If you’re reading this, it’s likely you attended our panel at CRS 2011, or are involved in country radio.  We created this post to serve as an extension of the panel, and provide a continued discussion and exploration of how social media can help you.  We’d love to get your feedback in the comments section below!

At Strategic Blend, we view social media as an extension of your brand.  As you’re all aware the landscape for a listener’s attention has become extremely crowded.  Between the multitude of blogs, streaming feeds, tweets, facebook status updates, etc, etc … you really have to be dialed into your strategy to stand out.

This is accomplished through SEVEN fundamental points that have become our marketing theology:

The Message

There are several things you can do to help ensure that you engage your fanbase in a way that is effective, extends the conversation with your audience, and becomes a powerful and lucrative tool for your station.

Perhaps the most important of these is the message.  What are you saying,  Who are you saying it to,  and How is it being consumed?

#1)  Pull Don’t Push (more on this subject here)

We have a fundamental policy at Strategic Blend to PULL the audience in as opposed to PUSHING messaging to them.  Good messaging strategy will PULL an audience in, they’ll seek you out for their information, and you’ll become a trusted source.  The converse of this is PUSHING irrelevant messaging on an unsuspecting audience.  When this happens you are added to all the other “noise” generated by today’s technology.  Even if your message reaches its intended target it can be quickly discarded as SPAM, deleted as trash, or glazed over as irrelevant.

#2) P1 Listeners CARE about your station

So when engaging them through social media give them information they care about.  While contesting and give-aways are certain to garner initial attention.  You also have an opportunity to break relevant news, to become a place of music discovery, and most importantly gain their attention.

(there’s more here)

Frequency

#3)  Don’t treat social media like you do your email list (more on this here)

Don’t treat social media like you do your email list.Within the last few years there has been a shift from email marketing campaigns to engaging a fan through social media.  An important thing to remember is that engaging your fans through social media is NOT like sending them an email blast.  The greatest thing about the social media is the level of immediacy, connection, and communication you’re able to have with your audience in real time.  Unlike email campaigns, these don’t always have to be long form calls to action.  Sometimes the greatest social media strategies allow like-minded people to have a conversation.

#4) Expectations Are Hard To Change

Frequency of messaging is a delicate balance.  You don’t want to burn a list by over communicating.  Set an expectation for your audience so they know what to look for from you.  If you tweet out every song that is played on your station, that’s an expectation, and while not every listener will appreciate that communication frequency, it may have its place on its own dedicated twitter account (like @WSIXnowplaying).  Setting the expectation of communication frequency will keep your audience attention… which reminds me, if you’re going to use social media to communicate…. USE IT.  If you were to take a two week hiatus, you’ve broken the communication with your audience and they’ll be difficult to get back

Continuity

Now that you’ve reeled them in, and they know what type of messaging to expect from you… and when.

What do you say?

This is where a great deal of folks run into an issue, their messaging has no Continuity.  Their twitter account will be run by one individual, their facebook presence by another, their email and mobile by another…. Each with a different voice, each with a different style, and each one confusing the audience as to the voice of the brand.

#5) Speak with the same voice as you do on-air

Whatever you say… say it to your intended audience in the same voice you have on the air.  If you’re an irreverent station that markets to a certain demographic… make sure your social network messaging reflects that.

#6) Continuity builds a sense of community

What you’ll find is the social networks will become a community of its own.  It’s where listeners will go to engage likeminded people.  As long as your brand is continuous from the airwaves to the social networks, you’ll have the makings of a successful strategy.

Acknowledgement

#7) Let your listeners know you’re listening

Now if you’re following.. you’ve got a passionate audience who knows what type of messaging to expect from you, has a good sense when to look for it, and recognizes it because it’s congruent with your voice.

If you REALLY want to empower this audience ENGAGE them.  Have on air personalities read aloud the comments and tweets from the social networks, suggestions, contest winners from the social networks.

A couple of years ago Seth Godin spoke at CRS about Tribes.  Which he defines as a group of people sharing a common culture, a goal, a mission, and a leader.   Your audience is your tribe.  Social networks allow you to be the leader.   If you communicate with them correctly you’ll be able to grow your audience, strengthen those relationships, carry your brand beyond the airwaves, and be the influential voice in your market.

We want to hear from you!

Use the comments section below to tell us how you use social media, successes, failures and questions.

One of my favorite things about my role at Strategic Blend is keeping up with clients, and seeing what they’re up to, how they’re using their digital properties, and watching them grow!

Some examples of recent innovative uses come from Drivin N Cryin, Karli Whetstone (and her new site theme), and The CO

DNC

Drivin N Cryin is a great example of motivating your community in a time of crisis/tragedy.  In a blog post dated Sept 13th, Drivin N Cryin took to their website with the following message:

Between 3:45am and 6am on Saturday September 11, Drivin N Cryin’s tour trailer containing their stage gear was stolen from the La Quinta Inn at x-169 on I-75 in Macon, GA. The black Quicksilver Racing 5×10 trailer held the band’s guitars, amplifiers, drums, merchandise and stage production gear. A complete list can be viewed here: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=5912085821&topic=15178#topic_top and photos can be seen here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=235150&id=5912085821. 3 items have since been recovered at a pawn shop in Atlanta, GA. The person responsible for pawning these 3 items has been identified as Atlanta resident Reginald Ellis. More information on Ellis can be found here:http://www.drivinncryin.com/thief/.

Drivin N Cryin would like to thank their friends, fans, the Georgia music community and the Atlanta/Macon media for the outpouring of support and assistance. For 25 years, you guys have been the best fans. We are truly grateful.

Not only is this horrible for a touring band, but especially for a band that’s been on the road for 20+ years.  Taking a look at some of that gear will make any music fan tear  up.

Using social media (and not to mention craigslist, hilarious!) to showcase the gear stolen, adding a page to the site to help catch the theif (that rotten bastard).  The general response has been overwhelming.  Bringing an entire musical community together in the search for their stuff, and, more importantly, getting the word out that they’d been robbed, someone was pawning their shit, and THIS IS THAT DUDE.

A great use of WordPress, a great use of facebook, and a good strategy in a time of panic.  DNC, may all your stuff be found, may it all be in one piece, and may they put Reginald Donta Ellis in a cell UNDER the jail, and never let him loose.

Karli Whetstone

Karli’s career has been steadily progressing, and she decided to give the site a new look!  What I feel is a more grown up / sophisticated look and feel.

In addition she’s also begun blogging.  And unlike this blogger…. she’s diligent.   Rarely missing a day to update you on what’s going on in her world.  It’s very “daily diary” in nature, and is currently the most popular section of her site.  Between that and a persistent twitter feed, her fans know what she’s up to every day… and that will pay off in spades!

A loyal, devout, and connected following is a very powerful thing!

The CO

The CO are one of my favorite artists we’ve worked with.  They just GET IT!  They have integrated every portion of their digitally owned properties into a really robust site.

Troy’s Blog is filled with some great video updates, quick quips and stories… and most importantly, his passion for giving back to the world around him.

Collin’s Blog has great introspection, and images.

Not to mention the great video blog on the general band blog page

Much like Karli’s site, you really get a sense of who these guys are, and what they’re up to!

So here’s to you guys…. I hope to continue learning from you, growing with you, and helping find success with you.

We’ve got some incredible clients and projects in the pipeline we’ll be talking about soon.  As we begin our third year, we have many cool changes and updates to the Blend you’ll start to see in the next few weeks.

Until then!

Google’s previous attempts at social networking generally weren’t received well by users.  FriendConnect had major issues with browser coding, Orkut never really caught on in the U.S., and I think we all remember the Buzz privacy scare last year.  I have high hopes for Google Me – this could be Google’s chance to tie all of their various outlets into an effective central hub.

Google’s varied demographic also sets a solid foundation for building a social network that can appeal to a broad range of individuals.  Businessmen and businesswomen use services like Google Docs to organize important information, Google Calendar for scheduling, and AdWords for marketing purposes on a daily basis.  College students, moms, and celebrity bloggers often check their Gmail accounts, read the latest stories on Google News, see a video on YouTube, or learn something new on Google Health, and then discuss their findings on Blogger.  Google owns all of these elements and I believe that Google Me could effectively incorporate them under a single, central site.  Think of it as Ping.fm on steroids that incorporates Google sites instead of social networks.

In a recent article on BNET, Ben Popper illustrates this idea perfectly and makes a few predictions of his own:

For Google, Zynga’s games are an important piece of the social networking puzzle. The company will never be able to premier a product now that, standing alone, can hope to challenge Facebook. Instead Google seems to be working in reverse, establishing the individual pieces one at a time and tying them together later on. It’s already got photos, micro-blogging and location based services. The key will be pushing an integrated suite of these tools on platforms like Android and Google TV. If Zynga becomes built into these offerings on a base level, and prompts users to login with their Gmail accounts, it could go a long way towards helping the search giant construct its own version of the social graph.

If Ben is correct and Google is, in fact, reverse-engineering their own social media platform, then Google Me could stand a chance against Facebook.  CNN Tech reports that over 75 million users actively use Facebook’s Zynga games on a monthly basis.  If Zynga offers unique features to Google users, then I expect a large portion of Facebook users will go check them out immediately.  New games, along with integrated email, calendars, documents, chat, photos, and videos is an enticing opportunity for all Facebook users to try something new.  Whether or not Google will integrate Zynga into Google Me is still unconfirmed, but think of the opportunity that Google has to connect all of their services under a central social network.

Posts are too short:

Now I am no Leo Tolstoy, I certainly err on the side of getting to the meat of the information and leaving the reader with a funny quip, question, or something to chew on… but some of the posts I read are hardly posts at all.  They’re more like tweets, that ran over a few characters.   Two sentences does not a news item make.  When working on an entry it is wise to think broadly, beyond what you the writer finds contextually relevant, instead think of your audience.  Do they need back story, is there content relevant form another source that they may find interesting (linking is a great habit to get into), or perhaps you might just need to get a little “wordy” as opposed to right to the point.

The point being, you as the administrator of a site have the responsibility to keep entries engaging and, moreover, entertaining.

Poor Layout

Even if your content is perfect to the letter, poor spacing, broken images, misplaced images, or poor page formatting can be a death knell for a news item / blog entry / post.

The solution to this is to ALWAYS preview your entry.  I’ve probably previewed this entry 3 times already, just making sure the text is the right size, images are well placed and symmetrical to the entry, and things generally “look good”.

We’re all in a hurry, so I can understand getting the content up and posted, but, again, the goal is to entice the end user.  The last thing you want is to revisit an old entry on your site and say to yourself, “What was I thinking?”.

Fake Authenticity

In all types of writing its important to have a “voice”.  Many times, we are asked to write something on behalf of a larger entity, be that a Fortune 500 company, or a band out on the road.  Problems arise when your voice doesn’t quite match up with the brand you’ve been asked to portray.  A band doesn’t need a news entry to sound like a Fortune 500 company, and a Fortune 500 company doesn’t want to sound like a band.  Know your audience, know who you’re ghost writing for, and get a sense of what that messaging should sound like BEFORE you put fingers to keys.

These days, people are so over-assailed by marketing messages, they’re learning to tune out and ignore the stuff that’s not real. If you don’t seem real, you get the same penalty as those who aren’t real: You get ignored. (hat tip)

No SEO

…. But what if no one reads it???  Even the most well written, authentic, perfectly laid out post will get lost in the shuffle if it’s set up to fail.  Always be sure to tag your posts, link out to relevant sites, other posts, irrelevant posts.  Try to get your posts fed to other outlets.  There are a million ways to improve SEO… or at least ten.  Make an effort to get your message heard!

No Follow Through

This is most definitely another common mistake that I make.  I have every intention of doing a “series of blog entries” which turns into one entry, and no follow through.  If you set the reader’s expectation, meet it.  It’s as simple as that.  If you say there will be a new video on the site every week, make sure there is something there.  If it’s news entries, a blog series, photo galleries… pick your poison.  If you can get users into a routine of visiting your site, you’re winning the battle.  The best sites on the net churn out content at a constant pace, keeping the site both “sticky” and fresh.

If you’re diligent enough to avoid these pitfalls, it is possible to gain a fervent followers of your content.  Feel free to add to the Common Content Mistakes in the Comments section!

Often I meet people who hate using the word “brand” or “personal brand.”  They think the term is a load of bollox and is either meaningless or too confining.

I think the word does have merit.  Sure, it gets thrown around by every wanna-be marketing professional out there, but it does serve a purpose.

Cutting through all the hype and BS, the word “brand,” really boils down to one thing: the expectation your fans/friends/consumers have about you. It’s that simple!  You don’t need to be a marketing professional to understand it.

Think of any service or product and you will have an expectation.  If I say the word Pepsi or Disney or Southwest Airlines, a thought enters your head and you have a perception of what those companies are or should be.  These expectations can be as flexible or as inflexible as you’d like.  They can vary by the thousands, and no one is more right or wrong than any other.

Big corporate brands spend millions to help shape and form your expectation.  They create packaging, logos and commercials because it benefits them if everyone has the SAME thought on their product or service.  Over in the creative world, those expectations are built around the content that is produced.  Mainstream artists may spend more money and attention shaping their brands, but it’s not necessary.  Peter Gabriel fans “expect” him to take many years to create new music, but know that it will be inventive, creative, and different than what came before.  Stephen King has been labeled by some as a horror author, while others know him for his dramatic (Shawshank Redemption) and escapist (Dark Tower) works.  Both have content that form their respective “brands.”

As individuals, we can also create and manage the expectations of others.  Are you funny?  Kind of a dick?  Punctual?  Professional?  Casual?  Do you proceed with caution or jump face first into new projects or ideas?  The answers to these questions form an expectation about you, and thus your personal brand.  It can be whatever you want it to be, and you can make it as important or as unimportant as you choose.

So the next time you hear the word “brand,” don’t think of all the marketing hype that goes along with it.  Simply remind yourself that its an expectation, and not a dirty word.

However, every now and then I stumble upon a survey or poll I feel IS worth a look.  Such was the case when I discovered this SOPHOS poll on Jason Calacanis’s blog:

60% of Facebook users consider quitting over privacy

Is this a truly scientific poll?  No, and SOPHOS admits as much.  But it DOES provide an incredibly compelling look into where facebook currently finds itself.  You may recall I recently blogged on where facebook stacks up in the forest of social media.  Since then things have only intensified as more users become disillusioned, mainstream media picks up the story and Mark Zuckerberg refuses to care.

This poll, while not scientific, gives us a glimpse into the current user-base.  I take away two things:

First, the % of users who have already quit the service is slightly higher then the % of those who have stated they will be staying.  These numbers also follow standard polling and survey results where “absolutists” at both ends are in the minority.

Second, and more importantly, there is a HUGE chunk of users currently on the fence deciding whether to leave or stay.  A combined 60% if you believe this poll.  The real number may be lower, but I don’t believe by much.  The biggest chunk of facebook’s active user-base are casual users; people who joined the service “because their friends or family were on it” and have no deep loyalty or brand-love for it.  THESE are the people that facebook needs to worry about.

The longer and more mainstream the negative publicity against facebook becomes, the higher the likelihood this “middle ground” of users will be swayed to delete their accounts or simply stop using them.  A “dead” account is just as threatening to facebook as a “deleted” one.

Facebook has survived scuffles in the past because their user-base was smaller.  This time may be different.  This time they pushed TOO far and risk offending too many average people in the middle, people who leave a service for the same reason they joined it….because their friends did.  The market is incredibly fickle, and contrary to what others might have you believe, facebook does NOT have a guaranteed spot at the table.

There is a lesson here for brand managers, marketers and even politicians.  With every fan-base or consumer group there are passionate people at opposite ends of every decision.  However, it’s the people in the middle (less passionate but greater in number) who truly decide things.

We’ll continue keeping an eye on this group as the evolution of facebook continues.

We look forward to working with The CO in the future, in guiding their marketing and assisting them in turning their web presence into a revenue vehicle.

launch project

We were able to build upon the established brand of HypeGenius, utilizing their existing logos and type treatments, while implementing new icons and site layout for a more effective communication of their company message.

We look forward to working with HypeGenius in the future, both as a client and a partner organization.

launch project

What are "Zuck's" real intentions?

But lately I’ve been feeling like we’re all just hoes to the social media company pimps.  We give more and more time, attention and information to these services, and I want to ask a question that most people seem afraid to:  are these services really worth the short-term gain at the risk of supplanting long term brand equity?

Put another way, for a brand (or even you as an individual) is it worth using these services in lieu of a website, app or interactive model that you’ve built and control yourself?

Yes, twitter and facebook have millions upon millions of users.  Yes, you can use these services to find people you care about all in one spot.  Yes, they’re FREE, and no they don’t require a whole lot of effort.  And with the rapid growth of facebook, it would seem a moot point to even consider NOT using it.

However, we’ve been down this road twice before.  The first time was with a little website called Friendster – a service too ahead of its time, in my opinion, yet one which built a solid userbase of young people and new media professionals.  They thought it would last forever until suddenly, a newer, sexier model came along.  This new network had more features than Friendster and EVERYONE you knew was suddenly using it!  It might be hard to remember, but myspace was once this service.  It was hip, easy, free and you could make it your own little place on the web.  Or so we thought because once again a NEWER network came along and “EVERYONE” got in facebook’s back seat, leaving myspace cold and lonely on the side of the road.

I bring this up because countless entertainment and business brands threw millions of dollars and man hours into myspace, making it their holy grail of online marketing.  Artists dropped their official website in favor of a myspace page.  Whole businesses were born off the back of myspace and there were even professionals in Nashville excited about the arrival of “myspace music charts” saying they would “probably end up replacing Billboard and radio airplay charts.”

It saddens me because that same energy, time and money could have been spent making existing websites better and more scalable.  Brands could have discovered new ways to increase traffic to their existing hubs.  (To be fair, many artists and businesses DID use myspace as a limited tool to drive traffic back to an official site or offer, but these were the exception to the rule.)

So now here we are, repeating the same mistakes with twitter and facebook.  Too many people are once again putting their lives and business hopes in the hands of proprietary networks they don’t have any control over.

I know what some of you will probably say…

“That’s the game, you just have to move where the market takes you.” You know what, I don’t buy that.  Why should you have to follow the whims of whatever company is in vogue at this moment?  Why can’t each of us build a brand and a platform that are one in the same?  The technology is there!  It’s free!  It’s open source!  There’s NO logical excuse for why this can’t be done.

So what should we do?

All of us should continue to use these services, but recognize they are supplementary tools at best.  And as tools, we should always consider how they can help drive traffic back to a hub that YOU control.

If twitter goes away tomorrow, what would you do?

If facebook started charging $30 month to use the service what would you do?

These AREN’T rhetorical questions.  Social media companies can do what they like, and in their path to monetization WILL do whatever THEY feel is in THEIR best interest….not yours.

I want leave you with Molly Wood’s recent CNET rant about facebook’s latest features (click here for that article).  It’s very worth your while, but if you’re too lazy/busy then I give you this gem of a quote:

“There’s nothing wrong with making a LOT of money. But you should not, Facebook, get to make that money by tricking me into making personal information public, by creating an increasingly baffling web of privacy-violating loopholes, and by opting me in to every new moneymaking scheme you come up with. That’s how you lose user trust, and losing user trust is how you lose users.”

Do you really want to build your business strategy around a company like this?