Quick Notes on Elastic Path’s Social Marketing Webinar

Last week I attended the Elastic Path webinar “The Secret of Social Media Marketing”. Neil Patel of ACSSEO spoke about e-commerce marketing through social networking/media. The broadcast was highly informative. Linda Bustos’ recap is very thorough and she adds some nice suggestions, so I will just point out some key points here.

You can leverage the Blogosphere by:

1) creating something worthy for bloggers
2) finding bloggers who blog on similar topics (see Technorati, for instance)
3) writing them a short custom message (short, simple and customized to the blogger)
4) then, let it be (i.e. don’t harass)

Re: Social media sites (Digg, Youtube, Del.icio.us etc.) :

1) When you submit content (articles, video etc.) for any of the social media sites, make sure that most of your submissions are not yours and/or directly related to your business. When you develop a reputation for providing content that is interesting to others you will gain a fan base/virtual friends and build your profile.

2) Then when you eventually submit your own content you will get more attention and more mileage (link-bait).

3) In general, your own content should be useful and link-able. Do not produce mere advertising for your company/product. Rather produce an informative, useful article that stands on its own. This will benefit you far more than a cut-and-dry commercial.

I enjoyed most of the tips on the webinar, though I wouldn’t suggest the (debatable) “spammy” procedures. One quick note to Neil though: I bristle at the repeated suggestions to hire students for grunt work and pay them $6/hr. People deserve to be paid a fair and livable wage. By doing this, you set a fair standard and establish working relationships based on mutual respect.