Implementing your social channels effectively is critical for search optimisation these days, so getting on top of your global campaign at a local level is more important than ever before.

Social means different things in different countries around the world.

So how do you handle each of these elements to deliver a consistent tone, brand message and positive campaign ROI?

Well, no one would claim it’s easy, but here’s five tips learnt from years in the trenches delivering social media strategy for multinational brands you’ll find useful.

Tip 1: Agree On A Social Style Guide

Just as important as your brand’s Social Media Policy, a social style guide should provide a framework for your social media mavens to work within in each country that ensures they have the freedom to be flexible in managing their profiles while still conveying uniformity of tone and brand message.

This is especially important in countries where the leading social networks are not your standard Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al. A good example is Skyrock.com, which is the second most popular social network in France and French speaking Switzerland and Belgium.

Though this will always be unique to the brand values of the business, examples of good general elements to a social style guide are:

• Don’t feed the Trolls! Always be positive.
• Write for, and to, people: don’t act like a heartless feed of information.
• Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t repost without adding value or opinion.
• You are an employee of your brand, therefore your opinions and interests reflect the brand: don’t be afraid to allow your personality into your posts.
• Write about what engages you. Don’t just parrot industry news.
• Spend time finding other people in your niche and say hi (oh: and you are in a niche, regardless of how big your industry is).

Remember, you should be providing a framework within which your social media managers can be flexible, so don’t be restrictive or paranoid: you have to trust your team in each and every country.

If you can’t, you should focus on solving that issue, rather than compromising your social style guide.

Tip 2: Get Your Branding & Social Profiles Consistent

In addition to the obvious backlink benefit of ensuring your profiles are correctly set up, engagement with those profiles is more accurately fed into your main site performance by Google when you have clear profile relationships set up fromt he outset.

It’s easy for medium-sized brands to forget that they have a huge amount of branding opportunity within social profiles: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and so on all have excellent personalisation opportunities which allow you to put your brand front and centre.

Larger multinational brands will  likely already have some basic profile personalisation in place, but very little naturalisation of that profile to the network it’s on: you should be presenting different elements of your brand to different networks (imagine trying to use a single profile to target the difference in audience between LinkedIn and Facebook: it’s not easy or recommended).

However, regardless of the current state of play, you should make sure you decide how you want your brand to be projected in the social sphere first of all.

Some brands are naturally suited to social by virtue of having a positive, globally recognised brand in the first place.

For example, Pepsi Cola’s integration of brand to their YouTube channel makes it almost indistinguishable from their own Web properties while still delivering all the advantages of being within YouTube’s powerful distribution system (not to mention the SEO benefits of YouTube activity).

Disney Pixar on Facebook also does a great job of maintaining a community for the Toy Story trilogy. And fun, relaxed, people-oriented brands like Boden or FatFace’s Twitter Accounts show how a strong community can be seamlessly built around brand ethos.

Nike has taken the social integration further than most by embodying social in itself, launching a variety of apps, and products that integrate with their applications as part of their core business.

Without going to those extremes, even a limited budget social media campaign can deliver improved campaign ROI by ensuring the core brand experience is consistent across all social profiles in terms of branded layouts and consistent profile descriptions.

Each profile should offer clear points of differentiation (for example, at a very basic level using Facebook for community groups, and Twitter for retail or promotional offer groups).

For the multinational business, the challenge is to achieve this level of integration in each country operated in, which still achieving an over-arching social brand personality.

By laying out your social policy clearly, upfront, and applying it to each territory by managing your local webmaster teams closely and ensuring buy-in, you have the best opportunity to achieve that balance. Regular (I’d suggest fortnightly at the least) and fair reviews of social profiles and activities against the policy allow you to give steer to each territory on how effective they are being.

Tip 3: Streamline Your Workflow

Once you’ve organised your social profiles’ tone and purpose by following the preceding tips, next up is the logistical challenge of mapping those networks to your global customer base.

This means you need to judge what capability you have to service as granular a localisation of your social strategy across all territories as possible.

In an ideal world, you’d look to cover off all relevant languages in all target countries. This might mean anything from unique twitter profiles for, say, your French eComms customer service team, or managing access to your global Twitter profile for different native language speakers and functions, each demarcated by unique hashtag handles alongside their post.

In practice, there are usually compromises to be made to match your in-house resources (we can’t all be Nike, after all), but to build out your process you should take into account the natural intent of each social network.

For example, if you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn is going to be a more valued network to you than Facebook or Pinterest and you should allocate resource accordingly.

You may be able to make efficiencies and therefore extend your social profile by shifting your Web-facing customer service function entirely onto, say, Twitter a lá Vodafone (also a good example of using tags to identify different real people using the account to make the account much more effective for handling customer concerns).

Whichever approach you take (and if you’re on a very tight budget, I’d suggest strictly limiting the number of networks and profiles used to execute your strategy, allowing you to concentrate your efforts), it’s important that you post appropriately and consistently, avoiding any automated solutions to try to ‘extend’ your reach: social networks ultimately are about real people, so no cutting corners!

The advantage for search is that the improved focus on profiles will trigger algorithmic benefits for your main domain in addition to increasing your brand visibility in time-sensitive searches.

Tip 4: Don’t Ignore Local Networks

A lot of countries have very strong local rivals to the major social networks, and if any fall into your target countries, I’d strongly recommend you prioritise including them in your social strategy and allocate some of your resource to developing your presence.

A colleague at QueryClick recently covered off some core multinational markets and social networks to be aware of, so I won’t repeat them here, but I strongly urge you extend the research in your core markets and also take onboard the difference in European and North American social network engagement.

Of course, each local network you identify is another profile and backlink engagement opportunity. When that link is coming from a locally important network you’re improving your algorithmic benefit most efficiently.

Tip 5: Positive, Localised Feedback

Finally, in order to manage the implementation of your strategy, you need to make the most of your analytics packages to show the value driven by your social campaigns to your team, and review the effectiveness of each country’s implementation of your brand policies.

I’ve found that collating an auto-run report scorecard showing activity, reactions, traffic driven, traffic converted, signups and sales (if relevant, otherwise leads generated) is the most fair report, which you should then temper with some real word reactions to the campaign for each territory (both good & bad).

This can either be gathered by looking at conversations generated, asking for feedback directly once converted onto the main suite via a feedback form, or by simply pulling out activity posted by the social manager themselves and matching it against your policy to show where they are hitting the mark and where they can make improvements. Much like the social commandments, you should always seek to keep your feedback positive to encourage positive activity from each country: when social becomes a chore, the quality of the content delivered is weakened.

It’s also a good idea to map out the social engagement of each country to give you a very top level idea of how pro-active each country is being socially. Aiming to make this map activity match up with brand ambitions for performance in each country (there will always be key markets for your brand) ensures you keep your focus on improving the countries which are strategically important.

If you have access to Hitwise for your marketplace, request a report on social network marketshare in each country and ensure you’re tracking aggregated activity across each network, normalised by its marketshare to get an accurate (or as accurate as you can be) steer for activity being performed in the right place.

After all, you don’t want to spend your time optimising socially shared product images in Orkut in the US, but you do if you’re reporting on activity in Brazil, India and Japan.

So remember: context is everything. Make sure you’re optimising in (and reporting on) the right language, in the right networks, for your target countries. One size does not fit all in multinational social media strategies.

Image attribution: Insights Consulting

Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than 3,800 social media marketers around the world.

When asked what other marketing channels they use, search engine optimization (SEO) was the No. 2 response behind e-mail marketing. Paid search — or “online ads” as the survey called it — was far down the list at number six. Sixty-five percent of social media marketers say they use SEO, compared to only 38 percent who use paid search advertising.

B2B social marketers were slightly more likely to do SEO (67 percent) than their B2C counterparts (62 percent).

Going forward, 68 percent of respondents said they’re planning to increase their SEO efforts — a number that’s down slightly from 71 percent in 2011. Only nine percent this year said they have no plans to use SEO.

Only 43 percent of the social media marketers surveyed say they’re planning to increase their use of PPC advertising.

As you’d expect, Facebook was the No. 1 social networking site with 92 percent adoption. Google+ was a distant sixth, but most respondents say they’re planning to use Google+ more in the future. I’ve written up more about that aspect of the study on Marketing Land: Survey: Only 40 Percent Of Marketers Are Using Google+, But Many Plan To Change That.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

For example, if you are a fan of a TV, movie, music or sports celebrity, your ability to interact with that person (or at least see them outside of their normal context) is fascinating. Social media enables us to easily find long lost friends, old flames, and remote cousins you never knew you had through the Internet, and renew relationships with these people.

Best of all, at least for my business, if you are a brand name, be it a large company (or perhaps just a small one looking to make it big), you can have direct, personal interactions with both existing and potential new customers that the Mad Men of yore could only dream of.

Social media enables businesses to promote their products, encourage brand and company loyalty, cross-sell new company products to existing customers, and generally be there for them when they want to find you (via search on social channels). It’s really an amazing phenomenon.

Best yet, the proliferation of online mobile devices, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, in addition to the ubiquitous desktop Web browsers, are all new opportunities for companies and customers to find one another, communicate, inform each other of your wants and needs, and find fulfillment! It’s nothing short of nirvana, right?

Not So Fast

That all said, ask me about my Twitter account. I have one, sure, but I pretty much only use it to communicate with my professional peers, inform those who might be interested when I publish a new blog post, and really not much else.

Unlike many Twitter users, I don’t tweet about the difficult decision I had to make this morning choosing between oatmeal and scrambled eggs for breakfast. I skip telling the world I am checking in at Bruno’s Bail Bonds (again!). I don’t take 10,000 phone pictures of myself and post them as tweets (I know what you’re thinking – and you’re welcome!).

And how about me on Facebook? Yeah, I have a Facebook account as well, but it’s locked down as tight as a drum. There’s nothing there about me to see, anyway. I pretty much only use it to administer the controls, settings and posts of several Fan pages I manage.

Am I a social media snob? No, far from it. I certainly see the value of regularly communicating with friends and family. But I have my reasons for my reticence.

Waiting For Something To Say

Part of my reluctance goes back to why I never jumped into the personal blogging fad that was so popular in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I never felt that my personal daily thoughts, random utterances, or really anything else that had to say was so important that everyone would wait with bated breath to see my next post. Perhaps I was afraid to trust my words and thoughts would be popular on their own merit just to have those dreams dashed in the empty anonymity of the Web.

When I got into the world of SEO several years ago, I was initially pushed into blogging, and even then, I only got into it when I felt I had something professionally helpful to say. Of course, my previous careers as a tech writer and, before that, an instructor of technology courses, helped shape my approach to writing for public audiences.

But beyond the nagging self-doubt that no one would care was the more pressing reality of the danger of unbridled transparency – the intentional abandonment of privacy. Not that I have anything in particular to hide, but some things are better left unsaid. There’s a wise, old axiom that goes, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Confirming The Fool

Call it the Cisco Fatty Syndrome. Do you remember the Cisco Fatty incident? I very much do (as I love learning life lessons vicariously). It seems there was this very promising young woman who was fresh out of college and looking for work in Silicon Valley. This was back in 2009, long after the Dot Com heyday had passed. The economy was in serious trouble, and the job-seekers market of yore had become an employer’s market.

Apparently our protagonist had the credentials and the interview skills to be offered a starting job at Cisco. It was apparently a well-paying position (at least relatively), but unfortunately not the glamorous role she was envisioning she’d get coming out of college. So she was torn about whether she should settle for the steady, well-paying but mundane job or continue looking for her dream role.

We’ve all be in this situation, more or less, haven’t we? Do you settle, or do you keep looking? It’s always a hard decision every time. But there’s a difference here.

While most of us old enough to remember the days before social media was big went through this conundrum by speaking face-to-face to our trusted confidants, our 2009 college graduate was a modern child of the social media age. She tweeted her dilemma. For all to see. To the Internet. Where things never die. Ah, to be so young and innocent again.

She tweeted, “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” She sent that message unencumbered by restrictions, security, or any sort of public access limitations.

And wouldn’t you know, the ever-present, self-appointed, vigilante Netizens Justice League made dang sure that this student’s identity and indiscreet tweet became known to all (there were even websites created about this little folly). And of course, someone working at Cisco quickly got wind of that tweet, and it was forwarded on within the company. Needless to say, her dilemma was solved for her. Some of the above story details are still in dispute, but you get the picture.

Double-edged Nature Of Social Media

But truth be told, this is far from an isolated incident. And this is the troubling, double-edged sword that is social media. Sending a letter to the editor is a private person reaching out to communicate in a public venue. But that private person reaching out to communicate with personal friends is not meant for public consumption.

Unfortunately for so many, though, it still is when it involves the Internet. Tweets, Facebook posts and even blog articles (oh the horror!) are all publicly accessible (and searchable) communications. At least they should always be written with the assumption that they will become public (because they often do).

I see so many young people today (and a great many not so young) who are careless, if not simply reckless, with what they say, do and post online. They may think they are clever, witty, and that they pwn3d someone good. They post embarrassing if not humiliating photos and comments about family members, friends, co-workers, and often, of even themselves online. How many teachers have been publicly fired over posting Facebook photos of themselves getting a little too loose at a weekend keg party?

Facebook Scores

Public embarrassment is one thing, but I submit we need to start thinking about our personal online reputations as we do our credit scores. We all know that our credit scores can influence whether we are approved for loans and credit cards, but do you know these scores also influence our ability to get approval for an apartment lease, to be hired in a new job, or the cost of our insurance rates?

So if HR departments can pull credit scores to help determine whether a job applicant is trustworthy and has sound judgment, doesn’t it make sense that they would do a Web search on an applicant’s name to see what sort of person they are online? It’s already happening. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote that Facebook profiles can predict future job performance. In fact, there’s apparently now a Facebook score for assessing employee candidates!

The way I see it, while some online citations can be positive (which is why I like the power of recommendations in a LinkedIn profile), HR is likely using searches in Facebook, Twitter, and other information online to find reasons to not hire a person. If you worked in HR, wouldn’t you use all the tools at your disposal to verify whether an individual is a good risk for hiring?

In the case of not opening one’s mouth to confirm one’s idiocy, having no reckless, self-published information online, or at the very minimum, a well-managed and professional online reputation in social media, can be a major factor in making or breaking a career, especially a new one.

The Illusion Of Privacy

Don’t be fooled into complacency by thinking you’ve got all of your hilariously raunchy bits hidden behind privacy settings that only friends can access. Facebook has earned a reputation for adjusting privacy settings on us.

But more importantly, MSNBC recently reported that many official entities, such as some government agencies and potential employers are now either asking for Facebook usernames and passwords or, in the case of some colleges, requiring that students friend a school official to enable account monitoring when people are accepted for admission.

Even if that doesn’t specifically happen in your next new job, how will you handle it when your new boss or a nosy colleague wants to friend you in Facebook? Are you comfortable with the potential consequences of declining their request, or do you open the privacy doors to your, well, sullied online past?

Privacy has, in many ways, become a thing of the past, but do we really have to spoonfeed the haters with our ample, self-published evidence of our less than perfect online past?

A Facebooked Generation

The young people today (and I mean those who are not yet adults) who use Facebook as a means of rudely and lewdly boasting, taunting, bullying, lying, and hurting others are effectively dumping online rat poison into the nascent body of their careers-to-be. We are potentially raising a generation of pre-screened, self-inflicted failures.

Yes, we can say, “Hey, they were just kids, they weren’t grown up yet, so cut them some slack.” But would you hire a young person with a criminal past, especially when they are competing with others who led quiet, dull, and crime-free childhoods? That’s an act of indiscretion that reflects one’s poor judgment, but so is an offensive, expletive-laced rant or a risqué photograph. Most criminal records are wiped clean at age 18, but the Internet offers no such promise. All of the regrettable things said and done that were published are always going to be there, searchable online.

As I said earlier, I think social media is an amazing opportunity for people to interact. But it can be very revealing as well.

A lack of maturity mixed with the eternity of Internet posts is a career time bomb waiting to go off. Before we end up with a generation of self-inflicted, black-balled job applicants, let those of us in the social media marketing field help everyone else understand that you can use social media wisely or foolishly. Competition for good opportunities is hard enough these days. There’s no benefit in shooting yourself in the foot forever.

As online privacy evaporates for us all, our words and actions represent us to people who initially have no other way of judging us. Our reputations are formed by our deeds, good and bad. Yes, we are all imperfect beings and we all make mistakes. But let’s not publicize them on social media, OK?

Eric Enge performed the interview for Stone Temple and didn’t pull any punches on social indicators or author authority.  Microsoft was surprisingly open with their results, which made for a refreshing read.  Some main highlights from the interview were:

Social Indicators

Yiu was straightforward when talking about how Bing did relying on social sites to enhance their results.  He stated multiple times that it social is synergistic with search, but not a standalone indicator that will replace search.  Yiu gave a great quote when describing Bing’s Social Search:

“So today, the algorithm is flavored by people.”

When describing how people like content that can be seen by others in the search results Yiu also stated:

“We are trying to merge a little bit of the search and browsing intent into one, and have your friends help you navigate the web a little bit better. In a way we are bringing the office water cooler to the search engine.”

Yiu also stressed the importance of fresh content in search results.  Being a former member of the Yahoo Search team, it has always been a goal to match fresh content to a user and a query and that is a goal of Bing’s Social Search.  This is something that is continually being improved as well.  Enge brought up a great example of social search for the New York Post that was showing a few months back that is no longer in place.  Yiu pointed to engagement metrics as a reason why social search may change so much.  If people aren’t using the results, they are no longer enhancing the product:

“If the content doesn’t earn its spot, its placement gets modified.”

A few other key take aways on social indicators were:

• Friends social data get premium placement
• Friends of friends get special treatment
• Bing holds the maximum number of social enhanced results to three
• Conversations are not currently pulled into the search results

Author Authority

The most fascinating portion of the interview in my mind was Enge’s round of questioning on Author Authority.  Always a hot topic, Yiu did a great job of providing answers that should give marketers a big heads up on how to bolster their own authority on social search.

Yiu mentioned that spamming and gaming the system is a min attribute that Bing looks for and that the way people are connected and their networks help to flag spam.  He stated:

“We look at the way people are connected, and often we correlate that to the quality of a Tweet. We can also analyze the content the Twitter account links to. What does that mix look like, and how do people interact with the content you are tweeting. That’s just on the Twitter side of things.

On the Facebook side in a way we are still working on it; with Facebook most of the time it’s your true identity. On Facebook right now is just stuff from your friends, so it’s a different problem.”

Other signals that goes into the author authority on Bing are:

• Ratio of followers to following
• Retweets
• Sharing (as a strong indicator than just a like)
• Having good followers
• Following good accounts
• Tweeting about relevant topics
• Authority and Relevance of Retweeters

Hands down, the most common reason for using social media was “Staying in touch with current friends” as 91% of respondents agreed it was a ‘minor to major’ reason they embraced social media.  Following closely behind were the reasons “staying in touch with family”  and “connecting with old friends you’f lost touch with” with 87% agreement and 86% agreement respectively.

The lowest motivators were “finding dating or romantic partners” and “reading comments by celebrities, athletes, or politicians”.  Only 3% of respondents stated that dating was a ‘major reason’ they joined a social platform, and only 5% said following celebs was a major reason.

Some other interesting facts in the report show that middle aged users tend to see more value in using social media to connect with others around a hobby/interest and that users under the age of 50 see the most value in staying in touch with current friends.  To see more data, view the entire report from Pew Internet.

Other interesting stats?

• People tend to share the most around 9:30 Eastern Time (so we cunningly timed this post for just before that peak moment),
• 75% of clicks on a share will happen within the first day that the content is shared
• Most users click within 2 minutes of a share
• Copy-and-paste to share can be used up to 10 times more than those social sharing buttons out there

More from the infographic:

Want the infographic for yourself? It was posted last month to the AddThis blog, as part of its five year birthday celebration: Happy Birthday AddThis!

The full-size files were provided through the Clearspring Flickr account here (Clearspring owns AddThis).

Most Shared In 2011

AddThis also told us that among the most shared content in 2011 from its tracking were:

• MoveOn’s campaign to get people to all share a status update pushing against big companies and Wall Street greed
• A photo of a dog lying next to the casket of a US Navy Seal who was killed in Afghanistan

Social Sharing “Half-Life” & More Information

If those stats about how short-term sharing seems to be got you thinking, that’s beginning to be referred to as the “half-life” of a share, and we have some past articles with further information:

• Infographic: Half-Life Of Social Media Shares
• Why “Second Chance” Tweets Matter: After 3 Hours, Few Care About Socially Shared Links

Social sharing will also be a big part of Search Engine Land’s upcoming SMX Social Media Marketing conference next month in Arizona, so be sure to check out the full agenda of our event.

Also consider subscribing to our free column related to social media, Search & Social, and see some of the resources we list on our What Is Social Media Marketing page.

Join us December 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ for an intensive dive into successful social media marketing tactics from leading internet marketing experts. The agenda features laser focused sessions on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, viral marketing and location services.

You’ll have face-to-face speaker access, engaging Q&A and plenty of networking opportunities with all conference constituents. And with a program 100% dedicated to social media, you’ll absorb more proven techniques and strategies than any typical marketing conference, we guarantee it.

Register today and pay just $1145 for 2 days of actionable content, invaluable networking and essential conveniences like free WiFi, breakfasts, lunches and all day snacks and opening night reception. Rates increase next week on November 12, so do it now!

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For example, if we submitted this very post to StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, the best option available might be the ‘marketing’ category:

Without the “interest optimization” feature, this post would only show up in the marketing category.  With this new optimization tool, additional categories will be targeted that are deemed relevant.  Instead of just ‘marketing,’ this post may show up in ‘social media marketing’ or ‘social media ads’ categories that users are unable to target specifically in Paid Discovery.

Don’t want interest optimization in your campaigns?  No problem.  Make sure you are using manual campaigns and then click the “Strictly limit my campaign to only the topics selected below” button and you can bypass interest optimization completely:

This new feature should allow more specific targeting, a wider campaign reach and has already been rolled out for all Paid Discovery users.

Please take the survey here and we’ll share the results when you’re done.

Thanks!

American Social Network Usage

The study revealed that 76% of Americans use social network sites, a higher adoption rate than that of European countries’ 73%. To no surprise, Facebook topped the list of social networking sites with 70% usage in the United States. Some other staggering Facebook stats show that 58% of users also log in daily, and the average Facebook session is 37 minutes. The second most popular U.S. social site is LinkedIn (22% penetration) and Twitter is third (20% penetration). An interesting statistic about Twitter is that while 77% of Americans know about the site, only 20% use it.

European Social Network Usage

While 73% of Europeans engage with at least one social network, 50% choose to only participate on one network. The market split is a bit different in Europe as 62% of Europeans use Facebook, 16% are on Twitter and 12% are active on Vkontakte. Social media is a daily routine to many as 60% of Europeans log into their social accounts every day. Western Europe is lagging behind the rest of Europe with 66% of respondents active on a social network.

Social Media & Brands

The study found that the majority of American and European social media users actually like brands and choose to follow them: 57% of Americans follow at least one brand while 51% of Europeans follow a brand. Globally the numbers are lower. When factoring in all countries, the total number of respondents following a brand worldwide drops to 50%. The users who follow a brand don’t just listen, 42% have had a conversation with a brand on a social network.

Resistance To New Networks

One surprising fact in the report was the fact that 60% of respondents don’t want to partake in new social networks. Of the polled respondents, 93% are happy with the current networks they are active in. A penetration chart highlighting user intent also backs these facts up. The chart displays user intent about joining networks; the smaller the network, the less willing the respondents were to join. InSites Consulting concluded that “Big social networks will get bigger and small ones will get smaller.”

Employees & Social Media

Survey results showed that employed social media users typically have a positive feeling about their company. Of those polled (that were employed), 61% of are proud of the company they work for. Not only are users proud, but 19% talk about their company on social media. Again Americans led the way with 63% of respondents sporting positive feelings toward employers while Europeans are just behind with 61%.

In contrast, while many respondents have positive feelings toward their employer, only 4 out of 10 like their employers’ attitude toward social media. One main reason for this low number may be the fact that 33% of respondents could not access social media at work.

The full report can be seen here: