While executing a social media marketing campaign you begin to notice how you can start shifting the target conversation of the campaign.

When starting a campaign you should pick a topic or a conversation that you are hoping to build a presence in.  This topic should be a key word or key phrase that represents where you would like to be.  You can also further define the conversation using a more refined list of keywords similar to a online marketing campaign.

Pretty soon you will start to find topical areas where your message is better received and drive the kind of traffic you desire to your media, profiles, blog and Website.

It all takes paying close attention to the conversation and considering new keywords or phrases that could drive your social media marketing campaign to achieve the results you are looking for.

Lately we have been receiving a lot of requests for in-house social media marketing trainings.  Clients are requesting that we come on site to assist them in developing a social media marketing campaign strategy.

The downturn in the economy has really hit small businesses and they are looking for new ways to find and retain customers.  Social Media and Social Networks are a great avenue for finding new customers and maintaining the relationship with your existing customer base.

We are always working to provide new white papers, case studies and operations manuals for social media marketing campaigns in many different industries and conversations.  These materials assist small business owners who may not be able to afford a full-blown social media marketing campaign.

Social Media Squad has been assisting businesses and organizations on-site with the following:

• On-Site social media marketing strategy needs assessment and development
• Social media marketing campaign setup, oversight process, and reporting / metrics
• In-House social media marketing campaign training and monitoring
• Custom social media marketing materials development

This new in-house social media program is really helping businesses cut cost and realize a social media marketing campaign for their business.   They are able to utilize existing staff and resources as well as outside professional social media marketing resources to achieve their online goals.

Stay tuned for more blog posts, white papers, and programs on in-house social media marketing campaigns.

While some have argued that the internet isolates us, internet users know it has a remarkable ability to bring us together. Through forums, blogs, and other social sites, it’s possible to connect with thousands of people all around the world who share your particular interest. However, when that many people are brought together it’s inevitable some tensions will develop.

In a group that large, there will no doubt be a great mix of characters and personalities, including those who are highly sensitive and those who are highly insensitive. The laws of the internet dictate that these two types of people will find each other, even be drawn to one another, and tensions will erupt.

After spending time on social sites, I realized that the rudeness, angry volleys (sometimes called “flames”) and general jumpiness was far too widespread to be coming from simple misunderstandings between people on different ends of the sensitivity spectrum.
We’re all pretty well aware of road rage by now, and it got me to thinking if the web-rudeness I was experiencing was linked to this kind of anonymity-driven hostility on the road.

I quickly found that web rage is a documented phenomenon which stems from something called “online disinhibition effect.”  The online disinhibition effect means that posts turn to nasty flames because the writer is unable to gauge the target’s response, or in many cases decipher the true motive in the first place. In real life, we “read” someone according to their body language, tone, pitch, all the things that are impossible to decipher online. In fact, in real life words account for only 7% of our communication.

It took millions of years for humans to develop our complex communication techniques, so it makes sense that when you take away 93% of what we use to get our message across, the messages often get lost or misinterpreted. Whether behind the wheel or behind the screen, we need to find ways to adapt to help our desired messages get through without causing more harm than good.

Some tips to combat web rage:

• To cut down on misunderstandings, use smileys or emoticons to give emotional cues to your message.
• Don’t waste time on “trolls” (people who scan through social sites looking for arguments) or flamers. If you feel the need to clarify an original post, simply do it and excuse yourself from the discussion.
• Before taking offense and firing off a nasty remark, take a moment to imagine the person behind the post. In all reality, it could be someone you know. Imagine if a friend or family member came to you with the same statements. How would you respond to them?
• If it is someone you know, pick up the phone or ask to meet in person. The extra cues from hearing their voice on the phone or meeting face to face will help you deal with the situation much more effectively.
• Last but not least: learn proper web etiquitte and teach your children.

Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit articles, blogs, video, images and many other content types to sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader notes, magnolia, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr and twitter.

Shareaholic also lets you know how many times the web page you’re on has been dugg or saved to del.icio.us.

You can get Shareaholic at http://shareaholic.com/.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any user access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

To use Amazon S3 you need to first be using the Firefox Web Browser, if you already don’t have it you can download the Firefox Web Browser.

Once you have the browser installed you can use right in the browser using the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer. It gives you access to the Amazon storage in a interface very similar to FTP.

Once installed you will have to add an account for the Amazon S3 service. You will have to add the key and secret key provided to be able to access.

Once added you can then upload and download files freely.

As you will come to find out, we’re a large fan of the google tools. Most people rely on Google Alerts to monitor their online reputation. Google alerts works by sending you an email any time a new relevant result for a certain search is found. People will set it up to be notified for their company name and sometimes even competitor names.

We like to take this a step further and setup a google home page tab for reputation watching. Inside that tab, we’ll add various RSS feeds created from searching various search engines for our key terms. Some of the sites that we consider a must add for repuation watching are:

• Technorati
• Yahoo! Answers
• Google News
• Yahoo! News
• Google Blog Search
• Blogpulse
• Bloglines

This should give you a good monitoring base for both blogs, news and the randomness of Yahoo questions. It would definately be a good idea to customize this list for your own personal niche market, but this is a good base to start from.

The folks over at Courts Internet Marketing School have an excellent article up about Keyword Sniping.

What is keyword sniping? It’s a method of SEO where you setup up an entire site based on one keyword in hopes of capturing a niche market.

I agree with them in the sense that it’s very important to do keyword research. They mention Wordze (paid service) and WordTracker (free service) other options are Google AdWords: Keyword Tool and Submit Express. Google’s solution is nice because it shows advertiser competition as well as avg monthly search volume and past month search volume. However, google uses graphs instead of actual numbers like the others. I’d recommend spending the extra time and using both Google’s solution as well as WordTracker (or if you’re really serious - Wordze).

Targeting something outside of the tech market is another great idea. The majority of “tech” people ignore ads or have ad blocker installed. Try thinking about things your mom, grandpa or child would search for.

The article also provides great insight into how much content to have and how to load it with keywords, domain name consideration, setting up inbound links and also good guidelines for site branding.

The web has gone through a large transformation in the past few years. Before the whole “Web 2.0″ explosion the web consisted of a lot of static pages. People presented their information and that was it… Read it and move on (but please click the animated gif ad first). Lately (last few years) sites are becoming a lot more focused on interaction and community.

Besides the obvious giants - MySpace and FaceBook - there are tons of other socially based sites. Flickr, Dopplr, Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Classmates.com, Fotolog, Friendster, Linkedin and Plaxo to name just a few. All these sites are based around communities. Sharing photos, suggesting new articles, keeping in touch with highschool classmates and sharing addresses are all examples of the basic ideas behind these sites.

These are all examples of one for of conversation to join. Registering for any of these sites (that are relevant) is an early step in the marketing campaign - but a step we’ll talk about in a later post. Other examples of conversations going on on the web would be Yahoo Answers where people post a question and then members of the interweb try to answer… users rank others answers and the best answer is chosen.

Of course another form of conversation is blogs. Blogs allow readers to comment on the authors posts. The good blogs (in my opion) have th author respond to those comments… this allows readers to ask questions, point out errors and then the author can reply… and there’s your conversation.

One of the largest forms of conversations has actually been around since, I guess you’d call it, web 1.0. This would be forums. There are forums out there for almost everything. Forums work a lot like blogs where someone posts a topic and then anyone is welcome to join in on the conversation. Forums can be a great place to join in on conversations and get your name out there.

Now that we have some examples of conversations, in my next posts I’ll start explaining how to utilize them to your benefit.

One of our goals when implementing a social marketing campaign is “Joining the Conversation”. It’s not our goal to increase page rank or sell throughs on pay per clicks. Our goal is to drive traaffic to the site because people are interested in our clients content. One of the best ways to do this is to slowly build a reputation in the clients industry.

Lets say our client is a supplier of specialty products for Salt Water Fish tanks. This is a pretty specialized market that deals with a lot of educated customers. Chances are good that we aren’t going to have a Campaign Manager that is a specialst in this area so we will dedicate the first 40-80 hours of the project to just educating ourselves - nothing more.

The first step in a campaign should ALWAYS be educating. Many places make the mistake of jumping right into the conversations and talking about thing that they are not educated about. It is very important to actually have a base of knowledge to pull from. Of course 40-80 hours is not nearly enough time to become experts on any subject, over the next few posts, i’m going to take you through a sample campaign using the Google platform to help create the illusion that you are knowledgable about your client, that you want to join in on conversations and are not just their to market yourself (even though that is the main reason).

I was just reading a blog entry on Techcrunch about Grouply an online discussion aggregator and management service.

It is a perfect management tool for your Social Media Marketing Forum campaign. Allows you to save and keep up with the daily flood of messages from your groups.

Your message end up in one centralize place.

Good stuff, will incorporate into the our Social Media Marketing Toolbox.