Chrysler was recently forced to apologise after someone at the agency employed to handle their Twitter marketing misappropriated the account to express their frustration at the drive to work in Detroit (also Chrysler’s home town). This person lost their job and the agency lost the account.
Find the updated report and image here: http://bit.ly/e7Rt4q
This story highlights the importance businesses (in this case the bigger end of business) now place on social media marketing to generate interest and create buzz about their products/services. Hence the growth in the process called Social Media Optimisation (SMO) – the art of maximising the social media investment by optimising each channel used to gain the most leverage through search.
The idea behind it is really very simple; all your content needs to be optimised for search engine searches. You do this to maximise the opportunities of attracting the right audience to your content. A lot of company effort (not to mention money) goes into writing and distributing information about their products, services, promotions etc. through online blogs, articles and PR releases. These usually include all the important features and benefits from the perspective of someone who has already found the content. Frequently though, not enough consideration is given to how people will find this content.
A useful process in deciding what search words and phrases to incorporate is just to sit down and decide what are the main terms you want your stories to be found under in the search engines and prioritise them in order of importance, not too many though. You can then test these searches in the main search engines to see if they are used – no point using terms not searched. At the same time you can gauge the numbers of searches done for specific terms and maybe adjust your terms to suit the searches. The best terms then need to be seamlessly worked into the article. Remember, the headline and first paragraph provide the best search ‘strength’, so your number one search term should be used here.
The same thinking should apply to all the social media channels you use. Make sure you effectively tag all the images on Flikr and Videos on Youtube with the relevant terms. Use Twitter and Facebook to get the correctly targeted messages out with links to the appropriate articles, blogs and releases. And don’t forget to promote through your LinkedIn accounts.
Finally, co-ordinate what you say and where you say it in a structured and planned way - this will achieve the best results overall, and, at all costs, avoid tweeting in haste.