. But it was a starting place.  It was something to count, till we could find something that counts.

If I have any advice for my fellow social media nerds, its that you need to start counting stuff.  Despite the fact that it’s not a numbers game. Despite the fact that it’s all about relationships.  Despite the  fact that you may, in fact, come from a non-techy discipline, and all this techy analytics stuff scares you as much as the touchy-feely social stuff scares your clients.

Because I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to join the Amish for anything but dinner.

One of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers is through a corporate blog. Being able to provide useful content to your readers can be effective in creating brand awareness, thought leadership, as well as provide opportunities for your content and ideas to be shared across social media platforms.

However, many corporate blogs are started and left to die in the blogosphere. In the beginning they had good intentions, but due to lack of focus they slowly fad away.

I would imagine that the overall understanding of the effectiveness of having a blog hasn’t changed, it’s usually loosing momentum and purpose that becomes the deal killer.

Here a few ideas that could kick-start your corporate blog.
1. Establish goals and purpose of your blog.
2. Set specific goals for the first 30-60 days.
3. Draft an editorial calendar for the next 30-60 days.
4. Assign writing assignments with deadlines to all who are on your blogging team.
5. Have 1-2 weeks of post schedule to publish in advance.
6. Evaluate web analytics after the first 30 to determine your effectiveness in regards to your goals.

As you commit to producing content on a regular basis, you’ll begin to see traffic results to your blog, comments to your blog posts, and your content being shared on social networks.

Remember, that readers want to know more than just your products and your pitch. You want to provide insights and information that bring value to your readership.

image credit: spieri sf

Today would have been the 106th birthday of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.

img courtesy wikimedia commons

Supposedly, The Cat in the Hat was the result of an editor giving Seuss a list of 348 first grade reading level words, asking him to cut the list to 250, and write an irresistible children’s book using only those words.

Geisel managed to do it in 236.

Creative constraints can be frustrating (brand messaging in 140 characters, anyone?)  But they can also result in some amazingly good work.

If Dr. Seuss could create timeless work within his creative constraints, so can you.

It’s that time of year to clean up all your social profiles. Can you remember every place you’ve created an account? Are you still using them?

If you’re like everyone else, it’s so easy to sign up for an account for the latest tool and application. If you’re like me, you sign up for accounts to test services and review tools that could be useful both personally and for your clients. Unfortunately, what often happens is that you have s a trail of unused accounts tied to your screen name and email address.

It’s time to take out the digital trash!

Action List:
1. Take inventory of all social accounts, tools and applications
2. Delete all accounts that no longer provides any value.
3. Delete all test accounts

Image by melodramababs via Flickr

This is also the time of year to take the opportunity to “spruce up” all your active social profiles.

Social Media Scrub:
1. Update all bios and profiles
2. Update profile images and custom backgrounds
3. Test and update any links if needed
4. Delete “Friends, Followers and Spammers” who are no longer relevant to the conversation you are participating in.
5. Review and refresh your goals, content strategy and editorial calendar
6. Clean out all spam comments in your comment provider and CMS
7. Delete all “permissions” to Facebook and Twitter from the accounts that you are longer using.

Spring cleaning is never fun, but once you start you’ll be grateful for the clean slate. You’ll also discover a new-found energy and purpose to your social media goals and executions.

Since the core of what we do at Doe-Anderson is building relationships between consumers and brands, we thought it would be cool to use relationships as a theme. So in honor of Valentine’s Day, all this month we’ll be sharing 28 Days to Make People Fall in Love with Your Brand. We hope you enjoy it.

Until you have their number, you don’t have anything.

Do you remember when you were looking for a potential partner to date that you really weren’t going anywhere until you got their number. If you could get their number, you immediately increased your opportunity for future interaction and a potential relationship.

Why Don’t You Do it Online?

What does everyone have that gives you an opportunity to influence directly? An email address.

Every website and blog should have a strategy to build an email database and provide exclusive content to that list of subscribers. If individuals are already visiting your site give them another opportunity to receive communication from you. By opting into your list, they are informing you that they want that communication and are open to the content, product and services that you provide.

By participating in email marketing you:
1. Increase the opportunity for conversions
2. Generate return customers
3. Provide the platform to up-sell and cross-sell
4. Receive feedback from your subscribers

Building an email database can be one of your most valuable resources. Having a strategy to drive traffic to your site is great. Having a clear call to action that builds your email database, converts eyeballs to potential customers.

Since the core of what we do at Doe-Anderson is building relationships between consumers and brands, we thought it would be cool to use relationships as a theme. So in honor of Valentine’s Day, all this month we’ll be sharing 28 Days to Make People Fall in Love with Your Brand. We hope you enjoy it.

Do you remember when your first felt feelings for someone? You counted everything! You could recall phone conversations, how long you talked, and how many times they looked at you. You could quantify everything!

In social media counting everything is just as important.

As the shiny object syndrome begins to wear off, clients are demanding that their efforts in the social space is measured in a meaningful way. No longer is it just about, “joining the conversation” clients want to see tangle results. Most marketers expect the same type of measurement standards as they do with traditional media.

The more you’re able to provide data, the more comfortable the brand and CMO’s will be embracing the effectiveness of social media.

If your goals are clear and your social activity is built upon those goals, then you’ll be able to provide right data.

This data at the very least should include:
1. Friends
2. Followers
3. Mentions
4. Conversations
5. Content shared by friends and followers
6. Content distributed
7. Traffic
8. Pageviews

Depending on the goals, you may also need to measure conversations that led to to leads and sales.

If you’re wanting to integrate social media into your overall marketing strategy, make sure you don’t just settle for owning the tools. Make sure that at the end of the day you can measure your rate of success.

Since the core of what we do at Doe-Anderson is building relationships between consumers and brands, we thought it would be cool to use relationships as a theme. So in honor of Valentine’s Day, all this month we’ll be sharing 28 Days to Make People Fall in Love with Your Brand. We hope you enjoy it.

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

Nobody wants to hear those five dreaded words of rejection from the one they love.  What makes it worse is that everyone knows those five words aren’t true.  Nobody really leaves a relationship with someone they genuinely think is a great catch.  Since when is being with someone out of your league a bad thing that needs to be rectified with a breakup?

That said, sometimes we do a great job of convincing the person we want to attract that maybe they should aim a little higher than us.  We sell ourselves short, and eventually talk people out of wanting to be in a relationship with us.

How does this apply to building a confident social brand?  The most common way premium affinity brands sell themselves short is by literally selling themselves short–by apologizing for or discounting their pricing.

Discounting yourself constantly in a relationship can lead to a loss of confidence from your partner.  Discounting a premium brand constantly can lead to consumers losing confidence that your product or service is genuinely worth the regular price.

Look at your brand’s copy over the course of the economic downturn. Have you been apologizing for your pricing?  Beware giving the message that you’re not really worth it.

Over time, your audience just might believe you.