In Social Media City you need to find the right attraction to ride...

In this era of consumer control, companies must work harder than ever to manage perceptions and reputations, and they require dynamic, customizable and robust social media strategies to ensure swift response to online opportunities and threats.

Social media can provide a low cost, highly targeted, and highly engaging means of increasing awareness of your brand, products/services, campaigns or any other subject of interest. Moreover, Social media can be used to build trust and engage customers in a relationship with an organization or business rather than simply pushing out messages (You can’t buy their love and they can always smell a rat, even underneath all the sweetening messages).

You need a Social media game plan:

Those rules will help you improve your digital identity:

1. Increase Your Linkability - add a blog to your site (it will humanize your brand by showing people real thoughts of a person, not a company presentation), aggregate content from elsewhere (for example, show people relevant blogs or Twitter lists you follow and get inspiration from, create a place where they can find useful information concerning your industry), create whitepapers (filter your knowledge on a particular subject and make it downloadable and storeable);

2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking Easy - add social bookmarking buttons, add relevant tags and related articles (help people find other things they might be interested in, but also help increase the number of clicks they make on your blog – win-win situation);

3. Reward Inbound Links - track inbound links to measure the popularity of the site; use permalinks and list blogs that recently linked to your site or blog (people who pointed to you for writing something really liked it – you can compare this to a vote, so why not thank them for what they did?);

4. Help Your Content Travel - submit PDFs, audio files, video files, etc. for broadcast on social networks (this way, your content travels, people get to learn from it, and it also brings links back to the site – another win-win right at the tip of your fingers);

5. Encourage the Mashup - allow content to be shared (this is done through YouTube embedding or RSS feeds – allow people to show others what they liked, allow your content to go places you didn’t even think of);

6. Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn’t Help You – by being helpful (even if this means linking to competition), you will become a go-to point on the web, people will know that on your site/blog they can find important and trustful information, not just promotional stuff;

7. Reward Helpful and Valuable Users - valuable users are influencers of your community and you should give them credit for their work or rate their activity (together, you’re building your brand and your community, so why not compensate your evangelists for their effort, even if you do it symbolically?);

8. Participate - joining the conversation leverages your message and gives it more credit (people will know that there is a real person behind all the data and technology; sometimes, ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ work wonders);

9. Know How to Target Your Audience - you can’t sell to everyone – find your niche and own it;

10. Create Content - you can create relevant and spreadable content for any type of industry, just find the points of interests (don’t think that your area of expertise is boring and you can’t make anything of it – write something funny, put things in a new perspective);

11. Be Real - ‘the community does not reward fakers’ – it’s about human contact, people will know you are not true, particularly if you use ‘tricks’ more than once; and remember, everyone hates spammers, so use their time carefully;

12. Don’t Forget Your Roots, Be Humble - respect is gained by not forgetting who helped you and not getting ahead of yourself – always thank people who did something for you, respect your customers and never think there’s no room for improvement;

13. Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Things, Stay Fresh - challenges are just around the corner in social media, it’s a constantly evolving environment and you need to keep up with it;

14. Develop an Social Media Optimization (SMO) Strategy - put down objectives and goals, whether they refer to awareness or sales – it’s important to know where you’re going and what you’re striving for, it will help you focus on all the important things and never lose perspective;

15. Choose Your SMO Tactics Wisely - define your desired outcome (is it creating content, enriching it or consuming it-like 90% of those involved in social media do?) and act upon it;

16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices - incorporate SMO tactics in your organization’s practices of content creation and distribution – your employees are also brand ambassadors and stakeholders, so get them involved in your strategy, let them also be carriers of your messages. After all, who can talk better about what the company’s values are, if not people who work there?

Time to get social!