Chris Winfield (@chriswinfield) kicked off a packed breakout session at the South By Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin by promising to not mention Facebook and Twitter. Easier said than done.

The “T word” and the “F word” (no, not that one) were mentioned numerous times but Winfield and fellow presenter Tony Adam (@tonyadam) did offer some good strategies for businesses looking to enhance their marketing efforts through social media. Local media companies should be doing most, if not all of them.

The key lessons:

- Find out where your customers are: Use traffic reporting tools like Google Analytics to find out where your current visitors are coming from. Set up news alerts on your brand and your competitors to find who’s talking/writing about them.
- Frequently update your blog(s): Winfield said it is “so important to reach out to your customers” this way. He also recommended becoming part of the community on blogs and news sites that frequently write about your topic area.
- Seek new sources: Check Technorati and Alltop to discover new blogs and news sites that are focusing on your topic area, too. instead of technorati to figure out what’s hot in your topic area.

- Niche social networks: Do a Google search for niche social networks and find one in your topic area. then frequent it and monitor it.
- Publish video: Make sure they are bite-sized clips, “short and sweet” according to Winfield. “They are great for awareness but the best ones contain little to no marketing messages.” (I’d love to see a media company try that!) Among the best examples mentioned were the Quicksilver dynamite surfing video, the Dove Evolution series and this …

- Don’t overlook forums: One of the most overlooked areas of social media, according to Winfield, is forums. “They’re not sexy, they’re kind of old.” But they have a tremendous amount of activity, including some in your topic area. Go to search.big-boards.com to find some that share your interest.

- Use Yahoo answers: Winfield called it “one of the only things Yahoo has done really well. There you can find your niche pretty fast and pretty easily. Once you do, you want to be pretty involved.” Why? Because answers rank so well in search engines. So more people will find your site. If you’re a local media company, think of all the knowledge you could be sharing by answering questions about your local area, either on Yahoo Answers or on a Q&A section on your own site.
- Social news and bookmarking: Do what you can to get your content shred on Digg, Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Go to www.stumbleupon.com/groups and find topic areas that are similar to your main news beats. Find a way to participate in those communities.
Adam emphasized the importance of this final lesson: social news sites. Primarily because of how much it can do in terms of improving your site’s SEO. The more links coming in, the higher you will rank. He also suggested running contest to grow the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Do random giveaways, for example.
See, they almost gave an entire presentation with mentioning the Big 2. Almost.
(Note: sorry for the lack of links throughout, but the next session is starting.)

No related posts.