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Dan’s Social Media & Inbound Marketing Cliffnotes
Keys to making social media work for your business

I have read 6 books about Social Media, Personal Branding and Inbound marketing over the past two years and I thought it might be helpful to provide you with a super-condensed “cliffnotes” version I recently compiled:

Be Social. Listen. Communication is a two-way street

The real key is it’s not about being ON social, it’s about BEING social, but make sure you have the right people on your team to talk for you.
Social media marketers ask, “What can we provide our customers online that will make their digital experience better?”
- Create something worth building a community around
- Identify and recruit advocates immediately
- Give people something to chew on
- Welcome criticism
Don’t “play” with community building, take the no-bullshit approach:
- Define Goals
- Establish Measurable Objectives
- Enact Strategies and Tactics to accomplish them
- The measure what is done and the results of it
- Rinse and repeat.
To sell online, stop thinking like a traditional marketer. Remember the fundamentals of this type of marketing:
- Listen first
- Be responsive
- Be honest
- Provide value
- Sell last
There is a difference between driving business FROM social media sites and driving business THROUGH social media sites.

Get Found with Inbound Marketing

Customers are getting better-and-better at ignoring marketing “interruptions.” Inbound marketing today is about “getting found” using Google, blogs, and social media on the Web.
Inbound marketing as opposed to outbound is achieved through social media marketing when your business:
- Asks and answers questions;
- Provides information or engagement through content, or
- Shows up when the audience members are having conversations about the industry, the company or anything at all really.
It is about having a seat at the table.

Create Remarkable Content

It is important to create remarkable content on top of having a remarkable value proposition. Remarkable content encourages your message to be spread giving you links of people that may possibly become customers to your website and allows you to move up in the search rankings for your keywords. Remarkable content is the gift that keeps on giving, unlike paid advertising. You need to make sure that you create content that people can effectively spread online like:
- Blog Articles / Posts
- White Papers (about industry trends and challenges, not products)
- Videos (short 2 to 3-minute videos about industry and/or products)
- Webinars (live ppt presentations)
- Podcasts (Ten to twenty minute audio programs)
- Webcasts (live video shows viewed online)
You have to give to get with remarkable content. Today your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain. Think of yourself as half marketer, half publisher.
Blogging
- Blogging is one of the best ways to create remarkable content. A blog shows that you are a thought leader in the industry, makes your website dynamic, and gives your potential customers a way to engage with you (versus being hit with a sales pitch). You can build trust with customers over time with a blog. Blogs also dynamically improve your search rankings and provide a medium that other bloggers are much more likely to link to than a product page on your website.
- Spend half your time writing the article and half your time crafting a catchy title. You need to capture attention in literally half a second. Examples of viral post titles:
Video Posts:
- Videos are a great way to give a sneak peak behind the screens of a company and make people feel like you are more real and approachable.
- Videos should be less than two minutes, accompanied by text descriptions and posted on the blog.
- In general video views drop by about 1% per second for the first minute or so (10.4% @ 10 sec, 55% @ 60 sec, etc). Simply posting any video does not mean it will be watched from start to finish.

Tweet your tweeter off – but don’t be a lame broadcaster

Think of Twitter as a micro-blogging interface
“Give more than you expect to receive out of twitter,” and to ask the question, “How many people can I engage in a dialog with?”. 20% about yourself 80% about everyone else on social media is the rule.
Focus more on starting conversations and less on broadcasting
Most everyone on Twitter is looking for new wisdom and hope. Order of operations for using the collaborative power of Twitter is:
- Find a topic;
- Ponder;
- Share your thoughts and findings.
In terms of Twitter Research:
- Find awesome people to follow. You can use wefollow.com and other sources (there used to be a site called twellow, but it has closed down).
- If you are all about the metrics, check out influence measurement tools like Klout and Twitalyzer
- Twubs.com and WhatTheTrend.com are great resources for tracking what people.
- Start using Hootsuite or bit.ly to track your links and see what people actually click upon.
- For monitoring, check out SocialMention.com and google.com/alerts. Set up some alerts for our topics (i.e. Solar, WasteWater Efficiency, things like that). You can receive email alerts when something new pops up. For instance, any time my name appears on the web somewhere new, I get an email letting me know someone is talking about me.
Look at personalizing (and possibly standardizing across the company) a twitter background that includes name, contact info, web, and bio but is not distracting

How to get started – game plan #1:

A big shout out to @DrBret for help pushing many of us to jump into the fire and get started in this way:

Define Value Stream:
- Define a simple yet niche value stream for your online communication (say Solar for California municipalities)
Tweet:
- Find and follow 25+ influencers in that value stream already on Twitter (i.e. people in California Solar, CleanTech, Efficiency, Municipal, and Energy spaces).
- Start with say 5+ tweets per day of relevant content including RT’s, MT’s and via’s of other people’s content. A few of these tweets should include a link to relevant content you’ve come across and the twitter handle of the person who wrote it. Examples:
  - Daniel Herr @DanHerr 19 Jun
    “So go find a frontier and go for it. Choose to do something important and different.” http://brianbalfour.com/post/25362212446/peter-thiel-stanford-cs183 … via @bbalfour
  - Daniel Herr @DanHerr 15 Jun
    The Great Depression http://wp.me/p23JPv-qg via @sking1145 Good post, but not sure this shows that things are as bad as the Great Depression.
  - Daniel Herr @DanHerr 13 Jun
    RT @SolarCity & U.S. Bancorp Announce Fund to Finance up to $250 Million in Residential & Commercial Solar Projects http://www.solarcity.com/pressreleases/122/SolarCity-and-U-S–Bancorp-Announce-Fund-to-Finance-up-to-$250-Million-in-Residential-and-Commercial-Solar-Projects.aspx …
- Thank every person that Retweets you
Facebook:
- Similarly engaging content as found and posted on Twitter should be posted to the Facebook page, but not as frequently (say once per day) without handles, though Facebook now recognizes hashtags.
- Consider asking questions and provocative (non-scandalous obviously) content is encouraged. Example:
  - Project Vesto post: “Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.” – Lori Greiner.
    ‘Like’ if think this is true
Publish two blog posts and one video post per week
- Publish posts on different days
- Each post should be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and/or LinkedIn where appropriate
Comment on relevant blogs:
- Comment on say 2 blog posts per day with insightful and relevant thoughts.
- DO NOT just comment to comment or spam with a bunch of links back to your homepage. If you have nothing to say, keep that nothing to yourself.

Be Human. Be Genuine.

Don’t just share links and stories – a bot could do that :). Be human :). Incorporate thoughtful commentary into posts that you share in tweets and Facebook posts. Make your own case for why people should read this. Get a little craft with your title of the article where appropriate. Examples:
- Didn’t know @Walmart & @lesliedach spent so much mental energy conserving “A different look @ Walmart http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/07/15/exit-interview-leslie-dach-walmart via @greenbiz“
- I think it’s time to break out my lawn chair 🙂 – Healthy living & building #CA #reading list! http://www.treehugger.com/culture/summer-reading-book-recommendations-treehugger.html via @JaymiHeimbuch
- RT @zshahan3 Going Solar Is Getting Popular — Check Out These Charts! http://dlvr.it/3fT4nn @solarloveorg #solar – makes me love my job!
- Can you believe #india is kicking #California‘s butt in eco-construction?! RT Living with nature http://thne.ws/13eG7De via @thehindu

Get to the point

Spend less time searching and more time engaging. While you obviously want to make the most of this experience, the priority with social media is action over precision.
Between searching, listening, creating content, sharing content, and engaging with folks don’t spend more than one to two hours in the day (though when you are first getting started I understand it taking a little longer ). A person could spend all day doing this stuff, but that wouldn’t be the most effective use of all of their time.
Don’t end up in analysis paralysis in searching for the perfect people to follow or engage. Take the startup culture mentality by getting 60% of the way there and then acting and testing your hypotheses.