Social Media has witnessed a tremendous growth over the past year and witnessed a kind of mass hysteria among brands of all sizes to get on this social media bandwagon. As a result it is easy for brands to spend lot of money on “social media campaigns” and still get lost in the crowd. Social Media at many levels is chaotic at the moment with the mad rush of marketers to get some piece of that social media action. Bringing order to that chaos and applying a method to social media madness is Liana Evans. Liana Evans is a sought after speaker on Social Media and recently published a book on Social Media called Social Media Marketing : Strategies for engaging in Facebook, Twitter & other social media. We took this opportunity to chat with Liana Evans and get her insights on Social Media Strategies.
(You can watch the video interview or read the full text interview below)

Bob Tripathi: I know you are a noted authority on Social Media and speak at various conferences on social media. Can you tell me what session you would be speaking on at this conference?
Liana Evans: I am going to be doing a social media 101 session where I will be talking about the rise of social media, how we got here, and so on. We used to be push marketers with TV, radio and we don’t listen to those messages anymore. People can now interact with products; they want to talk to the companies about their experiences with it. Now we have this new environment. How do companies interact with social media, like how much time do I spent with it or how much time do I spend on twitter or how do I interact on Facebook and so on. That’s what I am covering in my social media 101.
Bob Tripathi: It’s amazing. I hear these conversations regularly as there are so many platforms and so little time. So what is the process or recommendation you recommend to your clients or companies?
Liana Evans: How we work with our clients is we do an in-depth audience research because that is the basis of everything. Where they are, how they talk to people, who are the influencers. You want to understand how to better prepare your strategy and what tactics to implement rather than just willy nilly throwing up things against the wall hoping it would work.
So we do this in-depth audience research and then come back with our clients and then do this discovery workshop with our clients where we may have found 5 to 10 tactics depending on how big they want to go with their strategy and we work with clients to say resource wise, time wise, can you realistically do these tactics and come away with 3 tactics in the strategy. We figure out what we want to measure, what stop gaps are, contingency plans, policies, and all that kind of stuff we put in to that workshop and we come back and retrain the clients to implement these things. Then we will watch the measuring, we’ll do the auditing, on what they are doing. So it really works well when you take that approach because its full scale from beginning of a social media campaign to the end of social media campaign.
Bob Tripathi: Other issues I have seen with companies are ok we get the platform, we understand the opportunity but who is going to manage it. I mean what do we do about staffing? I mean there is lot of work involved in managing social media campaigns?
Liana Evans: I mean you really have to look at it realistically as to what you can do. It’s not just because it’s a free platform. Well it’s not free because you need to have time and resources. So maybe you can only implement 1 tactic at this time and then once you are up and running then maybe you will have time to add some more and maybe justify hiring someone to manage this or outsource some of this stuff that maybe requires more social media ground work and that does not require interacting with your customers. As you should not have someone tweeting for you or have someone else putting a blog post out for you as it should have your own voice talking. But, that does not mean that you cannot have someone doing the ground work for you, finding you the blogs that you want to link to or comment kind of stuff.
Bob Tripathi: How do you show your clients or companies you work with the value of social media?
Liana Evans: So, you really have to look at lot of different areas. It’s not just the traffic coming into your site. I mean you don’t see a clear click to purchase conversion as that is really rare in social media. You have to really go back and step back and see how much reach I am getting. It’s like our conversation right now. It’s not just you and me talking about my experiences but you are going to go and share this conversation with five other people and they will share it with 5 other people. So it’s exponential. It’s looking at how much buzz you are starting to pick up with or how much traffic is coming into your site, what’s the interaction you are having on all these different social media channels as well. It’s taking it all and then looking at them. And we at Serengeti Communications are building a tool that will help you look at all those things in one dashboard rather than going out to Youtube or Facebook or going out to all these different social media platforms. Essentially one dashboard that will be able to track all that social media activities for you along with your analytics and buzz monitoring.
Bob Tripathi: What is it called?
Liana Evans: It is called Social Snap.
Bob Tripathi: Other issue I have noticed is there is still some confusion as to where do social media specialists sit. Whether it should be in marketing, PR, branding?
Liana Evans: What I say to this is you should have everyone on the table. Everyone from your marketing should be involved in your social media strategy but find someone to drive it. It is not that your PR person can do it best or your SEO person can do it best but probably someone from your Customer Service department. Chances are your customer service department has great stories and they know already how to engage your customers and keep them calm or get the right information out of there.
Bob Tripathi: For someone starting out lets say a small company in social media, do you recommend any special social media platform they target first?
Liana Evans: Really depends where your audience is before you establish your presence on any social media platforms. Like everyone should have fan page or twitter account but really depends on where your audience is. I always say at least go out and get your company usernames so no one cyber squats your name. But whether you should be out there or not really depends on your audience research if they are really out there or not.
Bob Tripathi: Where do you see future of social media in let’s say 2 years?
Liana Evans: Well, 2 years is a pretty long time it’s going to get lot more sophisticated as to what we can share content wise. Video is going to get bigger; it’s going to be lot more with phones meaning you can get lot more social with your phones. Today, I can go out on the street of NYC and say I want to find a restaurant and are the tables open. I don’t have to go to my computer but can do it on the phone and even see pictures and reviews and make better judgments for myself and that is all what social media is about. So people are going to find more ways to share more content and things are going to become more valuable and more chances for content to go viral.
Bob Tripathi: You are right so the world is going to be more collaborative and the world is going to be flat.
Liana Evans: And yes much smaller too.
Bob Tripathi: Can you tell us something about Serengeti communications?
Liana Evans: Serengeti Communications is an integrated marketing firm which means that we don’t do just SEO, or PPC, or social media but look at how these online strategies can be incorporated offline as well. For example how TV works with online and how can TV drive something to my Facebook page. How can print drive something to my newsletter? So we deal in integrated marketing strategies primarily dealing with how online works with offline.
Bob Tripathi: Well, this are some great insights for the audience and thank you so much for chatting with us today. Thank you Liana!
Liana Evans: Thank you for having me.

About Liana Evans:

Since 1999, Liana “Li” Evans has been active full-time in the search marketing arena, becoming well versed in all avenues of social media and search marketing. Li runs the Search Marketing Gurus blog, and is the director of social media for Serengeti Communications, a Washington, DC-based online marketing firm that focuses on building social media strategies for companies and training companies to bring online marketing in-house.

Li has led the SEO strategy for an Internet Retailer 500 company, and was the SEO and social media architect for a Fortune 500 multi-million page entertainment Web site. As a database designer and programmer since 1992, Liana has developed technical expertise in dealing with large-scale retail sites and their dynamic natures.

She holds degrees in both public relations and information technology, which lend well to working with client strategies in social media and search marketing. She speaks and trains social media and SEO at Search Engine Strategies and other industry conferences and recently published a book about Social Media Marketing for Pearson Education called Social Media Marketing : Strategies for engaging in Facebook, Twitter & other social media.

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