Chris Abraham

I always tell clients that it is no longer enough to be beautiful when it comes to marketing online. The Internet has become more like an Oscar after-party than it is like the airport Ramada. Online, you’re never the lone beauty in the hotel lounge. Online, you’re surrounded by equal or greater beauties. What’s more, the most successful online social media barflies are aggressive in addition to gorgeous. Too many companies that have invested vast resources in social have Pretty Boy/Girl Syndrome. A symptom of this disease is an expectation that others will go out of their way to pursue you.

No matter how much money you spend on a graphic designer, a social media expert, and a community manager, you may very well not find the kind of success you want and expect from your investment in social media and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Being beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming is no longer good enough when you’re not just competing with the student body for Prom King and Queen, you’re now competing with potentially every other beautiful, friendly, clever, generous, and charming person on planet earth. The Internet has flattened the market, allowing anyone to eat your lunch, so just ringing the dinner bell after you launch your social media presence is not going to work as well as you expect.

Mind you, there are exceptions. If there are holes in the market–a vacuum–then filling that need will result in amazing success. Another exception is celebrity. If you already have an undeniable fan-base, it will translate perfectly into success online. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we have neither.

In order to compete on a world stage, it is essential to aggressively recruit new members. Not just new members, but passionate, enthusiastic, members who will do what you expected Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to do for you in the first place: create firestorms of buzz and word-of-mouth influence. To become a channel of primary, secondary, and tertiary influence that result in your members sharing your content on their walls, resulting on an organic growth, ultimately snowballing into massive conversions and stellar online sales.

Do some research and you’ll find out, to your astonishment, that a majority of those viral videos with over a million views were not “upload it to YouTube and they will come.” Most of them skyrocketed as the direct result of some form of publicity campaign, be it grass roots or from an agency.

Be the catalyst of your natural social media success. Take your fate into your own hands and get off of that bar stool and walk over and start some conversations with all the folks you want to meet. This can include a long-tail blogger outreach campaign, it should include an A-list influencer outreach, be they on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever.

Membership in your community is a later stage of the hearts-and-minds campaign in which you need to engage. Just collecting Likes or Follows doesn’t often result in engagement. If you spend any time on your Facebook Page Insights, which you do, you’ll understand how important performance is to the success of your social media campaign. You need both quantity and quality of Likes. I won’t kid you: more is better; however, if you have hundreds of thousands of Likes on your Facebook Page but have negligible engagement in your posts in the form of likes and comments, then you will not earn the sort of gravity and popularity to elbow on your members’ Facebook Wall.

If you’re able to prospect passionate followers by going out there–to where they live on their own blogs, forums, Listservs, social networks, and communities–to find them, recruit them, convert them, and win them over, then you’ll start seeing the true power of world-of-mouth marketing.

Via SocialMedia.biz via Biznology.

Thanks to an investment from Intel Capital (USA) and Abraaj Capital (UAE) in 2010 and 2011, respectively, Nymgo has now completely re-developed its networking infrastructure and is accordingly re-launching its product, website and brand with a completely new look and set of functions that pushes the envelope of mass consumer VoIP technology in 2012.

With an established user base around the world and fast-growing multi-national workforce, Nymgo is definitely a start-up that you’ll want to pay closer attention to soon.

Nymgo is heating up its social media efforts by celebrating and honoring the hard work of expats and all kinds people living all over the globe by launching the “Nymgo, fly me to visit someone” contest on its regional Facebook pages - Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. A total of 5 competitions and 5 round trip airplane tickets , Nymgo is awarding one person on each of these Facebook pages the chance to fly anywhere in the world, by simply choosing a friend they would like to visit. The contestant simply uploads a picture along with a required caption (maximum 500 words) explaining why they should win the trip to see that person.

I am so happy I was an English Major. Communicating is something I have been trained to do. My colleague, Sally Falkow, agrees intensely and you should check this article out.

Don’t waste your time and treasure on only pitching the most obvious and most popular — work towards the most targeted and most receptive — this article goes into it a lot more, comparing blogger outreach to doing Google AdWords campaigns right.

An essential list of all the social media, technology, and marketing conferences of 2012 from JD Lasica of Socialmedia.biz