It’s all in this week’s top five most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media:

• How to build a truly great Facebook tab
• How to set up a social media command post
• Facebook courts Timeline skeptics with custom movies
• 3 kinds of content people always love to share
• How to take advantage of YouTube’s redesign

Image credit: narvikk, via iStockphoto

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Marketers are afraid of making social media mistakes. Even worse, they’re concerned their social media faux pas will balloon into a public relations nightmare. Get over it! In today’s always-on, connected world, issues can arise whether you’re participating in social media or not. So be a part of the conversation and engage, because when you have a problem, it’s too late to build your base. (And of course make sure that you have PR crisis plan ready!)

Here are seven common social media mistakes marketers make and how to fix them.

1. Fail to show respect for others on social media. Take a lesson from the Godfather because social media runs on old-fashioned good manners. Just because you work for a large company doesn’t mean that social media participants will automatically listen to you. Remember they’re thinking WII-FM (What’s in it for me?). Further, just enticing them with a special offer may not cause them to stay longer than necessary to make the purchase.

Actionable social media marketing fix: Listen to what your customers and the public are saying on social media platforms and respond where appropriate. To this end, it’s helpful to use social media monitoring products and to have customer service representatives prepared to respond via these channels.

2. Use sanitized corporate-speak on social media platforms. Social media requires a human presence. The absence of anything sounding remotely human, such as in one-way, one-to-many message broadcasting, hurts your organization. It means you’re only talking about your company and products. This me, me, me syndrome is how marketers miss the boat on social media.

Actionable social media marketing fix: Before pushing out your business-focused messages, listen to the conversation and realize it’s multidirectional, including many-to-many at the same time. Inwardly focused messages about your organization tend not to be where the interest and power are on social media platforms. Instead actively participate. The bottom line is you need to be and sound human! Consider what you can do for others.

3. Shout buy, buy, buy on social media platforms. This is akin to being a fast-talking sleazy salesman. While causing prospects to run in the opposite direction, it shows you don’t understand how social media platforms work. Instead, it’s important to pay-it-forward on social media platforms.

Actionable social media marketing fix: Change your tenor on social media networks. You can have one deal-of-the-day special where you push out a one-day-only offer the way Woot and Target do. (Check on Target’s site and on Twitter.) But the rest of your social media participation should contain at least 10 messages about others including your customers to every one message about your organization. To this end, it’s useful to create an editorial calendar of content you plan to share on various social media platforms.

4. Build a social media following for one campaign. Without understanding the ongoing nature of social media, marketers may build a social media base for one campaign without thinking about how to keep these participants engaged. I call this the LeBron James approach to social media. Basketball player LeBron James built lots of interest around which team he was going to join in July 2010. Instead of providing fans and followers with reasons to support his decision, he seriously pissed them off.

Actionable social media marketing fix: Start by understanding the relationship nature of social media. Getting engagement for a one-time promotion translates to customers taking your deal and leaving. Use your promotion to build long-term relationships with your prospects. Create a plan for ongoing engagement and marketing to maximize your investment in the acquisition campaign.

5. Forget to incorporate your brand into your social media engagement. Organizations work hard to create and grow their brand. Branding should be integrated into every aspect of your social media interactions including your pages, interactions and content. It’s deeper than the colors you use or slapping your logo onto your avatar.

Actionable social media marketing fix: Examine your brand’s DNA and determine how you’ll translate the salient elements to social media interactions. Remember social media runs on content. Think in terms of your organization’s stories.

6. Employ a college student who knows Facebook. While it’s enticing to hire an inexpensive intern to handle your social media communications, it overlooks the importance, experience and maturity required of understanding your brand, organization and the public. Understand social media participants take exchanges seriously. Therefore, shouldn’t your organization put its best foot forward?

Actionable social media marketing fix: To this end, show that your firm is serious about social media by having permanent employees who know your organization, brand(s) and product(s) run your social media efforts. Create a set of social media guidelines and provide social media training for your employees so they understand how to represent your organization and what to do as private citizens.

7. Are you opaque in your social media dealings? Social media requires a level of transparency. This doesn’t mean you need to divulge your competitive advantage or financial statement. Your target market and social media participants want to know where you stand and what you’re up to.

Actionable social media marketing fix: Don’t just lurk on social media platforms. Create a profile that represents your organization and discloses your point of view. Ensure that your representatives are trained in social media and understand your business so that they can be transparent in their dealings without telling corporate secrets.

Face it: You’re going to make mistakes on social media. It’s an evolving platform and, while there are pathways to help you develop an effective marketing plan, none of them is guaranteed to have no problems. What’s more important is that you’re prepared to respond in today’s 24/7 world and how you handle your engagement.

Have you made any of these errors? If so, how did you handle it, and what was the result? Are there any other social media mistakes you’d add to this list, and why? Please respond in the comments.

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This week, we asked: Do you tie your social media marketing efforts into your traditional marketing campaigns?

• Sometimes: 44.3%
• Always: 41.61%
• My brand doesn’t use social media marketing: 6.71%
• Never: 4.7%
• My brand doesn’t use traditional marketing: 2.68%

Everyone hates organizational silos. They poison innovation, fuel miscommunication and hamper efficiency. You will never* hear your boss say, “What this department needs is become more insular and secretive — only when we’ve destroyed all semblance of coordination with the rest of the company will we really start to perform at out best.”

Marketing silos can be just as dangerous. If all your company’s marketing is all done in complete isolation, you’re not only duplicating effort, you’re potentially weakening your brand with mixed messages and definitely missing out on ways to improve targeting and deepen customer engagement.

Good news, everyone! It looks like more than 2 in 5 SmartBrief on Social Media readers feel the same way — since they say they always find ways to link their social media marketing with their traditional campaigns. And an additional 40% say they sometimes coordinate their marketing efforts. Fewer than 5% say they never bother at all.

In practice, it may not always make sense to fully integrate social and traditional marketing for every campaign. Certain campaigns may only work properly in one medium or another, or perhaps technological or budgetary limitations make it difficult to roll everything into one ubercampaign. What’s most important isn’t whether or not you can always achieve perfect alignment; it’s whether or not you’re taking integration into account during the planning process. Are you looking for ways to coordinate and then branching out as your campaign needs dictate? Or are you working in complete isolation, not knowing or caring what the rest of your organization is doing? Because if you’re not even looking for ways to use social and traditional marketing in tandem, you’re just leaving money on the table.

How are you making social media and traditional marketing work together at your organization?

*If you ever do hear your boss say this, just go ahead and quit on the spot. The company’s not going to be around much longer. You might as well beat the rush.

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The first step in the “You’re in Charge” campaign was introducing employees to the concept so that each employee could be an ambassador of the company. Employee “activation” is crucial, said Jamie DePeau, corporate chief marketing officer for Lincoln Financial, because employee engagement comes first in any campaign. Without buy-in from those supporting the organization, any campaign effort will ultimately fail.

According to DePeau, who discussed Lincoln Financial’s campaign while speaking at the What’s Next D.C. event, the team began with a pre-launch teaser campaign complete with posters and internal activities that encouraged employees to invest in the idea. They were given opportunities to fill in the blanks and develop their own version of the campaign’s “Chief Life Officer” titles, where ideas included Chief “Got Your Back” Officer and Chief “This is Awesome” Officer.

The second part of the equation, DePeau said, is ensuring a well-rounded customer experience that’s in line with the campaign’s messaging. It’s the most important element for any brand-building efforts, but it’s also the one that you have least control over. The best thing to do is make sure that every part of the customer experience — from call centers to points of sale to everyday communications — is consistent with your brand’s promise.

It’s not a good customer experience if your product isn’t easy to use or your service representatives are not pleasant to talk to. Make it your company’s ultimate mission to provide a better experience for people that’s consistent with what your brand campaign is promising — be it a friendlier, more relatable or easier-to-use service.

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And while it’s different for every brand and every group of talkers, there are a few core forms of content that fans typically love to share.

What you should try:

• Content about them. If there’s one thing people love to talk about — online or off — it’s themselves. Try initiatives such as group projects, featuring customers’ work, or posting photos or interviews of your fans.
• Exclusive content. If everyone knows it, there’s no reason to talk about it. But content that nobody has seen yet — new products, sneak previews or insider news — has natural viral potential. We love being the first to tell our friends about this stuff.
• Fun stuff. It’s hard to talk about serious business all of the time. That’s the reason goofy, off-topic and funny content can be such a powerful word-of-mouth tool. Try simple stuff such as photos that show employees’ personality, hiding a few Easter eggs in your products, celebrating an obscure holiday or doing a wacky stunt.

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It’s all in this week’s top five most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media:

• PeekYou rates the 50 most influential social media experts
• Can you run a social campaign in just 20 minutes a day?
• McDonald’s finds itself embroiled in “a hashtag horror show”
• Should social media pros be paid extra for after-hours tweets?
• Long sales funnels require looking beyond Facebook and Twitter

Image credit: narvikk, via iStockphoto

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Great Facebook Pages are easy to spot; however, the reasons for their greatness might not be so obvious. Visually appealing and well-designed tabs are good, but there are five traits that make a Facebook tab great.

1. Purpose. With every Facebook tab, there needs to be an easily understood purpose of its existence. For example, a page’s landing tab, sometimes know as the welcome tab, should clearly and briefly introduce Facebook users to your brand. For created tabs that serve as host to a contest, a promotion, a subscription form or other content, make certain their purpose is real and measurable. Creating a Facebook-only promo code or listing a unique telephone number on your tab are two methods of tracking its metrics.
2. Viewpoint. Great tabs make a statement. Tab elements that support a worthy statement usually include nice graphics, meaningful text and components such as video, a Twitter stream or even SoundCloud. Integrating features into your Facebook tabs not only allows for a statement to be made but also creates allure and can complement the intended purpose for a specific tab.
3. Branding. Whether it be incorporating brand colors or integrating your business’ overarching message, great tabs always support their brand. Incorporating business logos, using consistent text styles and choosing graphics that support the brand imagery of your business are ways to ensure your custom-created tab stands out to Facebook users.
4. Incentives. What most separates a good tab from a great tab is its “like” ratio: the number of tab views to the number of “likes” a page receives. The best Facebook tabs capture users’ interest and often allude to special offerings. “Fan-gating,” which gives page administrators the ability to create content that is viewable only to users who have “liked” their page, does exactly that.
5. Timeliness. It’s often overlooked or forgotten that Facebook tabs can and do expire. Out-of-date content, seasonable graphics and limited-time promotion codes expire a tab. To avoid making a great Facebook tab a poor one, stay aware of the time sensitivity of the tab’s content and, when needed, update or delete the tab.

Not every Facebook tab embodies all of these five traits, but all of the great ones do. When creating a Facebook tab for your business’ page, keep in mind more than design. As much as aesthetics play a large role in whether a tab is great, the thought, meaning behind a design and content can prove more important.

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This week, we asked: If a social media public relations crisis were to hit your brand tomorrow, do you think you would be prepared to respond effectively? The results:

• We have the capacity to respond, but there’s no formal plan in place: 63.81%
• We wouldn’t know it was happening until we read about it in the media: 15.24%
• Yes, we have a well-documented social media crisis-control strategy: 15.24%
• We’re monitoring social channels but lack the capacity for a response: 5.71%

If it can happen to McDonald’s, it can happen to you. The fast food chain recently found itself in hot water after its promoted trend on Twitter was turned into an opportunity to mock the company. McDonald’s pulled the trend after two hours. Some people have criticized the brand for ending up in that position in the first place, but think about how much worse things could have been if the company hadn’t been aware of how users were responding to the promoted trend and willing to take quick, decisive action. Two hours is long enough that pulling the trend isn’t a knee-jerk reaction, and the company didn’t make the mistake of trying to feed the trolls — engaging in rational debate with people who are out only for attention. But the company acted early enough to keep the abuse from truly going viral — and its response since then has been consistent and appropriate. You can argue about whether the company should have used the promoted trend at all, but once things began to go south, its response was right on point.

But what about you? If your social media presence were hijacked or a damaging news story broke about your company or a customer service complaint started to go viral, would you be prepared to respond in a cool, disciplined manner? Most of you say you’ve got the means to respond but no plan for how you’d react. And that’s a problem. Because when it comes to social media, he who hesitates is lost. Speed is important, but so is consistency and calm. And those are attributes you can get only from having a well-considered social media crisis-response plan.

Maybe it’s the word “plan” that frightens people. This doesn’t have to be a major undertaking: Having a social media crisis plan means everyone knows his or her role. If you don’t have a plan yet, try asking yourself:

• Who is supposed to be monitoring social channels for signs of trouble? How is the person doing this?
• If something went wrong, who would have the authority to respond?
• If that person is unavailable, how is that authority delegated?
• What kind of negative reaction does the company need to respond to, and which ones are better left alone?
• What’s the official company line for common complaints about the brand?

Now, knowing the answers to those questions isn’t the same as having a social media plan. But it’s a start. You can hammer out the answers to those questions in an afternoon meeting and use them as provisional guidelines while you work on a more formal plan. That way, you won’t be caught flatfooted, even if trouble comes looking for you.

How are you preparing to respond to negative publicity on social media channels?

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As consumer consumption of technological advances increases at a breakneck pace, brands are fighting to keep up with a society that thinks in 140-character status updates. But most companies are failing to evolve, Bough said, and instead are staying stagnant, unable to keep up with the technology that has captivated their customers.

Society thinks digitally now, and mobile has taken the world by storm. In fact, Bough added, there are some countries where more people have access to mobile phones than running water. Is your company ready to keep up?

Bough challenged attendees to perform digital fitness tests on their own companies in order to evaluate the readiness of their organizations to evolve and adapt with their consumers. Here’s what he suggested.

1. Invite innovation. Encourage a company culture that’s open to new ideas, and you might find that last midnight brainstorming session just yielded your next million-dollar idea.
2. Challenge convention. Find ways to make your brand stand out and don’t be afraid to break the mold. What worked last time doesn’t need to dictate what will work the next time.
3. Experiment. How do you encourage experimentation? Often, people will stick to what they’re comfortable with — such as television or radio campaigns — because they have experience with those media and know what to expect. Experimenting with newer outlets — such as mobile or social media — is the only way you can say you’ve experienced them.
4. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. It’s not a matter of releasing the perfect product. Spending two years developing the “perfect” mobile application just means you’re two years too late when you finally release it. In fact, using feedback from your customers might be the best way to develop and launch a better version 2.0.
5. Learn, rinse, repeat. What were the successes and failures of your latest efforts? Use them as lessons for your next attempt.

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Your customers are using social media. That’s no surprise. So is it appropriate for you to join in on the fun and get your business on board? I know what some of you are thinking. “Sure, I know everyone’s using social media, but my company sells products that cost a ton of money and sales can take years to close. I can’t generate a sale, or even a lead, for any of my products using Facebook or Twitter.” If you just said some version of that to yourself, let me reframe the way you might want to think about social media for your business.

All too often, Facebook and Twitter dominate marketing meetings and boardroom conversations about social media, both in B2B and B2C. But social media is far more expansive than just these two behemoth sites. There is almost certainly another platform that will suit your company’s specific needs if neither of “the big two” fit. To shift your social media paradigm, consider the following types of social media outlets and how they might benefit a company with a long or complex sales cycle:

• Photo-sharing sites. Is your product visual or design-related? Help inspire your customers early in the sales cycle with a photo stream on Flickr or Instagram, a Tumblr blog or maybe even a board on Pinterest.
• Video-sharing sites. Does your product have killer demonstrations? Would side-by-side product comparisons help close the deal? If so, video sites such as YouTube or Vimeo could be your golden ticket to capture interest early.
• Message boards. There are message boards for nearly every industry under the sun. If you don’t believe me, check out coffin-talk.net. All you need to do is find out where your target customer goes to ask questions about his/her job and help answer them. This is frequently overlooked, but can be unbelievably successful in finding customers who are ready to buy. The key is to understand the message board’s particular tone before jumping in with a sales pitch.
• Industry blogs. You are probably already reading a few of these to stay on top of industry trends. Why not reach out to them to see if you can write a guest post as a representative of your company? This is a great way to get exposure to new audiences and another effective tactic for early in the buying cycle. If you’re skeptical, consider that you’re reading an example of this right now. Of course, if there are no great industry blogs, perhaps you could create your own. Nothing says “thought leadership” like creating the best content in your industry.
• Professional-networking sites. There’s nothing wrong with cold calling or e-mail campaigns, but a sales team who isn’t engaged on a professional networking site (let’s be honest, we’re talking about LinkedIn) is missing out on a potentially huge opportunity. There is a right way to use LinkedIn, so be sure your sales team knows what they’re doing before they let loose on their own. If done correctly, LinkedIn can be used to generate leads and nurture them all the way through the sale.
• Social-networking sites. I can’t just ignore this. After all, sites like Facebook and Twitter are quite useful for a lot of companies with long sales cycles, but you need to be smart about how you decide to use your account. Using Facebook and Twitter for customer service or simply as a platform to answer customers’ questions is often a great way to get started, though there are countless other ways to use social networks effectively to hit customers at all points during the sales cycle. Before moving on, I need to mention Google+ too. Recent changes to Google search have made it all but necessary for companies to create a G+ page. As always, research is key, so make sure you go in with a plan if you decide to create a page.
• Location-based games. If you have trade shows in your marketing mix, location-based games are a great way to engage an audience and capture early leads. Perhaps you could offer deals or contests for people who check in at your booth.
• Group buying/couponing sites. Group couponing sites have struggled to find their way into B2B, particularly for a complex, expensive sale, so if you have a great idea on how to apply it, I’d love to hear about it!
• Podcasting. Allured by the idea of owning their own radio show to brand their company, many businesses jumped into podcasting without realizing how difficult it is to create and manage a radio show and quickly gave up. But there are more ways to get involved with podcasting than creating your own show. For example, sponsoring a podcast or volunteering to be a guest interviewee on a popular industry podcast are two “early cycle” ways to take advantage of podcasting without the commitment.
• Slide-sharing sites. Do you sell to a target who needs to get approvals from an endless line of executives before he/she can sign on the dotted line? Why not create a sharable slide show (or several) that help your customers sell your product up the chain of command. That way, they have the tools they need to make your case when your salespeople can’t be in the room. Done correctly, slide shows can help you generate leads, then help you again to close the business at the end of the cycle.

In the end, social media may or may not be right for your organization for a lot of reasons, but if you think creatively it can often prove to be a valuable part of your overall B2B marketing mix.

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