In an article posted on WordStream.com, Ken Lyons details step by step how his company created a swarm of traffic around an article that they posted on their blog.  Although the article is infused with confusing industry jargon about “link bait”, “authority sites” and other SEO gobbledygook, the strategy they use is pretty repeatable for any online marketing campaign.

• Step one is to write something on your blog or on your website that is worth reading.
• Step two is to promote that written piece with a low cost press release making sure you optimize the release with some good contextual links back to your article.
• Step three is to tweet and comment about the post with links back to your article.
• Step four is to contact members of the press and other influential people in your industry with the potential to spread the word.  The best contacts are direct emails and phone calls. But twitter messaging will work to hit a lot of people who you don’t have time to reach out to personally.
• Step five is to follow up any links or mentions you get in the press with a thank you message that creates goodwill for the next time you pursue this strategy.

Note that the goal of Ken Lyon’s staff was to generate back links to his website from large national news sites.  Most of my clients are more focused on lead generation.  Ken got his wish, but he did not get many leads.

The take away is that you need to be careful what your initial goals are.  You don’t need to create controversial content for its own sake.  I have seen strategies like this work with content that was fairly mundane, like how to budget the cost of new accounting software.  The key is that the content that you create needs to be valuable and interesting to your target market.  It certainly cannot hurt if it rides a wave of industry awareness like a new major product launch or an emerging industry trend that people are curious about.

The biggest takeaway here is that social media marketing should be focused around something interesting,  something valuable, or some event that attracts attention (contests, competitions etc.)   Social media is not advertising, its PR, its creating buzz around material that you create.  This material can be a video, white paper, webinar, ebook or just a plain old blog post.  The one thing that all successful social media campaigns have in common is that someone spent a lot of time and effort creating some really good content.   The steps to get the traffic to that content need to be carefully planned and executed as well.  When this strategy works, it can generate a ton of leads at a very low cost.