The following is another guest post by my friend John Haydon.  As he works primarily with non-profits, I asked him if he could share his insights on how these organizations can approach marketing in social media outlets as I think it would be of use to both entrepreneurs and other for-profit businesses.

We all know that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are free platforms that marketers can use. But what’s not free is the investment in strategy and the staff time using the tools. Also, social media is often an additional cost, and not meant as a replacement channel within the overall marketing mix. For example, I would never recommend that a nonprofit should replace their direct mail marketing with social media. So the net costs of social media generally increase the overall marketing spend.

However, there are at least five cost-saving benefits that social media can create:

1. Permanent Sales Pitch
Emails written to customers answering the most common questions could be repurposed into blog posts, or demonstrations of your product on YouTube (bonus points if you can make it fun and entertaining). This could lower customer service costs spent and demonstrate your expertise to potential clients.

2. Improve search
Using a blog to answer the most pressing questions about your service or industry helps to improve SEO. Especially if no one has answered that question. The cost savings is found when you can dial down paid online ads when your appearance in search engine result pages (SERPs) hits a certain point.

3. Word Of Mouth
Getting people to talk about your company to their friends has to do with your offering (which better kick ass, by the way). Facebook is now the sharing beast. The cost savings is found in warmer leads that cost less to convert.

4. Volunteer Sales People
Social media allows you to connect with your biggest fans on their terms. Whether it’s on Facebook or in a private online community, companies that treat their cultists like gold eventually see a percent of them blogging or tweeting about their products. The cost savings is found in zero payroll costs, and a higher conversion rate in trusted third-party endorsements.

5. Market Research
Listening to how your current customers are talking about you in forums, on blogs, on Twitter, can be valuable research. This can be used to improve the product and how you talk with your customers. The cost savings is found in dialing down traditional methods of market research, which can be expensive.

What do you think? What ways have you realized a cost savings with social media marketing?

John Haydon writes about social media marketing for nonprofits.

Photo courtesy of I Am Paul’s Typing Fingers

The following is a guest post by my friend and fellow blogger John Haydon.  John writes about marketing strategies for social media sites on his blog at JohnHaydon.com.

Integrity, as Tanveer has talked about before, is a critical factor in attracting and retaining readers, subscribers and customers.

In the offline world, integrity is something people easily recognize. It could be demonstrated by returning something on time that you borrowed, staying true to one’s convictions, or having the courage to protect others from unfair attacks – even if they are “competitors”. In these examples, integrity and character is demonstrated through the actions of that person.

But how do you demonstrated integrity online, through the proxy we call the internet? How can people quickly get a sense of your trustworthiness and character – even though you’re not actually present?

The Trust Of Crowds

The answer is in your crowd – the hundreds or thousands of readers who, on a daily basis, give you the thumbs up.

Blogs by definition have several features that can easily demonstrate crowd-sourced quality checks, or “social proof“.

• Comments – Comments are a qualitative measurement of our character. How many comments, on average, do your blog posts receive? What is the quality and depth of these comments? Is there a diversity of people making these comments? Getting large numbers of quality comments takes years of hard work – even for people like Chris Brogan and Brian Clark.
• Comment Replies – One advantage bloggers like you and I have over people like Chris and Brian is that we are able to reply to each commenter. Two bloggers who do this very well are Grant Griffiths and Liz Strauss. They both take the time to comment back and forth with each commenter. A quick note: Make sure you have set your commenting system to support threaded comments – at least three levels deep.
• Admit When Your Wrong – Or At Least Not Completely Right – No one can know everything about a subject, and often times, it’s our commenters who help us fill in the gaps. When you acknowledge them, and amend a post in response, it says you respect your readers and can admit when you’re not completely right. Click here to continue reading »”How To Demonstrate Integrity On Your Blog”

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to listen and participate in an interesting discussion that took place following a presentation by CT Moore at the latest edition of PodCamp Montreal.  Although his talk revolved around whether a particular character from the drama series “Mad Men” would consider writing a blog, the conversations it sparked got me thinking about the stories that we tell.

Without question, we all have stories that we choose to share with others.  When we meet people for the first time, we often share with them the story of what we do for a living.  With those we’re more familiar with or comfortable talking to, we share stories about what we did over the weekend or what latest feat our child recently accomplished.  As the years roll on by, we share stories from our past that remind us not only of the good times we’ve had, but also of how far we have travelled since then.  With the growth in online social networking sites, our ability to share such stories has unquestionably grown, if not along with it the size of audience we might draw in with our tales.  But what about the stories we now share?

Click here to continue reading »”Telling The Story Of Ourselves”

An online conversation with a friend of mine this week had me thinking about social networking sites and the relationships they foster.  I was told about a mutual friend who was experiencing some hard knocks in his personal life.  While he shared news of his troubled state with the thousands of people who are connected to him on one of these social networking sites, less than a handful of them took the time to respond to him with words of encouragement or support.  Although this casts an unflattering light on social networking sites, I can’t help but feel that it reveals certain truths about social media in general.

By its nature, social media sites are designed to revolve around us.  We share the ideas, stories and information that we want to share.  We make connections with people on these networks who we have an interest in connecting with.  Where the differences arise is whether Click here to continue reading »”Is Social Media Making Us Uncaring?”

In my previous entry, I wrote about the ongoing tactic used by social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to remove pictures of mothers breastfeeding their children as they deemed them to be “offensive” and/or “pornographic” in nature. Indeed, the blogosphere has been ablaze with posts either expressing outrage at this continued discrimination against women or worse, people trying to rationalize that images of breastfeeding mothers would be as appropriate as seeing pictures of people going to the bathroom as both are ‘natural acts’ (how’s that for a mature, rational thought process – trying to connect providing sustenance to a baby with the process of excretion). Now I’ve already made my position on this clear in my last post, but as I inferred near the end of that entry, there is another related issue arising from this that bears some examination for further discussion and debate. So what I want to discuss here is the framework under which this controversy is occurring and that is how should we define the balance between how end users of a social-networking site communicate and share and the rights/responsibilities of the owners/managers of these online community websites. Click here to continue reading »”Social-Networking Sites MySpace and Facebook – It’s Time For Some Change”