The work involved in building the social websites will be as follows:

Set up:

1. Account setup (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

2. Aggregating the accounts:

You can have blog post content automatically into the social accounts. There are a few ways to do this based on what accounts you have to use.

Example:

a. Facebook

Has a feature in notes that feeds in blog post when using WordPress CMS.

b. LinkedIn

Has a built-in feature that feeds in blog posts when using WordPress CMS.

c. Twitter

You can use www.ping.fm to deliver the post from your wordpress CMS to twitter. There also plug-ins for wordpress that can do this for you.

So for the main three accounts you have a few different options to go from and depending on the social marketing strategy you would work up a formula.

The one thing you need to make sure about is the campaigns do not overlap and have double post.

Monthly maintenance:

This would be based on the amount of post that need to be done a week. I have streamlined much of the process by using free tools such as ping.fm, hootsuite, twitterfeed. Content is always key. The more you produce, the more your site will be considered relevant and important to the search engines. The other kicker will be the inbound links which shows how many sites find your information more important then others.

To jump start a site’s traffic you will need to do social bookmarking. The social websites are a form of communicating a brand. Social bookmarking is a way of targeting the consumer and allowing them to promote and spread the brand. This will feed inbound links further making sure the site’s content is considered relative and important.

An account will have to be created for the following:

Main aggregator I use.

onlywire.com

Feeds to any of the following:

(Accounts will have to be created for each one)

Ask

Bebo

Bibsonomy

Blinklist

BookmarkSync

Connotea

Delicious

Digg

Diigo

Facebook

Fark

Faves

FriendFeed

Google Bookmarks

Hi5

Jumptags

LinkaGoGo

Mister Wong

Mixx

Multiply

MySpace

Newsvine

Plaxo

Plurk

Propeller

Reddit

Simpy

Slashdot

Spurl

Stumbleupon

Tumbl

Twitter

Yahoo Bookmarks

So the process of maintenance would be as follows:

1. Build Content

2. Add post and search engine optimize page.

3. Check social sites for posted materials.

4. Social Bookmark urls to various SBM sites with one tool 5. Analyze traffic and data with Google Analytics and Web developer tools provided by the search engines.

5. Last but not least (Monitor any type of feedback and follow up).

So here is an Almanac (of sorts) around Social Media and adjacent technologies:

• Social Media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
• Facebook has more than 250 million active users (more than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day), Skype has 480 million, and PayPal has 75 million. (July 2009.)
• Facebook saw over 1 billion video views in June 2009. That’s still far less than that 1.2 billion YouTube sees every day, but it undoubtedly makes Facebook one of the top video sharing sites on the web. (Source: TechCrunch, July 2009.)
• Facebook is also the largest photo sharing site, with more than 10 billion photos uploaded as per February 2009 (source: TechCrunch). Flickr currently boasts 3,841,609,965 pics.
• 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. (Source: YouTube, May 2009.)
• Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN) has 26 million members and Microsoft Xbox Live has 20 million members (Source: Reuters, August 2009.)
• The one-year old iTunes App Store has 75,000 applications with 1.5 billion downloads so far. (Source: Apple, July 2009.)
• The milestone of 1 billion iPhone apps downloads was reached in April of 2009, only 9 months after the app store launched (July 2008).
• 1 out of 8 couples that married in the US last year met via social media.
• Years to reach 50 million users: Radio (38 years), TV (13 years), Internet (4 years), iPod (3 years).
• The number of iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this).
• A 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
• The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
• Facebook users translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks, at a cost of 0 USD to Facebook.
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
• 90% of people who can TiVo ads, do.
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation, because consumers no longer search for the news, the news finds them.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook… daily.

Let’s take a step back and think on how this will transform the new generation and digital.

Thanks for the stats Kanishka.

If you are not going to use the play of content to build and gain fans or visitors then you would have to target the individuals or companies themselves. I think this will be a little tougher because it would be more PR. You will have to produce the list of companies and or people that would best suite client. Investigate the list to determine who or what is already online and has a channel you can get to and then promote a social site from those channels.

Here the thing, some of those channels will be hard to come by because some people do not want to be found or do not care to spread your information. So what you have to do is get the client to start there own social network as an individuals and promote there product from already establish channels. The president, vice, directors, and employees would have to get involved to create an internal social network to promote the external one.

The only other tactic that can be introduced would be the play of a viral campaigns, which can be very successful but really take some creative thinking and I am not sure if there is anything that can be applied to this type client other than a really well done image ad. Social Bookmarking like Digg could help spread the ad.

My recommendations would be to make a play on content and have them establish a content outline that can be written on a weekly or monthly basis. This will help produce fans and visitor loyalty to the site. I would also set up links on the main site to promote a Facebook, twitter and other types of accounts on the website to help gain visitors who are already interested in the already established materials. The 3rd thing would be to promote the site with online media buys such as ad words, Facebook advertising and so on.

There is no good answer. Before you can really come up with an all encompassing strategy, you need to have all the research in order and then break it down.

Start with the building blocks.

Phase: 1
a. Establish the structure and content of social websites.
b. Establish the demographic.
c. Build the connections (This would be creating the accounts and making them visible to all the channels you have).

Phase: 2
a. Build the content in all the channels and then social bookmark them
b. Start online media buys
c. Establish a contact form to capture leads

Phase 3:
a. Evaluate the changes and what channels are working and adjust accordingly.