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Social Media For Isle of Man Business
(22nd June, 2009)
Social Media For Isle of Man Business | 
When Dell last week announced they had surpassed $3 Million in sales from it’s Twitter followers since it started twittering in 2007 the business world rightly sat up and took notice of the social media platform.
Dell’s monetary success though is an exception to the rule, as is being able to measure a social media campaign’s success in hard cold cash.
It’s this lack of quantifiable results that tends to put business off social media yet it is the easiest, cheapest way of creating brand awareness and buzz available today.
Business just needs to realise that unlike a traditional advertising campaign the monetary returns are neither instant nor the main goal.
In 2007 the Isle of man government launched the “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” campaign to communicate the Island’s advantages more effectively to the outside world.
Do a Google search for the term “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” including the quotes and you will get a return of about 186 results. Go to the second page of results (11-20) and Google tells us after the 17th result (it will be 18th now because of this post) that they are omitting the rest of the results as they are very similar to the one’s already shown.
This is Google’s way of punishing those omitted results for having duplicate content. The Isle of man Government probably issued a press release which was posted ‘as is’ by the other 160 sites so Google simply ignores them.
So we have just 17 genuine appearances of the term “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” across the web, none of which are on a social media site.
Where’s the Youtube videos? The Facebook page? The Blogger and Wordpress blogs? Where’s the Wikipedia page and the Wetpaint wiki? The Flickr and Photobucket pages? Where’s the dugg stories, the social bookmarking accounts and the thousand other social media applications that could have been used to create the brand awareness the campaign set out to achieve?
Compare the above campaign with the one promoting the island’s latest export, blues guitarist Davy Knowles. The folk handling him have so far used social media to great effect. They have already created the buzz and they are well on their way to creating the brand.
Do a Google search for “Davy Knowles” (with quotes) and you get a return of 46,900 results. The top 10 includes 7 social media pages including his Twitter, MySpace and Vimeo pages and 2 YouTube videos.
You could argue of course that the comparison is unfair. Music lends itself to social media, Davy is an amazing guitarist, it’s a younger audience etc. etc. All genuine arguments but if the people looking after the promotion of Davy Knowles had simply issued a press release last year and then sat and waited, would he have achieved the fame he’s so far had across in the States?
Not yet he wouldn’t.
If the “Giving You Freedom to Flourish” had set up a social media campaign would it have more than 17 results in Google today?
Absolutely it would.
Things to remember before starting a social media campaign.
Social media site users are brutally honest. If your product or service doesn’t do what you claim it to do, they are quick to tell the rest of the group. Listen to what they say and take appropriate action.
Social media can take on a life of it’s own. Sites have been known to crash because hundreds of people are digging a story on the site. A few hundred Diggs can result in tens of thousands of hits within an hour.
For SEO purposes social media is a great natural link builder (Davyknowles.com already has a Google page rank of 5) and your main web site benefits from all that Google attention.
Consider a social media campaign rather than a standard link building campaign if one of your goals is brand awareness or a product launch.
You need to put the work in and stick with it.
Use the contact page by clicking here to contact us about setting up and managing a social media campaign for you.