This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
In yesterday’s post about marketing in a digital world, I mentioned Allister Frost’s 12 tips for marketers but didn’t go into the details. You can find them at the back of his deck on SlideShare but I took some notes too so I’ve added them here:
- Invest in social leadership and social players – it may be you, or it may be somebody else who sets the strategic direction but find people with energy and enthusiasm to make it happen. Do not confuse the two roles: if you’re the social leader don’t play as you’ll lose sight of the strategy.
- Invest in tools and expertise – ask tough questions of vendors selling tools.
- Develop your social recommendation optimisation (SRO) strategy – optimise everything so it become recommended through social channels. Not to be confused with social media optimisation (SMO) which is short-sighted (too focused on channels).
- Listen, then engage – don’t assume you know the answers – understand the channel first.
- Answer the social telephone – if a phone was ringing, you would pick it up so treat social in the same way to avoid losing opportunities.
- Moderate wisely – if you don’t, your brand can become associated with spam.
- Create social objects – think about how they get to customers. May be a video, a white paper, or something else…
- Make it better when shared – thank, reward and encourage.
- Handpick your interfaces – go and find the channels where your audience is.
- Be remarkable – do things that people remark upon.
- Show some personality – there is a balance between appearing as the juvenile delinquent or the company robot and you can move – just don’t stay at the extremes.
- Fail fast, learn faster – continuously pilot-test (again and again…)