Master of Social Media Marketing

Today, at the monthly INFUSION tech lunch I host in partnership with the Berkeley Startup Cluster (www.berkeleystartupcluster.net/Events), Dennis Yu of BlitzMedia gave a short course on how to use Facebook to market your business or cause. He made some insightful observations.

First, you need to understand who your customers are. In other words, you need to be a good marketer; otherwise social media marketing won't do you any good. It's akin to when a plethora of typefaces first became available on the computer. People who didn't know the difference between Arial and Times Roman starting concocting streams of type that looked as if they were on mind-altering drugs. To transpose the analogy, to be a good social media marketer, you first need to master the basics of marketing.

Yu says that Facebook is all about ego: "You want to stoke your client's ego." So for one of his clients, Lane Bryant, which sells clothes to big (size 16 and above) women, Yu posts daily questions on its Facebook wall. He asked our audience of small Berkeley entrepreneurs for a question to post in real time on the Lane Bryant Facebook wall. We came up with "What's your favorite thing to wear on a Friday night?" Within five minutes, Yu had received dozens of responses, ranging from "hooker heels and yoga pants" to many "nothings." I don't know how the "nothings" are going to help fuel Lane Bryant's clothing sales, but it's obvious that a lot of potential clients are hanging out on the retailers Facebook wall.

What gets shared needs to have emotional content, says Yu. If we described FedEx as a company with the largest private fleet of airplanes in the world (2,200), the public would think of them as a transportation company. But most people equate FedEx with "trust." They know that when an item is fedexed, it will arrive on time. It's the emotion that counts, not the actually function a company provides, and your Facebook presence needs to support that emotion.

Yu says that a business or organization or person doesn't need a web site anymore. A Facebook page will do. He compares Facebook to the circuitry of the Web, connecting everything to everything. With Facebook's brilliant use of "like" plug-ins, it's easy for this connectivity to take place and let everyone know what you are promoting.

He has a point. There are 800 million people on Facebook. How many people click on your web site every week?

Yu told us he would critique any sites we'd like him to, so we volunteered the Chez Panisse Facebook page. It had hundreds of reviews, but the actual web site looked as if the owners could care less. "Why should Chez Panisse care about its web presence?" someone from the audience asked, "when it's one of the most famous restaurants in the world?" Yu agreed that there was no reason for Chez Panisse to beef up its Facebook wall or web site. In fact, he said, there was no reason for it to do marketing because its customers were its best marketers and it provided an excellent dining experience.

Which makes one wonder about the value of social media marketing for a product or service that people already love to use. Perhaps, one might spend more time on developing a really great product or service and less on marketing, although Yu does have a point: that Facebook can take far less time than traditional forms of marketing.

 

 

 

Comments

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Sylvia,

Thanks for the coverage of the event. It was an honor to present to your group. Anyone who wants a free Facebook dashboard analyzing their business, please ask them to email info@blitzlocal.com and we'll respond.

Best,
Dennis

[mia]

Thank you for your post,I like it very much!