Becky is a marketing strategist for a large company here in Nashville. One evening she was planning some snacks for an evening with friends when her search for a snack led her to purchase a book she didn’t know she wanted. Here’s the email Becky sent to her director the next day:

“I Googled Chili’s because I wanted to find out how much it would cost to get chips and salsa to go. When I Googled Chili’s, this link came up that said “Brand Autopsy: Would you miss Chili’s?” That intrigued me, so I clicked on it and found the blog of a marketing guy who used to work for Starbucks and Whole Foods. He, in turn, raved about this new book that is all about marketing and social networks. I thought it might be something that our whole team would benefit from. Isn’t it ironic that I was looking for chips and salsa and found a marketing book? But it hit the right audience at the right time!”

I really like this story at a number of different levels because:

• It shows the power and influence of blogs even in the most unlikely of connections.
• It reminds me that people trust blogs that seem trustworthy.
• It reminds me that your target audience cannot be segmented so neatly all the time because Becky the marketer wasn’t looking for a book but she found one and bought it (and will likely buy one for the entire marketing team at the company) when she was Becky the snack shopper.
• It reminds me of the power of a Google search and how blogs could make (or break) the positioning of your brand.

The book Becky found was called “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed By Social Technologies” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I’m reading this book now too but I found out about it through Twitter via Jeremiah Owyang.

I’m keenly aware of the irony here (and also the affirmation of the power and influence of social media) that a book called Groundswell benefited from the groundswell in at least two cases I can point to directly (mine and Becky’s) and I’m sure countless others. So the question is, what are you waiting for if you’re not getting in yet? Don’t fight the groundswell.

This week’s social media batting practice involves a local, upscale music venue trying to figure out how social media marketing can work for it. This “pitch” was submitted by Steve, a MicroExplosion reader and our batter was Lynn Terry of ClickNewz.com. Lynn’s full list of recommendations and ideas follows the entire scenario below.

Scenario: How would a local entertainment venue (mainly musical arts) use social media to grow its fan base and increase single performance sales and season memberships? Assume the venue has a reputation of being a “black tie only” establishment, but in reality caters to music lovers from all walks of life. It recruits some of the most famous acts in classical, jazz, pops, cabaret and rock music and is known throughout the region. They sell out several shows a year for the more famous names, but want to be full for every weekend and weeknight show as well. What should they do?

Lynn’s ideas: They obviously want a social media campaign that will cover two objectives: gain local interest and also create a specific impression. In order to attract people from “all walks of life”, those people need to see others just like themselves.

I would recommend a photo/video campaign as the base for the online marketing strategy. They can be used to display the wide variety of entertainment available, as well as crowds & individuals (various types) that frequent the venue.

Use Flickr to host the photos and YouTube to host the videos. This serves two purposes: it saves on hosting space & bandwidth usage, and it also helps to create a broader reach. The goal is to “go wide” so that you are easily found online in a variety of places online. Not only will you be found at various social sites, but it will create more opportunity to be found in search engine results as well.

The primary web presence should be a blog, or a website + blog. Using a blog format will allow people to engage in discussions about specific shows they attended, subscribe to the calendar of upcoming events, and interact both with the business and other customers.

Elements to feature on the site/blog might include:

• About Page -written to give the impression desired
• Location/Directions -including photos and Google Map
• Entertainment Calendar -with RSS & Email subscription options
• Show Reviews -photos, videos & written reviews of recent shows
• Photo Gallery -invites visitors to submit photos as well
• Mailing List -notification for upcoming shows
• Testimonials -encourage visitors to send feedback & publish it

A great way to encourage visitors to sign up for the email list is to host a monthly giveaway. It might be a dinner, appetizer or door pass from a random drawing of subscribers. You can also use the drawing strategy to get customers to submit testimonials.

Tip: A prize of higher value could be offered for video testimonials, shot on scene.

Using the blog to feature reviews of recent shows will serve two purposes: it helps create the impression desired by featuring the variety of musical arts available, and it also allows you to optimize pages for keyword phrases such as: acts, names, music types, etc. Ranking well in the major search engines for the name of a well-known band can help you reach their fan base online.

Setting up a well-optimized blog and website, and optimizing your photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube, will allow locals and fans to find you. The next step in the marketing campaign is to find them.

Set up an account on MySpace, as their primary share in the social media market is with music. Use the name of the business for the account so that the URL is myspace.com/business. This makes it easy to find online, both by memory and by search. Use the calendar feature to display upcoming events. Search for bands and independent musicians that have played in your venue and add them to your friends list. Next, search your town and local area and send friend requests liberally.

When a band is scheduling a show, ask them if they have a MySpace account. Offer to feature them on your Top Friends space prior to the show and encourage them to send out an invite to their own friends list by posting a bulletin.

Set up an account at Twitter.com also, which is a micro-blogging service. Again, use your business name for the account. Publish updates daily that feature upcoming shows and artists, and link to the full write-up on your website. Use the search box in your Twitter account to find bands and locals just like you did with MySpace.

You now have presence on five different online properties - your own domain, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter. Done right, you can “own” 50% of the search results for phrases your ideal visitors are searching for online. Meaning if someone searches for XYZ Band on Google, you can easily show up in 5 out of the top 10 results.

Getting them to your site is the key. Interacting with them and engaging them in your content is what will turn them into loyal, repeat customers at your local venue.

—–

Lynn, thanks so much for your ideas and giving us a lot to think about. Anytime a business can own 50% of the search results for the keywords or phrases they want is a big win. That’s the beauty of what social media marketing can do. Interestingly enough, almost everything you suggested here costs nothing to get started but it takes time (sometimes significant time) to set up and maintain well. It just shows that in the economy of social media marketing time is the new money!

Also, thanks for the pitch Steve. All right…who’s got another pitch and who’s our next batter?

All bloggers want more traffic to their site. It doesn’t matter if it’s a professional blog or some random musings from your life, you want more traffic if you publish a public blog. Sure, you know about blogrolls and link exchanges, but do you ever link specifically to posts to bring some traffic to you blog? You can. Here’s how.

Linking to posts (called trackbacks or pingbacks depending on what your blog tool calls them) is a way to show that you wrote a blog post specifically talking about a post on another blog. That referring link then shows up on the original blog either under the trackback area or in the comments. That referring link can then send people to your blog to see what you had to say on the topic.

For instance, if I wrote a post about how Seth Godin gives a good explanation on the types of people who use Firefox rather than Explorer, I would link to it as I’ve done here and grab the trackback link at the end of his post. That trackback link can then be inserted into a special trackback field within Wordpress (some blog tools can do this automatically…just check how your blog platform deals with these or try this). Then my post referring to Seth’s post would show up on his blog.

Wordpress is especially generous to pingbacks. If you were to link to this post for instance (the permanent link) it would show up in the comments. Wordpress works like this for all users unless the blog’s author has specifically turned the feature off.

The strategy here is that you add value to the conversation and get to bring people over to your blog to see what you’ve said. It’s better than a comment because it shows you took some time to really respond to the blog post. People who read the comments will be more likely to click over to see what you said because they also recognize that you took the time to write it.

One final thought here…don’t be a jerk. Don’t trackback unless you have something valuable to add. There is such a thing as spam trackbacks and spam pingbacks and you don’t want to be one of those. Just add something to the conversation and you’ll be fine.

I think the business of website development is going through a major shift. With the power of current blog platforms and the ease with which they can be used as a valid alternative to traditional websites, I believe small web shops are going to have to adapt and/or specialize in something else or their business is dead meat.

In the good old days (about four years ago) you could build a website from the bottom up if you were talented enough or you had to pay someone to build a website for you. Fact is, many of those sites amount to little more than what we see on blogs today, but it was the only way to really get a decent, well branded web presence. There were some do it yourself type of website tools with templates you could choose from, but by and large if you were serious about being online you didn’t go that route.

That’s not the case anymore. Blog platforms can be customized beautifully these days with a fraction of the development time and cost because the entire backend of the site is already done. That’s a huge shift for the web design business because traditional shops (and I’ve worked for and with some) would have their own code set for building sites or they would start from scratch. Customers got charged like crazy for sites that would really be no big deal in this day and age. The worst part is not everyone knows this and some web shops are still selling their services like always.

All I’m saying here is that it’s no longer necessary to look only to a web design firm to build your web presence. My friend Cory Miller began a venture a while back to start building on Wordpress and selling the designs so he can deliver an entire web presence on a platform he didn’t have to build. You can check it out at iThemes.com and you’ll see the designs are really sharp. Nathan Moore and the Anthology Creative crew did my blog on Wordpress and I love it. It’s clean, simple, gives me everything I could want, and it’s a full website that covers everything I need.

This web development shift is great for customers. They are generally better looking sites that are easy to manage and much cheaper than what some companies charge.

If this feels a little too doom and gloom for the web designers then you’re not seeing the opportunities. I actually think the future is bright in the web design/development world if they adapt to the changes or become specialized. Here are three areas that seem wide open for growth:

• Blog Design Specialists: Blogs have emerged as a great platform for a web presence that meets the needs of what many people want when they think about getting a website. The web designers who are focused on providing a great web presence with a focus on ease of use, function, and beauty will do well. Their counterparts building sites the old way, however, will still be charging clients to use some bulky, proprietary stuff their company is married to.
• The Flash/Controlled Media Specialists: Some people want to control the entire online experience for users and Flash or some other controlled online media like that is always going to be a preference for those people. Blogs won’t cut it in that regard and the specialists who can do this well will likely be in demand for a long time.
• The Big, Bad, Complex Website Specialist: There are some websites that are just too big and bad to warrant being built on a blog platform. You’re not going to see Amazon.com or anything like that switching over to a blog so there will always be a need for the large and highly complex site specialists.

I should note if anyone is wondering…I don’t build websites. I know enough HTML to get into trouble and  my design skills are mediocre at best. This entire perspective is based on the opportunities for consumers and my observations about how the market is changing. It’s as simple as this: the days of paying more than five or ten thousand dollars for a website are gone except in some select scenarios. In many cases you can get more than enough for what you need for under $1000. Just be aware of that next you want a website.

You may not know it but you have some control over the way your blog’s RSS feed displays. You can allow your feed to show a summary (which usually consists of the first paragraph or introductory sentences in your post) or the full post. Most blogs default with the full post display but I was asked recently if I thought the summary option is a good idea based on the premise that if people can only read an introductory paragraph from the post then it will drive traffic to the blog.

My advice is to never just do the summary and here’s why…

• The summary option assumes people care enough to click out of their feed reader to go to you blog. Many feed readers are scanning headlines and if they see something that catches their interest, they want to read it then and there. That’s a primary reason for having a feed reader to begin with…the person chose to bring the content to them rather than go to every blog to read the posts. iGoogle wasn’t the most popular Google property in 2007 for nothing. Increasingly, people want their online information consolidated, convenient, and quick. Don’t make it hard on them because they will likely keep moving through their feeds and never click over to read your post.
• The summary option assumes that unique visitors to the blog are a more important statistic than the RSS readers. Personally, I believe the richest statistic you can measure for your blog is your RSS subscriber base. Those readers have elected to pull your content into their feed reader. They are your new opt-in list so treat them special and don’t make life harder on them. You need them more than they need you.
• The summary option isn’t a common practice with 99% of blogs. If for no other reason, don’t do this because you’ll be the one blogger who forces people to click over to your blog to read the posts and it’s just counter cultural (in blog culture that is.) If you do the summary, the best case scenario is that people will ignore it an move on. The worst case is they’ll think you’re controlling and egotistical…and they still won’t read it and will move on.

The bottom line is that anything you may gain in some new traffic to the blog will be a much bigger loss in people’s attention and your influence because you’re creating a hurdle they have to get over if they want to read your posts. It’s just not a good idea. You have more to lose than gain.

I’ve noticed that people who have opinions about blogs and bloggers see them in one of two ways: either as fish or rats.

Fish are:

• Beautiful
• Admired
• Valuable
• Prized

Rats are:

• Disruptive
• Sneaky
• Hated
• Pests

The reason I bring this up is because some of us who happen to think blogs and bloggers are fish work with, for, or around people who see them as rats. It’s a huge divide when you think about it. If someone thinks they’re rats how can you convince them otherwise? You could talk about blog growth and hope they’re convinced that 100 million bloggers worldwide can’t all be wrong. You could give anecdotes of stories where bloggers have made and changed news stories or rallied around causes to help people. You could tell them that generating content is the new promotional strategy (and I would insert personal stories here) but that may not be enough either.

If I know I’m talking to someone who sees blogs and bloggers as rats rather than fish I generally try to find out how they arrived at their conclusion. Many times this idea developed from an experience (either one they had or something they heard about) where a blog was used in a negative way. Perhaps it was an attack blog or some kind or the perceived lack of control with a blog that made them uncomfortable. Whatever the case I haven’t yet discovered a sure-fire method of changing someone’s mind and I don’t think there is one but the best thing to do is to deal with the issues that led to the conclusion they now hold before dealing with their perspective of blogs and bloggers. Forget that they think blogs are rats. Deal with the reasons they think that. Take the time necessary to reconcile those issues. Only then will you have a chance to turn that rat into a fish.