About The Book
Social Media Marketing: Engaging Strategies for Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media is a business marketing book aimed for any company c-suite, executive & senior level management as well as both accomplished and novice marketers who want to learn the ins and outs of being successful with marketing plans that involve social media.
Order The Book
RSS Li’s Articles on ClickZ
  • Integrating Paid Ads With Social Media Effectively April 12, 2012
  • How Small Businesses Can Integrate SEO Into Their Social Media Efforts March 15, 2012
  • Integrating Email Marketing for Small Businesses February 16, 2012
  • Where to Begin With Integrated Marketing for Small Business Owners January 19, 2012
  • People Want to Connect With You, Not Be Marketed To December 28, 2011

Archive for May, 2010

This Sunday’s edition of 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days brings us a look at Chapter 35 in the book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media, which is The Difference Between Buzz Monitoring & Audience Research for Social Media.  You may think they are one in the same, but both of these can bring you back very different information.  You actually need both of these to have a successful social media marketing strategy too.

The three high level tips that I have for you regarding the differen between buzz monitoring and audience research are:

  1. Buzz Tells You the Where, the When, and the What
  2. Research Can Payoff
  3. Understand that It Is Listening versus Hearing

These are three really quick tips regarding this, and this particular subject is a pretty deep one to get into.  In the book I dive into a lot more than what this short three minute video delivers.

One Programming Note: Due to the holiday (Memorial Day) there will not be a video for tomorrow, but stop back Tuesday where we’ll pick up with another chapter in the book!

Full video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend marks the start of summer! Parties, cookouts, celebrations, fun at the beach a lot of social activities and a lot of fun. I thought it would be appropriate to make today’s chapter highlight from Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media be chapter 41, In Order For It to Work, You Need to be Social.

Unless you are actively out in the social media communities actively engaging, sharing and conversing your social media marketing strategy is going to flounder and eventually fail.  Just like at any of the fun parties or things your going to be doing this weekend, unless you actively engage with other people, you aren’t going to have as great of a time as you could have if you “shared” your fun with others.  Today’s 3 high level tips for the 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days series are:

  1. Just Because You Built it Doesn’t Mean They Are Going to Come
  2. You Can’t Just Set It and Forget It
  3. Don’t Just Lurk

Full video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we’re talking all about YouTube.  That’s right, YouTube is actually the 2nd largest site that searches are conducted on.  It even surpasses Yahoo, Bing & Ask, how’s that for social media and community power?

Today’s chapter has a lot of rich and useful information which you can use in your social media marketing strategies, but in this video which highlights chapter 40 from the book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media, I give you three high level tips selected especially for the 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days series.

Today’s three tips are:

  1. You Have To Think Beyond That Whole Viral Aspect
  2. Video is Much More Engaging than Text
  3. Videos Appear in Search Engine Results

Video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to SMMarktingBook.com, the site that supports the upcoming book, Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media. Each day we highlight a chapter of the book in a series called 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days. Each insight is about 2-3 minutes long and includes 3 high level tips about the chapter. These are brief tips, the actual chapters have a lot more to them.

Today’s chapter is chapter 9, Understand Each Community.  It may seem like simple stuff on the surface, you see a community, you see its name and you automatically think you know everything there is to about that community.  Think again!  There’s a lot that goes on behind closed doors (or IM’s) that you aren’t privy to until you become a part of the community and understand its members.   The three high level tips you’ll find in today’s video are:

  1. Understand the Norms
  2. Read the Rules
  3. You Need to Stop, You Need to Listen, You Need to Learn Before You Open Your Mouth

Full video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s chapter in the 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days is chapter 15, Be Open To Trying New Things, But Don’t Fall Off the Bleeding Edge.  It may sound a little silly, but time and time again I’ve seen senior executives and the c-suite hear something about a new tool or a new community and hand down the “word from on high” that the marketing team needs to use these latest greatest tools or communities.  Many times these communities or tools disappear or stop working and that creates a nightmare for the marketing team.

I go into a lot more detail in Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media about how companies should go about adding new things to their social media strategies, but being wise about how they do that.  To get a glimpse of that, here’s today’s 3 high level tips from Chapter 15.

  1. SOS – “Shiny Object Syndrome”
  2. Be Prepared for These Tools to Fail (or Break)
  3. Fads of the Moment

Video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

If you happen to be at Social Media Plus today and have some time, feel free to stop at the Serengeti Communications booth and say “hi!”, come and learn about Social Snap, or come to my session at 4 p.m. and introduce yourself! In the mean time, here’s today’s edition of 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days.

Today’s Social Media Insight is all about chapter 38 in the book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media which is all about Aligning Your Offline Strategies with Your Social Media Strategy.  This means your traditional marketing efforts need to work hand in hand with what you are planning to do in social media.  In today’s word, neither of these efforts can operate in a vacuum anymore.  Today’s three tips are:

  1. Social Media Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum
  2. People Consume  Media in Many Different Formats
  3. Your Offline Events Can Matter Online

These tips can give you a glimpse into this rather complex issue, the full chapter in the book dives deeper into the overall subject.

Video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

This week starts the second week in the series 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days where each day I highlight a chapter of the book, Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media. These videos give you a quick run down of what the chapter is about with three high level tips.

Today’s chapter that’s featured, is chapter 6, The Conversation Happens With or With Out You.  That’s right, you can’t just stick your head in the sand and think that because you aren’t involved in the conversations, that they’ll just stop or go away.  Actually if you aren’t involved, it could harm you more than hurt your marketing efforts.  Acting like people aren’t out there sharing their experiences about your brand, products or services could actually insult an audience.  There’s a lot more about all of this in the chapter, but today’s three high level tips in this video are:

  1. Even When You Aren’t Listening, People Talk
  2. User Generated Content Gives Customers Control
  3. Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Converse

By understanding these three tips plus the other important points of chapter 6, you can understand how important engaging in social media becomes.  Listening too, is a vital piece of the puzzle of creating successful social media marketing strategies.

Video transcript after the jump….

Read the rest of this entry »

This Sunday’s edition of 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days highlights how personal ethics can have an impact on your Social Media Marketing strategy.  In chapter 18 of the book Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media we take a look at how not just your ethics, but those of your industry,  your customers, your audience, your employees and communities as a whole can have significant impact on what you plan to do and how you interact with members of various social media communities.

The three high level tips for chapter 18, Personal Ethics Matter are:

  1. Everyone Wants to be a Star
  2. You Don’t Want to be Constantly Doing Drama & Controversy
  3. The Internet Amplifies

These are three concepts that at times can be pretty hard to wrap your head around.  The fact that how someone acts in a forum, whom you have no control over, can be a pretty tough pill to swallow.  These tips in this video and what’s actually explained more in-depth in the book, can help you deal with these types of situations in a more successful way.

Video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Social Media Plus LogoI’m pretty excited for the upcoming Social Media Plus conference happening in Philadelphia this coming week!  Social Media Plus is happening at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.  This event is pretty unique in that it’s got four very distinct tracks that haven’t really been focused on by any other conference before:

  1. Executive Level
  2. Human Resources
  3. Information Technology
  4. Sales & Marketing

Along with 4 great tracks, there’s a bunch of great speakers in the line up and fascinating topics.  In fact a few of the companies I highlight in my book, Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media will be there, including Frank Eliason from Comcast.  All the speakers have a wealth of knowledge that they’ll be sharing on all different topics that fall within the tracks.

My colleague and coworker from Serengeti Communications, Beth Harte, and I will both be speaking.  Beth is speaking about Social Media for B2B Companies.  My topic is Search & Social:  What’s the Link?  I’ll be highlighting a bunch of tips, facts and information about how Social Media Marketing and optimizing for Search Engines are linked, it’s a lot more than securing your social media accounts!

Beth and I will also be at the Serengeti Communication booth on the expo hall floor with information on our new tool Social Snap, which is a dashboard that enables companies to get a 360 degree dashboard view of their social media marketing strategies.  We’ll also be signing up beta testers for the tool prior to the tool’s full release in August 2010.

So stop on by and say hi and register to win a free copy of my book which will be sent to the winner when it ships after June 24, 2010!

Yes, even on the weekends I’ll be posting to the series 45 Social Media Insights Over 45 Days!  The next installment in the series which highlights chapters from Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media, is chapter 28, It’s All About the Idea.

The content in this chapter focuses around realizing that a lot of times you, or people within your company might not always have the next latest, greatest, whiz-bang idea that’s going to propel your product or service to the heights of stardom and have evangelists banging down your door.  Sometimes it could be the evangelists themselves that have the next great idea.  Embracing this concept is pretty tough for some companies, but if you enter social media marketing and engage with an open mind, you might find a lot of surprises.

This chapter’s video highlights the following three tips:

  1. You May Not Be the One with the Next Idea
  2. Embrace the Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers
  3. Keep it Simple

Video transcript after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Engage & Interact
  Become a Fan of the Book  Connect with Li on LinkedIn  Read the Blog Feed in Your RSS Reader
Conversations