2. ! Social media is a great way to connect
with your network, but it is also a great
resource for connecting with your
customers. Young professionals bring a
wealth of information to the table
especially when it comes to Web 2.0
and social media channels.
This session will give you pointers on
being the best social media advocate
for your company and how to sell that
to your boss so that you can
get started.

3. Questions for the Audience
! Who is involved in social media for business
! Who isn t but would like to be?
! Who in this room is trying to sell sm to
the higher ups?
! What are the objections?

4. Anticipated Objections
! Blocked at work
! Time waster
! Don t understand SM
! Expensive
! Can t prove ROI
! That s not where my customers are
! Negative stories

5. 5
Social media defined
! Internet-based tools used for sharing and discussing
information among people
! Activities that integrate technology, social interaction
and the construction of words, pictures, videos and
audio
! Information depends on the varied perspectives and
building of shared meaning among communities
- Wikipedia

6. 6
Shift of power
The power to define and control a brand
is shifting from corporations and institutions
to individuals and communities

7. 7
Social media is a conversation
Social media is a
conversation online
! Look who’s talking:
! your employees
! your critics
! your fans
! your competition....
! anyone who has Internet
access and an opinion.

8. 8
Social media is a channel
! The conversation in Social
Media is not:
! controlled
! organized
! “on message”
! The conversation is:
! organic
! complex
! speaks in a human voice
! Social media is not a strategy
it’s simply a channel

9. 9
Why you should care about
social media
! 87% trust a friend’s recommendation over a critic’s review -
Marketing Sherpa
! 3 times more likely to trust peer opinions over
advertising for purchasing
decisions - Jupiter Research
! 1 word-of-mouth conversation has
impact of 200 TV ads - BuzzAgent
* Slide courtesy of Digital Influence Group

10. 10
How do people
make purchasing
decisions today?
Information
gathering through …

11. 11
The Internet makes information available.
Google makes information accessible.
- Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

12. 12
Social media
! Social Networking
! News & Bookmarking
! Blogs
! Microblogging
! Video Sharing
! Photo Sharing
! Wikis
! Geo Location Tools
! Virtual Reality
! Related:
! Podcasts
! Real Simple Syndication (RSS)
! Social Media Press Release

13. 13
More than just a trend
Social media sites are the fastest-growing category on
the Web, doubling traffic over the last year.
! 73% of active online users have read a blog
! 45% have started their own blog
! 39% subscribe to an RSS feed
! 57% have joined a social network
! 55% have uploaded photos
! 83% have watched video clips
Universal McCann’s Comparative Study on Social Media Trends,
April 2008. 17,000 respondents from 29 countries

14. 14
The Power of your Website
! The influence of professional
services websites on purchasing
decisions has increased
significantly over the past
four years.
According to the survey,
74% of buyers report the
provider s website holds
at least some influence
over their ultimate decision
to buy services from the provider.
Raintoday.com survey

15. Reasons for Social Media
1. Listening & Research to your customers
to find out their wants, wishes and pain points.
We live in a Web 2.0 world, if you re not a part
of it you re missing out on a lot of information.
2. Communicating with your customers
and prospects, not just about your products
and services.
3. SEO: Social media is more than just
communications and connections, it is a
powerful business tool.
4. News & Information: Consumer habits have
changed, people rely on their
social networks and other Web 2.0 sources for
news and information.
5. It is in line with the business
objectives.

17. Listening
! It is important to listen to your
audience.
! The media in Social media
by nature means to
communicate, but
there's a time and a
place for talking.
Listening is
important
! Real time information
on your brand 24/7/365

18. Listening Example #1

19. Listening Example #2
! Comcast & Dell
! They have brand managers that do nothing but
listen & Help
! Social media is a perfect tool to find out exactly
what people are saying about your brand

22. Interaction with customers
and clients

23. 2-way conversation

24. How to Engage in SM?
! Connect to your Audience
! Ask Questions that Invite Discussion
! Be transparent
! Be yourself
! Don t pretend
! Know your followers; keep
in touch with them…
! Highlight content generated by your followers

26. “Search Engine Optimization!
is the process of taking a page
built by humans and making it
easily consumable for both other
humans and search engine
bots.” !
" " " "!
- SEOmoz, www.seomoz.org
"

27. As more and more people use search
engines to answer their questions
online, companies needs to surface as
a resource to provide answers to those
questions.
A successful SEO strategy will require a
robust back-end (keywords, meta
descriptions, tags, etc.) and a front-end
that is rich in relevant consumer-centric
content. Once the foundation is
established for SEO on the back-end,
content on the front-end needs to be
targeted and strategic to optimize
search engine results.
All too often people think the job is
complete when the back-end is set up,
but that is just the beginning. Search
engines such as Google, Bing and
Yahoo crawl the sites for keywords and
tags (backend) but are increasingly
placing a greater emphasis on the
content (front-end). Therefore, both
components play a critical role in any
website development project.

28. The mechanics of SEO
The exact algorithm behind search engines is
unknown. The reason it is unknown is to
protect consumers. If the algorithm were known, anyone and
everyone could take the appropriate steps to optimize their website
to rank higher in search results. Without knowing the exact algorithm,
a few things are known to impact SEO.
1. It changes daily and therefore so does your site
2. Traffic to your site
3. Inbound links
4. Relevancy of information
5. Keywords
6. Social graph metrics (social media usage)
7. Bounce rate (stickiness of site)
8. Domain registration (how long
have you owned your URL? And is it a .com or .info, etc.?)

29. Search engine bots
Google and other search engines use
“bots” or “spiders” to search web pages.
These bots continuously search web
pages to index and rank sites.
Obviously, you want to make your
website as easy to read and navigate
for these bots as possible. While the
bots are not as complicated as they
seem, they have become more
sophisticated to read the content on
your site as a consumer would.
Meaning, they cannot read images so
you must tell them what the image is of
(through keywords and descriptions).
They read the content line by line and
when they encounter a link they send
another bot to that site to see if it is
relevant to the previous content, if so,
your page rank increases.

30. 1990s: search engines mostly relied on the backend of sites to tell them what
information was contained on the page: meta keywords, tags and descriptions
2004: More importance was placed on the frontend than only on the backend,
because search engines were being deceived by inaccurate keywords and tags.
2010: Things changed again with the rise of social media. There is now more
importance placed on the “humanness” and frontend of the website rather than
the backend. What search engines deem as most important is the relevance
and importance of the content. Because search engines are technical
bots they are relying more and more on how people (humans) are
sharing, linking and using the content contained on a website.

31. 4 Functions of search engines
1. Crawling websites
2. Building an index of
sites crawled that can be
called upon later when
someone performs a s
earch.
3. Calculating relevancy
and rankings of those
sites and information
contained within the site.
4. Serving results

32. Search engines look for two
things when indexing sites
1. Relevancy: Based on what the
consumer is searching for, what
sites in the index best fit the
search query.
2. Importance (popularity):
Based on the relevant
sites, which are the most
popular (received more
traffic, have more links
to the site, more
outbound links, etc.)?

34. 5 O Clock News
! How many people in here
watch the 5 PM news??
Why not?
We no longer
wait for the news,
the news finds us!

35. What started it all – Social Media
Driving the communication
! Who remembers this picture?
! Flight 1549
! Hudson River
! Twitter had
the Scoop 1st
! NOT CNN, FOX
MSNBC -Majors
NO ONE!!!
Janis Krums who Twittered it from his iPhone,
and posted via TwitPic.

36. Major news stories

37. Japan quake

38. Social Media Backlash - Gap

39. !"#$%&'$()*&'+,-+).$/)
! 0#$$1-,)2#''1$) ! L&==M)*D1N&;4)
3#4)56&#$)738)9'-/) O*)P1DD#;):::/6-=1DD#;/-&=)
:::/;#4$6&#$<;/-&=)
QAQA)R&:#DD)2;1C#)
>?@@A)B#;&+#-6)2;1C#) S;##')T,M8)>1)EFQ@@)
B<<D#+&'8)>9)EFG@F)
GHAUG?EUGIHH)
GHA/I@?/@AFI) +&=-K6-=1DD#;/-&=)
J#$$1-,K;#4$6&#$<;/-&=)