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Socialmarketing is the new search engine optimization. Reciprocal voting isthe new reciprocal linking. It offers a fairly low barrier to entry,and the opportunity to drive a TON of traffic in a short period oftime. Even more importantly, social media has become a cornerstone ofthe strategy for launching sites, or improving their link popularity.
What is social media and why do we need it? 
Wake up and smell the series of tubes. Here’s social media in plain English. You’re banned from using the company email and internet until you read the Cluetrain,and can name at least 10 social media sites, and which 3 are likely todrive the most traffic. If you’re in a corporation that won’t listen,or change anything because of what lawyers say - you deserve yourmiserable cubicle dwelling existence for not standing up and pitchingthings better. I hope your 401k makes it out the door before your idiotexecutives bankrupt the company drinking fine wine and Cristal on theirexecutive retreats to Tahoe. Redtape sucks, and generally only existsto screw people. Find a better company, and keep learning how to pitchthe novel idea of treating your customers and web visitors withrespect.
How to Pitch Social Media Marketing Internally in 6 easy steps:
1. Create Positive ROI on keyword set for a PPC campaign.
2. Explain lifetime value of a converting customer that came from that keyword set
3. Sell the value of SEO as a long term, less expensive form of PPC on above mentioned keywords. Here’s some help.
4 . Demonstrate the need and importance of links to search engine rankings.
5 . Explain the value and process for obtaining links (and how much these would cost).
6 . Introduce the idea of linkbaiting and social media marketing.
I know, I know, that sounds a whole lot easier than it is whenyou’re facing the red tape in your company. Build your case slowly, andplot your strategy to be executed over time. More help to build yourcase below.
1. Your competition is doing it.Mostof the competition that’s doing it, you didn’t even know was yourcompetition - UNTIL they started showing up for your best convertingsearch phrases. Why are they showing up you ask? Well, they’releveraging social media to build global link popularity and brandawareness. You’re customers know who they are now, and know thatthey’re faster, smaller, more efficient, and will keep them happy.They’ve implemented the technology to minimize overhead, and aretreating customers better.
2. Your customers are using it (though maybe indirectly)Nomatter how non-technical your customers are - social media impactstheir consumption decisions. Social media’s impact on traditional mediais increasing on a daily basis. Newspapers, television, and radio, arerealizing that digg, reddit, and twitter, are sometimes even fasterthan the AP newswire. This impacts which news is presented in atraditional sense. The geeks, webmasters, the trendsetters, and otherfolks who are on the bleeding edge are now watching social mediaoutlets and republishing to the channels that your customers areconsuming from.
3. Your vendors and partners are using itYouknow who’s NOT using facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit,myspace, stumbleupon, and other large traffic social networks well?Automakers and Banks. Luckily, they can get billion dollar bailouts. 
Try getting your modem rebooted over the phone with comcast - then ping @comcastcares You can thank them and I for the time savings later.
Has your site been on the homepage of digg or reddit? Has your sitebeen stumbled? Do you know what it is? Do you think your no overheadweb based competition from the Silicon Valley knows what it is?
4. More Social = more Search.
More Search = More Customers.
More customers = More business.Duh.The web is more de-centralized than ever. After we do our initialsearches through the Google, we start looking for communities oflikeminded people. Your best customers are the ones that are passionateand want to have a conversation about you, your product, or somethingrelated (news, pictures, whatever). You need to be there to have theconversation WITH your customers. Otherwise, they will have it behindyour back. You might not be able to rank right away on search enginesanymore, but you can get to the top of a news or industry specific sitefor a few days with good content.
5. Paid search prices are rising.
PPC consultingis still a great solution to improving your ROI, and decreasing yourCPC - but the market is getting tougher. It is great to be able to buyyour keyword phrase to your targeted audience - but everyone isbecoming wise to that fact. Those awesome high conversion, high profitkeywords are slowly having the ROI sucked out of them by rising clickprices. This makes organic search a must have long term proposition.Any self-respecting search marketer is going to tell you that you neednatural links. And the best place to get natural links is???!?!?! Youguessed it Chachi - Social media linkbaiting.
6. SEO isn’t easy anymore
Mando I miss the days of buying run of site text links and ranking top forany search term. Like Jim, I would never buy links anymore (okay, maybeI’d TRADE for them if it was SUPER relevant). The days of the littleguys ranking well in google is slowly coming to an end, and a gloriousera will go down in history. Pretty soon, however, it will be bigbusiness as usual. Those same big businesses have a while to catch onto social media FOR SEO, but they’ll do that eventually too.Personalized search is the next big thing (and yes it’s now REALLYalmost here). You need lots of people coming to your site, staying onyour site, and bookmarking your site for later to prove that youdeserve to be on top of the search results.
7. You can’t buy links anymore
The communists have won the war. We have declared defeat. Of course if you listen to SEO’s and search engineers for too long, you will think that there are NO links that pass value.Well, at least we can pay to create viral content, and pay foroptimization in the distribution channel, and HOPE that people link tous. The content kings have one, and it’s time to get writing. You mightas well start talking to your customers and actually giving them whatthey want. Since bounce rate is now a significant factor for search results, it’s gonna hurt you to dupe your users with crap content anyhow.
8. Your website is only a billboard
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa.Just ask all those big corporations who paid millions to have theirbeautiful flash sites built, and forgot to hire a SEO. You launchedyour site, and now you need traffic, or it’s been there for a longtime, and you need MORE traffic and exposure. You listened to thesearch engines, and created great content! (after all, content isking!) But you still don’t seem to have much traction, and only yourAunt Frita, Uncle Merv, and 6 other people are visiting your site everyday.
9. Great ROI on the Marketing Budget
With the DIY route and use social tools,social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of theweb. Social media is building future communication empires at themoment with the likes of facebook, digg, reddit, digg, delicious, asthe distribution points for web communication. They are the portalsthat every dot-bust era strived to be. Social media is seperating theold guard from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embracethe technology. Do you?
Social media is a way to reliably disperse your message to a groupof people who want to hear what you have to say. When you havesomething good to say - you TELL them through your selected channels.At minimum, companies are becoming aware that they need to haveconversations with their customers somehow.
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