First, the good news.
Social media marketing is no longer the “next big thing.” It is a mainstream aspect of marketing in both B2B and B2C businesses.
Now the bad news.
Social media marketing has grown extremely fast in the latter half of the last decade, and due to bad choices, and poorly thought out social media strategy, the customers of the 2010s are just as skeptical toward social media marketing as they ever were towards traditional marketing.
Between finding the right keywords for SEO, trying to think of “top seven things” lists, and joining up to every new social network, the industry as a whole has lost the plot. The result is that you can’t expect overnight results anymore. Trickery with search engines and social news sites can provide a short-term bump in traffic, sure, but they don’t help you do the one thing that increases pipeline and revenue – become a valued source of information for your customers.
Social media isn’t just having a blog, a Facebook account, or twittering random trivia, in the hopes of getting a lot of traffic. Any strategy that only focuses on reaching new customers misses most of benefits of social media.
Social media is how companies enter the conversation about their business and their industry. It’s how customers can let the company know what their needs are, and how companies can let customers know they can be depended upon to meet those needs.
Businesses need to become more than just good talkers – they need to become good conversationalists.
The best conversationalists, online and off, are people with interesting information to share and stories to tell. They don’t just parrot facts, they explain why those facts matter and how they affect the listener. They don’t just espouse opinion, they explain and justify their point. They make you laugh, or sometimes cry. They make interesting points and present new ideas, or old ideas in a new light. They entertain and enlighten – and give you the tools to share the information with others.
They create compelling content. Blogphilo New Media can help you do exactly that.
Beyond Buzzwords
There are a number of companies that enter the social media space with little idea of long term strategy or even short-term planning. More than one company blog was founded simply because a competitor had one, or the company thought it would make them look more “hip” or “professional.”
But companies shouldn’t put out blogs just for the bragging rights and being able to fill boxes on buzzword bingo sheets. You only begin to see the real benefit of social media when you start putting your best ideas out there.
By providing new and interesting ideas, you can establish your company’s reputation as a thought leader within your industry. And “good metrics” flow naturally from building your reputation – not the other way around.
Create material that people want to share, and the message becomes the medium. If it’s worthwhile to share, your customers will link to it. That will increase your overall viewership, RSS subscribers, and PageRank. Trying to increase the metrics artificially may work at first, but unless you build a reputation, your social media strategy will not be sustainable.
What Blogphilo Does
Blogphilo New Media can creating compelling content for use with social media endeavors such as blogs, viral videos, and yes, even tweets. But we’re more than just Web copywriters.
When and if you’re ready, we will consult with your company to help you create your own compelling content – helping you recruit and/or train the talent you need. Nobody knows your company better than you – so it makes sense that you should be writing about your company. We’ll guide you through every step of the way.
We also offer video production services for when you’re ready to move onto YouTube or want to host your own videos on your site – and if you’d like to do your own video production in-house, we can help with the basics, such as choosing equipment, basic composition, and video editing. And yes, we can train you for YouTube video as well.
All of this is to help your company find its voice in the social media setting.
Standing Out
For the past four years, the principals behind Blogphilo New Media have an established track record of success with B2B and B2C companies in social media, blogging, and viral video. We’ve gotten placements in the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, Slashdot, Reddit, Fark, Digg, and the YouTube homepage.
And while we insist that reputation is more important than staring at analytics, we do have a proven track record in increasing traffic. We’ve taken a blog from 0 visitors to 187,000 over eight months, taken websites from 750k/mo to 1M/mo, and created a Web series with an average of 30,000 views per video – with two videos in the series getting more than 140,000 views.
We’ve received praise from the editor of Network World, the tech columnist at Houston Chronicle, and Michael Cote of RedMonk. We’ve also been part of a great team that earned the #2 spot in MarketingSherpa’s Viral Hall of Fame for 2007.
And while we love Austin, Texas, and couldn’t think of being anywhere else, we are willing to travel literally anywhere in the developed world to work with your company in person – from LA to New York… or London, or Paris, or Berlin, or Buenos Aires, or Auckland, or Sydney, or Tokyo, or Seoul… – to be able to get the full story about your company.
The Inevitable Call to Action
If you’ve read this far, obviously you have questions about our track record and our services; so feel free to check out the rest of this site, and if you’d like, you can contact us at brian.boyko@gmail.com, or give us a call at +1 512 402 8617. We’d be happy to schedule an initial consultation with you about what we can do for your business.