Dudas: Social Media is Social Marketing

November 15

00:00 2010

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FEATURE

Eric Dudas’ Best Practices or ?Thou Shall??
1. Remember the BIG PICTURE!

2. Consider Social Marketing vs. Social Media.

3. Go with a strategy, but adapt as needed, probably often.

4. Use a “community manager” for product or company campaigns.

5. Link your websites with SM sites like Facebook, Twitter, and RSS enable them.

6. Engage in conversations, don’t “pitch”, when using SM.

7. Set up accounts on all major SM sites, if only as place holders for later use.

8. Create a SM policy for your employees. Communicate it to them!

9. Watch your competitors. Monitoring tools help with this.

10.DO SOMETHING!!! It’s not too late. Don’t worry about inevitable info overload.

Eric Dudas of FastenersClearingHouse delivered both good and bad news about social media and the fastener industry. Speaking at a conference during NIFS/West in Las Vegas told attendees that the fastener industry lags in social media savvy, but there’s still time to catch up.

“If you’re not yet doing things with social media, don’t panic too much because there’s a lot of room.”

The harder part is recognizing how essential Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are to future business success.

“It’s not just social media, Dudas explained, “it’s social marketing.”

Here’s what else he had to say:

1. Remember the Big Picture: Social Media is here to stay, it’s all around us, and our job as business people is to find ways to use it as a marketing tool, establishing credibility and relationships for our companies, products and services.

Think SOCIAL MARKETING!

2. An excellent video reinforcing the idea of the importance of the SM shift can be found on YouTube. It’s now a classic, called “Social Media Revolution”.

3. Read “The Web is Dead” from Wired Magazine. This is a seminal article that will give you more “big picture” understanding of current Internet trends.

4. Read “Android Invasion” from Newsweek, which deals with the battle between Apple and Google, but also presents an excellent and quick survey of the current mobile phone/computing landscape.

5. Remember the key uses for SM in business:

a. Marketing

b. Networking

c. Communication

d. Search Engine Optimization

e. Lead Generation

f. Research

6. Monitor your company name, products, and competitors constantly. Regardless of your interest in SM. You will be mentioned online by someone, some time.

7. Use on-demand media that suits your precise interests or requirements. YouTube is the king of video online, as one example.
Find audio podcasts that meet your needs at sites like www.blogtalkradio.com.

Everyone in the fastener industry should listen to Fully Threaded Radio!

8. LinkedIn is the number one professional networking site with over 80 million business people as members. You should have a profile on this site.

9. Measuring return on investment can be difficult. Remember “how long is a piece of string”? Compare your SM efforts to current marketing strategies. Consider the cost of not using SM, and also what your competitors will be doing.

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