Making the Most of Social Media Marketing
Dr Hunter Madsen of Yahoo! gave the keynote at Online Revealed Canada today.
He started with this definition of social media marketing:
Social media marketing is when you empower people to tell your story in a way that enhances your brand online.
Canadians are the most intensely active people online and it’s social media that is driving engagement online. Two out of of every three Canadians are active on social media sites. Why do they go there? Entertainment, information and knowledge, says Madsen..
Reviews and recommendations are the number one influencer online – and although this is perfect for the travel industry it is conspicuously absent from most travel and destination sites, says Madsen. By a show of hands in the room a mere handful are doing any social media marketing..
Yahoo has been involved with affinity groups and communities for years and is now immersed in social media activities – such as del.icio.us and flickr. Madsen points out that images and video are strong influencers for travel purchase and if a travel or destination site is not using visual elements they’re missing an effective marketing tool. Using photo and video sharing would be a perfect social media strategy for a travel site.
Madsen offers these basic principles of social media
1. You do not own your brand. It lives in the hearts and minds of your customers and the public at large
2. You have to be authentic. People want genuine, from the heart content. They’re not interested in marketing message-speak
4. Tolerate and learn from negative feedback
5. Empower and showcase your advocates.Help them to talk about your brand.
He says there are four sectors of social media. See how you could use these categories to best advantage:
Connecting – networks, newsgroups
Expression – blogs, feeds, ratings, reviews
Facilitate with tools – brand universe (http://www.pontiacunderground.com) flickr, YouTube
Incentives – competitions, create community
Lessons to be learned:
- A brand advocate will create content that promotes your brand
- Focus on the user – make them the heroes
- Sometimes they need a hand – give them the tools or facilitate the end product
- Good user generated content fuels more user content
My social media session right after the keynote was full and the discussion was lively. Dr. Madsen certainly opened their eyes and gave them something to think about. My session gave them specific tools nad strategies to get started.
A good first step is to create articles about the destination and syndicate this content in an RSS feed along with social media bookmarking and tags in place.
And then plan how you can make it possible to post reviews and ratings along with trip stories, images and video content.
