Create a social media campaign - part one

Social media workshops and seminars are a popular feature of many conferences and meetings in the voluntary and community sector.

Why?

I suspect the answer lies in the intuitive understanding that volunteering and community involvement is one of the traditional social networks. Modern social media provides new tools for developing communities of interest that extends beyond the confines of geography.
The growth of social media allows these networks to extend and expand. The networks are largely based on the notion of friendship and shared interest and this means that it allows organisations and individuals to talk from a trusted position. This means that within the network people can promote ideas, exchange information and recommendations and provide opportunities for some great opportunities.
However, the same people who launch and use social media campaigns are the same people who object to spam in all its forms. Understand the social etiquette of helpfulness, other centredness and empathy.
This article (first in a series) looks to identify how you can use social media to market your organisation and your cause. How you can monitor and assess what is being said and who is saying it. We will look at a few social media tools and how you can build a campaign that is goal oriented; memorable and builds a network of people who are happy to talk with you and to take you with them into their networks.

What is Social Media?

The common forms of social media that is popular at the time of writing includes Twitter; Facebook; YouTube; LinkedIn; Ipadio and Google+ . Each has its own media format e.g. words, images, video, sound and is housed in a targeted network. Facebook is about friends, LinkedIn is colleagues, YouTube for Video, Ipadio for audio and then latest to the market is Google +.
Social media allows people to exchange information very quickly without it being filtered by traditional media organisations. This means that people trust, or mistrust, the information based on the reputation of the sender. This power that allows you to broadcast from your mobile to anyone who cares to listen gives tremendous power to the individual. It is a time of change and as community leaders it is essential that you are involved.
Social Media Marketing means using the tools of social media to actively engage people through blogs, online conversations, to drive traffic and increase awareness and visibility of your objectives. Social Media Marketing means persuading people to do something on your behalf; follow a link; tell their friends; donate; buy or simply engage.

Introduction

Social media is being used by your staff, your clients, your friends, your family and of course your competitors.

By identifying which social media platforms each of these groups use you can find the best way to engage with them. Identifying the systems that people you want to talk to are already using means that you can reach your audience more easily. Putting it bluntly if all your clients are on Facebook, then even a great Twitter campaign is not going to yield results.

Of course knowing where people are and being able to reach them is great but what do you want to say to them. What do you want them to do as a result of the interaction?

Examples of some social media campaign goals include:

• Increase traffic to your website
• Get people talking about your business
• Self promotion; Be seen as knowledgeable
• Increase the number or type of volunteers
• Sell products and services
• Raise funds
• Increase participation

How a Social Media campaign can help

It would be simplistic to suggest that social media is a trusted resource because there are many elements to how it is perceived and used. For example, as large social media providers like Facebook, try to generate money from this ‘free' resource; you see an increase in PPC (pay per click) advertising down the side of the screen.
Links within a person's profile may be trusted if the person who has posted the link is known and if the link appears to be in line with that individual's profile.
Social media can help you achieve a number of objectives including

• Increase traffic for your website
• Raise the profile of your organisation
• Get people talking about the issues that matter
• Generate opportunities
• Be seen to be active
• Helping Clients
• Build Your on-line Reputation

Building a Social Media Campaign

The three key areas to building a successful campaign:

1. Listen to the conversations and monitor for keywords
2. Engage with people and participate in their conversations
3. Suggest, advise and influence your chosen area

Your aim is to influence people to achieve your objective. However, this requires that first you have developed your on-line reputation as a person who is active, involved and as a trusted resource. The hard sell is never going to work and in a social media setting can damage the perception of your organisation or cause.
There are many platforms for getting your message across, these can be split into three areas

• Your website and blogs: where you control everything that's being said.
• The social web: Facebook, Twitter where content is informal and more socially based
• The business web: LinkedIn and professional forums.

Each of these is an important part of any campaign and each should be used as part of the campaign story you are building. However use the correct message in the correct format in the correct place is crucial.
Seeing someone's drunken tweet on their LinkedIn profile is not good and can damage the reputation you are trying to build. So please be careful when using those tools that post the same message across multiple platforms.