Ever think about the possibility that Zen teachings could be applied to social media engagement? Hey, as they say, don't knock it 'til you try it!
One of this week's top inbound marketing articles explains how you can use lessons from Zen to make the time you spend on social media more rewarding and productive.
Author: Soren Gordhamer of Mashable
As Soren points out in his article, it's easy to get caught up in the "social" of social media. Therefore, in order to avoid wasting time, he offers 4 valuable Zen lessons to help you get the most positivity and productivity out of your social media experience.
While there are many out there who are self-proclaimed social media experts, Soren urges us all to approach social media with a beginner's mind, as the person who "knows" is often less open to new learning. Other bits of Zen advice include giving what you want to receive, adding only useful content and maintaining a positive state of mind.
Lesson: The key to successful social media engagement is focus.
Author: Kipp Bodnar of Social Media B2B
As a B2B marketer, one of your main goals for social media engagement should be to generate leads. Although its understandable that every industry/business should have a different social media lead generation strategy, Kipp argues that there are 7 steps every B2B company can share:
- Understand Online Analytics
- Develop a Content Strategy
- Build an Infrastructure to Gather Leads
- Establish Back-End to Manage Data
- Construct Workflow to Maximize Conversion
- Institute "Social" Sales Follow-Up and Nurturing
- Establish an Autopsy
Lesson: Use social media to strategically build your lead pipeline.
Author: Rob Ousbey of SEOmoz
Expert marketers have written a lot about how to demonstrate the value of social media to your boss, but what about convincing them of the value of search engine optimization?
Rob's article gives an awesome breakdown of how to promote the importance of SEO involvement internally, specifically addressing the CEO, CTO, Web designer, Web developer, sales manager, marketing manager, content editor, and community/outreach manager within a company. Rob clearly identifies tailored messages to use to explain why each role should be concerned about SEO.
Lesson: SEO is an important part of inbound marketing. Advocate SEO involvement within your company using targeted messaging.
Author: Brian Solis of PR 2.0
Brian's article focuses on the benefits of social media marketing for small businesses, citing Ad-Ology's recent "Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010″ report that reveals lead generation (See Kipp Bodnar's article above for tips!) as the top benefit of social media marketing.
In addition to discussing the report's results, Brian also highlights several other ways businesses can monetize conversations happening in social media, which include analyzing data and acquiring followers, among others.
Lesson: Determine ways your business can monetize its social media engagement to increase ROI.
Author: John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing
Instead of worrying about how you can be better than your competition, how about focusing your energizes on figuring out how to be different? Besides the fact that being better is difficult, John points out that most prospects won't spend the time analyzing your product to discover its subtle advantages over your competitors'.
Therefore, John's article advocates businesses find ways to stand out from the pack, whether it be through creating a unique experience or a totally innovative way for people to get a result. To get started, ask yourself the following two questions:
- What are we doing that our competitors are not?
- What are we doing just like our competitors that we could change for good?
Lesson: Sometimes "different" is better than "better."
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