This is a guest post by Maria Ross, founder and chief strategist of Red Slice and author of Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget (2010, Norlights Press)

The old adage, “Is it the medium or the message?” has never held more weight than it does in today’s marketing arena. You have a story to tell (your brand message) and you have a dizzying array of mechanisms through which to tell it: Twitter, website, blog, ad, events, signage, Facebook, etc. etc….

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So when it comes to evaluating success, you have two factors to consider: the message and the medium itself.

Seth Godin’s blog talks about how organizations use PowerPoint appallingly these days. Never has a tool come along that seemed so easy to use, but people forgot about honing basic presentation skills before cutting loose on this software. It’s just like Twitter, blogs or DIY websites – just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should” or even that you are doing it “right.” You could be doing more harm than good in communicating your message simply because of using the vehicle incorrectly. You have to adapt your message to the medium you are using so you leverage it effectively.

In addition, a third layer to consider is choosing the right vehicle to reach your target audience in the first place. So let’s say you have a great message AND you are using the medium correctly – you still might be singing beautifully to an empty room, because no one that needs to hear your message is actually present. This is what happens when you get caught up in the next new shiny thing or use social media incorrectly, and forget to evaluate if your target audience responds to it.

Messaging can be complicated. You can’t just assume messages “didn’t work” if they fail, simply because you got no response. Look at how you are using the media first: are you leveraging it fully, do you understand how audiences are properly consuming the information, and did you design the message to fit the specific medium? As an example, people that use Twitter to constantly promote themselves rather than creating useful content or engaging their followers usually get kicked off the island.

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Next, look at the medium itself and judge if it’s the right vehicle to reach the people you wanted to reach – meaning the ones who will buy from you or influence those who will buy from you. Hopefully, you put all this thought into it before you embarked on the campaign, but if not, take a step back and look at these factors.

It is way too easy to fall into the trap of doing something “because everyone else is doing it” and writing it off when things don’t go your way. But you have to consider both what you are saying and through which channels you are delivering that message before you can determine what went wrong. Then you can decide if you need to tweak the message – or find a new medium.

Guest post from Maria Ross, founder and chief strategist of Red Slice a branding and marketing consultancy based in Seattle. Red Slice helps businesses large and small tell their brand story so they can engage, inform and delight customers – and keep them coming back for more. She is the author of Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget (2010, Norlights Press)

Is the Medium or the Message Getting in Your Way? is a post by: Samir Balwani

Social media and digital communications have really grown as a marketing medium. The new strategies that the web have afforded can be extremely powerful. With that in mind, it’s important to learn as much as you can.

Getting started can be the hardest thing. To help people better understand social media marketing, I’ve outlined some important reading for individual topics in social media…

Facebook Basics

For many Facebook is a really important aspect of their social media strategies. Making sure you create a Facebook fan page that maximizes your return is important.

How To Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page
Tamar from Techipedia wrote an awesome article outlining a few steps to creating a great Facebook fan page. She goes over the idea of creating a landing page, Facebook SEO, and FBML.

Who’s Blogging What: 2010 Facebook Page Marketing Guide
Recently, I took part in a really in-depth Facebook Marketing Guide that’s being published by HubSpot. The guide goes over everything from creating a fan page to building a loyal following.

Use Vanity URLs to Save You From a Branding Fail
Once you have your Facebook fan page ready, definitely check out the article I wrote on branding. Don’t make the mistakes many large brands do on a day to day basis.

Starting with Twitter

Many businesses have found value in the reach afforded to them through Twitter. The following articles should help you get started with Twitter and using it to market your business…

Twitter 101 for Business
For the very basics go to Twitter itself. The Twitter staff put together a great guide for Businesses getting started with Twitter. It includes case studies and best practices.

Using Twitter Search for Business
Even though a very short post by Chris Brogan, it is full of information. Being able to use search properly is a great way to find new leads and consumers.

The Ultimate Guide for Everything
A great guide that outlines how to get started with Twitter and what some successful brands have done. It gives you good ideas on what to do once you have your Twitter account.

Twitter Marketing: A Small Business Guide
I previously put together a Twitter marketing guide for small businesses. It’s relatively short, but reviews how to get started, how to use Tweetdeck, and what to do with your Twitter account.

Using Online Blogs

A blog or social media hub is an extremely important aspect of a social media strategy. Most marketers overlook the idea of owned media and determine that hosting a blog is too expensive and resource intensive. The truth is that a blog can be the greatest social media investment a brand makes…

Do You Have A Social Media Hub?
Really one of the most important things for your social media strategy is creating a social media hub. The hub acts as the anchor for the strategy and ties together all the social media profiles.

Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors
For many businesses, their social media hub will be their blog. Hubspot put together a great study showing the impact of a blog on a businesses’ digital footprint. Definitely check out this article if you’re curious about creating a social media hub.

New To WordPress – Where to Start
Almost always, I recommend WordPress for small business blogs and sites. Their “getting started” guide is a good way to learn more about the software and how you can use it.

Analytics and Metrics

Once your campaign has launched, you have to be able to measure and optimize the campaign. Knowing which metrics to track and how is important. The following articles explore the topic of analytics and metrics…

This is How You Measure Social Media ROI
This article reviews how you can possibly measure social media ROI. It reviews the pitfalls and obstacles to adding social media to the marketing mix.

HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics
A short article that reviews the basics of pulling together some social media metrics. Shows you how to track social media shares and other important metrics.

Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics
As usual, Avinash puts together a great article that outlines his thoughts on Twitter metrics. He reviews both how to measure and draw analysis from the data.

Understanding Social Media Metrics: Basic Modeling
This more advanced post looks at econometric modeling and how it relates to social media marketing. Using the model, we can begin to determine what impact individual decisions have on our social media success.

Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales
Everyone wants to know what they need to do to track sales through social media. This post explores why it’s important to measure social media sales, what to track, and what tools to use.

Online Culture

The web has evolved our culture and changed our social norms. What is acceptable offline might not be tolerated online. How you say something online, might not be acceptable offline. Understanding the web culture is a necessary step for being successful online…

Culture, the Great Influencer on Corporate Social Media Adoption
Although the slideshare is gone, this article definitely gives some great insights into the idea of culture as a driving force for social media understanding through a company.

Social Media Requires a Cultural Investment
An article that explores how culture can affect the profitability of a company and explains why the evolution of culture is a necessity for social media success.

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media
A TED video that highlights the idea of social media culture and gives a great case study that shows how the reddit community works.

Christopher “moot” Poole: The case for anonymity online
Another important cultural phenomenon online, the idea of anonymity. “Moot” the creator of 4chan talks about privacy and anonymity in this great TED video.

Final Thoughts

Just learning the basics of social media marketing, how you should act, what you need to do to begin, and how to measure your success, is extremely difficult. Reading as much as you can and testing out new ideas is the best way to gain the knowledge you need to be successful.

I’ve outlined some articles I recommend, but now it’s your turn. Leave a comment and share articles you believe helped you get started with social media. Don’t feel like you have to share only articles, give your advice or thoughts for those trying to get started.

Help! I Need Social Media Advice… is a post by: Samir Balwani

Remember when you were younger and new toys would hold your attention for some time, but then you’d quickly run off and do something else. Your focus would be extreme, but fleeting.

That same tendency doesn’t disappear as we get older, we still can revert to that mindset. Lately, everyone’s been focused on social media. It may be a great marketing tool, but it’s important to not lose sight of your ultimate goal and bottom line. Social media is only one of many marketing options available online.

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5 Ways to Stay Away from Over Focus

Just knowing that “tunnel vision” exists can save you from the trap, but it might not be enough. Sometimes you need a set of rules to follow, to keep you from making this mistake.

1. Create an integrated strategy
The first thing to do is to make sure you’re starting with an integrated strategy. Online marketing is similar to a machine that requires each individual gear to work in perfect harmony. Each marketing medium can play a different part in your online strategy.

For example, display advertising and social media have great potential to drive demand. A good search engine marketing campaign can take that demand and push conversions. Without both aspects of this strategy, the marketing campaign won’t have demand to convert or will attempt to convert search volume that doesn’t exist.

2. Identify your goals and resources
A good strategy for ensuring optimal use of resources is to be organized. Create a list of your goals and KPI’s (key performance indicators). Then outline what resources you have available.

This will force your resources and goals to dictate strategy. For example, have a web development team but no content team? It might be better to dedicate time and energy in making sure your site is technically optimized before investing in social media.

3. Ask your consumers
Sometime integrated marketing strategies is difficult to do. It’s not always clear how or why to create the strategy. In these instances, it can be best to ask your consumers what they think.

Using surveys to ask your consumers how they found you, what the found had the most impact, and what they wish was different can be a powerful tool. Take the data to determine gaps in your acquisition process and determine where resources can be used to create new marketing channel or reach targets.

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4. Ignore the hype
Regardless of what you do, if you get suckered into the hype, you’ll find a way to justify investing in a marketing medium. Recognizing that new and exciting marketing tools are just that, new and exciting, can keep you from focusing on an extraneous marketing expense.

Remember, there’s no single marketing medium that is the end all be all. Whether it be paid vs organic or even online vs offline, they all need to work together to make a successful marketing strategy.

5. Create an experimental budget
Finally, be sure to create an “experimental” budget. The budget is dedicated for trying new marketing strategies, experimental tools, and innovative ideas.
Defining monetary boundaries forces you to maintain your current marketing strategies, while slowly trying new ones. It makes sure you don’t lose too much or stray too far when trying something new.

Conclusion

Over focus is a trap many marketers fall into. It’s easy to get tunnel vision when something new and exciting comes along. Making sure you don’t forget about other marketing mediums and strategies are important skills good marketers must learn.

Although social media may be exciting, it can’t stand-alone. Each marketing medium needs to work harmoniously to create a successful strategy. Integrating social media, search engine optimization, email marketing, display advertising, content marketing, with the next big thing is a skill that great marketers learn to master.

How are you integrating your strategies? What have you done to make sure you don’t fall into the marketing tunnel vision trap?

Do You Suffer From Marketing Tunnel Vision? is a post by: Samir Balwani

On Monday, I started my new position as Digital Marketing Strategist at PMK BNC.

I’m really excited to be taking a role that allows me to work with an extremely strong and well respected PR and marketing agency. I’ll be working to identify areas of integration between digital and traditional.

It’s great to be working with a traditional agency that is dedicated to evolving with publishers and consumers. The agency will stay true to its roots and maintain its reputation as a PR powerhouse, but will continue to grow its digital know-how and mastery.

I hope you’re prepared for some exciting announcements and new things. Not much will change on this blog, you’ll still get in-depth and actionable digital communications insights.

If you have any questions or want to reach out to me to learn more about my new position, don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment.

On The Move: Digital Marketing at PMK BNC is a post by: Samir Balwani

Social media marketing is a difficult field to master. To truly master it, marketers must understand multiple fields of study.

People feel that social media marketing is simple to understand because everyone already uses social media. Sure, the concept is simple – be a good person, interact online, and monitor your brand.

The truth is that building a community is one thing, but getting them to do something is entirely a different story.

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So what do smart marketers know that everyone else doesn’t? They know that understanding “marketing” by itself, means nothing. It’s when you bring together learnings and understanding from other fields do you fully master marketing.

Let’s explore a few important fields of study and just what they mean to a marketer…

Psychology: Why People Share

The idea that people share content online is a fundamental staple of social media. If people didn’t share things online, social media wouldn’t exist.

Understanding how and why people spread content means that social media marketers must learn the psychology of sharing. We have to know why things are shared and explore how to recreate results.

Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring underlying physiologicaland neurological processes. credit

Questions to Consider

• What drives people to share something?
• What kind of content will people share?
• How do consumers feel when they share content?
• How can a marketer generate a sharing atmosphere?

Anthropology – Understanding Culture Evolution

Social media didn’t appear out of the blue. It’s an cultural evolution and one that continues to change. Anthropologist explore how cultures and communities change. They want to know why cultures behave the way they do.

Anthropology’s basic concerns are “What defines Homo sapiens?”, “Who are the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens?”, “What are humans’ physical traits?”, “How do humans behave?”, “Why are there variations and differences among different groups of humans?”, “How has the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens influenced its social organization and culture?” and so forth. credit Bolds added by Samir

Questions to Consider

• What caused the growth of social media?
• How has the online culture evolved humanity?
• What can we expect from the future based on the current culture?
• What are the cultural norms when interacting online?

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Sociology – Building Communities

Online networking and communities, definitely falls within the idea of sociology. It’s one of the most important understandings a social media marketer can have.

Learning how networks are created, how people interact within the network, and why they join in the first place defines the difference between a real marketer and one that’s just pretending.

Sociologist and good marketers are adept at collecting data, identifying trends, and analyzing outcomes.

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter ranges from the micro level of agency and interaction to themacro level of systems and social structures. credit

Questions to Consider

• Why do people create communities?
• How is influence gained within a community?
• Why does a node interact with a separate node?
• How do nodes connect within a society?

Neuroscience – The Drive to Buy

Marketers don’t need to be adept at neuroscience but instead need to understand the basics, especially when it relates to persuasion and buying.

The idea of neuromarketing isn’t a new one. Knowing what makes a person want to buy something or what kind of marketing works from a biological standpoint can be an important idea to understand.

The techniques used by neuroscientists have also expanded enormously, from biophysical and molecular studies of individual nerve cells to imaging of perceptual and motor tasks in the brain. Recent theoretical advances in neuroscience have also been aided by the study of neural networks. credit

Questions to Consider

• How does a brain react to good marketing?
• What does a person experience during the buying process?
• Which words or content will result in the best response?
• How can you maximize the sharing potential of your content?

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Web Development – Building Hubs

If you’re an online marketer, you need to know the basics for coding HTML. You should also know your way around a cPanel, DNS, domain registration, and probably WordPress too. You don’t need a degree in computer science, but knowing how to setup a social media hub on your own domain is definitely an important skill to have.

Maximizing your branding potential means using your domain, hosting your own sites, and building blogs for brands. Learning the basics of web development means doing it yourself instead of having to outsource these simple tasks.

Web development is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network) . This can include web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, and e-commerce development. credit

Questions to Consider

• How do I build and deploy a blog?
• How can I create a social media hub?
• What’s the process to installing WordPress?
• How do I register a domain and create a site?

English / Grammar – It’s All About Content

Content creation means writing and writing well. Even if you create video or audio content, proper grammar goes a long way. Social media success can depend on getting your point across in a way that is illustrative and compelling.

Marketers should at least know how to write in a distinct voice and without any major grammatical errors.

English grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the English language. A language is such that its elements must be combined according to certain patterns. This article is concerned with (and restricted to) morphology, the building blocks of language; andsyntax, the construction of meaningful phrases, clauses and sentences with the use of morphemes and words. credit

Questions to Consider

• Does this article flow?
• Is our content voice exciting and humorous?
• Does this piece of content have any grammatical errors?

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Final Thoughts

Social media marketing isn’t easy, it is not a simple medium to understand. Then again, marketing, as a field, isn’t simple to master. Each of the points outlined above are applicable to all marketers.

The barrier to entry is relatively low; anyone can become a social media marketer. The difficult part is mastering the marketing medium, recreating results, and evolving the strategy.

What do you think? Am I expecting too much from others? Did I miss a field of study that you think marketers should really understand? How do you keep up with learning everything? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

What a Social Media Marketer Should Know… is a post by: Samir Balwani

Webinars are a great way to learn from others because of the visual and conversational aspects of the training session. They’re great because you can join from anywhere, and it’s a real example of how technology is making education easier.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to webinars. I’ve been doing a lot of research to host my own webinars and also to learn as much as I can about marketing, pr, and analytics.

The more I watch, the more I realize that there are certain ways to maximize your return from each webinar.

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Getting The Most

Making the most of webinars means learning the most. It also means signing up for the right webinars and doing more than just listening.

If you want to be happy with your webinar experience, it’s all about choosing the right ones. I’ve noticed that the best way to determine which webinars will be useful means answering a few questions before actually signing up.

Questions to Ask:

• Is the webinar free or paid?
  If it’s a paid for webinar and you’re unhappy you get the option of asking for you money back. Remember though that you still lose the time you invested in it.
Is the host going to try to sell you something?
Usually you can tell this from the actual site and way the program is being conducted. A webinar that is actually a sales pitch that I paid to attend is the single biggest pet peeve I have.
• Who is the host?
  Learn as much as you can about who is actually hosting the program. Who are they? What makes them qualified to teach? Why are you listening to them? These are things you need to know. The host is the most important part of the webinar.
• Are there previous webinars I can watch?
  The person speaking might be the most intelligent person in the world, but that doesn’t mean they’re the most effect speakers. If you can get a chance to see or read transcripts of previous webinars, definitely take the time to research it. Does their style fit with how you learn?
• What is the topic? Does it relate to me?
  After the host, the topic is the second most important aspect of the webinar. Find out as much as you can about what will be covered. Does it relate to your business fully or just a little?
• Can I ask questions?
  Some webinars have a questions and answers period at the end or sometimes during. These can be extremely useful because you get to see firsthand what issues others are having and how to overcome them. Also, it gives you a chance to ask relevant questions and get direct advice for your business.
• Who else is attending?
  Another way to gauge the value of the webinar is by looking at your peers. Are they attending the webinar too? Are most of the attendees at your level or no? If you’re a small business and the guest list is full of brand marketers, you might want to rethink this webinar. Looking for good social proof also gives you an idea on the credibility and validity of the webinar itself.

The questions above should give you an idea of whether or not the webinar is really worth it for you. It should help you decide whether you should invest both the money and time to attend it and if you’ll actually learn what you need.

Expectations

Regardless of the webinar you are attending, how much you pay, and how famous the host is, you should create reasonable expectations. Don’t think that once the webinar is over, you’ll suddenly be able to easily and complete market your business online or become rich over night.

Most topics are extremely complex and webinars tend to cover only a single aspect. You should, however, come out with some action items or ideas.

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You should conclude each webinar with a list of action items or at least a number of ideas for new strategies. Knowing what your expectations are, action items or ideas, should help you decide between webinars that are more direct or theory based.

Future Webinars With Me

Just as I stated at the beginning of the article, I’ve been looking into possibly hosting a number of webinars of my own. It really depends on the feedback I get from you.

I’ll be using GoToMeeting to present the webinars and would attempt to do one at least once a month. I’d give about a 30 minute presentation, followed by 15+ minutes for questions and answers. I’ve outlined, below, a few potential topics I had in mind.

Potential Webinar Topics:

• Maximizing Your Branding With Social Media
• Budgeting In The New Marketing Paradigm
• What Brand Marketers Need to Know About Online Marketing
• Is Social Media Marketing Dangerous?
• Crisis Management And The Web
• Integrating Offline and Online Marketing

Your Thoughts

How do you maximize your return from webinars? How much would you pay? What topics do you suggest? Would you join a webinar I host?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Also, don’t forget to join the newsletter. I’ll be sending updates and early access to webinars to newsletter subscribers.

Learning Everything You Can From Webinars is a post by: Samir Balwani

Early this afternoon I spent about an hour reviewing my Facebook friends list because I’ve realized that I’m really not friends with most of them.

I’m sure many of you have done the same recently, and just realize that most of the people you’re friends with, aren’t really friends. To Facebook and most social media sites, this is a huge obstacle.

The reason it’s a huge problem is because of the business model Facebook has chosen. The fact that Facebook makes most of it’s money from ads.

Ads are targeted to you based on your likes and dislikes and also what your friends like and dislike. Facebook has tied itself to the quality and size of your friend network.

What Marketers Want…

Marketers want users to have a smaller more influential friends circles. The idea of influential friends can be outlined by Dunbar’s number, a theory stating that there is a maximum number of meaningful relationships a person can maintain.

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You, as a Facebook user, might have 1000 friends but your ability to convince all of your friends to do something is most likely really low. Most of your friends on Facebook don’t care what jeans you like, they probably don’t even know who you are.

How Foursquare is Changing the Game…

Now enters Foursquare. The mentality has changed here. People are much more careful who they add as a friend and the value of each connection shoot through the roof.

When a friend recommends or visits a store on Foursquare, I’m curious because I respect their insights enough to add them to my inner circle.

The chart’s axes numbers are not real, but instead are meant to illustrate a trend

Foursquare is a social media site that connects customers with potential consumers. When driving someone to perform an action – visit a store or buy a product – trust and influence is key.

The Future…

Because of the high impact each Foursquare user makes, be prepared to see it flourish for driving foot traffic and in-store sales.

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If you have a physical location, working with Foursquare, being active, and rewarding mayors is definitely a strategy worth pursuing.

How are you using Foursquare? What other sites have you noticed really empower users to be influential?

Foursquare Marketing: The Power of Small Communities is a post by: Samir Balwani

One of the best things about creating a social media campaign is its effectiveness in branding. But for how great it can be, many marketers miss a number of great opportunities and never take full advantage of the branding potential.

The issue arises from the fact that social media sites require a minimum of co-branding. When your content and consumers are interacting with you on Facebook or Twitter, you lose some level of branding to the respective social media site.

For larger brands, this can be a major issue – especially when social media is being sold as a powerful branding tool.

The problem can be exasperated when larger brands begin bridging the gap between social media and offline advertising. It becomes a major problem when brands start advertising their Facebook fan pages or Twitter accounts.

Don’t understand why it’s a problem? Take a look at the Vitamin Water example.

The ad was created to push users to their Facebook fan page. In the there’s a call to action, sending usings to Facebook.com/vitaminwater – their fan page.

What Vitamin Water did makes sense on the surface. But why not take it one step further and make it better? Why not advertise the Vitamin Water website and forward users to the Facebook fan page?

The trick is pretty simple actually. All you have to do is create a URL that redirects to the Facebook fan page. So on our brand site, we create our own URL, vitaminwater.com/fb that redirects to our Facebook page.

Now we can promote the vitaminwater.com URL and have our website gain all the branding value from the offline advertising.

Creating a Vanity URL

Building vanity URLs is really simple for WordPress users. Start by first installing the Redirection plugin. It allows you to quickly create 301 redirects and vanity URLs.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, log into WordPress and go to the Tools tab. Then look for the Redirection options page. Within the Redirections page, create a vanity URL by filling out the form and clicking save.

There’s no reason a large business should lose any branding value from multi-million dollar offline advertising campaigns. It’s extremely simple to create a vanity URL for when other marketing disciplines are being used to promote social media campaigns.

How are you making the most of your online branding? What tricks have you identified for putting your brand front and center?

Use Vanity URLs to Save You From a Branding Fail is a post by: Samir Balwani

Want proof that social media and public relations overlap? I’d like you to meet @BPGlobalPR on Twitter.

It’s a joke account that someone made and hopefully isn’t associated with BP itself. This account could become an issue for the brand and something the company’s PR department must recognize and monitor.

This could have been a really bad situation online for BP if they hadn’t already created a social media presence. However, they were smarter than that and already created a BP America account and are using it…

But, the joke Twitter profile could be a bad thing, or is it? What would you do? Would you do anything?

A Potential Idea

I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t try to get Twitter to close it, I’d let it be, and let it run it’s course. Right now, it’s just a joke – do something and it could be a lot worst.

There’s already been stories about BP stopping reporters from covering the effects of the oil spill on the beaches, shutting down a Twitter profile can only lead to bad PR.

However, with that said. It’s important to monitor this account. Does it go beyond a joke, gain a following, and become defamatory?

At that point it might be worth revisiting the strategy and determining if it’s time to try and pull attention from the joke Twitter account to the real one.

What do you think? How would you handle these situations? What should BP do now?

Thanks to Dave Surgan for giving me a tip on the fake BP Twitter account

What Should BP do About This Twitter Account? is a post by: Samir Balwani

One of the interesting questions I’m asked often is, “how do I get a job in social media?“. It’s an interesting question because social media and online marketing are still fairly new industries. Not many colleges offer a degree or major specifically for digital marketing and most business owners are still unsure exactly what the position requires.

So with all this uncertainty, how can you find a job and make sure the potential employer realizes you’re the person for the job?

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Available Jobs in Digital Marketing

First, let’s start by looking at what jobs are available. As the industry grows, there are more and more jobs being introduced – obviously. Regardless, they tend to fall within three categories: the in-house manager, agency consultant, and self-employed consultant.

In-house Manager
The in-house manager works for a specific company, Johnson and Johnson or Best Buy for example, and covers aspects of the digital marketing for the company. Being in-house means you integrate with parts of the company, identify optimizations on the site, and create social media strategies.

In-house social media managers tend to take care of the day to day planning and execution of strategies. You’re the one in charge of a Facebook fan page, or working towards creating a good Twitter account.

Be passionate about the company you’re applying to, and be prepared to do a lot of reporting. As an in-house social media manager, you’ll be tasked with continually proving the worth of a social media department.

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Agency Consultant
Consultants that work for agencies, advise a number of clients. The nice thing about being a consultant is that you get to work on a number of clients and experience different challenges.

Most consultants are called in to answer specific questions or solve problems. Social media consultants generally help brands get started with social media or create long-term strategies.

It can be frustrating to work with companies that are unwilling to execute ideas or go against best practices. It can also be tough putting together a great idea and not being able to follow through with it. However, the ability to work with so many different industries and companies can keep things from getting stale.

Self Employed Consultant
It’s harder to success as a self-employed consultant versus being an in-house manager or agency consultant. Self-employed consultants work with small and medium sized business to create and employ online marketing strategies.

Generally, self-employed consultants need to be well versed in all aspects of online marketing including; SEO, content creation, a little bit of web dev, and ppc. Since most smaller businesses don’t have a huge marketing budget, they tend to look for someone that can do it all.

If you’re looking to get started as a self-employed consultant, learn everything about online marketing. Start with a small client in your area and don’t forget to take some to build your portfolio. It will be slow, but for many, it can be the best way to work.

Finding the Best Job

For those of us that aren’t ready to be self-employed, yet, it can be difficult to find a good job. The best way to start is to look at job boards and ask around.

Make sure you look at Mashable, SEOmoz, ProBlogger, and Marketing Pilgrim job boards – these are great places to start.

I highly recommend starting a blog and just sharing your thoughts about anything. The topic doesn’t need to be about online marketing or marketing related. Being a part of the community can be the best way to get a great social media job.

Think about it from an employers point of view. If I’m an agency that has a number of tech clients, a tech blogger would be a great addition to our social media team. Same with in-house – many companies hire social media community managers from the very bloggers they outreach to.

Proving You’re the Right Person

Once you’ve found the job, you’ll have to prove you’re the right person for it. The best first step is to make sure you’re passionate about the brand. Do your homework and research what the company has done and be prepared to talk about it and be prepared to share what you would like to do.

Know what’s going on in social media and be active. It’s so easy to get social media experience, but don’t only use it, analyze it. Question why something works and share your theories. Potential employers want a social media strategist that not only uses social media, but also is looking to maximize it and forecast what’s next.

General Career Advice

The best advice I can give anyone, when it comes to getting a job, network as much as you can. It’s so simply to meet new people and make connections with things like Facebook and Twitter. Don’t forget email and be open to just emailing someone and build a relationship.

A good social media strategist is good at building relationships – you should be able to build a network and influence someone into hiring you. Don’t be afraid, go out there and start doing what you do best… being social.

A special shout out to Chris from 10e20 who helped me find the job I have now.

How did you get your job? Did someone help you? Share your thoughts

Getting a Social Media Job is a post by: Samir Balwani