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ixTable of ContentsCreate partnerships. 57Track the results . 58Using LinkedIn to Determine Your Objectivesand Shape Your Campaign Plan . 59Making connections in LinkedIn . 59Getting help with your SIM campaign planusing LinkedIn . 60Participating — Four Rules of the Game . 62Be authentic . 62Operate on quid pro quo basis . 63Give participants equal status . 63Let go of the campaign . 64Killing the Campaign Expiry Date . 64Monitoring Brands and Conversations . 66Responding to Criticism. 68Chapter 5: Energizing Employees withinYour Company for Social Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71Encouraging Your Employees to Collaborate . 72Rewarding teams . 74Treating everyone equally . 74Trusting your employees . 74Creating the right culture . 75Placing a premium on groups with a purpose . 75Avoiding excessive snooping . 75Picking Social Software for Social Influence . 76Enterprise software . 76Emergent enterprise social software . 77Small-scale social software . 77Consumer social software . 78Chapter 6: Applying Metrics to the SIM Realm . . . . . . .79A Core Measure of Social Influence Marketing. 80Considering Influencer-Specific Metrics . 85Evaluating Each Platform’s Metrics . 87Facebook . 88YouTube and video clips . 92Twitter . 93The blogosphere . 96Widgets and social applications . 97Website community metrics . 98Other metrics to consider . 10002 678619-ftoc.indd ix1/29/10 9:11 PM

xSocial Media Marketing For DummiesPart III: The Part of Tens . 101Chapter 7: Ten SIM Best Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103Open Up Your Brand to Your Consumers, andLet Them Evolve It . 103Develop a SIM Voice without Silencing Other Voicesthat Support Your Brand. 104Respond to Everything, Even If It MeansYou’re Up All Night . 104Think Beyond the Obvious and Use SIMto Evolve Your Business . 105Focus Not Just on Social Mediabut on Social Influencers . 105Structure Your Marketing Departmentfor This Social World . 106Take Your Organization with You, from the CEOto the Field Representative . 107Conduct Many Small Tests Frequentlyand Build on Each One . 107Capture Every Single Piece of Data that You Can . 108Make Mistakes, but Make Every Effortto Correct Them as Well . 109Chapter 8: Avoiding Ten Common Mistakes . . . . . . . .111Encroaching on Customers’ Time. 111Your Customers Don’t Want to Hear You . 112Choosing the Wrong SIM Voices . 112Not Being Patient . 113Treating SIM in Isolation . 113Having Only One Approach . 114Thinking of SIM as a Channel . 114Don’t Plan for the Worst . 115Focusing on One Large Campaign . 115Forgetting to Reward Your Participants . 11602 678619-ftoc.indd x1/29/10 9:11 PM

IntroductionOn August 23, 1999, Blogger launched as one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools. At that time, socialmedia was considered a niche activity on the fringes of theInternet. But today, Blogger is the 16th most popular site onthe Internet, hosting millions of blogs. In a span of three years,Facebook has grown to over 200 million users, and Wikipedia,for all practical purposes, has replaced Britannica as an encyclopedia. Social media is today the most important phenomena transforming the Internet.There is more to it than the phenomena, though. It also presents unique marketing opportunities, providing new ways toreach social influencers and allow for people to influence eachother and do the marketing for the brand. Social influencemarketing (SIM) forces companies to rethink how they marketonline, to whom they market, and how to structure their ownorganizations to support these new marketing opportunities.Social Media Marketing For Dummies is written to help youmake sense of the madness. This book simply explains whatsocial influence marketing is and how you can harness it toachieve your objectives as a marketer. It also aims to help youprioritize what’s important and what isn’t.About This BookThe social influence marketing space is changing rapidly, soby very definition, this book can’t be completely comprehensive. It does, however, aim to distill the core concepts, trends,tips, and recommendations down to bite-sized, easy-to-digestnuggets. As social influence marketing touches all parts ofmarketing and all parts of the Internet, too, (from traditionalWeb sites to social platforms to the mobile Web), based onyour own experiences, you’ll find some sections more valuable than others.03 678619-intro.indd 11/29/10 9:11 PM

2Social Media Marketing For DummiesAs you read this book, keep in mind that the way people influence each other online and impact purchasing and brandaffinity decisions is similar to the way they’ve done for thousands of years in the real world. The technology is finallycatching up, and social influence marketing is fundamentallyabout allowing and encouraging that behavior to happen in abrand-positive manner online, too.This book helps you understand why social media matters tomarketers and how you can harness it to directly impact yourown marketing efforts in meaningful ways. Targeted at bothmarketers in large organizations and those of you who workin small businesses or run small businesses, it includes advicefor every business scenario.Foolish AssumptionsIn writing this book, here are some of the assumptions I cameup with about you: You have a computer with Internet access. You’ve visited a social media site like Facebook orTwitter. You’re working in marketing, want to join the marketingfield, or are a small/medium business owner who has astakeholder interest in the growth and reputation of yourcompany. You have customers or prospective customers who usethe Web frequently. You sell a product or service that you can market online. You’re curious about social media and whether itchanges marketing.How This Book Is OrganizedThis book is divided into three distinct parts. As you progressthrough the chapters, you move from learning the fundamentals of social influence marketing to practical strategies forimplementing SIM programs and campaigns for your brand.03 678619-intro.indd 21/29/10 9:11 PM

3IntroductionPart I: Getting Socialwith Your MarketingA common misconception about social influence marketing isthat it’s fundamentally about marketing on social platformssuch as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube. But that’snot the case, and Part I lays out the landscape of SIM, placesit in the context of other forms of marketing, and then looks atthe influencers you want to be reaching.Part II: Putting SIM into ActionPart II is very much the practitioner’s part. The chapters inthis section also detail how you launch your SIM campaign,how you can encourage your employees to road test your SIMefforts, and how you can easily measure all your SIM efforts.Part III: The Part of TensAll For Dummies books feature some top ten lists and thisbook is no different. In this part, I list ten key SIM best practices that you must absolutely pay attention to. Also includedare ten common mistakes — mistakes made by the best of uswho have been practicing SIM time and again.Icons Used in This BookIn the margins of the book, you’ll find these icons helpingyou out:Whenever I provide a hint that makes an aspect of social influence marketing easier, I mark it with a Tip icon.The Remember icon marks paragraphs that contain a friendlyreminder.Heed the warnings marked with the Warning icons to avoidpotential disaster.03 678619-intro.indd 31/29/10 9:11 PM

4Social Media Marketing For Dummies03 678619-intro.indd 41/29/10 9:11 PM

Part IGetting Social withYour Marketing04 678619-pp01.indd 51/29/10 9:11 PM

IIn this part . . .introduce you to SIM, and look at the platforms, bothmajor (such as Facebook) and niche (like LinkedIn). Ialso discuss who the social influencers are, and how youcan reach them.04 678619-pp01.indd 61/29/10 9:12 PM

Chapter 1Understanding SocialInfluence MarketingIn This Chapter Understanding social media’s role in social influence Knowing what types of influencers you’re marketing to Coordinating your efforts with other types of marketing Moving beyond corporate marketingWhen designing Web sites, you display banners andpush your Web site listings higher up in the searchengine rankings to promote and sell products. It’s easy toforget how people actually buy. It’s easy to assume that thepotential customers are lonely people crouched over theircomputers late at night choosing what products to add to ashopping cart — isolated from the real world and their familyand friends.But in reality, that’s not how people purchase online today.Although it might have been the case in the early days of theWeb, those days are over now. Using the Internet has becomea mainstream social activity. Consumers approach purchasingonline differently, too, and as a result, you need to approachyour marketing online differently as well. Your approach mustincorporate social influence marketing.This chapter discusses the fundamentals of social influencemarketing: what it is, how it works, and what it means in thecontext of your other marketing efforts.05 678619-ch01.indd 71/29/10 9:12 PM

8Part I: Getting Social with Your MarketingDefining Social InfluenceMarketingA discussion of any subject needs to begin with a definition,and so here’s the one for social influence marketing: Socialinfluence marketing is a technique that employs social media(content created by everyday people using highly accessibleand scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards,podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wikis, and vlogs) and social influencers (everyday peoplewho have an outsized influence on their peers by virtue ofhow much content they share online) to achieve an organization’s marketing and business needs.The definition warrants further explanation. Social mediarefers to content created for and consumed by regular people.It includes the comments a person adds at the end of anarticle on a Web site, the family photographs he uploads to aphoto-sharing site, the conversations he has with friends in asocial network, and the blog posts that he publishes or comments on. That’s social media, and it’s making everyone in theworld a content publisher and arbitrator. It’s democratizingthe Web. WordPress.com, shown in Figure 1-1. is one popularblogging platform.Figure 1-1: Wordpress.com.05 678619-ch01.indd 81/29/10 9:12 PM

9Chapter 1: Understanding Social Influence MarketingAnd then there are the social influencers. Are these peoplewith special powers to influence a large majority of people?Not at all; rather, social influencers are the everyday peoplewho influence the consumer as he makes a purchasing decision. Depending on the decision he’s making, the social influencers may be a wife (or husband), friends, peers at work, oreven someone the consumer has never even met in real life.Simply, the people who influence a brand affinity and purchasing decision are the social influencers. They may do thisdirectly by rating products and commenting or by publishingopinions and participating in conversations across the Web.Anyone can be a social influencer, influencing someone else’sbrand affinity and purchasing decisions, and you, the reader,are probably one, too, without realizing it.Social influence marketing is about recognizing, accounting,and tapping into the fact that as your potential customermakes a purchasing decision, he’s influenced by variouscircles of people through the conversations that he has withthem online, when he shares his own social media and consumes theirs.But wait a minute. How does social influence marketing tieinto social media marketing? These terms are increasinglyused interchangeably, but it’s worth noting that when talking about social influence marketing, the emphasis is onthe social influencers versus social media, which invariablyimplies just marketing on the social platforms like Facebookand Twitter. Since this book covers marketing with socialinfluencers and social media on both the social platforms andcompany Web sites and also emphasizes the importance ofsocial influencers, I use the relatively newer term social influence marketing throughout the book.Understanding the fundamentalsof influenceTo understand how social influence works, you need to lookat how people are influenced in the real world, face to face.Social influence isn’t something new. Long before the Web,people asked each other for advice as they made purchasingdecisions. What one person bought often inspired another05 678619-ch01.indd 91/29/10 9:12 PM

10Part I: Getting Social with Your Marketingto buy the same product, especially if the original purchasersaid great things about the product. That’s how human beingsfunction; we’re influenced and motivated by each other to dothings. We’re social beings, and sharing information on ourexperiences is all a part of social interaction.Is influence bad? Of course not. More often than not, peopleseek that influence. People ask each other for advice; theyshare decision-making processes with friends and colleagues;they discuss their own experiences.How much a person is influenced depends on multiple factors. The product itself is the most important one. Whenbuying low-consideration purchases (those with a smallamount of risk), people rarely seek influence, nor are theyeasily influenced by others. Buying toothpaste, for example,is a low-consideration purchase because each product maynot be that different from the next one, and they’re all fairlyinexpensive — so you won’t lose much money if you chooseone that doesn’t fit your needs. On the other hand, buying anew car is typically a high-consideration purchase (a purchasethat includes a large risk). The price of the car, the maintenance costs, and its reputation for its safety all contributeto making it a high-consideration purchase. Social influenceplays a much bigger role in car purchases than in toothpastedecisions.Social influenc

successful marketing The big and small sites ideal for marketing Where the social infl uencers hang out and how to get their help Strategies for getting employees involved Best practices of the social media experts Shiv Singh is the VP & Global Social Media Lead with Razorfi sh.