Virtual Assistance and You

Next level thoughts on business and the internet

In 2010, my bet is that you’ll improve your social media marketing strategy by being even more transparent than you’ve already been.

Is this possible? You have a website, your profile picture is everywhere and information about you is plastered all over social networking sites. You feel like you’ve never been so out there and exposed in your life. But you must be still more nakedly honest, at least with yourself.

In 2010, you’ll learn how to skillfully manipulate a select few social media channels to achieve real objectives. You’ll be brutally honest about what responses you need from your social networking. You’ll look deep, make no excuses, work fanatically for what you know will succeed.

We’ve had our time in the sandbox. We’ve played with all the toys, tried out all their bells and whistles. Through natural selection, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are on the top of most lists right now (and have been for a year or so); but their complementary and competitive markets are legion. Our whimsy could champion a new channel any given year. It doesn’t matter because these are only the toys, only the tools.

It’s time, in 2010, to return to the fundamentals, and get clear about what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to run a business, right? We want at least to support ourselves and do some good. Many people want riches and fame as well.

How can online marketing efficiently serve your real honest-to-gosh nitty gritty purposes?

The internet can be critically helpful to your business in several very different ways. Knowing which use you are making of it at any given time will vastly increase your sense of forward progress.

1. It can help you to spread a message. In this way, the web is like traditional marketing, though its techniques are new. Instead of billboards, you can use Twitter. You can write articles and distribute them at a hundred sites; you can blog about your message, and share it on Facebook, etc. This method can easily become spam, however, so approach it with caution. Most would call the approach spammy to begin with, and righteously proclaim social media as a place where such behavior is not accepted. But despite their disclaimers, it exists, to be sure, and so is offered here as not only an option but a reality. By participating at all in social media, you advertise your brand.

2.  The internet can help your business if you manage to make it to the first page of a Google search for your keywords; and if your keywords have some popularity. With SEO and fabulous content along with social media marketing, you can make it to Google’s top placements. Indeed, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Indexing on the first page of Google = customers; this truth motivates most of the work of social media marketers.

3.  The web can also give you a platform, so your expertise can become visible to other people who are interested in your field. Through the usual networks and through specialized online forums as well, your brand can be presented as powerfully as your expressive abilities will allow. On the new proverbial level playing field, you are able to establish your ability to solve potential customers’ problems.

4.  Some companies don’t have an urgent need to advertise, since they have plenty of clients. But they still need to maintain public relations; and they need to be aware of fluctuations – not only in the market, but in their branding. Online reputation management is crucial for well-established companies, who can be caught sleeping if they don’t stay alert to what’s being said about them.

For each of these uses of the internet, an entirely different strategy and selection of tools will apply. The selection of tools and creation of social media strategies will become an increasingly exact science, as you work to achieve very specifically targeted results.

2010 is the year we’ll start to use the internet and social media in more purposeful ways, at least when it comes to marketing for business. We’ll begin to understand the value of consistency over multiplicity. We’ll more attentively select just a few channels, and devote our passions there, rather than flitting and flirting amongst a dozen arenas. We’ll know what our goals are in social media activities, and we’ll measure the outcomes accordingly.

This year, we’ll get real, get down and deep, get the unadorned skinny on how to maximize the internet’s amazing technologies for individual business gain. And we won’t be shy about it, because the web is coming of age!

Image by qthomasbower via Flickr.