Five Articles for Social Media Marketers

Innovative marketers continually find new ways to communicate and engage with their constituencies. One of the latest channels available to marketers is social media (or social networking sites), which allows access to small but targeted audiences.

For those who are still new to social media marketing, I’ve compiled some of the best recent articles and posts I have found on social media and SNS marketing do’s and don’ts.

1. In the article, The Importance of Social Media Marketing: Why You Should Learn and Master it, Maki lays out the reasons why social marketing is increasingly important. The post explains how, when done properly, it can lead to increased web traffic and tangible benefits.


2. Steve Coulson’s 5 Tips for Optimizing you Brand’s Presence on Facebook provides useful tricks to help businesses improve how they market themselves through social media, and more specifically SNS giant Facebook. Mashable.com is a good resource for news and information on social media and should be visited frequently by those interested in social media.


3. In 10 Things You Must Know Before Using Twitter, hilzfuld sums up what is most important to know about Twitter if you intend to become a more adept user. hilzfuld provides Twitter terminology, dos and don’ts, and useful applications to use in conjunction with Twitter.
   
4. eConsultancy’s in-depth article, 10 ways to measure social media success, provides a great list of ways to measure success and results from social media activities. A must-read for marketers challenged by their bosses or clients to provide measures and metrics to justify marketing spend.
   
5. To close the list, here's an article about using caution when Twittering. The article from Jim Andrews zeroes in on a specific case of someone Twittering recklessly and ruining his own reputation as well as the reputation of his firm. The article teaches us that, like traditional online media, social media are far from being private.

If you feel this article is useful, feel free to leave a comment or to forward it to your peers. After all, it's the "social media" thing to do!

More articles like this? Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CedricVanhaver.

Social Media Reshape Financial Communications

Social media’s disruptive approach to communications will be interesting to follow as it relates to financial communications and investor relations. While social media offer new ways of reaching investors, they also entail a certain amount of risk for publicly-traded companies with respect to fair disclosures and legal compliance.

Wouldn’t it be absurd for a company to have to tweet CYA legal disclosures when Twitter only allows for communication in spurts of 140 characters? Well, that’s exactly what eBay will be doing next time it tweets earnings information to avoid getting into trouble.

Companies also run the risk that someone communicating through social media might affect the company's stock price by focusing only on positive information or jumping ahead during earnings calls.

According to a recent Financial Times article, next time eBay tweets information during an earnings call, it will first send four legal disclosure tweets, including one to the effect of: "The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures."

While there will be growing pains, and even though the SEC will certainly keep a close eye on developments in financial communication, there is little doubt that companies will continue to tweet their way to communicating with new audiences. And social media are just what will allow them to do that.

Are you aware of any companies running into fair disclosure trouble from social media? I’d love to hear about it.

More articles like this? Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CedricVanhaver.

Twitter for Marketing

Last year, I blogged for help in understanding why Twitter was such a big deal. As a marketing pro, I wanted to understand why so many users were touting Twitter as a promising marketing tool when it appeared to be nothing more than yet another social networking site.

Since then, a few things have happened. An airplane landed in New York’s Hudson River; an earthquake was reported in California; and more recently, a Turkish Airlines plane crashed at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Each time, Twitter was the medium that broke the news and the preferred way to share initial photos or thoughts publicly.

But these catastrophes and tragedies are hardly what businesses want to be associated with. So how does a marketing pro recommend the use of Twitter or other social media to a skeptical executive, especially at a B2B company?

Many reasons exist and I will discuss them in upcoming posts. But until then, here is one that by itself should suffice: Twitter has grown to more than 8 million users as of March 2009 and keeps growing very quickly. In fact, much has been written recently about SNS giant Facebook taking inspiration from Twitter in some of its newest features and layout.

So, while some may philosophically never understand why Twitter is a powerful marketing tool, the debate is moot. Social media are here to stay and Twitter is already one of their leaders.