Ten years ago agencies urged clients “you must have a website”. Then five years later the message was “it’s no use just having a website if no-one is looking at it – optimise, optimise, optimise” The most important thing became optimising your website so the search engines could work out what it was about and rank it highly for relevant and popular search phrases. And rank it highly they would! I have worked on many a campaign where the site gained top 5 positions for massively popular phrases in very competitive industries. What halcyon days they were!

Optimise your site for search – but make it social too
In the current world of web, SEO is still very important. Ensuring your site is accessible by the most important search engine crawlers; creating the right amount of clearly tagged content to inform and attract; and encouraging related external links are all still essential parts of creating a successful online presence. But with so many gazillions of websites competing for a place in the first few SERPs (search engine results pages), something had to give. What happened was people started exploring the web through recommendations from people they know instead of just relying on Google to find great websites. Thus, other ways of getting traffic to your site have come to the fore. So what is this other avenue of natural traffic? It’s social media of course.

Create content that attracts natural search traffic - and then encourage sharing via social media
Just as in SEO, we recommend creating content that attracts people to your site. Whether this is a blog, WIKI, videos, or white papers – implement a sharing facility so people CAN distribute your article, video etc if they think it’s something that will be of interest to other people. This way you are extending the reach of your marketing and getting more bangs for your buck. Even if you don’t add a Share button or similar (they are free, just search for Share button), people can discover your site and promote it using social media by tagging your site of their own accord – however, if you provide the facility you are enabling them to share with even greater ease.

Put your content out there where your customers are
It’s fantastic to create content and then encourage sharing. But what about doing more to encourage engagement via social media? How about going where your customers spend time rather than waiting for them to come to you? Create channels on appropriate social media sites where you think your customers might spend time. Facebook generally is more consumer focused, whilst LinkedIn is great for business audiences. You’d be surprised at how many professionals are on Twitter too so consider using that for conversations with potential and existing customers.

Engage people first and then you can concentrate on converting them…
So what is our overriding message to clients now, ten years after the web exploded? It would be something like this: “Create communication materials that attract people to your site and that you can place elsewhere to engage people and drive enquiries to your site. Then when they arrive at your site make sure they can find what they want easily so you can convert them into customers”. It’s not as short and snappy a message as ten years ago but then, it’s not as easy as it once was to get people to your site and make them want to become a customer as it was back then. That’s why you need the right people to help you achieve your online business objectives! Feel free to talk to me on Twitter, email or phone about using social media to grow web traffic.

We had a great day on Wednesday hosting a workshop with one of our international technology clients about how they can harness social media to achieve some of their business objectives in 2009. It was a really practical discussion in which we pitted their own internal objectives against the end customers' goals and then considered some social media tools to see which ones could work for them... watch this space! Here's a snap of a few of us outside the lovely building where we hosted the event.

Social media has become part of many people's everyday lives: Facebook-ing friends when we’re supposed to be working; watching YouTube instead of Coronation Street; and Twitter-ing - if you’re not now, you soon will be - with people we’ve never even met. But what about social media as part of a corporate marketing strategy? Can companies be social in this sense?

The answer is yes, most definitely! Here are a few things to consider as you embark on your campaign...

Marketing managers need consider what they want to achieve with a social media strategy. If clear objectives aren't set the campaign will easily lose focus (like any good marketing campaign you will need to set out metrics to measure your success).

Next, think about your audience. Are they active in social media, even Internet literate? If not this doesn’t necessarily mean they never will be, but keep in mind the channels within social media that will be most appropriate. You should not rule any demographic out. If you are certain that your end customers aren’t active within social media now and never will be, consider communicating with their key influencers: children, friends, and colleagues.

Now consider that well-known brands are often perceived as monolithic, impenetrable presences: a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘them’. With social media comes an opportunity for brands to communicate with customers on a more personal level, literally human to human. The human face of a brand is its employees, and it is important that brands empower (and trust) their employees to represent them online. Forrester Analyst Josh Bernhoff asserts that brands are wasting their time if they are not prepared to let their employees, rather than the brand, do the talking:

“Your customers and your prospects are connecting and talking about your products and your company right now... You need to be part of this conversation... You might start a blog... a Facebook group... But until you start connecting as a corporate employee, you won’t understand what is going on out there.”

Another way of putting it is: companies don’t blog, people do. It is difficult for brands to move away from wanting to control all corporate communication with the utmost diligence. But social media is about the moment; brevity is its defining feature. Status updates are changed hourly, blogs are hurriedly published with typos, comments left breathlessly without hesitation - the next day yesterday’s activity is on page 7, no longer important. In short, there simply isn't time for all comms to go through the usual sign off channels - so try and loosen the reins a little.

Authenticity is a key concept to be mindful of when it comes to brand engagement with your customers within the social media environment. People don’t want to hear ‘risk-avoidant lingoism’ (as one commenter recently put it), but instead real opinions and helpful advice from the experts, the employees! Be careful to keep alive the inherent spirit of authenticity and informality, or else your efforts will be less successful.

Lastly, remember that participation isn’t limited to ‘speaking’. Josh Bernhoff cites four other ways for companies to get involved with the conversations happening in social media: listening (finding out what your customers are really saying); energising (getting your best customers to evangelise your products); supporting (helping customers solve their own and each other's problems); and finally, embracing (working with your customers to make products better).