This morning we’re lucky to have a guest post from Caleb Levell. Caleb is a Search Marketing Consultant at Hanapin Marketing and a contributor to PPC Hero. We’re big fans of PPC Hero at Trada! Check it out for daily articles on how to improve your PPC advertising.

Take a moment and picture a mullet. Yes, that’s right, the unfashionable haircut – short in the front and on the sides complemented with long hair in the back. Now, think about the online marketing industry. See the similarities?

Admittedly, the analogy is not the best, but please humor me for a second. The truth is you can approach a mullet and an online marketing campaign with the exact same mentality: Business in the front, party in the back.

Billy Ray knows.

The Business

The fundamentals of search marketing make up the business half of your mullet.  You take the front end of your haircut seriously. Proper maintenance, care, and constant consideration are essential. Waking up in the morning, you know just what to do, how to do it, and in case of a bad hair day, how to fix it.

Similarly, SEO and PPC are proven areas of success taken seriously by you and your client. The conventions are well established and evolutions in the technology from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. only make the current relation between auction and relevancy that much more dependable. PPC is as reliable as any traditional (print, radio, television) marketing campaign, and arguably easier to track, test, and recreate. Waking up in the morning, you know just what to do, how to do it, and in case of a bad PPC day, how to fix it.

The Party

So, if search marketing is all business, then the rise of social media and social advertising is the party half of my hypothetical online marketing hairdo. The back of a mullet is untamed, continuously changing, and ever-growing. To put it simply, the back of the mullet is the risk. Everyday you look in the mirror you see something different. Sometimes it’s a good look, and sometimes you second-guess ever getting a mullet haircut in the first place. However, no matter what it looks like, the back of the mullet is getting the attention from those people around you.  (Side note: I’ve never had a mullet, but boy, I sure have thought an awful lot about them).

Social advertising can be thought of in much the same way. The social media landscape is still evolving and new innovations are constantly emerging. With over 400 million people on Facebook and 100 million people on Twitter, opportunity certainly awaits, but the question remains, which clients can not only afford, but are willing to take the risk? Experimenting with social media promotions and advertisements will produce successful days, but also be prepared for stressful days when you wonder why you ever got involved with social media in the first place.

While SEO and PPC campaigns continue to show success (and are predicted to continue this success for the foreseeable future), social media is grabbing the headlines and probably the curiosity of some of your clients. Thus, it is important to keep an ear to the ground and be well versed on the latest advancements out there. Here are a few examples to get you started in the area.

Social Media Branding

Brand-specific Facebook fan pages and Twitter profiles are probably the most tried and true methods for companies utilizing social media.  Most notably, for large brand names (i.e. Coca-Cola or AXE) these pages are set up as an additional public relations resource and stand as an effort to better interact with fans of product, but more direct marketing efforts should soon follow. It is hard to not get excited about the potential for small to medium sized businesses to capitalize on this intimate consumer interaction.

Brand page Best Practices:

1. Let people reach out to you.
2. Listen to consumer comments and address both praises and concerns.
3. Use a casual, friendly tone.
4. Share and re-tweet messages you like and that relate to your brand. People will likely respond positively and appreciate your interest in their tweets.
5. Posts and tweets need to provide value:
   1. Offer promotional deals only available on Twitter.
   2. Take people behind the scenes of your company.
   3. Post pictures of offices.
   4. Offer sneak peaks of upcoming projects and products.
   5. Don’t spam… don’t spam.
   6. Measure your success via social media monitoring, coupon codes, and track click-throughs.

Facebook Advertising

Social PPC like the Facebook Ad platform is a marketing model that should look very familiar to us in the PPC industry. Borrowing much of the logic from content match ads, Facebook employs an auction based pricing system, targeted ads, and a comparable click-through-rate. The key difference, however, is Facebook’s unique ability to target based on demographics and social information rather than the traditional contextual targeting.

TweetUp

Entrepreneurs and developers are innovatively exploring what to do with the social capital that comes from Twitter. Ad.ly, Twad.ly, and Twitter’s own in-house advertising solutions are a few that come to mind. Yet, with TweetUp launching publicly at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on May 24, it seems timely to direct you toward this fascinating start-up.

TweetUp is a mashup of Twitter and Adwords spawning from an ideology similar to Digg’s founding principles. In short, it allows TweetUp users to place bids on keywords, which consequently aides search in Twitter by pulling out the most relevant and popular tweets from the vast amount of Twitter chatter.

“People can bid on keywords or phrases, like “iPad” or “solar energy,” to push their Twitter profile or posts to the top of TweetUp’s rankings. Bids begin at 1 cent and people will pay each time their profile or a post shows up in a search” – Serial Entrepreneur and Co-Founder, Bill Gross [source]

The start-up targets both individuals looking to build a following and companies looking to promote services on certain keyword searches.

The Future of Advertising

So, are you planning to complement your search marketing campaigns with the emerging area of social advertising? Or is it still too early to make a call?