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Great advice from the new book:  Power Friending Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business-

1. Act authentically. A few years I worked as a social media consultant with Tony Robbins. As a leading speaker, entrepreneur, and coach, he is one of the busiest people I know. Still, today, Tony has time to manage many of his own social media efforts. As an active Twitter user (@tonyrobbins), he shares honest and compelling personal and professional messages. When he recently celebrated his 50th birthday, he took the time to record a friendly audio message for his fans. Being honest, accessible, and authentic is a key ingredient to social media success.

2. Make time. People complain endlessly about not having time to roll social media efforts into their lives. Let’s face it, many of us are short on time. As many highly effective people will attest, you always have time for the things you put first. Take the Tony example, I’m quite sure he doesn’t have time to record friendly audio and video messages for an audience but he makes time because he knows it’s important for his business.

3. Be consistent. As much as you want to run away from your email and the web for a few days here and there, to ensure that your online marketing efforts are getting results try to participate in the social media world on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean that you have to stay glued to your computer 24-7, but try to respond to comments within twenty-four or forty-eight hours during the work week.

4. Tell stories. If you’re looking for content ideas, there is nothing better than a good story. Whether you’re sharing photos on Flickr or blogging on Blogger, people love to look inside the lives of people at home and at work.  Although you don’t want to share anything that makes you uncomfortable, a little personality goes a long way online.

5. Plan ahead. When I interviewed the face of Ford’s social media efforts for my book he explained that a strategic plan kept his company on top. “A solid social media strategy meant that we had a plan and were well prepared for the newfound attention we received,” said Scott Monty.  While you might not be experience a huge wave of social media activity right now, six months down the road this could change. As a result, you should be prepared.

6. Embrace criticism. No one likes negative comments, but may times this feedback can help your organization make appropriate changes. The worst thing you can do when someone lashes out with a complaint is to ignore them completely. Often times, the individual simply wants a reaction and someone to listen to their problems.

7. Listen well. To pick up on the last point, be aware of what people are saying about your brand or business. A free and easy way to do this is to sign up for Google Alerts, so you can monitor online conversations on a regular basis.  Depending on what you hear, look to your plan to figure out how you want to engage.

8. Create a policy. As social media continues to grow quickly, and more than 400 million people worldwide continue to flock to Facebook, now is a good time for your business to develop a social media policy. This document can help your team determine what’s appropriate to talk about online, and how they should interact in various situations. For example, Coca-Cola’s social media policy includes a few smart guidelines, including advising employees that the Internet is permanent and that local posts have global significance.

9. Go mobile. Remember how quickly the mobile world is exploding. Within more than one million iPads sold since launch, the demand for apps on the go shouldn’t be ignored.  Consider developing your own application, either now or put it on your project plan for the future.

10. Have fun. Although the technology is constantly evolving, and often frustrating, there are lots of exciting opportunities in the social media environment. A few weeks ago I hosted a workshop where attendees were tasked with developing an online video campaign for a fictitious airline in under thirty minutes. Many groups pitched pretty traditional ideas, but one group dragged their chairs up on stage and acted out an online skit with “Amelia Earhart” leading the audience through their plans to go viral. In other words, the most creative and original ideas have the best chance to stand out.

There are a number of major changes and new features in the pipeline for Twitter. Here is an overview:

Proximity- If you were not aware of it, Twitter considers itself to be a largely mobile service. Sure, during its adolescence it grew mostly on its website, but now with the plethora of smartphones Twitter is focusing on its mobile side.

Today Twitter began to discuss “points of interest,” that are going to allow tweets to associate tweets with locations, and not just raw latitude and longitude data. You can tie a tweet to a place. Everyone is noticing the similarity of this to what Foursquare and Galla are doing.

Twitter had this to say “[points of interest are a ]way to see where a tweet is coming from but also a way to read all the tweets coming from specific nearby landmarks.” That is going to make Twitter more personal, and more interesting. As we will see, more data more relevance, or as @Rsarver said “proximity is a proxy for relevancy.”

User Streams- If you thought that PubSubHubBub was fast, wait until you see User Streams, Twitter’s upcoming uber-real-time feed. Imagine no lag whatsoever between when I tweet, and when it shows up in your desktop Tweetdeck. This is the Google Wave of tweets.

Even better, it is going to come with no rate limits to let everyone use it as they will. No more running out of API calls, hallelujah. Assuming that Twitter can handle the load that this will add to their hardware, this is going to make Twitter feel much more like the final version of FriendFeed: information overload.

If you are familiar with Clicky’s Spy feature, it is like this but for the updates you want. And is not just for updates, but also for your complete social graph of DMs, @s, Favorite tweets and so forth. Twitter is only letting developers play with this for a few days as a trial, so we have to wait, but when this does come out it is going to be a massive upgrade to the basic Twitter experience.

A Twitter is going to let developers and applications tag tweets with metadata. What type of metadata? Any metadata that developers want.

Twitter decided to let developers decide how to handle the next big thing in metadata. What is even more important is Twitter’s decision to let developers pull the data back out of Twitter, once it has been sent it. More or less, this is a read write API for calling and tagging anything.

@Anywhere- If you missed our coverage, check it out here. @Anywhere is live, and out in the wild. Bringing deep Twitter integration to a plethora of websites, @Anywhere is going to bring hovercards, tweets, and other Twitter features inside of a publisher’s website.

If you know Facebook connect, this is Twitter’s answer.

Communication/Developer Relations- Twitter is launching a developer website, and is working to have more open and active discussions with developers as to what they need, what they want, what they hate, and what needs to change right away.

Twitter could do nothing smarter than this. If they want to stay ahead of their competition, and continue to be the darling that they are to all of our hearts, this is the golden goose they need to keep fed.

Maybe it’s because you’re in marketing. Maybe it’s because you’re from the younger generation assumed to be digital natives. Or maybe it’s because you’re already been experimenting with social media and your success has been noticed.

You have chosen you to write a social media plan, now what? Where do you start?

Here are some ideas

1. Opportunity Backgrounder

Start your social media plan with some startling statistics and pithy quotes about the huge shift away from traditional publishing towards social media.

If you wrote this plan two years ago, you would have leaned on the endorsement of old media with quotes like this:

“Consumers are flocking to blogs, social-networking sites and virtual worlds. And they are leaving a lot of marketers behind.” – The Wall Street Journal

But now you can tell the big opportunity of social media by just relying on social media’s accomplishments. Include nuggets like:

* 4 of the top 7 highest-traffic websites (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Blogger) are social media websites
* Two-thirds of the global internet population visit social networks — Nielson, Global Faces and Network Places
* More than half of all people in the U.S. over 12 have set up a social media profile
* With over 400 million users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world
* Twitter now has 110 million users and is adding 300,000 a day

Add with a flourish a quote or two from a top social media book, such as Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, or The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott.

2. Define Social Media

Because social media is such a nebulous thing for many, you need to put concise parameters on what it is. However, don’t start your plan with the definition of social media because it’s not as exciting as the first section about the big opportunity. Get their attention first, and then you can go Webster on them. Include something like this:

“Social media is user-generated content on the internet. It’s created with free or inexpensive technology, is easy to update, and can reach a niche audience or millions. It can be mere words in a blog, but also user-generated videos, photos, and audio. It can be interactive with unfiltered comments from visitors. And as user-generated content, it does away with controls associated with traditional media – and most of all, it removes the need for big media.”

3. List Tangible Business Goals

If you don’t already have a social media plan, it’s very possible that your top management fears that social media is only a plaything. You have to show them you mean business. Tell them how you will use social media activities to:

* Build awareness
* Strengthen relationships with clients, prospects, and influencers
* Better understand your buyers
* Improve customer service
* Identify new product ideas
* Increase web site traffic
* Improve search engine rankings
* Drive traffic to your trade show displays at events
* Generate leads
* Generate sales

You don’t have to promise to do all these things. And preferably your goals will match top management’s goals. But whichever goals you choose, make them attainable, and include a measurement plan. Ask for a grace period (at least several months) for learning and experimentation until you have to start proving tangible results.

4. Plan A Timeline Of Steps

You can’t just push a button and have a full-fledged social media marketing program running full-swing. But management won’t wait forever, either. Give them an idea of what your steps will be, which may include:

* Time to define goals, objectives, and strategy
* Time to get trained on social media
* Time to determine team, either internally, choosing a social media consultant, or both
* Setting up accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube
* Finding your existing community of clients, prospects, and influencers on the main social media sites listed above, on niche social media sites, and on established industry blogger sites (if you determine your clients are not yet on social media, you may not have a plan!)
* Time to set up your own blog
* The sequence of social media sites you will concentrate your efforts
* Time needed for listening to each online community
* Time to develop a following
* Time to create content, such as a blog (which is ongoing), videos, white papers, podcasts, and more
* Time to learn time-saving tools such as RSS feeds, Technorati, Hootsuite, Bitly, and more
* Dates of pre-scheduled progress reports

Write this timeline of steps on paper, not in stone. This is a working plan that you use every week, and change as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

5. Set Realistic Expectations

Because social media revolves around so many free tools, and because it has become the darling of marketing hipsters everywhere, expectations run high. So you also need to help your team understand there’s no guarantee it will be a silver bullet. Tell them things like:

* Social media is not a panacea: if your company or product sucks, social media is not going to make that go away
* While many of the tools are free, it can take a substantial investment in time and consistent effort to build up a loyal following on the main social media sites
* Social media is not just another advertising channel – old-school product messages will go down in flames
* There is a substantial learning curve of the technology, language, and culture of the various social media sites
* Social media is always evolving, so successful methods can stop working
* Success may require effort from a team, not just one person

6. Ask for Resources

Getting this plan accomplished will require resources. Don’t be shy, ask for help, be it training, people’s time, or budget to pay for consultants, website hosting fees, a video camera, or useful web applications you later determine you need. Because social media requires near constant attention, tell them you need a laptop with broadband access, and a smart phone with an unlimited web access plan, too.

And ask for something free but priceless: For your top management to share their buy-in with your plan to help you get more cooperation from the rest of your company.

7. Recommend Who Does Social Media For Your Company

The first step of choosing who does social media for your company is deciding between doing it internally, hiring a consultant to do it, or a combination. You can shorten your learning curve with social media consultants who can train you and help identify online communities where your clients already gather. But ultimately, your social media activity really should be done by people who work for your company. It’s just too hard to hire an outsider to be the authentic voice of your company.

Then figure out who does social media within your company. Just remember that while the youngest member of your marketing or customer service team may be the most familiar with social media, they may not be the best choice to represent your company in social media. You want someone who has:

* Deep knowledge of your customers, industry, products, and company
* Exemplifies the personality of your organization
* Insatiable curiosity
* Integrity
* Good people and communication skills
* A quick study on technology
* Very strong work ethic

That person, of course, may end up being you.

8. Finish with an Urgent Call to Action

While similar to how you started your plan, you want to finish with some more strident points that create a sense of urgency. End your plan with things like:

* “We no longer control our brand – it is being shaped by our customers in social media with or without us, so we must engage with them to protect and enhance the brand.”
* “Social media is where our communities are shifting their attention; we ignore them at our peril.”
* “If we delay our entry too long we risk being left behind by our customers and our competitors.”

Social Media is a vast universe of communities, cultures, and ultimately, for the marketer, choices. I hope these 8 parts of a social media plan will help you to inspire your organization to get engaged with your clients, prospects, and influencers via social media.

Twitter has a steady stream of updates, capabilities and new offerings. Following some of the key innovations.

Proximity

If you were not aware of it, Twitter considers itself to be a largely mobile service. Sure, during its adolescence it grew mostly on its website, but now with the plethora of smartphones Twitter is focusing on its mobile side.

Today Twitter began to discuss “points of interest,” that are going to allow tweets to associate tweets with locations, and not just raw latitude and longitude data. You can tie a tweet to a place. Everyone is noticing the similarity of this to what Foursquare and Galla are doing.

Twitter had this to say “[points of interest are a ]way to see where a tweet is coming from but also a way to read all the tweets coming from specific nearby landmarks.” That is going to make Twitter more personal, and more interesting. As we will see, more data more relevance, or as @Rsarver said “proximity is a proxy for relevancy.”

User Streams

If you thought that PubSubHubBub was fast, wait until you see User Streams, Twitter’s upcoming uber-real-time feed. Imagine no lag whatsoever between when I tweet, and when it shows up in your desktop Tweetdeck. This is the Google Wave of tweets.

Even better, it is going to come with no rate limits to let everyone use it as they will. No more running out of API calls, hallelujah. Assuming that Twitter can handle the load that this will add to their hardware, this is going to make Twitter feel much more like the final version of FriendFeed: information overload.

If you are familiar with Clicky’s Spy feature, it is like this but for the updates you want. And is not just for updates, but also for your complete social graph of DMs, @s, Favorite tweets and so forth. Twitter is only letting developers play with this for a few days as a trial, so we have to wait, but when this does come out it is going to be a massive upgrade to the basic Twitter experience.

Annotations Twitter is going to let developers and applications tag tweets with metadata. What type of metadata? Any metadata that developers want.

Twitter decided to let developers decide how to handle the next big thing in metadata. What is even more important is Twitter’s decision to let developers pull the data back out of Twitter, once it has been sent it. More or less, this is a read write API for calling and tagging anything.
@Anywhere

If you missed our coverage, check it out here. @Anywhere is live, and out in the wild. Bringing deep Twitter integration to a plethora of websites, @Anywhere is going to bring hovercards, tweets, and other Twitter features inside of a publisher’s website.

If you know Facebook connect, this is Twitter’s answer.
Communication/Developer Relations

Twitter is launching a developer website, and is working to have more open and active discussions with developers as to what they need, what they want, what they hate, and what needs to change right away.

Twitter could do nothing smarter than this. If they want to stay ahead of their competition, and continue to be the darling that they are to all of our hearts, this is the golden goose they need to keep fed.

Many brands are feeling the pressure to keep up with the times! It’s no longer sufficient to offer “one size fits all” content to consumers. So what’s the secret? Social networking seems to be the hot topic, so maybe that’s the ultimate solution. In this is day and age, it is essential for brands to embrace a practical and achievable action plan for their digital future.

Brands must ensure their content is not just clutter on the Web. Well-defined, relevant, fresh knowledge is a tremendous magnet for prospective consumers.  This may sound like preliminary Web 1.0 advice, but surprisingly, many brands still aren’t doing Web 1.0 correctly. So, that’s the first step — go from Content to Knowledge.

The next step is to extend value by creating community connections around the knowledge.  This aspect of the brand digital strategy is centered on people and their ability to connect to the things that are meaningful to them.  Interaction is the key ingredient of any community Web site and group forming can be a powerful exercise.  This is web 2.0 at its finest, not just social networking, but professional knowledge sharing.

Finally, the brand can extend to web 3.0+, relevant and semantic user experiences in an interactive marketplace. Brands can facilitate the knowledge, connections and business of its category. Consumers collaborating online, exchanging ideas, sharing and contributing knowledge.  Effective social strategic planning and measurement will lead to better ongoing results.

In summary…

Step 1: Knowledge (Web 1.0)
Strategy: Convert content to knowledge
Tactics:
* Harvest existing knowledge assets into central repository.
* Use analytics to determine which content is most popular. Analytics is a fantastic tool. With authentic social interaction you can learn about the tastes and demands of your members.
* Keep content easily accessible and fresh/current.
* Keep design/layout intuitive and consistent.

Step 2: Connections (Web 2.0)
Strategy: Turn member data into community of connections.
Tactics:
* Allow for user generated feedback to ensure content (knowledge) is meaningful: ratings, commenting.
* Facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing through integrated professional networking solution with features including member profiles, messaging, groups and resources.
* Connect outside organization walls with Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr).

Step 3: Marketplace (Web 3.0+)
Strategy: Create a “community beacon” through relevant knowledge, connections and products.
Tactics:
* “Brand” all Content.
* Deliver Relevant/Targeted Content.
* Offer Personalized User Experiences.
* Distribute and Connect with Video, Mobile, RealTime.

After creating a successful pop-up shop in Facebook for their Rachel Roy brand, Jones Apparel Group decided to create a “fan shop” for their Nine West brand. Only fans of Nine West on Facebook can access the “Shop Lookbook,” and they get a 15% discount through the end of the month on the items offered.

The flash-based store within Facebook (shown above) was easy to navigate. Several products were available, and fans are allowed to “like” and “share” them. Items are added to a shopping cart, and clicking on “Go to Shopping Bag” takes the user to the Nine West e-commerce site where they can view their cart and see the 15% discount. Its a pretty seamless experience that leverages the e-commerce site nicely.

Due to theses efforts, both of the Nine West brands have significantly increased their “fans” in Facebook. This is the equivalent of opting-in for future wall postings, which are typically promotions.

Social Retailing will continue in new and innovative ways and it is essential for retailers to recognize the need to take the store to the customers and instead of expecting customers to always seek them out.

1. Profiling/Foot-printing/Mapping

• Identify social network channels, e.g; social media neighborhoods, third party influencers, etc

• Identify activists target habits – online by segment

• Identify Opinion leaders in the group – This is done by targeting activists who frequently offer or are elicited for category-related advice

• Identify the best “Social media marketing” practices against each group and their habits

• Listen and monitor the tone of the communications online, so any social material we create is in the “tone and speak” of the online communities.

2. When in Rome!

No social media campaign should be undertaken without due diligence. The community not organizations owns the social channel. Due diligence in social media is to “listen”. Providing a clear insight into “What’s on our minds”; “What’s our emotive triggers”; “How are we speaking – tone and language” ; “Where are we hanging out online – What is the online social neighborhood?”.

This research and preparation grounds any strategy and recommendations, it is also a process of ongoing analysis to keep up with our society and their thoughts to best serve the right message, the right engagement, at the right time, for maximum viral input.

3. Monitor

* So you can use blogs for ongoing research and, following the conversation threads to track influencers and engage with them as advocates
* Posting feedback, helping your client through training to conduct an ongoing, resource light post back strategy and implementation
* Providing snap-shot tracking reports
* Monitor the activity with access to your own analytics to see where the uptake and successes are to prove:
* Measure the volume of traffic
* Breakout the volume of uptake generated by the social media marketing activity as opposed to the normal traffic
* Measure the impact of the social media marketing activity

4. Engage Meaningfully

We will engage with specific elements of the blog community to create new highly emotive conversations and useful content pieces to the online wider audience than the traditional activist base you already has. We will create debate to the broadest reach of audience who may not even be aware of the issues. We will put the issues front of mind through powerful emotive commentary that they can connect with. We will understand the emotive arc through the initial research phase of the activity, because we will ask them.

5. Enable the Discussion by:

* Listening to online conversations
* Identifying opinion leaders
* Developing content based on what is learned
* Participating, commenting and generating interest
* Becoming a resource
* Supporting your client to build your online personality through the training program
* Syndicating RSS content
* Using your social media user generated content, cut up and repurposed for Online Consumer Relations.

6. Optimize By:

* Increasing your linkability
* Making tagging and bookmarking easy
* Rewarding inbound links
* Helping your content travel
* Encouraging the mash-up
* Implementing “Keyword” strategy incorporation
* Developing contextual links within the body of the content
* Citation strategy

7. Report KPI’s

1. Pre-activity word of mouth benchmark report will be supplied at the start of the research,
2. Ongoing snap-shot reports to measure results. The reports will measure social media marketing & advocacy success
3. Ensuring Check’s and Benchmarks are enabled by: 1.Using ‘control areas’ where the word of mouth campaign is run in order to measure the effect of the campaign, 2. Measuring changes in word of mouth pre-and post-actions and track online word of mouth to measure changes of the ratio of word of mouth, 3. Tracking recommendation rates and how they change over time, 4. Including an online element that allows use of web statistics and online feedback to measure reach and participation levels, 5.* Reporting on the brand behavior within the environment and the impact on the brand as a result of the new social contact methods
4. Final Report: In Summary What Should be the Outcomes of the Social Media Marketing?
   * Speaking the voice of the individual
   * Targeting influentials
   * Encouraging engagement with the community
   * Being sensitive to “social speak”
   * Creating critical authenticity
   * Becoming highly interconnected
   * Make news travel fast
   * Enabling feedback and interaction as a fundamental core of your activities

One of the number one complaints about social media is that it takes too much time.

Companies considering the leap into the land of blogs and tweets often run screaming into the night after they glimpse the reality of what it takes to launch and maintain a worthwhile social media presence.

I don’t blame them. The onslaught of digital information is overwhelming, but there is hope. The key is in being selective.

We all know that it’s the kiss of branding death to try and be all things to all people.

The same goes for social media engagement. Unless you have a dedicated staff ready to spend all day, every day monitoring every inch of the Web and churning out top-notch content, you need to be choosy about how and where you spend your time.

This isn’t rocket science, you say? You’re right. But it’s amazing how many people - even professionals - fall into the trap of trying to be everywhere, all the time. In this highly competitive market, it’s easy to start making judgments based on the fear of missing out on something.

The 24/7, real-time nature of social media sets businesses running faster and faster on the proverbial hamster wheel. You start by monitoring here and there, then you launch a company blog, set up a facebook fan page, start tweeting, create a professional group on LinkedIn, develop a collaborative community for crowd-sourcing industry-specific solutions, and so on and on and on. Before you know it, running your social media efforts takes nearly as much time as running your core business.

Instead of jumping on every shiny, new wagon recommended by the so-called gurus, take control of your social media journey. Here are six steps for making sure things don’t get out of hand:

1. Strategy first:  You want to make sure the plan is custom-fit to your needs and capabilities as well as the needs of your target audience.

2. Have contingencies: Even the best strategy sometimes goes awry. Your project is going to be a huge success, but - just in case - make sure you are prepared for anything.

3. Roll-out in phases: Get your toes wet before you attempt a backwards triple somersault with a half pike and a twist. Start small and grow your presence in as organic a manner as possible. Listen well, and your audience will tell you what your next step should be.

4. Enable : In the best case scenario, social media becomes part of your company culture, not a specialty that’s handled by a few select members of your marketing department. Deputize people across your business to monitor and engage, but be sure to keep an overall eye on the conversation, watching for consistency and balance.

5. Target,Target,Target: Finally, narrow your focus. Be brutal. Though it’s highly unlikely that your company can stand out everywhere, if you concentrate on a few key areas, there’s a better chance for greater impact. Even if you wind up with a smaller audience, you’ll be able to have a deeper dialog, and it’s the deeper dialog that leads to actual relationships, a perception of leadership, and business deals.

Are you already engaged in social media? How did you get started? What worked for you, and what was an utter failure? What advice would YOU give to a business getting ready to take the plunge?

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

But these days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command and control branding that has become such common place for marketers.

Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!

I believe that there is a very compelling argument that media doesn’t have to be fragmented while at the same time the message need not be command and control anymore. It is only a matter of knowing how to orchestrate it.

One of the first instances of this to hit the marketplace was Ogivly & Mather’s Dove “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (ok yes it is B2C but sometimes we marketers can take inspiration from our B2C brethren) Which won the 2006 Grand EFFIE Award and for good reason, They did a great job finding a powerful attribute of their brand and made a very inviting campaign around it that engaged their key audiences into a conversation. Evidence this by the nearly 3000 blog entries about it, the 2,000,000 viewers of their video on YouTube and you will see that they got the blogosphere humming about an ad campaign. Now I am not professing you drop everything and just do some clever video with your ad campaign, I do applaud the use of video to make their campaign more viral. What can we learn from this as technology marketers? Take a look at my next example.

Now compare this to the “Greg the Architect” campaign from TIBCO. Here is a B2B example that took a very different approach to making their technology funny, and engaging. What they have done is told the TIBCO story through a series of episodic vignettes and allows the viral component to kick in. Viewers are bound to have an opinion on these videos and so is the blogosphere. Also they have given the audience something to react to for better or worse rather than say “we do SOA better than the next guy”. Also don’t forget about the reaction internally to these videos and how that helps give everyone in the organization a conversation starter for the next meeting.

So why is this good news for technology companies? Because for the first time ever, technology companies specifically in B2B can lead the way using technology tools to get their message out to the masses for very little money. Just one tactic like using a video on YouTube can reach 325,000 viewers and engage them with your brand but more importantly with a message that they have sought out. But how to you take something so tactical like a video and make it part of an overall approach to your brand?

Here is the secret.

First, the brand manager needs to architect a single theme that can be used across all media traditional or otherwise. Notice here I didn’t say command and control at all – just to create a theme that is broad enough to use across every aspect of your media plan and “invite” customers and prospects to “engage” with it.

Next, you need to give your customers and prospects the digital tools to comment, to interact, and to add to the conversation. Then you add in more traditional elements of a media plan that all point to the online conversation and you will end up supercharging your media plan!

The bottom line for technology firms is your customers and prospects are perhaps the most savvy engaged technology users of any buyer in any industry. You can’t expect to reach them with traditional media only any more, you need to deliver your message in a way that is targeted to their exact interests. So why not get out there where they talking about your product or service, and give them a conversation starter along with the permission to start a dialog with your brand!

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