I have a love-hate relationship with trends: online group buying - love; 4-inch stiletto heels - hate; wine by the glass, carafe and bottle - love; SF chefs ALL having sunchokes, nettles and beet salad with goat cheese on their menus - hate (be original!)

Like beet salads, BSMOS (bright-shiny-marketing-object-syndrome) is a highly contagious affliction for businesses that don't identify their SMM (social media marketing) goals and instead chase unicorns and rainbows. All businesses want SMM to build their brand's positive reputation and/or generate leads. Based on these two goals, these are the current social media trends that I can assure you are not going to be replaced by the next fad.

Education is Viral - You need to demonstrate your industry intelligence constantly. No one is going to come to your website, read it and say, "Yup - that's who I'm hiring." You need to validate your knowledge and use your blog to share information and your personality. From my tone, you should have a pretty good idea how I roll. Connecting with your words is a large part of the process.

Consistency is Mandatory - You cannot try SMM for 30 days and declare it a success or failure. The minute you stop putting out educational content you don't exist. And, if your competition has been paying attention, they will swoop in and finish what you started.

Self-promotion is a Death Knell - "Click my junk" is pretty obvious and irritating. I received a birthday message on Facebook that said, "Your personal birthday present is attached below," with a link. I don't know this person well enough, so he was deleted. Solicitation through birthday wishes - who is teaching people this stuff? You really think that even if I clicked the link it would make me a client? If you do have something to promote, limit these communications to 10% of your total daily online conversations and be clear in your message. Don't try to be sneaky.

Micro-Management Kills - Whomever you task with communication needs to be given the autonomy to post and reply without excessive approvals. This means you need to articulate the tone that they should take when they reply. While you need to control the public perception of your company, if you insist everything be approved and you do not trust this person you will bog down the process and end up with one more task on YOUR to-do list.

"Social" is the Operative Word - Systems do not replace real people, no matter what they promise or how much they cost. You cannot throw money at this problem and make it go away. You must assign talent to it. When engaged by a reader, you need to reply in kind. If you think a social media company will answer better than someone close to your product, think again. You can automate being alerted to replies, but you still need to take a minute and respond yourself.

Conversion Occurs in Many Places - When measuring the success of a social media campaign, you should define every conversion separately. We at PMG identify 6 areas of conversion for our success analysis:

Reach - total audience potentially listening;
Hits - audience that clicks a post and visits our site;
Level One Conversions - visitors who convert on one of our low-requirement offers;
Level Two Conversions - visitors who convert on one of our high-requirement offers;
Level Three Conversions - visitors who convert on our highest-requirement offer leading to an appointment; and,
Closing - a prospect who enters a contract.
These vary for each of our clients, but it's essentially the same.

From the perspective of any SMM trend, you still need a solid content strategy or all the BSMO in the world will not convert. You may as well be Tweeting what you had for lunch.

What trends do you think are here-to-stay in SMM?

Posted by Paula Pollock on Wed, Apr 27, 2011