Sonicko Consulting

One thing that I’m constantly asked about by traditional marketers is the value of social media marketing. They have by now all heard of social media and the corresponding big names Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Linked In, etc. What is less clear is how to leverage them effectively to meet their marketing goals. Definition of marketing goals followed by business analysis of who your target customer is, where they are, and how they interact online are some of the fundamental aspects that will help drive your strategy.

All to frequently I’ve seen marketers jump into the social media space without understanding the media and just wanting to be on facebook for example. Starting a group without a strategy with a few posts here and there doesn’t add value to your company or your brand. Knowing that a large potential customer base is active on a social media site is a start for you to establish a dialogue with them and find an ‘in’ for yourself and your products. Another mistake that marketers make is coming off as too corporate. A large majority of users are on social media sites to interact with friends, family, former classmates, etc. They are not actively engaged in searching for your product for the most part. This is not search engine marketing where a customer is typing in a contextualized search term in which you offer a corresponding product. You need to establish a value add for them in this medium.Don’t just build a corporate widget or application, toss it up online and expect the masses to come flocking to you.

Perhaps you sponsor a message board or online forum. Maybe you have a member of your staff answering questions with a signature in your post pointing back to your site from groups on Facebook, Linked In, etc. Large brands have been utilizing social media to offer customer service based activities in a new format different than traditional phone and email. Developing a strategy based upon your customer base and then a short term and long term road map for social media marketing will better serve your goals and objectives. After all you want to enhance not tarnish your brand. Anyone have specific examples that they would like to share about the value that they’re currently seeing when it comes to social media marketing? Please feel free to use the contact form to share.

I received an interesting email from a reader last week about using Google Analytics on a Myspace profile. As most of you know Myspace does not allow for the addition of JavaScript into profiles, and up until now there has not been a solution to allow for this. Over the years I’ve received thousands of visitors looking for information about this, but I’ve never had a solid solution in which to offer up until now. Please note that this solution is for technically savvy users of Flash, but hopefully an easier solution can be built through a script or simply application. The reader proposed the following solution: 

Simply put since Myspace allows embedding flash objects.  You can create a flash file 1px by 1px with the same color background as your myspace page. Then you would call the javascript from the flash object as shown at (http://blog.projectx4.com/2008/03/28/google-analytics-flash-easy-peasy/).

 

// GOOGLE ANALYTICS SIMPLE TRACKING /// Script by: corban baxter   import flash.external.ExternalInterface;   function gaTracking(page) {         ExternalInterface.call(“pageTracker._trackPageview”, page); }   //end 

// CODE FOR SIMPLE CALL IS BELOW \\
gaTracking(“/flash/home”); //sends event to google’s analytics system

Please note that I have not verified that this is in fact a permanent solution, but a very clever idea to solve the issue of getting web analytics tracking beyond Myspace’s rudimentary ‘views’ tab. Please feel free to provide comments, and I’ll be sure to update this post as reader’s give it a shot. Through community and heopfully with some web developers with a few spare moments users of Myspace will be able to tag their profiles with Google Analytics.