Will Your Social Marketing Efforts Ripen And Product Fruit? June 12, 2008
Posted by Andrew Wee in : social networking , trackbackSocial marketing has quite an organic flavor to it and the garden analogy applies well.
If tended well, your social marketing efforts can take off virally and yield a bountiful harvest with social goodwill being generated, credibility being established and the positive buzz grows at a quantum rate – everything having to do with having provided value to the community and becoming a key member of the community.
But like an good gardener, if you don’t watch over your garden – whether it’s a blog, forum or content website, it can be overgrown with undesirable weeds – spam, massively out-of-topic discussions and trolls.
The Chinese/Japanese art of bonsai culminates in miniature trees cultivated to aesthetic perfection – these same principles apply to growing your social community too.
Here are a couple of strategies:
- Seed and Germinate: Continually spread your marketing efforts even after you’ve established a foothold in at least 3 anchor communities in your niche. There’s a tendency to find maybe 10 communities and spray your marketing efforts liberally over all of them and quit halfway due to fatigue. Instead, build an anchor presence initially, then expand your efforts. If anything, having a strong presence in one community is preferable to merely having accounts in 100 others.
- Watering and fertilization: Again, a seed dropped into the ground doesn’t do much unless it’s watered regularly. Continually visit communities, even after you’ve established yourself. Even though it’s a free marketing effort, you still need to “pay” in terms of time to growing relationships. It’s out of these relationships that better things come.
- Prune and deweeding: Continually check on the feedback that’s accumulating at your blogs, forums, social community profiles. Look beyond just having a large number of comments at your sites and go for quality, rather than quantity. One great blossom is better than ten average ones – if you let your ego run your sites, you’ll go for quantity. If you let quality rule, you’ll be growing your sites.
I like social marketing because it’s a great test of your ability to be disciplined, have a game plan in mind and continually take action.
It’s not an “instant” formula or even a “quick” one as some marketers would have you believe, but it can sustain you for a long time to come if handled right.
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A great analogy Andrew.
There are so many blogs, not just on the social networking sites, but also on Blogger and Wordpress, that are now abandoned after that initial flurry of activity.
I will give the link of this blog to my list in the hopes that they will take the warning.
[...] finished up the week on Friday with Andrew Wee of WhoIsAndrewWee.com talking about “Social Media and Web 2.0 [...]
[...] Wee, of WhoIsAndrewWee.com taught today’s session. His focus was to cut through the hype surrounding social media and to [...]
[...] You also need to be aware of not making the opposite mistake, particularly if you really want to promote your business through these sites. Many people enjoy the fun of a new site or user login, but after an initial flurry of activity, they to start to drift away from these communities. An interesting discussion on this topic has been written by management consultant Andrew Wee – he also has an interest in internet marketing. He presents a balanced approach to managing social marketing activities. I found it very helpful. Here it is: http://thesimplewebcompany.com/thislooksinteresting/AndrewWee [...]