Social Marketing Strategies from Social Marketing Expert Peter Lenkefi

Social media marketing can take on many shapes, sizes and iterations. However, most people blindly head down one path with no regard for the folks in their selected niche.

As an example, let me tell you a story that involves my beautiful wife.

My Wife - The Internet Diva

My wife has her own laptop, and as a very “organic” person, likes to go online and learn about things related to natural health & wellness.

She is also a business owner with her own web site (actually it’s a blog but we won’t tell her that for reasons you will understand in a minute) promoting her skin care and massage practice.

She also is a bit of a gadget girl, always “craving” the latest cell phone or Playstation/Xbox and bugs me weekly about getting her a “cute little Mac”.

She is online all the time… she takes webinars, she reads lots of content and has even done some of her own graphic design work -brochures, biz cards, etc.

At first glance, you would correctly presume that my wife is technology and internet savvy.

You may also assume that she subscribes to RSS feeds, reviews social news sites like Digg or Care2 and reads/leaves comments on blogs related to her interests.

Well, while the former is absolutley correct, the latter couldn’t be further from the truth.

I started noticing this little “disconnect” and, since it is my business to know these things, I set up an innocent little “spy campaign” on my wife.

Perched over her shoulder, a few minutes here and there, I watched her browse the internet…

I asked her about the social bookmarking buttons when they presented themselves…

I asked what she thought that giant orange RSS button was…

I told her I wanted to check something and had her scroll down to see the comments and asked her what she thought…

I told her about Connotea and Care2 to see if it perked any interest…

Guess what?

I got nuthin’.

So, I did what any good social media marketer would do… I sat my wife down for a talk.

My Brief Stint as a Social Media Evangelist

I figured that all that was missing here was some breif social media evangelism and then my wife and I would be cheerfully sharing our starred RSS feeds on Google Reader.

The puzzled and somewhat concerned look on her face quckly alerted me that the first minute of this sermon wasn’t going very well.

So I dug in… I gushed, I explained and shared, I illustrated and testified to the joys of bookmarking, the efficiency of RSS, the power of Wordpress, and the social news site brotherhood.

My wife patiently listened and, after I completed my regretably unforgetable monologue, she siad…

“I am just not interested in participating… I just like to read and learn. I don’t care if it’s a blog, I think those comments get in the way and all those little button clutter up the web site.”

Uuuugh… My little world was rocked to the core ;)!!! I kept thinking, “But Rich Schefren said….and Jack Humphrey said…”

“Could there be more people like my wife out there?” I asked myself…

Here I am focusing hours and hours of my work-life on these sure-fire social media marketing techniques and my own wife tells me she simply ignores them.

A Revelation

But then, I thought… this is not bad news, it is actually a serendipitous discovery.

Yes, if I could find out what parts of the social media landscape my wife does travel on, I may be able to expand my marketing reach into areas I have unwittingly ignored.

So, this is my current project. I quietly and carefully peek over her shoulder as she is browsing away, gleaning from her click patterns. I casually converse with her about her new web site “finds” and, of course, check her browser history like a jealous freak -just kidding, I don’t do that last one.

What have I found so far?

Well, although my wife doesn’t realize it, most of her favorite content sites are blogs. Nice clean, well structured blogs, but, nevertheless, they are blogs.

They may not have loads of bookmarking buttons or a prominent RSS feed but they do have the traditional opt-in newsletter form and a place to share comments.

Also, these sites seem to have more pages than posts, in fact most are set up like static html sites. In other words there is no major distinction between pages and posts. The homepage is not the latest 10 posts like most blogs but a static “intro” page.

I also discovered that my wife really likes links, text links. No, not adsense, but anchor text links inside the content. She would frequently browse forward to a product offering from these anchor text links.

Re-Thinking Social Media Marketing in Some Niches

So, unless your target market is 25-35 year old SMMers who frequent Digg or drink up RSS feeds like a cup of Starbuck coffee, you may want to re-think your social media marketing strategy. I have…

Aside from this blog (whose target market is the above), I vow to :

structuring my content toward solid pages of content with post added in over time that point to those pages

add lots of anchor text links that carry my reader to product offerings and related content

create an interactive home page rather than display a list of the latest posts

and cleanly and concisely regulate the social media buttons and RSS feeds

Maybe, one day, my wife will stumble across (no, not StumbleUpon - I know she will never be doing that) one of my “blogs” and add it to her IE favorites.

Then, dear readers, I will have succeeded.