The digital age has created a number of creative marketing challenges as well as a flood of service providers eager to establish themselves as experts. SMO (Social Media Optimization), ORM (Online Reputation Management), and SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management) are just a few of the “buzz” services you may have heard of lately.
Just because someone adopts a trendy acronym doesn’t necessarily mean they are right for your small business.
Broken down to its most basic principle, we outsource work to service providers because they have a particular expertise that we do not. We hire an attorney because of their understanding of law, a programmer because their understanding of computer languages, and a Realtor because of their understanding of housing markets. Theoretically, their fees should be proportional to the energy and time it would take to acquire that expertise ourselves.
Conversely, most of us don’t outsource the task of driving to work because we understand that the difficulty of driving does not offset the cost of a chauffeur.
For auxiliary services like SMO (Social Media Optimization) it can be a very difficult decision whether or not to outsource. If you’re paying someone hundreds of dollars just to add your company’s key words to “YouTube” tags then you may want to reconsider.
New media sites like Referral Key, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter may seem a bit intimidating when approached as a whole, but you’d be surprised just how short the learning curve is when you delve into the mechanics.
These tools were developed with the lay person in mind, so watching a few tutorials on YouTube will familiarize you with a site’s features, capabilities and limitations. After you understand the mechanics of a new tool, your strategy is just a matter of deciding which features you want to use and how much time you want to spend on each one. Since you know your own business best, you’re in the best position to effectively communicate your brand’s value.
The Golden Rule for Small Business SMO
The goal for the small business owner is to keep a consistent message on every social media platform you engage. Develop a short paragraph explaining the value of your products or services, choose about a dozen keywords that describe your services, and save this file as a master template.
Yes, there are people who will aggrandize their social media services but the fundamental strategies are very simple:
- Create a template paragraph that best describes who you are and what you do
- Identify keywords that describe your services (i.e. a Realtor may try “Minnesota Realty”, “St. Paul Homes”, “Luxury Condominiums”, “Midwest Real Estate”…)
- Paste this information where applicable and tweak it to fit the particular community you’ll be interacting with. Perhaps for your Facebook profile you want to tweak the message to appeal to homeowners, while on your Referral Key profile your goal may be to exchange sales leads; you’ll want to appeal to other service providers such as mortgage brokers.
While there are more complex strategies you can try, communicating a consistent brand message is about 80% of what an SMO specialist is going to do for you.
This isn’t to say that some people aren’t better suited to take advantage of emerging social mediums but this is the question you need to ask, “Is it worth hiring a marketing consultant if I can be almost as effective myself?”
However, if you think you need an SMO specialist, a qualified small business directory is a great place to begin your search.
