The Emergence of Social Search

Earlier this year I predicted that this would be a breakout year for social search. It seems I was right—however, it’s unfolding differently than I expected, with Google leading the charge.

It turns out that Google is not going to sit back and allow Facebook to eat away at their search advertising revenue. Instead, Google has recently made some bold moves that all online marketers should be responding to.

What’s happened is Google recently changed its search algorithm that determines what type of online content is the most relevant—specifically placing greater emphasis on original social content.

While Google didn’t specifically announce a focus on social content, the handwriting was already on the wall. Prior to the recent changes, Google co-founder Sergey Brin commented that Google has only touched 1% of what they’re capable of with social search.

Indeed, you may have already noticed that socially shared content is rising to the top of your Google search results. So, if you want to earn higher rankings with Google, you not only need to be creating high-quality content, but also actively encouraging its sharing on the social networks.

Social Content Matters for Search

Why so much emphasis on social content? For one, there’s so much of it. Google can’t ignore the fact that social content is being created at a breathtaking pace. And because search is all about content, they have to go where the action is.

The second reason is that social content is contextual—rich with original perspectives that result from sharing on the social networks.

Unfortunately for Google, one of the largest sources of social content is within Facebook—a place that Google can’t access. To acknowledge that would be tipping their hat to archrival Facebook. Instead, they’re just quietly going about the business of aggressively indexing what’s available—with blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Quora as leading sources.

Social Search

Search is what drives the web, and Google is still the leader with nearly 65% of the market. However, Google recognizes that Bing is a viable competitor that happens to have a partnership with Facebook, as well as with Yahoo. To maintain their dominance, they’re making adjustments. You’ll have to do the same to keep your business relevant online.

The following three practices will help you focus your online marketing efforts to maximize your relevance for social search.

#1: Create fresh and original content

Google’s internal name for the recent changes to their search parameters is the Panda Update. If you Google that phrase, you’ll find numerous rants regarding how particular sites lost up to 90% of their traffic following these recent changes. The reason for this is Google downgraded not only specific content, but also domains where there was an abundance of it.

So, if you happen to be a blogger who has been creating high-quality, original content for your community, Google just gave you a big thumbs-up. While there are a number of places to create your online content, a blog that you control is arguably the best place.

Thus, your primary objective is to strive for originality. If you’re going to republish the words of others, do so only to the extent required for supporting your original perspective. And of course, always ask for permission and provide attribution.

Here are some guidelines for creating original content.

1. Provide your unique perspective—If your perspective is truly unique, it adds something original to news that’s available elsewhere. This is why fans tune in to Howard Stern or David Letterman, and why your community will do the same for you.
2. Curate only the best content—Do your research and learn from other experts first, then personalize only that content that’s highly relevant to your community.
3. Learn from your community—Regularly engage with your community to learn and discover the unsolved problems. The solutions to unresolved problems by definition have to be original.

#2: Share to build social context

To better understand how sharing builds context that enhances your online presence for social search, it’s helpful to understand social graphs. This earlier article gives you a full description, but for now it’s enough to know your social graph is a digital map that describes you from the context of your relationships with your connections or friends—and from the content that you all share, which includes links to articles, photos, videos and more.

A powerful step you can take to help Google find all of your social content is to establish or update your Google Profile. The recently updated Google Profile interface has been simplified, making it easy to aggregate all of your social networks, as well as other online news sources relevant to you or your social network.

You can add links to other sites you network on.

For example, in addition to the major social networks, I’m also able to link to all of my articles here on Social Media Examiner by simply plugging in the RSS feed. Because your Google Profile is personal to you, bringing in feeds from your business blog or other news sources elevates your social influence in your business communities.

Another important reason for maintaining a Google Profile is that it’s required to use the new Google +1 button. The Google +1 button is Google’s answer to the Facebook Like button. It’s a vote of confidence that adds more social context to your original content.

You may have noticed how Bing is more frequently showing pages in their search results that are Liked by your Facebook friends. Google +1 will do the same on Google search results for your friends across multiple social networks.

To recommend something, all you have to do is click +1.

How does Google know who your friends are? From all of those feeds passing through your Google Profile. Google +1 is still experimental, but you can start using it now by going here.

Your +1s can help friends, contacts and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

Here’s a list of actions you can take to encourage sharing that builds your social graph and the relevance of your business for social search:

1. Update your Google Profile—Update your bio and verify the accuracy, relevance and completeness of your social and news feeds.
2. Include social sharing in your newsletter—Most email services now allow for social sharing. Whatever is digital can be readily shared.
3. Start using QR codes—QR and other 2D codes make real-time sharing with mobile devices easy.
4. Create social objects—Social objects such as photos and videos have a tendency to be shared more often than printed news because they’re instantly engaging.
5. Share and share alike—The more you share, the more others will share your content.
6. Make a call to action—Your community may not understand the importance of sharing, so don’t hesitate to ask them.

#3: Use location and time to enhance relevance

In response to the many comments regarding the changes to their search formula, Google simply affirmed that their objective with search is the same as it has always been: to return the most relevant information as quickly as possible.

While we live in an increasingly global business environment, what’s most relevant is what’s happening in our own environment—or the one we happen to be visiting. Fortunately, optimizing your location is now practically unavoidable thanks to the prevalence of geotagging.

You may think that location isn’t relevant for your business if you don’t have a location that your customers regularly visit. However, consider that if you’re a technology expert who has any kind of association with Palo Alto, your influence is instantly enhanced.

Thus, there’s more to location than just proximity. Location is just one example of context. Another is time. In their effort to provide relevant content for search terms, Google and other search engines make an assumption—right or wrong—that real-time news is more relevant than what happened yesterday.

This means you have to make an effort to use real-time networks such as Twitter to keep your content fresh for Google and your community.

Here are some best practices for making the most of location and time for social search:

1. Claim your business on Google and Facebook Places—If you’re a local business, claim your location on Google, Facebook, Foursquare and anywhere else where your prospects and customers may be active.
2. Turn on Twitter Location—Location adds context to your Tweets, and it pinpoints your business for those using Advanced Twitter Search.
3. Check in with Facebook, Foursquare and Picplz—Use social check-ins to communicate that you’re actively engaging with prospects and customers.
4. Monitor your brand with real-time search—In addition to Google, SocialMention is one of my favorite real-time search tools because it also tags influentials. When you see a spike in your traffic, use Social Mention to learn more.

The most important thing to keep in mind regarding search is that Google has been and will continue to strive to emulate human tendencies. Social networking logically makes that objective much easier, and to a great extent, explains why search is trending in that direction.

If you search for identical terms on both Google and Bing, you’ll notice dramatically different results, although both are now increasingly favoring social content with contextual recommendations. At the very least, you may want to give strong consideration to developing a two-pronged marketing strategy to be relevant for both search engines.

What are your thoughts on social search? Are you ready? Leave your comments in the box below.

But the owners balked at giving away free food, which they estimated would cost them several thousand dollars. Yet they had spent $5,000 on a magazine ad!

“How many customers did it bring in?” Stratten asked. “We don’t know,” they replied.

Does this sound familiar? Stratten calls this the “push and pray” marketing strategy. You push your ad out to thousands and even millions of people, and pray that some respond.

“The food cost and my fee would have been less than the amount they paid for that ad,” Stratten writes in his book, UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. And in just two days, the restaurant owners potentially would have created 150 satisfied customers to spread the word about their restaurant.

But the owners just didn’t get it. They refused to implement the strategy, and eventually they went out of business.

Stratten believes business is about creating and managing relationships with current and potential customers. Find people who are already talking about you, engage them and give them something of value. He calls this marketing strategy “pull and stay.” Pull potential customers to your business by engaging them, trade something they value for their name and contact information and stay in touch with them.

“If you believe business is built on relationships,” Stratten writes, “make building them your business. UnMarketing is all about engagement at every point of contact with your market.”

Use Social Media to Enter the Conversation

Stratten believes social media is the best way to find and engage potential customers. “If I told you that I had a room full of current potential customers all talking about your products and your competitors, would you not show up?”

If you’ve read our articles, you already know how to do this. Download TweetDeck and set one of the columns to monitor tweets containing keywords related to your business or your company name. When you see such a tweet, respond. Try to provide value in every tweet.

A self-described Twitter fanatic, Stratten decided in March 2009 to ask his 16,000 Twitter followers to help him raise money for a charity that focuses on child hunger. Together they raised $12,000 in just 5.5 hours.

Facebook and LinkedIn are permission-based, but there’s no barrier to communicating with anyone on Twitter. So he recommends starting on Twitter and using Facebook and LinkedIn to “go to the next level.”

He even uses Twitter to find out more about local businesspeople before he goes to a networking event.

This book essentially contains 55 ideas for “unmarketing” your business. Each chapter is one idea. And they’re in no particular order. So you can read the chapters in whatever order you want.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

• Trade shows – “pull and stay” works extremely well.
• Tele-seminars and tele-summits – how to do them right.
• Social media – the pros and cons of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Websites – they shouldn’t just be an online brochure.
• Content is king – how to create and deliver valuable content.
• Viral marketing – Stratten made many mistakes and you can learn from them!

In fact, “IMHO,” the chapter on viral marketing (at 26 pages, the longest chapter in the book), is the best part of the book. Stratten is humble enough to describe in detail all the mistakes he made. Essentially, he wasn’t ready when views of his video took off and people started subscribing to his newsletter.

That’s why he says, “Not being prepared for success in viral marketing is worse than never having success at all.” Because, “once it goes, it goes” and there’s no stopping it.

Stratten also writes about companies that really care about their customers, like:

• Zappos, which once let a customer return nine pairs of unused shoes even though the return period had long since expired
• FreshBooks, which once sent a couple of boxes of Triscuits to a current customer in Fiji
• McDonald’s, whose coffee lured Stratten away from Tim Horton’s coffee after 20 years of patronage
• Lush, a soap store whose saleswoman treated Stratten so well that he bought $65 worth of soap

Customers Are Not an Interruption

If you’re in retail sales, are your salespeople that enthusiastic about your products? Instead of thinking of customers as an interruption, think of them as “a word-of-mouth machine that can spread the word, good or bad,” Stratten writes. “Do anything to show that you are interested in my potential business with you rather than treating me as an interruption to your busy day.”

Do you spend most of your time trying to get new customers? Do you treat new customers better than regular customers? If you know that it takes five to ten times the amount of effort to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing one, why would you do this?

Creating current satisfied customers is your highest priority. And why would you risk losing a current customer? It just doesn’t make sense.

Stratten uses coffee as an example. After drinking Tim Horton’s coffee for 20 years, he switched to McDonald’s coffee. They had solved some problems that Tim Horton was ignoring. Dissatisfied customers won’t necessarily complain, they’ll just go somewhere else.

Stratten also recommends surveying your current customers periodically. If you’re thinking of offering a new product or service, consider creating what he calls a “Stop Start Continue” campaign. Send all current customers an email with a link to an online survey. Let them answer anonymously. Ask your customers:

• What should we stop doing?
• What should we start doing?
• What should we continue doing to meet or exceed your expectations?

Most people would be thrilled to know that a company cares so much about them, it values their advice. Another benefit of doing a customer survey: “Every point of contact is an opportunity to engage with your market,” writes Stratten.

Social Media Examiner gives this book 4 stars.

We have written so much about the new way of marketing, and now we’d like to hear from you! Have you implemented any of these ideas? Are they working? Please add your comments below.

Andy is also author of the book Word of Mouth Marketing and founder of GasPedal, a group that advises big brands such as TiVo, Dell, Sprint and Kimberly-Clark.

During this interview, you’ll gain insight into how large corporations are employing social media and you’ll also gain Andy’s insight into word-of-mouth marketing.

Word of Mouth Marketing & Social Media

Mike: Let’s go ahead and start with the first question.  What exactly is word of mouth marketing, and how, if at all, is it any different than social media marketing?

Andy: Word of mouth marketing is the art of getting people to fall in love with your brand. Getting them to be so thrilled and so turned on by what you do that they’ve got to tell people how awesome you are.

It’s a series of tactical things that I teach in my book. It’s a philosophy that says if we earn the respect and the recommendation of our customers, they’ll do all of our advertising for free.

Mike: Because they become advocates for you, right?

Andy: Because they love you. This is the Southwest and the Starbucks and the Zappos. When people love a brand, they love to talk about those brands.

Social media is a subset of that. It is one tool you can use to make it easier for your fans to talk about you.

These days, we’re really hot on social media. Everyone is saying, “Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.” We love the stuff, but we’re starting to let the tool take over the purpose.

Mike: Just so I understand what you’re saying, word-of-mouth marketing is about getting your customers, followers, or fans—whatever you want to call them—to love your brand so much that they’re going to ultimately advocate for it and spread the word on your behalf, so you don’t have to invest a lot of money.

And social media marketing is just a subset of that, which is leveraging these social media tools to do the exact same thing. Is that what I hear you saying?

Andy: Exactly. Social media is a great tool. I’m a huge user and fan, but it only applies to the online half of word of mouth. Even if you look at the online half, there are probably more recommendations happening by email than Twitter or all the other social media put together.

Word of Mouth Marketing Story

Mike: That transitions really well into my next question.  How has word of mouth marketing evolved, in your opinion, over the last decade? What do you think the catalysts have been?

Andy: We used to think word of mouth was luck. You did a good campaign, you did a good press release and it got buzzed—this magical word buzzed—and everyone was talking about you.

What’s happened is we figured out that it isn’t luck. It’s a planned series of things that you do to get people talking. It’s this idea that word-of-mouth marketing is similar to any other kind of marketing.

I guess what’s new is the “marketing” part. “Word of mouth” is old. “Word of mouth marketing” is new.

Then we layered social media on that. Now we’ve got this big tool to take word of mouth that might have been one-to-one or one-to-two, and suddenly it’s one-to-1,000 or one-to-50,000.

Mike: What did a typical word of mouth campaign look like a decade ago?

Andy: I don’t think the word campaign would have been there. It wasn’t word of mouth marketing yet. We didn’t understand it’s something that you can earn, that you can accelerate or that you can enhance. It just sort of happened.

Mike: The medium was probably email back then, right?

Andy: It was then, and probably is still today, more offline than anything.

If a friend tells you about a restaurant, you tell another friend about the restaurant. You go there for lunch with the office. Now everybody knows about it. Somebody emails a friend, somebody else posts a review, somebody else tweets it and somebody else puts it on Facebook. Then you read it on Facebook and you tell your spouse. Then you tell your coworkers.

The conversations weave in and out online and offline. None of these tools are the sole channel for one particular conversation. Your recommendations are flowing in and out of whatever format makes the most sense.

Word of Mouth Marketing Steps

Mike: What might be some of the word of mouth marketing steps at a very basic level?

Andy: I like to talk about the five Ts. If you go to my blog, there’s a download where you can get all of these written up, which is the framework for any kind of word-of-mouth campaign.

1. Finding the Talkers

Who is going to spread the word about you? They might be fans, customers, just people thrilled by who you or are maybe neighbors. There are all those people who could speak for you.

2. Giving Them a Topic

What are they going to say? That’s unique to the product and the talker who’s spreading the message.

Customers are saying something different than fans. Fans are saying something different than particular user groups. You have to find the topic that people love to repeat, that’s easy to repeat, and that travels.

3. Tools

Tools are all these things we use to accelerate and extend the scale of the conversation.

Mike: Like Twitter, for example.

Andy: Everything social media falls in that tool bucket. But it’s also something like the stickers that come with every Apple product. It’s classic offline word of mouth. Everybody shares those stickers.

The tool can be a T-shirt. If your customers really want to put your logo all over their chest and run around and advertise you for free, they should have a T-shirt!

The tools are all the stuff of this. The tools are things that real estate agents love to do—the refrigerator magnets and the calendars and the rulers and all the other doodads. It’s the stuff that lets the conversation travel.

4. Taking Part

Once people start talking about you, you need to respond, participate and become part of that conversation.

If you don’t join the conversation, either the conversation ends or it goes negative because people think you’re a snob.

5. Tracking

How do you measure this conversation, how do you measure the results and how do you drive through to your business objectives?

Mike: That’s some brilliant simplicity to describe the components of what makes word-of-mouth marketing work.

Andy’s Story

At what point in your career or in the last few years did you decide to focus on social media? What was the turning point for you that made you decide to focus on that?

Andy: There are two. Of the two brands that are part of my company, one is the GasPedal side, but we teach word-of-mouth marketing. It’s the word-of-mouth marketing company.

Then on the SocialMedia.org side, we run the Social Media Business Council.

I think what happened is about 3 years ago, we realized that social media is something that anyone can get up and do. If you’re a small business or an individual, it has that simplicity.

But when you’re a big company, it gets so much harder. It requires significant philosophical, behavioral and operational changes. It’s just not the same inside a major enterprise.

We started this group to be the home base and the peer group for people at big companies who are using social media and want to learn how to adopt it and learn from each other and share. That’s where this started.

Mike: Was this just about when Twitter was exploding in popularity or was it actually even a little bit before then?

Andy: Twitter had just begun. We started in the summer of ’08.

Mike: I think it was really about 18 months ago when Twitter started exploding in a massive way. Then Facebook, of course, just a few months behind, started exploding as well. It seems like you were a bit ahead of the curve.

Did you get there because you started to hear some of your clients on the GasPedal side saying, “We’re starting to hear a lot from our customers about this social media stuff, and we need to get onboard” or had you seen this coming for a while?

Andy: It’s interesting. Our name used to be the “Blog Council” because blogs were the only thing. Social media hadn’t really become part of the mix yet.

We were at Dell headquarters and Dell was doing what they then called a “buzz marketing” conference. Dell had been inviting other companies over to learn how they ran their blogging, social media and conversations department.

I was at lunch with some folks from Dell, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft and Intuit. We had been sharing our unique challenges with this stuff. We had been talking to each other informally, ending up with “Why don’t we start a group that lets us formalize the sharing, scale it up, and bring a whole lot of companies together?” That was the formation.

Social Media in Business

Mike: That’s incredible. I’m imagining social media has grown into a very popular tool for a lot of these huge corporations now.  Do you agree with that?

Andy: I think every company is using it. What’s most interesting is that the marketing side is such a small part of where social media adds value. It’s really becoming transformative across the entire enterprise. HR is using it, customer service is using it, research is using it and internal communications is using it.

Mike: Do you find it’s often starting from marketing and then spreading to other parts of the organization?

Andy: I would say with 50% of the companies, it starts in PR, which actually makes a lot of sense when you think about PR being much more structured for conversation. You build relationships with reporters, you tell stories and you build long-term dialogues. It’s about words, whereas marketing is about numbers and campaigns.

Mike: You’ve spoken to a lot of big brands when it comes to social media. What are some of the important challenges today that many of these big brands are facing and how are you suggesting they deal with those challenges?

Andy: Probably the biggest challenge is what we call “Guffman,” as in the movie Waiting for Guffman. Everyone is waiting for this special person to show up and be in charge.

In a big company, every department gets it. They know what to do and they want to start using it, but then, “Is the Twitter account for the PR department or should HR use it or are the marketing guys going to use it? Is our Facebook page going to be for campaigns for marketing or customer service?”

You get all of these people moving around in the company trying to figure out who runs it and owns it.

Mike: How do you recommend they deal with this issue?

Andy: It really depends on the nature of the business. A lot of really big companies have a center for excellence, which is a centralized council of folks from all different departments who become the governing or guiding voice of social media across the enterprise.

I think, less formally, it’s about locking into wins. When it’s working over here in this department, you do more of that. They tell the department next to them and they tell the department next to them. It’s a series of small growing successes.

Dark Side of Social Media

Mike: Let’s talk about the dark side of social media. There’s a lot of hype around the phrase social media. Are there certain misconceptions, do you think, among businesses? Do they think it’s the Holy Grail and can solve all their problems? Does it fall short in any particular areas? What are the downsides to social media, in your opinion?

Andy: People think it’s an advertising technique and that it’s about campaigns. If your ad guys take over your social media voice, you’re in trouble. It’s not a customer acquisition tool like, “What’s our ROI?” It’s a conversation tool.

If you start jamming what are really TV ads onto YouTube and calling it social media, it’s not going to work. Equally important, you’re going to miss the point.

Search has made us completely addicted to the numbers. We know to the 800th decimal point our search engine lead generation costs every second of every day. But we don’t know if someone posted an Amazon review about our product that is going to sit right next to the Buy button forever.

Thinking about social media as advertising is really where the danger is.

Social Media Outsourcing

Mike: Let’s talk about outsourcing. Do you think big businesses can outsource their social media activities? If so, what kind of transparency needs to be in place? What are your thoughts on outsourcing social media?

Andy: It’s hard to do a lot of it outsourced. There’s a reason why our group is a ‘brands only’ group. We can talk about these things without the agencies in the room.

The mechanics, you can outsource.

Mike: The Twitter background or something like that.

Andy: Yes, setting it up and doing the creative, some of the heavy lifting on the execution, the analytics and all of that kind of stuff.

But what we’re talking about is fundamentally your customer voice, your brand voice, and your personality. The whole point of this is to connect with people and talk to people. How do you outsource being friends with someone?

And if you think you went bad with all of the tech support that went overseas where everyone just tried to save a buck and it was a disaster for any brand who did it, imagine when your brand is being represented by somebody who’s only in it as long as their agency has the account.

There are exceptions. There are great agencies and PR firms that have long-standing customer relationships with their clients, where the agency is speaking with the customer voice and has been doing it for years and knows how to do it.

Mike: Do you think there needs to be any kind of transparency or do you think that’s not necessary when it comes to this kind of outsourcing if a big company does choose to outsource some aspects of this?

Andy: I am the single biggest advocate and maniac when it comes to absolute transparency all of the time. You’ll see me running all around the country pounding the podiums screaming about ethics because this is what it all comes down to. You can’t build a trust-based relationship that starts with lying to somebody about who you are.

Mike: How would you go about doing this then? If big brands are outsourcing certain aspects—let’s say they have a bunch of Twitter accounts and one of them is maintained by an outsourced agency—how would they disclose that kind of detail?

Andy: It’s surprisingly simple. You say, “Hey, I’m working at so-and-so helping out with branding.”

Everyone thinks this transparency thing is hard. It’s really easy. “Hi, I’m on Brand Company’s team over at the such-and-such agency. How can I help?”

It’s a phrase that goes from total lack of disclosure to complete transparency.

Social Media Success Story

Mike: Let’s talk about a company that’s doing social media marketing. Is there any one particular standout story or company you think is doing it really well? Who are they and what are they doing right?

Andy: I think Starbucks is doing a fantastic job right now.

Mike: What do you think they’re doing right? They’ve been getting an enormous amount of press regarding their Facebook content. I’m trying to figure out if it’s because they’re a big brand. Is it the “Ford” effect? Ford was one of the first big brands to get on Twitter, thus they got all the focus of the press. Is it the same deal with Starbucks and Facebook, or is there something more going on here?

Andy: Starbucks uses social media like it’s supposed to be used. They have a big team of smart people who are out there every day talking to folks. Their followers are earned because they love the brand, they love the products and they love the people they talk to.

When you become a friend of Starbucks on Facebook or you follow them on Twitter and start having conversations, it’s really awesome. That begets more which begets more and that’s how this stuff happens.

Mike: Do you think part of the reason they’re so successful is because they already had a loyal, crazed fan base to begin with, and Facebook and Twitter just allowed them to come together?

Andy: Yes, this goes back to the sort of framework for word of mouth.

People love Starbucks, but it’s hard to have six people in Seattle talk to 150,000 friends every day until you add the social media tools. Suddenly, you can have relationships with lots of people—meaningful relationships—and you can do it with science.

It’s interesting. They presented a case study at our last conference. They did a new Facebook page and Twitter accounts for Frappuccino®, which is a very new brand, separate from the Starbucks Facebook and Twitter pages. Millions of people went from being fans of Starbucks to fans of Frappuccino. That kind of transition doesn’t happen unless people were enjoying the first relationship and they found it beneficial and meaningful, or they wouldn’t have bothered to friend a sub-product.

Mike: Do you know whether Starbucks is actually encouraging people to participate by putting on the cups “Join us on Facebook” or that kind of stuff?

Andy: I don’t know.

Mike: It may just be that their brand was so great to begin with, and then they applied a really great strategy to it that has exploded. It certainly seems as though it follows the five Ts that you’re talking about.

Are there any B2B brands you can think of that are doing social media well?

Andy: There are a lot of good brands. Some of the big ones, some of the pure-plays are Intel, Cisco, SAP and a lot of those tech brands. I forget the exact number, but SAP is picking up something like 20,000 new members of their communities per month. That’s a lot of people.

Future of Social Media

Mike: Let’s look to the future. Where do you see this whole social media thing going in the next couple of years? Do you think the words social media are going to be obsolete? Do you think there’s some new stuff coming on the horizon?

Andy: I think it will get normal. We’ll stop thinking of it as “media.” That’s a bad word. It implies it’s something you buy to get your message out.

Mike: It will be another channel as ubiquitous as email or the fax machine.

Andy: Yes.

Mike: For those businesses that are just now getting started with social media, what would be the single piece of advice you would give them, even if they are a mid-sized or small corporation?

Andy: It’s the same advice for everybody, which is to just do the little stuff. Pick one thing you can do—whether it’s a Facebook page or a Twitter account or one particular product—and keep it really simple. Don’t spend any money. You’ll find it’s surprisingly easy and you’ll have some nice overall results. All of the politics and the fears and the objections that are getting in the way, they all go away because you can prove that it worked.

More Word of Mouth Marketing

Mike: Andy, this has been a really exciting and interesting conversation. If folks want to learn more about you and your organization, where might they go?

Andy: If you want to learn word of mouth marketing, go to GasPedal and check out our Word of Mouth Supergenius conference, our blogs, newsletters and the like.

If you want to learn about social media for big business, go to SocialMedia.org.

Mike: Andy, I really appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule today and I wish you the best.

Andy: Thanks for having me.

Listen to the full interview below to hear more from Andy.

What do you think about this interview?  Do you agree with Andy? Leave your comments in the box below.

Jay shares an innovative way to beat your competition using special social channels and critical tips on how to improve your social media marketing.

Be sure to check below for the other takeaways.

In this video you’ll also learn:

• Why you should listen first to monitor what’s happening then go out and make friends
• How the 3 “E”s help improve your social participation
• Why the first Golden Rule is there are no rules
• How his podcast only has 30 direct competitors (compared to his blog with millions)
• How to get experts on podcasts using Technorati and WeFollow
• Where social media is going

Jay’s busy with his Internet Marketing Club which is free to join. Be sure to check out Jay’s website Ten Golden Rules and the Ten Golden Rules Internet Marketing podcast.

Want to find out more about video?  Read these Social Media Examiner articles with tips on video marketing and YouTube marketing secrets.

What do you think?  Do you like Jay’s ideas?  Please comment below…

• The common blogging and social media mistakes businesses make
  
• How to succeed with social media and blogs
• Where Brian finds inspiration for his blog
• Tips for attracting opportunity to your business

In this video Brian also talks about how content is the foundation of the Copyblogger model, and why sharing great content is important to building a well-rounded online marketing presence.

What’s in Brian’s future? Web writers and content creators, you’ll want to listen to Brian talk about his move towards creating software for you.

And what about you? How do you think Twitter can improve the success of your blog? Do you think content is king in social media? Where do you find inspiration for your blogging? Please share your comments below.