In an age where every organization, brand, and product has a website, and many of your rivals churn out white papers like popcorn, having a book is one of the best ways to establish credibility and reinforce your company’s brand position as both an innovator and an industry leader. Your competitor has a business card. YOU have a book – that prospective customers (or employers) can purchase on Amazon, or even download for free from your website in exchange for their contact information. And what better advertising for your mobile app than having its hashtag and URL on your book’s cover!

Of course, writing your book is just the start. You also have to use social media to spread the word. The bottom line? No matter whether you’ve chosen to self-publish your book, or have taken the “vintage” route by working with a traditional publishing house, no one can ever market your information products (in this case your book) as effectively as you can yourself using social media. Note that this doesn’t just apply to books. The same rule applies to ALL of your different marketing assets, including your videos, white papers, underwritten research, podcasts, presentations, and blog posts.

A quick reminder that the opinions expressed here are my own. They come from my hands-on experience managing social marketing content and campaigns, leading social marketing teams, and consulting for social marketing clients. You, your organization, and your brand are unique! Please use what works for you, and toss the rest! Do you disagree with any of my guidelines, or think I have forgotten something? Please share your experiences with all of us in the Comments section below, so we can continue the discussion and the learning.

My guidelines for using social media to promote your new book are simple. More importantly, they are based on my ongoing and personal campaign to promote my own contribution to The Everything Guide to Mobile Apps: A Practical Guide to Affordable Mobile App Development for Your Business. The book, written by MobileGroove’s own Peggy Anne Salz, brings together the diverse insights of mobile professionals, practitioners, and pundits (say that three times fast!) to identify the market trends, best practices, and lessons learned in developing, distributing, and marketing mobile apps. As I share in the book, even small app developers can compete – and win! – in the big leagues, provided they use social media to promote their apps and create community. The book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and has proven so popular that it is being released this month as an ebook.

To help the different contributors promote the book with social media, I developed a “Ken’s Author’s Toolkit” (catchy, no?) infographic/cheat sheet. Being the social marketing guy, I of course uploaded it to SlideShare – http://www.slideshare.net/KenHerron/kens-authors-toolkit – so I could share it with all of you! So enough with the exposition, let’s dive in!

#1  If your target audience is on a given social channel, then you must be too!

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never “pinned” anything before in your life. If YOUR target audience for your book happens to be on Pinterest, then you must be too. If you don’t know where your audience is online, then you need to find out. Fast! There are tons of free demographics research reports available for each social network. Whether your audience is mainstream or niche, B2C or B2B, you can *always* reach out to them and ask them. They will appreciate your asking, and it’s one more opportunity for you to personally engage with them.

#2  Share. DON’T sell!

This sounds easy, but it can be tough since it’s only natural for authors to want to say “Buy my book! Here’s the purchase link! Buy it now! Pleeeease!” in every single social post. Yes, you should make the purchase link for your book easily accessible for everyone, but focus your posts on the content in your book. Provide valuable content, not advertising. Don’t know what to write? Start off with short posts sharing your book’s key takeaways, and even your “top do’s and don’ts”. Sharing the story of how you came up with, wrote, and marketed your book – within the context of your existing online brand – makes for great social content. Compelling content, combined with your own personal story as an author, will drive exponentially more unit sales than a hard sell.

#3  Visualize, visualize, visualize

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” As old as that quote is, it applies perfectly to social media in 2013. You already know that people are social. Well, people are also visual. Find ways to share your story visually. Read C.C. Chapman’s NMX presentation on visual content. As C.C. says, “create an emotional response, look for ‘moments’, and share what no one else can.” Grab that spiffy new phone or tablet in your pocket. Find ways to visualize your content. Great visuals make even “dull” content come alive. With or without Google Glass, it has never been easier to capture and post [in real-time if you so choose] photos and videos on every single social network, from your own blog to Instagram.

Want a great example? Check out Debi Harper. She supports her husband and fellow book contributor Jez Harper by capturing the unique moments, such as when she presented a copy of The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps to Charlie Flanagan, TD, Fine Gael Party Chairman in Ireland and posted it in Facebook.

#4  Create [and use!] a hashtag for your book

Hashtags should be short, but should also be “readable”. What does that mean? Avoid long, unpronounceable, and meaningless acronyms. A hashtag should be simple, catchy, and to-the-point. You want to encourage [and make it easy] for people to talk about your book online, including tweeting about it.

True story. When I “shared” with the publishers of our Everything Guide to Mobile Apps book that we HAD to have a hashtag, it took a surprisingly herculean amount of persuasion to convince them that #EVERYapp trumped  #theeverythingguidetomobileappsapracticalguidetoaffordablemobileappdevelopmentforyourbusiness (yes, I behaved myself and refrained from sending them a pop-up book on dinosaurs). If there’s still time, put your book’s hashtag on your book’s front and back covers (and on your physical book’s spine!). If you’re not that comfortable with hashtags, I recommend reading posts on Hubspot, Mashable’s take, and yes, my next MobileGroove blog post which just happens to be about hashtags!

#5  Post FRESH content daily

Every author now struggles with the challenge of their information being out-of-date the second they publish their book. How can you keep your content fresh and relevant? Even if you’re time-crunched, social media enables you to both share new, original content AND to participate in the larger discussion in your industry, by showing how the content in your book relates to current events and trending topics.

#6  Share excerpts

Sadly, you can’t put your book on toothpicks and sample it like a new brand of cheese at your local supermarket, but you can let everyone around the world “taste” the first chapter of your book for free. Some (dinosaur) publishers will hate me for this, but I’m a huge fan of publishing the first chapter of your book on LinkedIn’s new professional gallery via Slideshare. You want to get people “hooked” so they are compelled to purchase your book to finish it. Also, your connections on LinkedIn are often your oldest professional connections. These are not only the people who are most likely to be interested personally in what you have written, but the people who will be the most willing and able to help spread the word about your new book.

#7  Directly target your key influencers

It used to be difficult to target reviewers, critics, the media, and industry influencers. Now you can engage all of them directly on social media. Remember, however, the definition of “targeting”. This isn’t about “friending” everyone on the planet. Instead, use tools like Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex to identify the social influencers for your specific niche. Connect with these influencers, and use Twitter Lists to monitor their tweets so you can more easily engage with them.

#8  Enable EVERYONE on the planet to attend your book readings and signings

When you hold a book signing or do a reading from your book, how many people get to connect with you? 50? 100? 200 (if you’re lucky)? When you are out promoting your book, have a friend video you and your audience’s reactions to you on their mobile device so you can live stream – http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/onair.html, http://new.livestream.com, http://www.ustream.tv, and http://www.justin.tv are four great tools. You can even upload the best clips to your branded channel on YouTube. The number of people who will be able to attend one of your in-person signings/readings will always be limited. Use social media to enable everyone around the world who is interested in the content of your book to attend, connect with you, and BUY YOUR BOOK!

#9  Leverage your email sig line

And finally, the one place where you absolutely MUST place the purchase link for your book is your email signature line. Keep it simple. No “Please buy my book!” Instead, share your excitement with something like “My new book, TITLE, is now available on Amazon at: LINK!” Remember to use a URL shortener such at http://bit.ly so you can track the clicks! You can even get fancy with a custom link with your book’s hashtag – http://bit.ly/HASHTAG (we used http://j.mp/EVERYapp).

Whether you’re looking for new customers or a new job, there is no better sales and marketing “leave behind” than a copy of your new book, showcasing your expertise AND your ability to successfully take a great idea from concept to execution.

What are the most effective ways YOU have found to market your book on social media? How do you use all of your different social channels to get people to buy your physical or ebook? Please share your thoughts with us in the Comments section below.

Ken’s note: I truly appreciate everyone’s questions, thank you! Do YOU have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question to me @KenHerron with the hashtag “#DearKen”.  All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.

Social media is no longer “optional.” Marketers MUST not only listen, but also actively participate in the online communities in which their customers are talking about their companies. More importantly, they must have prepared a plan of action to follow to avoid a social media meltdown.

The marketing teams at Gap, KitchenAid, and Celeb Boutique need no convincing. They experienced some of the nastiest social media crises of 2012, showing us that the worst social media disaster isn’t the one marketers cause themselves, but the one for which they have not prepared. The Altimeter Group found a whopping 76 percent of the social media disasters companies reported could have been avoided – if the companies had been better prepared.”

NOW is the time to kick off your New Year with a written social media disaster response plan to which all of your organization’s functional departments (don’t forget Legal/Compliance!) have agreed. Social crises can and do happen, even when we’ve done everything “right” to prevent them. It’s therefore critical to the financial health of our organizations to create – and rehearse – a formal social media response plan. No matter where you are or what you market, this is marketers’ number one priority for 2013!

A reminder that the opinions expressed here are my own. They come from my hands-on experience managing social marketing content and campaigns, leading social marketing teams, and consulting for social marketing clients. Your organization and brand are unique! Use what works for you. Toss the rest! Do you disagree with any of my guidelines, or think I have forgotten something? Please share your experiences with us in the comments section below, so we can continue the discussion and the learning.

To start, thank you for your question! When positive or negative content goes viral on a social channel, it requires marketers to act fast — and smart. The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices and apps, and the *explosion* in mobile video in 2013 mean the world is waiting to rave about your successes…and rant about your (perceived and real) failures. Let’s be crystal clear: This is not about image; this is about revenue. Good crisis management practices will mitigate the negative impact that social media goofs, disasters, and crises – self-initiated or not – would otherwise have on your revenues.

As regular MobileGroove readers know, I like to share both strategy and execution (let’s do this, and here’s how!). Here is my cheat sheet to help you assemble an immediately actionable social media response plan that makes sense for your organization. In it, I describe the various social media problems or “challenges” for marketers and identify the current best practice(s) to deliver the best results. I also share some of my favorite social media goofs from 2012 [in green], showing what can really happen and why a social media response plan is essential. While many of these goofs were truly innocent, they still had a serious (and sometimes fatal) consequences. When marketers mismanaged the situation, the result was a full-blown social media meltdown that had a significant negative impact on 2012 revenues.

Challenge #1: Social Authority

Your company is a media company. Period, full stop. While this simple statement of fact would have been inconceivable to a brand manager (or CEO) just five years ago, it’s a given that much of a brand’s Klout [sic] is now earned through their content. It’s not just about having influence online, it’s about managing effectively in a space where you are no longer the default authority on your own brand’s products and services. Think of social media as the great equalizer. Social media enables every person on the planet with a connected device to build influence and authority by sharing what they think about your brand. And it doesn’t even have to be accurate!

Best Practice: Presence

As a marketer, you are [hopefully!] already actively sharing, participating, and engaging on all of the social networks your customers are on. I include in these, the “review” sites – such as Yelp, TripIt, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare – where your customers (and target customers) are talking about your brand. Taking part in these conversations is the lynchpin of your crisis management strategy. Your goal here is to become the authority for your brand, build relationships with people and — ultimately — cultivate an audience of “brand fans.” Once you have created a community of brand advocates you can also reach out to them, in real-time, for ideas, insights – and help!

A great example of this is how diapers/nappies brand Pampers “pampers” its mommy bloggers, so these brand fans can quash rumors and inaccurate information about Pampers’ products the moment they appear online, anywhere on the planet. In a way, it’s similar to how tech companies have been befriending industry analysts for decades. At the end of the day, it’s about forging positive working relationships with your brand’s social influencers. And yes, this means you need to know who they are! Using social networks to connect with influencers and encourage brand advocates ensures you have valuable allies, who are willing and able to help you to get your message out when disaster strikes. They may even help you to avert a social media disaster altogether!

United Breaks Guitars taught everyone (unfortunately, except United) the high price a company can pay when it fails to make things right for a customer and correct a simple service delivery mistake.

Challenge #2: “Official Spokesperson”

Remember when organizations had a “company spokesperson”? This single, highly-trained person was designated as the only person authorized to speak on behalf of a company, and the media respected their position. Today, social media provides everyone in your company a platform to speak out — and be heard. Any post on any social network by any employee in your organization is “official and on-the-record” as far as the media is concerned. Moreover, every form of digital content (texts, photos, videos) can go viral in a heartbeat.

Best Practice: Consistent Messaging

It used to be the responsibility of skilled (in-house or agency) PR professionals to create and communicate for an organization during a crisis. Today, those talking points should be created by a team with representatives from each of the company’s customer-facing organizations [yes, you can still let your communications and legal/compliance heads in the room] and shared/distributed widely. How wide is widely? Everyone who touches the customer must now have the “talking points” that used to reside exclusively with PR and executives.

It’s also helpful to remind your entire employee population of your organization’s social media guidelines on a regular basis just as you do your organization’s Code of Conduct. Of course, listing what should be included in your social media guidelines (and why) would fill another column. In the meantime, here are some basics to get you started:

• Think before you post
• Negative online comments about employees and/or customers are grounds for disciplinary action up to and including dismissal
• Employees should NEVER “fight” online, with anyone, for any reason
• Communications with unhappy customers should be taken offline as soon as practical

The goal during a crisis is consistent messaging across ALL media channels, online and off!

#QantasLuxury taught organizations not to be tone-deaf to current events when launching [even long-planned] social media marketing campaigns.

Challenge #3: 24x7x365

In our crazy global mobile wired world, it’s not just that everyone, customer or not, has the opportunity to tell the world what they think of your organization. The real challenge is that social media is always “open”. In fact, nights and weekends, in every time zone, are often social media rush hours, so plan your resources accordingly.

Best Practice: Social Listening

Identify and use the right tools to suit the size of your organization to “actively listen” to what your customers are saying about you around the clock online. Solopreneurs and smaller organizations can make great use of free social media monitoring tools such as Google Alerts and the tracking tools already built into each social network (such as Twitter Search). Mid-size organizations, with dedicated marketing resources and budget, may be best served by products such as Brandwatch, Hootsuite, and Vocus. And the largest organizations (ones that have abundant, available  IT resources) may save money by investing in creating their own solutions. Remember, even the fanciest tools are worthless if you don’t use them!

Gap and American Apparel taught all of us NOT to be clever during natural disasters by offering Hurricane Sandy-themed discounts.

Challenge #4: Public Relations

Just a few years ago, larger companies had lovely little remote islands they called Public Relations. Each PR island had a high, thick wall, and life in the silo was good. So good in fact, that many companies decided to outsource their public relations functions altogether to reduce costs. This left few, if any, “in-house” experts to manage (let alone plan for and prevent) social media disasters.

Best Practice: Integrated Planning

With response times of minutes instead of hours or days, the traditional functional boundaries between departments can easily escalate a social goof into a full-scale disaster. The winning approach is the one that tears down the walls between your functional departments of Public Relations, Marketing, Employee Communications (often under HR), Legal/Compliance, and customer-facing organizations such as Sales and Customer Service. In fact, the most effective social media response plans are those built with input from each organization. But it’s not enough to draft a plan; they must also be rehearsed to make sure everyone knows their role when the tweet hits the fan. We rehearse fire drills to learn what to do in case of an emergency, and we need to treat social media response planning the same way. Ask yourself: which will have a greater revenue impact on your organization? A small fire in the employee lounge, or a toxic post that goes viral online? One may be expensive, but the other may close your business.

The Wienergate sex scandal taught executives everywhere that if they can’t keep it in their pants, to at least keep it offline.

Risky business

Social media never sleeps. So, it’s obvious that the speed of online communications will always be faster than your organization’s legal and content review cycles. I now routinely see professional industry analysts and journalists live-tweeting press events as part of their coverage, repeating, analyzing, and interpreting (if not always correctly…) what executives say as they say it. Ask yourself: Would YOUR legal department be nimble enough to review (and approve!) corrections to inaccurate product information or company earnings posted (!) online while a company event is still in progress? If your answer is ‘no’, then it is your responsibility to both teach your company the ‘new’ rules, and drive the required changes in your corporate culture that are required to support them.

Let’s recap. Actively participating on the social networks your customers are on is the best possible “prevention” for social media disasters. Leverage technology to monitor social media 24x7x365. Actively monitor conversations about your organizations and its principles. Respond to both positive and negative discussions. When someone posts a negative review about your brand, product, or service, first determine whether the review is accurate. If the negative content is valid, own it, fix it/make it right, and reply to the person who posted it, thanking them for bringing this to your attention.

If the information is inaccurate, consider NOT responding to the post yourself. (Remember, don’t feed the trolls – trolls WANT a reaction, so don’t satisfy them by giving them one!) Instead, let your brand fans respond for you as they will almost always be better able to correct inaccurate information without being salesy or defensive. It’s also important to note that censoring or deleting negative comments on sites you control [other than for language that violates your terms and conditions] usually exacerbates the situation.

As always, maintain your cool AND your sense of humor. Your company requires your leadership on this.

For more information on issue management/crisis communications in general, and social media crisis disaster communications in particular, I recommend the following resources:

• http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/radian6-social-media-monitoring-and-engagement-playbook/
• http://www.pr-squared.com/index.php/2011/07/social-media-crisis-communications
• http://ackermannpr.com/crisis-communications-social-media-plan/
• http://www.academicimpressions.com/news/including-social-media-your-crisis-communications-plan

What are the most effective ways have YOU have found to actively manage social media disasters when they hit? How do YOU bring together your company’s different departments to plan, prepare, and (most importantly!) rehearse? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Editor’s note: Do you have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question with the hashtag “#DearKen”.  All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.

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Thank you for your question. I will be so bold (What?! A cocky marketing guy??) as to say that you can pin ANY of your marketing content on Pinterest. I’ll show you how.

A reminder that the opinions expressed here are my own, and come from my personal experience managing social marketing campaigns, leading social marketing teams, and consulting for social marketing clients. Every brand is unique. Use what works for you. Toss the rest!

Pinterest can be an easy win for B2C and B2B marketers. Why? Because Pinterest is a fast, easy, and free communications channel with incredible flexibility. Moreover, Pinterest is receiving a huge amount of both niche and mainstream media coverage, additional attention that is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The sooner you begin using Pinterest, the sooner your business will benefit from this positive multiplier effect, and the faster YOU will climb the Pinterest learning curve for your brand(s). Said differently, everything you do for your business – and share on Pinterest – will receive more than its fair share of trade and mainstream media coverage. What marketer doesn’t want that!

Note that there are a near equal number of Pinfans (Pinterest enthusiasts) and Pin-”haters”. The Pinfans proclaim Pinterest to be a silver-bullet for marketers. The Pin-haters argue that Pinterest has zero value for business. Your results will depend on your audience, your brand, and…your skills.

Pinterest is simply a communications channel – albeit an incredibly powerful and cost-effective one – that allows you to engage your target audience. Debating whether Pinterest is the holy grail of marketing, OR a waste of time, is missing the point. Pinterest has given marketers a sound thump on the head that marketing has become increasingly visual, a trend we ignore at our [and our brands’] peril.

As a relatively new communications channel, Pinterest is experiencing a period of rapid innovation and experimentation. There’s plenty of room for marketers to jump in now, explore where the highest ROI is, and identify their best practices for this new social network. Please share your experiences on what works for your business on Pinterest in the comments section below!

To get us started, let’s begin with a quick recap of Pinterest’s four building blocks: the pin, the board, the like, and the almighty repin.

What is a “pin”?

A pin – which can either be an image or a video file – is content you post to one or more of your boards (see below). You can ‘pin’ in one of two ways:

1. You can pin directly from a website using Pinterest’s “Pin It” bookmarklet [after you’ve added the bookmarklet to your web browser].
2. You can also pin by directly uploading a file from your computer.

Please note that the process to tag/identify your content (and its URL) differs slightly depending on your approach. When you add a pin using Pinterest’s “Pin It” button, the URL of the source link is added automatically. When you add a pin from your computer, you will need to manually type in the URL you want associated with your image. As with all marketing content you publish to the Internet, you want your pins to have SEO-optimized images, names, descriptions, and URLs.

What is a “board”?

A board is a space you create on your Pinterest profile, which can either be empty (the Pinterest equivalent of being “under construction”), or contain one or more pins. You will want to fill your boards with brand-relevant images and/or videos, and their associated cover images, names, and descriptions. To answer the obvious question, I have not yet seen a limit to the number of pins you can have on a single board.

What is “liking” [a pin]?

Liking a pin adds the image/video to the “Likes” section of your profile. Think of this as “favoriting” a tweet on Twitter or “liking” a post on Facebook. Liking a pin is another way for you to engage with your audience. Note that liking a pin does not add the image to any of your boards, as does repinning [below].

What is “repinning” [a pin]?

Repinning a pin adds the image/video to one of your boards. Think of this as “retweeting” a tweet on Twitter. When you repin a pin to your board, you can also edit the repinned pin’s description to best suit your own marketing and SEO strategies. Again, this is analogous to a manual retweet (also called a modified tweet or “MT”) on Twitter. It says you like the person’s content so much that you want to post it so your own followers can see it. At the same time, you also want to tweak it to best suit your particular marketing objectives. The best example of this is where the person pins the image, but does not bother to add a description to their pin. Adding just a few words makes the pin more SEO-friendly.

Note that a repinned pin’s URL (source link) is added automatically. Just like”Likes” on Facebook and retweets on Twitter, you want your pins to be repinned. This is what exposes your brand to new people within your target audience, and makes Pinterest content so viral.

What else do I need to know to get started using Pinterest?

Like any social network, to use Pinterest, you first need to create a profile. Remember, the best practice is to use the same handle and avatar photo that you use on your other branded social network profiles. Therefore, if you use facebook.com/MYbrand and twitter.com/MYbrand, you should use pinterest.com/MYbrand.

Some users have criticized Pinterest’s user interface (UI) as being “awkward”, “klunky”, and”still in Beta”. While not “difficult” to use, some people find Pinterest’s UI to be counter-intuitive. An example? After you pin (upload) an image from your computer, you have to go back in and “edit” the pin to add the description and URL/source link. Is this difficult? Not at all. Is this kludgy? Absolutely.

A bigger feature outage [which will likely be addressed in an upcoming release] is that you cannot reorder the pins on your board. Currently, you must upload your pins in the order you want them to appear. For example, if you want your pins to appear in the order pin 1, pin 2, pin 3, you must upload them in reverse order – pin 3, pin 2, pin 1. Again, is this difficult? No. Is it annoying? Yes.

Remember to ALWAYS add your URL (think of it as your conversion link) and keywords in each of your pin’s descriptions. When you author a blog post on WordPress, your keywords are “hidden” in your post’s metadata. When you pin an image or video on Pinterest, your keywords are 100% visible – in your pin’s description. Marketers can (and should) add a URL to each and every pin on their boards. Doing so enables you to bring people directly to the original source version of your marketing content [if helpful], and/or directly to your “conversion” page, enabling you to achieve (and track!) your results.

Once you’ve mastered the mechanics of uploading content to Pinterest, give some thought to how you can best leverage your existing photo (hint: your Flickr inventory) and video (hint: your YouTube inventory) marketing assets.

If you would like more information on Pinterest “how to’s”, I recommend the “getting started” and “help” content on Pinterest.com, and the many Pinterest posts on Mashable.com and DanZarrella.com.

I’m busy. REALLY busy. Why should I bother to Pinterest-ize my sales and marketing collateral?

Now comes the fun part (and the answer to the #DearKen tweet). Not surprisingly, a large portion of our marketing content is ‘old school’ brochures, whitepapers, and collateral that is neither in photo nor video format. Therefore, our challenge is to find the fastest, quickest, and most effective ways to visualize our existing non-visual marketing content.

Why even bother? Depending on our target audience and brand (food, YES!; forklifts, not so much…), the benefits far outweigh the investment to tailor our content for this new communications channel.

It is significantly cheaper for us to invest in visualizing our existing marketing assets, than it is to create completely new marketing content from scratch, especially when we take into account the overhead of our review and approval processes. We can also co-publish these new visualized marketing assets on multiple social networks (Slideshare, Flickr, and YouTube to name just a few), not just on Pinterest.

The bottom line? Visual content converts. Research on the most effective social network content for brands tells us that social posts with images [regardless of whether they’re on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or other social networks] have significantly greater conversion rates. Yes, for marketers, visualization is the new black.

How do I pin my “non-visual” marketing content?

Get ready. Set. Pin!

Live Events

• If your original source content is a live event – such as a trade show, customer event, press conference, keynote or panel presentation, webinar or teleconference – visualize it by pinning .jpgs of PowerPoint/Keynote slides you create with the top three messages, including context-setting introduction and call-to-action slides.

Marketing Premiums

• If your original source content consists of marketing premiums – such as trash and trinkets, tchotchkes, giveaway items with your company’s logo, or specialty advertising products – take photos of them, and pin the photos.

Audio Recordings

• If your original source content is an audio recording – such as an executive interview, radio show or commercial, podcast, or even a jingle – again, visualize it by pinning .jpgs of PowerPoint/Keynote slides you create with the top three messages, including context-setting introduction and call-to-action slides OR video-ize it by adding it as the audio”soundtrack” to these same slides.

Print Collateral

• If your original source content is printed material, or a Word or Excel file – such as a newspaper or magazine article, an annual report, a white paper, a bumper sticker, a billboard, a bus or taxi ad, a sales brochure, a fact sheet, a business card, a customer testimonial, a case study, a book, customer research, a poll or survey, or even a handwritten note on a yellow sticky – visualize it by pinning the .jpgs of the .pdf file [scan the articles and yellow sticky notes] of the document (see: how to convert a .pdf file to a .jpg).

Websites (or Computer Files)

• If your original source content is a website – such as a banner ad, press release, blog post, or infographic [when you don’t have/cannot download the .jpg] – visualize it by pinning the .jpg of the screen capture (see: how to take a screenshot).

Presentation Slides

• If your original source content is a presentation deck – such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or a .pdf-format presentation on http://slideshare.net – visualize it by pinning the .jpgs of the .pdf file.

Emails

• If your original source content is an email – such as a marketing email – visualize it by pinning the .jpg(s) of the [print to] .pdf file.

Over the past few years, marketers have been overwhelmed by the number of new communications channels. While we don’t need to [and absolutely shouldn’t] use each and every new channel that comes our way, we are directly accountable to our stakeholders and ourselves to explain why a given channel is appropriate (or not) for our brand.

Before I get the eyerolls, being a marketer means continually evolving how we communicate. An example? Picture it (pun intended), Twitter, 2007. Remember how fellow marketers shook their heads, and were ready to write off Twitter. They said it was folly to think that 140-character long tweets could deliver ANY value to “real” marketers or their customers.

This”resistance” didn’t last long, especially after we realized Twitter makes it incredibly easy [thanks to URL shorteners like http://bit.ly] for us to add ANY link, complete with tracking analytics, to our tweets. As marketers, we go where the eyeballs are. If our target audience is on Facebook, we are on Facebook. If our target audience is now on Pinterest, we are now on Pinterest.

That said, depending on your audience, co-publishing your marketing content on Pinterest can maximize the ROI of your investment in creating the content. Whether or not your audience is on Pinterest, it’s important to understand what is behind Pinterest’s success, and is arguably, THE marketing trend so far in 2012. Compelling. Visual. Content.

What are the most effective ways have YOU have found to pin your marketing content on Pinterest? How do YOU use your pins and boards to increase engagement to drive your business’ revenues? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Editor’s note: Do you have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question with the hashtag “#DearKen”.  All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.

[Spoiler alert: The answer is co-publishing!]

You’ve been invited to share your expertise and passion with a live audience. Congratulations! Every time you present — whether it’s to a dozen people, or a thousand — social media gives you the opportunity to better engage your in-person audience and effectively reach people around the world [beyond just your “live” audience] who are interested in your topic.

Thank you for your question. At the risk of hyperbole, it is impossible to overstate the importance of social media in magnifying both the reach and the impact of your content, regardless of whether it is a formal presentation or your regular blog post (like this one!).

Think about how the 1967 movie “The Graduate”, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, would change if it were to be remade today. It’s easy to imagine how the famous scene, where Mr. McGuire gives Benjamin career advice, might go.

Mr. McGuire:                    I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin:                         Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire:                    Are you listening?

Benjamin:                         Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire:                    Co-publishing.

Yes, even more than “plastics” (Mr. McGuire’s advice in the film), my advice to you to make the best use of social media for your next presentation is to co-publish. I am defining co-publishing here to mean the “strategic creation and reuse of your marketing content.” To maximize the ROI of your investment in creating content, you can simultaneously publish your content on all of your different social networks.

“Show me” is exponentially more powerful than “tell me,” and to prove it, I have  co-published this #DearKen column. You will see the links further down in the post – designated by a Show me Ken! – linking to where I have co-published this column [in different formats] on some of my social networks.

You are no doubt familiar with the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle.”  Well, this is about taking “reuse” to the next, social level. You have invested a significant amount of time to research, write and visualize your presentation. To help you get the most out of it (before, during and after you present), I have created the following three checklists to help you better engage your in-person and online audiences.

A reminder that the opinions expressed here are my own, and come from my personal experience managing social marketing campaigns, leading social marketing teams, and consulting for social marketing clients. Every brand is unique. Use what works. Toss the rest!

Co-Publishing Checklist: Pre-Event

The pre-event checklist details the different items you can do in of your presentation to build in-person and online audience awareness. Please don’t let it overwhelm you. Select the items that most excite you, and don’t think you must do everything on the list in order to have a significant impact.

1.) The day you accept the invitation to speak, is the day you need to start getting the word out. How? Write a blog post. Share the details of the event on all of your social networks. Include the event’s hashtag and website in all of your posts. Call out your fellow speakers by name and publicly tell them how much you are looking forward to meeting them and hearing their presentations. There is no better way for you to grow your network, publicize your presentation, and get other high-profile speakers to promote you.

2.) Create a Twitter List of all of the event speakers, sponsors and principals, taking every [appropriate] opportunity to mention them in your posts leading up to the event. This fast, easy, and free tactic will be enthusiastically supported by the event organizers. Why? Because it promotes and drives attendance to their event.

3.) Create and register — using Twubs and/or #tagdef – a hashtag for your presentation.

4.) Share the story of creating your presentation with your audience. Crowdsource. Test ideas, preview content, and engage your audience before they even leave home.

5.) Join – or create, if the event organizers have not yet already done so – a group for the event on LinkedIn and/or Eventbrite.

6.) Upload a relevant and visually compelling (critical!) cover page for your presentation on Slideshare as soon as possible, letting people know you will upload the final presentation to the same URL after the event. Unlike YouTube (Hey YouTube, you listening? We want this feature!), Slideshare allows you to update your presentations after uploading them, keeping the same URL and analytics/view counts.

7.) Create a trip (even if the event is within walking distance of your home) for the event on social network TripIt.

8.) Find out in advance how (and if) the event organizers are going to capture, record, and share your presentation. The organizers may record audio (content you can share via your website and iTunes), or video (content you can share via your website and YouTube channel), or both. If the organizers have no plans to record your presentation, then consider making alternate arrangements to do so well in advance of the big day.

9.) Do a full simultweeting dry run BEFORE you go to the event. What is simultweeting? Simultweeting is pre-writing tweets summarizing the content on each slide of your presentation deck. Each time you advance the slide of your presentation, your pre-written tweet for that page will automatically be tweeted out to your followers. Is this cool? Yes. Must you absolutely, positively do a full start-to-finish dry-run of this in advance of your event to ensure you have it set up correctly? YES! It’s geeky, but it’s also a guaranteed “wow” factor.  There are several easy-to-use free software tools available to help you simultweet, whether you prefer to present with Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote.

DEEP DIVE: The How’s and Why’s of Simultweeting

In the three years since simultweeting began, it has become an extremely valuable, though not yet widespread, presentation tool.

Put simply, it is a co-publishing tactic that allows you to squeeze every possible drop of social juice out of the investment you are making to create and deliver outstanding content. What’s more, simultweeting allows you to provide your in-person and online audiences with interactive play-by-play ”coverage” of your presentation. It’s a bit like the audio commentaries you get as extras on DVDs (remember those?), but it has even more impact because it shares what you are saying as you say it with everyone everywhere, encouraging them to join in on the conversation.

However, simultweeting isn’t just about engagement. It also helps when you present difficult or sensitive content. How? Simultweeting enables you to get your content out in your own words – ahead of the responses and reactions of the media, critics, analysts, and sign language and foreign language interpreters.

If at all possible, don’t just simultweet, but actively listen to the conversation. To do this, you may want to consider having a trusted colleague monitor your backchannel – people’s responses to your presentation via social media.

Having someone be your eyes and ears is a great way to glean real-time intelligence that you can then incorporate into your presentation while you are still presenting. Should you speed up or slow down? Are there items that need further explanation? Are there specific questions you should address? Having a trusted colleague watch your back – your backchannel – frees you to focus on your in-person audience and helps you to ensure the message received by your in-person and online audiences is the message delivered.

Increasingly, speakers [like it or not] are having their backchannels projected on stage on monitors or screens to encourage the in-person audience’s participation in the presentation AND to increase the online reach of the event. While incredibly powerful, it requires more up-front planning, including rehearsals. (Do NOT skip these!) Work closely with the event organizers if you want to do this. Also, reach out to other speakers who have done this previously for their advice. None of us learned how to manage our online backchannel when we learned public speaking.

Co-Publishing Checklist: The Day of the Event!

The big day has finally arrived, and you are ready to rock and roll. While you will have a million things on your plate, here is my checklist of the items to do before you take the stage, podium, or milk crate.

1.) The moment you arrive, check into the event on Foursquare and Facebook.

2.) Have your trusted colleague take photos of you presenting for all of your social networks – not just for Flickr and Pinterest.

3.) Share geotagged Instagram photos that show you with other people at the event. This will encourage the people with you in the photographs to share them with their audiences on their social networks, thus further growing your network.
Tweet – with the geolocation feature on your mobile device turned on – so people know you are tweeting “live” from the event.

4.) At the beginning of your presentation, tell your audience your presentation hashtag, and that you have included it in the bottom right-hand corner of your slides as a reminder.

5.) Take a deep breath. Smile. And knock your audience’s socks off!

Co-Publishing Checklist: When You Walk Off That Stage

You wowed your audience and even became a trending topic on Twitter, but you’re not done yet. This is where co-publishing really kicks in, and adds the greatest value.

1.) Upload the final version of your presentation to your Slideshare account. Take full advantage of the opportunity to add in anything you may have missed, or additional detail that will increase understanding. Consider foreign language versions of your slides and/or adding your own voice narration. And don’t forget to add your name as one of the keywords! Show me Ken!: Slideshare.

2.) “Photo-ize” your presentation. Save each slide of your presentation as a .jpg file, and upload it to your Flickr and Pinterest accounts. Show me Ken!: Flickr and Pinterest.

3.) “Video-ize” your presentation. Convert your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation to a .wmv, .mov, or .mp4 file with voice narration [or appropriate royalty-free music] and upload it to your YouTube channel (personally, I’m a big fan of using Animoto to video-ize presentation slides). Add foreign language captions to your video in the languages of your audience. But don’t stop there. Also add English-language captions to make your video fully accessible to people who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing, to remove inadvertent communications barriers AND to increase your SEO. Captions tip? http://UniversalSubtitles.org is the best free tool I have used. Show me Ken!: YouTube.

4.) Add links and annotations as appropriate to your YouTube videos to help people discover your other relevant YouTube content. Extra SEO credit? Upload a transcript to further increase your SEO. And it’s not extra work if you’ve already added captions, as the transcript can be your captions file!

5.) Upload your photos from the event, and the video of you presenting. Don’t forget to include full metadata (your name, the conference name, your presentation name, the names of people who were also captured in the footage, your keywords, etc.) for every photo/video you upload.

6.) Upload the audio recording/podcast of your presentation to your iTunes channel. Show me Ken!: iTunes (.mp3 file download).

7.) Write a post-mortem blog post about your participation in the event, appropriately addressing all backchannel feedback.

8.) Socially thank the event sponsors, and send follow-up social posts (with the most relevant URLs) to the people you connected with at the event. Remember to connect with everyone you met on LinkedIn and your other social networks as appropriate.

9.) Finally, upload your presentation to your Google+ account. Whew! Show me Ken!: Google+.

As I said at the start, pick and choose the items on these three co-publishing checklists that work best for you. You do not have to do everything on each of the three lists in order to have a big impact. And yes, these checklists work just as well for your product launches, press releases, and blog posts as they do for your presentations!

Co-publishing your marketing content on your different social networks will maximize the ROI of your investment in creating this content. But there is an even bigger benefit than increasing the reach, understanding and retention of your in-person and online audiences. Sharing your expertise — before, during, and after the event — will establish you as a powerful voice in your industry AND one that must be included in [internal company and external] conversations about your topic and your company. Now, GO KNOCK THEIR SOCKS OFF!

What additional social items do YOU have on your event checklist?  How do YOU use social media to leverage your investment in the creation of marketing content, including your participation in events?  Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Editor’s note: Do you have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question with the hashtag “#DearKen”.  All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.