I came across an interesting post on HubSpot today.  In 22 images it presented just about everything one should know about Social Media Marketing, or SMM. There were some truly amazing graphics and it’s well worth the few minutes it will take you to check them out.

I’ve selected 5 to reproduce below along with my interpretation of them. And then, inspired by the artistry, I tried to create one of my own. Enjoy…

This first one (below) shows what you have to do: create content, collaborate where you can, form a community, and then harvest the collective intelligence of the community.

The 4 C's of Social Media Marketing

The graphic also shows within the steps on the RHS side of the diagram, the targets and or categories of people at whom you are aiming these actions, and finally the axes of the graph show how easy or difficult each step is which helps you design your strategy.

The next image shows 3 things you should aim for and 3 things you should strive to avoid. One graphic, in other words, which lays out some sound rules of good SMM conduct.

Six rules of good Social Media Marketing Conduct

The next one is all about how Social Media is changing the way we do business.

Social Media is changing the way we do business.

The first segment depicts the shift in power from seller to buyer that we have written of before on these pages.

The 2^nd segment shows how – at least on the surface (online in your browser) – it’s now difficult to differentiate between a large company and a small one. As an aside, I also find it fascinating that many people no longer seem to rate the size of company that high on their list of factors deciding who to purchase from. That statement probably changes as the size and importance of what you are about to purchase grows, but at least in the SMB market, the size of a vendor seems less important and I’m guessing it has something to do with this fact that online presence masks physical size.

The 3^rd segment tells the story of how the seller used to control the marketing message but how Social Media today has made it difficult (impossible?) to hide behind a corporate façade. In other words, Social Media makes the truth visible no matter what your actual agenda is.

The last segment of the image above is also something we have written of before in these pages, and simply reflects the ubiquity of the web – your online store is open for business literally around the world.

The last graphic  I want to highlight (below) is a neat way of summarizing a previous post of ours (or at least a part of it), which dealt with the way to run a social media marketing campaign (see below for details).

Social Media Monitoring and Engagement

The graphic suggests that you begin by monitoring conversations, learning to appreciate which ones are important (have real authority), and then that you aggregate these conversations so that you can read and study them. Then you, as they put it, Escalate the conversation. To be honest, I’m not sure why they called it “Escalate”, as the sub-text of the item suggests that it’s more a case of combining a little research with a form of internal promotion. And then you join in the conversation and of course, track your results.

But although one or two of these images focused on the concept of Process, they did not do a good job of describing it. At least not to a process bigot like me. But the article inspired me – despite being no artist myself – to give it whirl:

As I said, I’m no artist, but this is a powerful diagram: If you follow its steps, your SMM campaign will get better and better over time. Guaranteed!

Most of this diagram is self-explanatory. If you’d like to know more about the questions and activities it highlights, please check out three of our previous posts:

1. How to Run a Social Media Marketing Campaign which spells it all out in detail.
2. How to Run a B2B Twitter Campaign (Part 1), and
3. How to Run a B2B Twitter Campaign (Part 2).

Please note: Each time you begin the Repeat phase, the same list of questions needs to be answered for each Think stage. Why? Because your results and the analysis of them may force you to decide on a different objective. For example: Lets assume that you picked Increased Numbers of Visitors as one of your objectives. And lets further assume that when you evaluate the results of your activities, you find that there are indeed more visitors arriving on the site. But you also find that your conversion of those visitors into prospects is not good and that in the end, the additional traffic is not increasing your revenues. You may then decide to change the objective to be More Conversions. Obviously if you do this, you need to change the metrics you are recording and then the Plan and Do parts will need to change as well, as you will now need to focus on your Landing Pages, run some A/B tests, and so on.

If you’re still hesitating to get involved in SMM, take heart. It’s not that difficult (just follow the process). It’s not expensive (people time only, no out of pocket expenses), and it really does work. Good luck!

Bit-by-Bit #29 from Eric.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.