Social media marketing is a new and often misunderstood field. Contrary to what some might have you believe, we don’t just sit around Tweeting and adding people to Facebook all day. Fully two-thirds of our services involve harnessing the power of the blogosphere—the original, largest and still most-influential component of the social media universe.
Overall, SocialRadius offers both a platform and a suite of agency services. Our platform identifies thought leaders, enthusiasts and e-commerce affiliates and ranks them by level of influence in a matrix of sectors. This is coupled with the agency services, including blogger outreach, promotion and affiliate recruitment to finally “connect the dots” between social media influence and trackable monetization. Where the direct-to-consumer sales component is not primary, as with companies that utilize sales representatives or two-tier distribution networks, SocialRadius can increase trackable conversations by influencers, search engine visibility, traffic, downloads and/or sales leads.
Other services include blog creation and optimization; lead generation using social media; physical and virtual events to engage top bloggers; Twitter and social network strategy and execution; podcast creation and promotion; and viral video marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t what it used to be. Ten years ago, one could simply metatag keywords on the right pages, write a little code to keep the robots happy, work with website designers to make sure their pretty designs weren’t obfuscating the keywords, and maintain the site through sporadic site revisions. Today, unless you’re a deep e-commerce site with thousands of items to tag, your old strategies went out the window with the advent of the blogosphere.
SocialRadius will perform an audit of where your visibility stands relative to your competition and make strategic suggestions to dramatically improve your visibility in search engines, while ramping up and sustaining traffic, through content creation in the form of a thought leadership blog, industry podcast, topical white papers and more. We’ve taken clients from invisible to category leaders in a short period of time, as well as used these new content showcases as a launching pad for other credibility and traffic-building initiatives.
The concept of blogger outreach is simple and rooted in the basics of good public relations: convince someone with more credibility and a larger audience than you to say good things about your company, product or brand. In a fragmented and shrinking traditional media landscape (brought about in large part because of the success of the Internet and social media to get news and opinion out faster, cheaper and, in many cases, better, than the old grey icons of print and broadcast media), the same concept works. But in the blogosphere, there are 150 million vehicles, including hundreds of thousands with high degrees of credibility to both their core audience and to the search engines.
By microtargeting the most influential thought leaders and category enthusiasts, one can generate much larger levels of engagement, inspiration and action than through traditional media. The tinder that begins to burn in the highly concentrated spheres of influence inhabited by these mid-tier blogs will often catch fire and jump to larger blogs and online media, then finally to traditional media (where it will be more effective because it will already have left a digital trail of credibility in its wake).
SocialRadius has conceived and executed these types of campaigns again and again, in markets as diverse as 3D design and printing technology, a benefit concert for an educational cause , and an organic baby products retailer. One of our most prominent blogger outreach campaigns we also highlight under our video section: the viral marketing for the award-winning “Yes We Can” video during the Barack Obama campaign for client will.i.am.
Editorial news and reviews are just the tipping point of what we’ve been able to achieve working with nearly 40,000 bloggers across categories ranging from beauty bloggers to sports enthusiasts. For a major spirits brands, we were able to stage a promotion that garnered 40,000 entries to a contest, outperforming its print media buys by a wide margin at a fraction of the cost. For a television production company and network, we were able to create a contest where influential bloggers competed to appear on the show, engaging hundreds of thousands of their own readers in the process and powering the show to exceptional ratings.
SocialRadius will work with your company to identify the best opportunities to engage with enthusiast blogs on a contest level. We can set up systems to track your engagement, traffic and, where there’s a direct call to action, sales. In addition, we can help you make the right choices so that you avoid any legal or crisis communications woes by showing you how to steer clear of black hats, astroturfing (fake grassroots) and other inauthentic ways of marketing that can not only land you in hot water, but are utterly unnecessary when authentic social media marketing is so effective.
For e-commerce sites that rely on affiliates, we can also help recruit bloggers to become affiliates as part of our promotional strategies, as well as show you how to best use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other social networks to drive trackable sales, leads and traffic.
Podcasts, Video, Twitter and Social Networks. While this looks like a large grab-bag, it’s really more connected than might first meet the eye. Podcasts can be marketed virally through a variety of free distribution platforms, including iTunes, while the phenomenon of the viral video has become even more powerful through the market dominance of YouTube as a platform for both discovery and distribution. Meanwhile, in less than five years, social networks have gone from a quirky addiction among teenagers to a platform more widely used than email. Twitter, itself a hybrid of a social network and a mobile micro-blog, has captured the attention of the media like perhaps no other service in history.
SocialRadius will help you sort out the real opportunities from the time sinks and misguided attempts to stay current with doomed platforms (Second Life, anyone?). We can act as strategist, managing editor, platform, full-service agency (or any combination in between). For musical artist Will.i.am, we took a brilliantly composed piece of video and set into motion a tiered outreach into the blogosphere that garnered more than 50 million views in three weeks, as well as half a billion impressions of traditional media coverage—all without a single press release or outbound media call.
