David Peck on Designing Social Media Campaigns

I had the opportunity this morning to participate in a discussion on Social Media Campaigns given by Dave Peck, social media strategist for LSF Interactive.  The event was hosted by Elyse Tager of Elymedia and the Silicon Valley chapter of the American Marketing Association.

Of course, the topic of Facebook came up and while Dave went to great lengths to assure us there is more to a good social media campaign than Facebook - but you can't leave them out either.  According to Dave, 55+ aged women are Facebook's fastest growing segment although the overall demographics still trend younger.  Here are some of his favorite Facebook activities on behalf of clients:

• Setting up a Facebook "Fan" or "Group" page.  Facebook Fan pages have the advantage of being indexed by Google which makes it very convenient for Facebook members to quickly get to your content.  Groups have the advantage of being able to send email blasts out to all the group members at once and group members can individually invite other people to join your group which is all gravy for you!


• You don't have to decide on one or the other - you can do both a Fan page and a Group page within Facebook.


• Other Facebook activities Dave recommends are the news feeds, status updates, blog reposts and leaving comments.


• For major campaigns he suggests you hire one or more "Community Managers" to keep the conversation going, ban "griefers" and to help improve the overall experience by relaying feedback gathered from visitor comments.

When asked what his top 5 "go to" strategies for Social Media campaigns were, these are what he came up with:

• Facebook (can't ignore 160 million + people)


• Twitter (learned about "Mr Tweet.net" and Search.Twitter.com)


• Using pre-existing relationships to get content publicized and shared throughout the Internet (often blogs)


• Setting up a formal commenting strategy - in other words becoming very active in the online community


• Commenting


• Google Reader's "share" button

Of particular interest to me was the discussion of online video and using simple SEO techniques to get more attention for your own YouTube videos.  (You are using video as part of your marketing campaigns, right?)

If you look at the "related videos" appearing next to your own YouTube video you will see some of the top performing videos that have something to do with your topic.   Next, look at the keywords those other popular videos are using.   If you use those same keyword on your video then the idea is you will be able to expose your video to more people.

Bottom line, what you do is add those same keywords from popular videos put up by other people to your video.  For instance, if you have a video about Beer and a popular related video is tagged with the word "Brew" - adding "Brew" to your list of keywords will make it more likely that those watching that other video will see YOUR video listed under "related videos." Also anyone searching for "Brew" related videos in the future should be exposed to your content.

Keeping YouTube videos brief was another hint, under 1.5 minutes Dave says.

Oh and the last power-user tactic:  Using Linkedin's Q&A feature to ask a question relevant to your campaign.  Even if you actually already know the answer, the idea is to get a conversation going and to make more people aware of what you are doing.

Dave wants you to know that Linkedin isn't just for resumes anymore.

Comments

[dominic]

I really enjoy the presentation. Fast paced and full of interesting insights.

Good learning's on Facebook and Youtube tag optimization.
Thanks

[Dave Peck]

Great post! You summed up everything really well. Thanks for coming!

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