In my last post on file properties in Microsoft Word docs, I described ways to interpret some of the metadata that lives in those files. As a marketing manager, you probably read and create PDFs almost as often as you do Microsoft Office docs, so keep your eye on metadata in these files too.

Reading document properties in PDFs

First of all, you realize (don’t you?) that PDF is NOT proprietary to Adobe. It’s a standard format, and there are plenty of non-Adobe products for creating and viewing them. Nevertheless, consider Adobe Acrobat, which is representative of most readers. And free.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, you can select File > Properties, or hit Ctrl-D to open the Document Properties dialog:

Title, Author, Subject, Keywords: Fortunately, these fields populate themselves from the application in which you created the document. If you don’t like the values, you can change them here before publishing the document to your website or checking it into your content management system.

In particular, you should introduce keywords. To the extent that the bots pay any attention to keywords, they will find them in this field, in the same way that they will find them in the <meta> tags of HTML pages.

Application: If you’ve used a real layout app like Adobe InDesign or Illustrator or Quark XPress to create your brochure, case study or white paper, then this field helps show that you’re a serious marketing professional. But if you’ve done it on the cheap, using Microsoft Word or – heaven forfend – Publisher, this field will rat you out and inquiring minds will see it. Yes, there are a lot of good-looking Word templates around, but they aren’t the ones that most people use.

Location: You have no control over this field. It updates itself with the location of the PDF on the reader’s computer, not on the computer on which the PDF was generated. The field is a hyperlink, by the way, and if you click on it, it will open the handy Temp folder in which your operating system stores jillions of files you view and read on the Web. Throw away some five-year-old PDFs, if you’re in the mood.

Security tab: Did you know you can protect the content in your PDFs?

Unscrupulous people might want to take your work and pass it off as their own. Or, if you want the document to be read only on a screen, they might want to defy your wishes and print it out. They may want to fill it with nasty comments about you and slander your name all over the place. Isn’t it nice to know you can prevent all that?

For this, you need the professional version of a PDF generating application, like Adobe Acrobat Pro or Nitro PDF Professional; you can’t do it with the free reader application. After generating the PDF, visit the Security tab and head off all of those miscreants at the pass by setting restrictions on what they may and may not do with your white paper or eBook. You can also configure your PDF add-in to apply the restrictions when you first generate the file.

Marketing managers, note: There is some cachet to applying at least a few restrictions. It demonstrates that your team knows that these options exist, and that you’re savvy enough to want to protect your work. There are probably plenty of ways for a determined thief to hack into your PDF, but at least you can make it clear that you tried, and that you do place enough value on the content to want to protect it.

So, that’s why I like to hang out in the document properties. Do you? What have you found there?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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1. File Properties in Microsoft Word Docs – All Kinds of Dish

The coolest thing about listening to records was the music. The second-coolest thing was the liner notes.

Who wrote this tune? Who played bass? When did they record it? How long is it? Where was it recorded? Who’s on backup vocals? Who designed the cover?

Wrapped around the content was a layer of information that described the music and revealed bits of a story behind it.

Many years later, I came to understand this information for what it was: metadata. Data about data.

File properties

Every file you send and receive today contains metadata, a little story behind the content. In some files, it’s as simple as:

• filename
• size
• date and time last saved

Those metadata don’t tell much you of a story. But most files containing real content – MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF files – can reveal a lot more.

Maybe it’s that I don’t spend enough time perusing record liner notes any more, but I am constitutionally incapable of reviewing an MS Office file or PDF without first poking around in its file properties (or document properties). I just enjoy looking for the story behind the file.

Microsoft Office file properties

Have a look at the dialog box below that contains the metadata in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. I usually go straight to the Summary tab, which contains the most metadata.

First, I should mention that merely locating this dialog box is becoming more difficult. Until Office 2003, a simple Alt-F, I sufficed to pop it open in Windows. Since Office 2007, the key combination is Alt-F, I, Q, S, down-arrow. They’re not making it any easier. (If you know what it is in Office for Mac, please let us know in the comments.)

File properties dialog, Microsoft Office

Title: This field is self-explanatory, but it doesn’t depend on the file name. Usually, the app scoops up the first few words or the document, or any text you’ve formatted with the Title style. You can also make up your own title and place it in this field yourself. There’s probably some way to search on Title in Office, Windows or MacOS.

What’s interesting, though, is the metadata that might be left over from the last time the file was saved. Suppose your company is Macy’s, and Cosmodemonic has sent you a pricing proposal, and the Title field reads “Special Pricing – Gimbels”. So, you’ve just gotten the bit of dish about whom else Cosmodemonic is talking to. Busted!

Author: This field does self-populate, but not very consistently. It’s usually the most interesting bit of metadata to me because it contains the name, as burned into Microsoft Office during installation, of the original author of the file.

Unfortunately, a lot of enterprises burn a boilerplate author name – “Gargoyle Industries Employee” or “Breathlessly Ecstatic Dell Customer” – into Office, so the default entry tells you nothing useful.

However, the Author field can surprise you, too. Like when you get a late revision of a paper you wrote, and somebody else has replaced your name with his/her name in this field. Busted!

Company: Again, this field is populated with data burned in during the installation of Office. Of course, it’s possible to overwrite it, but not everybody knows that. So the next time you receive a legal document like a contract or a non-disclosure agreement from a business partner, have a look at the Company field and find out which law firm they swiped it from. Busted!

Keywords: But enough of the cloak and dagger. The Keywords field contains metadata of some potential business importance, especially when you populate it with the keywords that you want search engines to find.

I’m not sure that the search engines pick up these keywords if you simply hang your Word, Excel or PowerPoint file out on the Web, because these formats are binary. But if you save your Office file as a PDF or – heaven help you – HTML file, and then publish the file where the search engines can find it, you’ll see that the keywords you enter to this field are preserved for the search engines to index.

Comments: This is an excellent place to store comments about the file’s history. Excellent, except that nobody would ever think to look for important information buried all the way down here. Most people pump the file name with version numbers, revision dates and initials of reviewers, all of which should really go here. Again, metadata in this field is probably searchable in Windows or Office.

Statistics tab: Click over to the Statistics tab of this dialog box for one other bit of metadata, which is Last saved by (or Last modified by). This is not always the same as the author, especially if the file has been out for review. So, if Mr. Big sends you back “his” revisions and tells you how carefully he pored over your most recent draft, and you see that the file was Last modified by an intern, you can privately assume that perhaps Mr. Big is exaggerating his involvement in your draft.

Custom tab: Finally, on the Custom tab you can create and set your own variables and properties and use them for document automation and update-fields. When you send the file as an attachment in Outlook, several bits of metadata (e.g., _EmailSubject, _AuthorEmail, _PreviousAdHocReviewCycleID) land here automatically.

Had enough sleuthing for one post? Next time, I’ll walk through the document properties in PDFs. There’s plenty of dish there as well, if you know how to place it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Epiclectic

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It takes 21 days to form a habit. Let’s hope it doesn’t take you 21 clients to remember to ask a few important questions at the beginning of each marketing communications writing project.

1. Who is the audience? This is the most commonly unanswered question in marketing writing. Marketing managers know tacitly whom they want the piece to move, but they rarely emphasize it enough. It’s important to flesh out the answer to this question as exhaustively as the answer to the questions, “What does our product do?” and “How does this service save you time and money?” It’s just as crucial – maybe even more so – for the writer to know what keeps readers up at night and what has their hair on fire.
2. What do you plan to do with the piece? If this is for the home page or a printed brochure, it had better keep a human reader engaged. If it’s for a deep SEO page that search engines will see more often than humans will, focus more on text that is long on bullets with target keywords and medium on reader engagement. If it’s a PDF for print, then hyperlinks won’t help much, will they? But if it’s a PDF for Web download, then writers can put hyperlinks, Flash video, and social media links in it.
3. What else do you need me to do for you besides write? There’s more to this question than shameless self-promotion. You know that the longer you’ve been writing and the more you see what you can do for different clients, the greater the value your services can add. The folks at the Content Marketing Institute, most of whom have been writing for a long time, take writing far beyond the pale and advise clients on using writing strategically. Colleague and advertising copywriter John Kuraoka also consults on marketing and branding because his clients have seen that he does much more than take a briefing and send back 250 words for a magazine ad. Not every writer knows how to do these things, and not every client needs them, but they demonstrate how cumulative the writing process can be, and how much information writers accumulate.

Of course, you can ask these questions and get answers and write according to the answers, but you can still hit a snag in mid-paper that sends you back to these questions.

So these are questions that marketing communications writers should never stop asking. I know I never do.

To which questions do you keep coming back?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Aplomb

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Your keyword basket contains the terms people use most frequently to find you. Be sure to share it with your marketing communications writers.

Have you spent time and/or money researching the terms that people use to find your blog and Website, your “keyword basket?” Do you realize that you can pump these terms into the white papers, case studies, articles and presentations you hang out on the Web as well?

Your marketing communications writers should have access – and maybe even input – to the keyword basket that results from your search engine optimization efforts. They should be creating content that judiciously uses these keywords to help the pieces get found on the Web and draw more visitors to your site. Keywords aren’t just for stuffing into your <meta> tags, after all.

This occurred to me while I read a Stephanie Tilton article, “Buyer Personas: How to Deliver Relevant Content to B2B Buyers“. In the same conversation during which you tell writers about the piece you want them to deliver, you should describe the persona of the ideal reader AND you should talk about keywords of importance in the piece.

Of course, keyword baskets are still a novel concept to some marketing managers. I can think of three companies that are keyword basket cases because of how they handle – or don’t handle – their keywords. Here are the scenarios and how to avoid ending up in them yourself:

1. Company A doesn’t have a keyword basket at all. It has done an admirable job of growing business through sales rather than through marketing, so it hasn’t paid much attention to whether people find its content, let alone how they find it. The Webmasters have stuffed a few words into the <meta> tags on the home page, but there’s no concentrated, ongoing effort to assemble and maintain a keyword basket.
2. Company B has a well-oiled marketing machine behind it. This is a company whose Web team meets weekly to plan and work on a fabulous Web infrastructure for shooting content in huge salvos from cannon on the roof. The team disgorges disparate, technical content in an orderly manner week after week, but is wrapped around the axle when it comes to its SEO strategy. “People will find us,” the team believes, even though it could easily distill keywords from its content and analyze them from Web statistics.
3. Company C has a keyword basket that it gladly shares with writers, but it’s monotonous. The company stuck to the short, fat, dumb terms that drive 70% of visitors to their site, while ignoring finer, more subtle terms. The keywords in the basket are little more than permutations of the half-dozen or so words that most people would associate with its line of business. This makes for a simple basket, but not for very effective use in white papers or case studies, because almost all of the content from everybody in the category contains the terms. The basket is missing long-tail terms that describe in greater detail the nuances and unique value proposition in the company’s services.

Is your company a keyword basket case? What can you do about it?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: Marshall Astor

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The title of your white paper is where you sell your idea to the prospective reader. Don’t blow your chance to make a good impression.

Industry colleague Jonathan Kantor publishes a list of free white papers each week from his blog, White Paper Pundit. I’ve followed it the last few weeks, looking for interesting titles. They are few and far between. (Mind you, these are not papers that Jonathan himself has written.)

Have a look at this list from last week and tell me what you think of them:

1. Hosting a hybrid online conference
2. Enrollment Marketing Predictions for 2010
3. Lessons Learned From Windows 7 Early Adopters
4. Real World Predictive Analytics
5. Protecting Your Constituents’ Personal Information
6. Collections Lawsuit
7. Engagement: Understanding It, Achieving It, Measuring It
8. Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness
9. The Empowered RIM Manager
10. The Predictive Enterprise
11. Social Media and the 401(k) – The Time Is Now
12. The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication
13. An Unfortunate Surprise: Why Predictive Response Models Decrease Marketing ROI
14. Do Fortune 100 companies need a twittervention?
15. Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy
16. SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
17. The Lisbon Treaty
18. Why Vyatta is Better than Cisco
19. Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
20. HP_UX 11i v3: Congestion Control Management
21. The Road Traveled
22. How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
23. Transloading Efficiency
24. Sustainable Agriculture

Did any of those grab you? Even if you were in the position of needing to read up on these topics, did any of these titles raise its hand and squeal, “Oh, pick me, pick me!”?

White Paper Titles – Good and Bad

Let’s examine a few of these.

• Collections Lawsuit
• The Lisbon Treaty
• Sustainable Agriculture

This seems like search engine optimization gone wrong; the titles are perfect for SEO, but when they show up in the results, they’re not very tempting, are they?

Whose point of view does each paper examine? What aspect of each topic does the paper cover? Who is in the intended audience? What will they get out of reading the paper?

Consider another group:

• Real World Predictive Analytics
• SQL Server Consolidation Guidance
• The ROI of Backup Redesign Using Deduplication

These titles give us a bit more information and help us qualify them better. “I don’t need to consolidate my SQL Server implementation; I need to build it up. Guess this paper’s not for me, thanks.” Or, “Maybe duplication is what’s bogging down our backups. This might be worth a read.” And, they’re SEO-ready.

These titles give us steak, but not much sizzle. Your paper deserves both.

One final group:

• How Industrial Equipment Manufacturers Can Grow and Protect Customer Loyalty
• Understanding Web Accessibility: Why Universal Web Design Will Be Good for Your Organization
• Enterprise Microsharing: Nineteen Applications to Revolutionize Employee Effectiveness

These are pretty well evolved titles. They demonstrate that the paper is not for everybody, and they save me time by giving me enough information to qualify them.

They’re long, but there’s nothing wrong with that, especially with SEO-ready keywords at the beginning.

3 Steps to Good White Paper Titles

1. Include the job title of the intended reader. This is part 1 of the steak; it tells me you have done homework to find out who I am.
2. Include the business problem the paper addresses. This is part 2 of the steak, in which you focus NOT on your expertise, but on the thing that has my hair on fire. (See David Meerman Scott on the single most important pitching tip.)
3. Include verbs. This helps the sizzle.

So, how about:

• Literacy Instructors Scramble – Get the Most Out of No Child Left Behind before It’s Left Behind
• Let the Casual Bloggers Decide: WordPress or Blogger.com over the Long Haul
• What Is My Pancreas, and What Did I Do to It to Deserve Cancer?
• Rubbing the Buffalo off the Nickel – 5 Ways Deans Can Increase Revenue and Lower Expenses

And, since you’re front-loading the title with SEO keywords, you can consider publishing the paper under two different titles (A/B testing), with each one focusing on either 1 or 2:

• Translation and Manufacturing – How Managers Can Successfully Mix the Two
• Manufacturing Managers Take on Translation and Make It Work

What are you doing with titles to get your customers to read your content?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

photo credit: Doug Coldwell

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Put out great content

Half the art to getting found on the Web involves putting out great content. Your marketing communications writer needs to know this and produce accordingly.

A post at Problogger this week extols the virtues of linking to other content on the Web:  Linking reinforces the relationships – both human and digital – that make the Web go round. A quote at the end of the post from Google’s Matt Cutts:

I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are making great content that will attract links in the first place…

Your writer needs to know that her job is not merely to generate copy to keep up with everybody else. Her job is to create valuable content that will attract eyeballs and prospects and links (“oh, my!”).

Here are three things that will help her succeed in that:

1. Your keyword basket. If you’ve done the research and know the keywords you’re chasing, use them liberally. After you’ve enhanced your Web pages with them, have your marketing communications writer use them in press releases, white papers, case studies, blog posts and industry articles.
2. Your messaging. “Great content” is the right message in front of the right reader, eliciting the right response. If your messaging emphasizes how safe your products are, you don’t want your writer wasting words on how economical they are; that’s off-message. As a marketing manager, you should know your messaging and be able to articulate it to outside writers.
3. Your competitors’ copy. While your competitors zig, you should zag. Whatever they’re doing in their copy, you should be doing something else. A good writer can use competing copy like a bumper on a billiard table to bounce your content into a different direction and help you position yourself differently.

Once you have the great content, you can take it to the Web and social media teams and have them hang it in all the right places.

photo credit: WolfgangRieger

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Social media marketing seems like smoke and mirrors, but when the smoke blows away and you take down the mirrors, you still need to hire a writer who can deliver valuable content.

Social media marketing is an exercise in riding the tiger.

The buzz is that the traditional, prescriptive notions of marketing don’t fit very well in social media, and so marketing managers need to cede some control to the crowd. Let your customers tell you what they like about you and want from you, then give it to them in short, quick bursts and hope that you’re building relationships and spreading the word.

Some ad agencies like Crispin Porter & Bogusky have turned their home pages into “part Website, part digital fishing net.” In the last century, the equivalent might have been to offer free beer all day long in the lobby of your corporate office, or to let complete strangers answer the phone.

So you’re trying to convince your traditional-minded boss to let you run the company through this social media thingee. You know that “Because it’s fun” and “Everybody’s doing it” won’t fly as cornerstones of a social media strategy, so you have to explain tweets, back-links, followings and a Squidoo lens in classical marketing terms.

(Mind you, we are probably the last generation that will need to do this. In the future, people are just going to understand it without explanation.)

A Social Media Program for Traditional Marketers

Pete Caputa of Hubspot writes:

Based on my daily interactions with marketing agencies, I believe we’ve finally reached the point where convincing companies that they need to be using social media to build awareness, audiences, traffic and leads is almost over.

Now it’s about being able to speak to them in terms they understand (rather than in terms our social media peers understand), to explain why a social media strategy is absolutely necessary.

Pete describes a new e-book from Channel V Media that bridges the voodoo of the vehicles (remember that Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit and the others are only vehicles) and the traditional approach to marketing. Its goal is to help companies and marketers develop a social media plan with a foot in both camps.

-Audience Identification
-Platform Development and Design
-Brand Campaign Integration
-Content Creation/Coordination
-Goal Mapping
-Brand Identity
-Audience Attraction
-Social Media Listening
-Community and Social Responsibility
-Internal/External Community Engagement
-Brand Advocacy
-Customer Service

Marketing Writers and Social Media

In particular, the fourth bullet concerns your writers. Are they thinking too traditionally to fit in with your social media marketing plan? Do they know what to do with your keyword basket? Can they develop the content you need for these social media channels, and the brave new expectations of the people at the other end of them?

• You still need content. Whether you opt for a white paper or a free sample, you need to tell your story somehow.
• That content will still come from marketing writers you hire. Managing your social media strategy will be plenty of work for you already.
• The marketing writers have to write in new ways so that the content is valuable. Every sentence has to answer the reader’s question, “Why should I care?”
• Not valuable to you; valuable to your customers and the people with whom they share. They don’t want to share your brochure. They want to share something that will make people follow them.

The essence of social media is that somebody will read your story and share it.

Your marketing writers need to get that.

photo credit: L. Lew

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Je pense, donc j'essuie.

In a customer interview, your marketing communications writer can get more out of interviewees or subject matter experts if she can make them think.

Years ago, my boss at the time, a VP of marketing, gave me the secret to working with our infuriating, inscrutable, mercurial CEO:

You’ve got to make him think.

Frankly, I wasn’t adept at it then – hence, my being laid off some months later – and I’m still not good at it, but I’m working with a marketing communications writer who knows how to make our subject matter experts and even our customers think.

I heartily enjoy seeing them rise to the challenge.

Making the Customer Think in a Customer Interview?

This seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Why would you run the risk of antagonizing a customer or engineer who is doing you a favor by allowing you to pick his brain for a white paper or case study?

This writer is smart enough not to try to impress the interviewee with her knowledge of the business or technology. She doesn’t need to know more in those fields to make the interviewee think.

It’s all in the three questions she poses them to explain it.

1. “How cool is this technology, would you say?” She doesn’t ask about the novelty or even the cost-effectiveness of the technology. She’s looking for The Cool. In fact, she’s not even looking for it, but asking the interviewee to lead her right to it. Is the cool thing about predictive text entry on a cell phone that it only takes up a few KB of phone memory, or that it helps you text faster, or that it can guess which letters you want to enter next? And how cool is it?
2. “What can you tell me about this story that would get readers to want to share it with other people?” This is a big part of writing for social media, which she understands quite well. It’s thinking one step past the ideal readers, to their desire to share the story with their social network.
3. “If you were looking for a story like this on the Web, which search terms would you use?” Not everybody can get away with asking this question – I cannot – but she can. It’s the ultimate search engine optimization question, of course, and while interviewees can’t vouch for every possible keyword, their insight is valuable.

Questions like these might lead you to think that her drafts consist of keyword-stuffed, awkward copy. If she didn’t process the answers to these questions as well as she does, they would be awful copy. But, as a marketing communications writer, she knows what I want out of the piece, and she understands our audience very well, so she knows what to do with the answers.

By making the interviewees and subject matter experts think, she’s done more than tell our story: She’s told it without making our readers have to think.

(Tip of the hat to Steve Krug of Don’t Make Me Think fame).

photo credit: Dionetian

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Sure, this is all work for hire, and a freelance writer won’t have the dedication to your company that a full-time employee will, but what’s wrong with asking for a little commitment?

The Marketing Writer’s Commitment to You

If you’re structuring the engagement correctly, you as the marketing manager commit to paying and the writer commits to delivering the content you want. That’s not very complex, and each of you knows where the other stands.

But, it’s really only a transaction.

Don’t you want a relationship? Don’t you want a marketing writer who’s visiting places you don’t go and sending you back ideas? Don’t you want a writer who sees your overall content landscape and writes from that background?

Suppose your writer asked you to put him on your newsletter mailing list. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

Suppose your writer followed you in other channels – videos, webinars, tweets, press releases – and sent you a list of new content ideas with a note:

I’m not just angling for more work, but here are some opportunities for new content that we can jump on. What do you think?

What can you do to get that kind of commitment?

Ask.

Your Commitment to the Marketing Writer

Once you’ve determined that you and the writer get along, and that he’s willing to learn about your business and do better work for you, bring him in closer. Try these:

1. “I’m going to send you a sample of our product (or a guest login to our Website, or a free hour of our service).” Offer to pay for an hour or two of his time to learn your product or service better, so that he builds context and background around the terms he uses in his pieces for you.
2. “I’ll have our Web marketing team send you our latest basket of keywords.” This is so drop-dead simple – it helps your writer give you more-searchable content – but it’s a big leap for a marketing manager to think of it. Plant the relaxed, high expectation that he will do the necessary research to use the keywords properly.
3. “I’d like you to dial in to our weekly marketing meetings for the next couple of months.” Even if he’s just a fly on the wall, he’s going to pour things through important filters and come back with ideas that have not occurred to you. Ask him for them after a few calls.
4. “I’ll put you on our mailing list so you can see the kind of content we’re generating all the time.” No writer interested in a strong relationship with you will consider that spam. He doesn’t need to cling to every word, but he ought at least to find patterns or opportunities. Or maybe just typo’s.
5. “We’re sending you a plane ticket so you can work on the next paper on site for a few days.” Some writers will say they’re too busy to do this, and you may have to punt, but having your freelance writer in house for a few days will shift a lot of relationship-building into high gear.

What have you tried to bring your marketing writer in closer? Has it worked?

photo credit: Vinay Shivakumar

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6 new channels!

Hire a writer who understands that the social media business story is still warming up, and that it consists of several different channels.

How is your business using social media in all its channels? More importantly, how are the people inside your business using them?

I hope you are past the notion that this is all about a bunch of teenagers exchanging gossip, or that this is just “the new t.v.”? There are plenty of social media business success stories, including these compiled about Twitter by MarketingProfs.

There’s a strangely inverse relationship between business and social media:

• Business starts out as being about money, but ends up being about relationships.
• Social media channels starts out as being about relationships, and end up being about money (if you play them right).

Your Social Media Business in 6 Channels

So, what is your business in social media? Can you tell the players? Do you even have a program yet?

Heather Lutze of the Findability Group summarized social media for business as being in 6 main channels (as of this summer, anyway). With a tip of the hat to Heather, here’s my supplement to her summary:

1. LinkedIn – ranks well in search engines, strong focus on business and professional content, good place to describe your company.
2. Facebook – not as useful for search engine marketing because the personal pages are not indexed (group pages, however, are indexed). Facebook started out as strong in personal networking (think colleges and margaritas) and has gained a lot of momentum by facilitating business-to-consumer relationships.
3. MySpace – The social media darling of yesteryear, its reputation has not benefited much from news items detailing bad behavior among its users. Hey, it’s what we had first, so we all saw what we could get away with. Got a band? Be on MySpace.
4. YouTube – Yes, you too can market yourself with video; just ask Blendtec. You can also screw it up if you’re not careful; just ask Bank of America. Well indexed for search engines. Not as easy as updating a LinkedIn profile, but you may as well try something new in your organization. It’s the 21st century, after all.
5. Blogging – Search engines love blogs (constantly updated content), your customers love blogs (if you’re really creating a relationship with them and not just breathing your own exhaust) and your search engine marketing effort loves blogs (new ways to explore the keywords prospects use to find you). Blogging is a lot of work. So is business. Remember?
6. Twitter – Zen meets the Internet. Don’t try to control Twitter; just ride it as best you can. It’s its own best search engine, and you can find information, trends and opinions there as they arise.

Tell Your Story in Social Media Terms

Once you’ve decided on the channel(s) you want to approach, you’ll need content, because whatever you may do in social media, you need to tell your story eventually. Your marketing communication writers need to get your message out consistently and to a variety of audiences.

You cannot fill your Social Media channels with brochure copy. Nobody on the Web cares about you, your company or your products; they care about what you can do for them and their problems.

When you hire a writer for social media in business, you need to start and maintain a conversation in a new language, and not just re-hash your strengths. Your Web content writer needs to understand your message and tailor it to as many different channels as you select.

What do you think about these social media business channels? Where and how are you casting your lot?

photo credit: avlxyz

Related posts:

1. Social Media Engineering??
2. Search Engine Optimized or Ideal Reader Optimized?