Why pay for an ethical seo consultant or social media marketing?

Why pay for a social media consultant or and seo? What value or ROI do they deliver?

This is a question that small business owners and big brands in the Fortune 500 are perplexed with.
Here what I believe you are paying for:

• What to do and how to coordinate it
• How to set it up and maintain it
• How to structure it strategically
• How to see the systems and trends at work
• How to make smart media buys and how to save your money
• How to work efficiently and productively
• Overall to save you time and to ramp up your campaign far quicker
• Avoid marketing missteps and avoid misconceptions.

So why pay for social media marketing and ethical seo?

21 Different Types of Social Media Consultants and Specialists

21 Different Types of Social Media Consultants and Specialists:

You may be wondering or perhaps you’ve even been asked, “What does it mean to be a social media consultant?” or “What does a social media consultant do?” I was participating on the forums at Social Media Jobs and someone asked for some job advice and so I thought I would breakdown the 20 unique niche aspects of social media:

• Social media: marketing and bookmarking (Digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx)
• Social media: Online PR/Blogger relations
• Social media: Community Building and management
• Social media: Link baiting/Viral (shudder)
• Search engine optimization (onsite architechture, link building, seo copywriting, small business/local, international, etc..)
• Pay per click advertising (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, niche engines)
• Online copywriting and Content development (have 2 diff. purposes, but can be grouped)
• Conversion Optimization
• Social Media Metrics
• E-mail marketing
• Wigets
• Social Networking (Linked in, Facebook, )
• Video (video blogging and all the breakdowns of television video production: writing, editing, production, ads, marketing, etc)
• Mobile (mobile marketing and mobile application development)
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• User Centric Design /Usability (even social design)
• Web design and blog design
• Web development + web application development (Php, Ruby on Rails, etc..)
• Ad buying in social networks, blogs, and podcasts. Google is big in the ad buying space too.
• Affiliate marketing

This list is far from conclusive, if you think of one please feel free to leave it in the comments. I know Jeremiah wrote a post on this and Chris had some excellent analysis on the issue, I’ll at those soon. I think project management and outsourcing and perhaps even photography also become a de facto part of the equation.

Guide for Finding and Hiring a Social Media Agency

Social Media Consulting and Search Engine Optimization Company Buying Guide

Social media is a great way to connect with customers, but you’ve got to make sure that the firm you pick can perform successfully.

What are you buying when you hire a social media marketing company?

• Knowledge base
• Perspective
• Creative
• Experience
• Connections

So, what do you want to look for when picking a social marketing agency?

• Successful projects
• Ethical basis
• Strategic and creative edge
• Firm knowledge of search engine optimization
• Affordable and high return on investment
• Analytics and Landing page optimization
• Integrated offerings

What do you think you should look for when hiring a social media expert?

Creative Fusion Media provides social media consulting services and ethical and affordable search engine optimization solutions to innovative companies and forward thinking non-profits.

Nashville Social Media

Strategy + Friendly Southern Hospitality Meets Social Media:
The Nashville social media, technology, and startup community continues to build and amaze me. As social media platforms from Facebook and Linked In to blogging and Twittering mainstream, Nashville’s technology and creative sectors will take their true place as a source of international creative capital. Humans reaching are increasingly reaching out now out of a simple desire for self-expression and to create more authentic online conversation.

Need social media strategy or consulting?
If you are a small business, non-profit organization, or church interested in getting involved with social media, please contact me via email or at (615) 974-9662.

Also, if you are interested in learning about the social media space in Nashville, I would be glad to help connect with the right people.

Guide to Hiring Ethical Social Media Marketing Services

Toward Ethical New Media Consulting:

Have you seen the latest Mac ads? Its witty and effective. The ad was created in response to the media and advertising campaigns by Microsoft featuring a diverse group of passionate Microsoft users.

Customer Centric Business:
I think this response ad gets to a basic premise of business and business ethics: that you should improve your product and improve your relationships before dropping a bunch of money into commercial advertising. To me that is the basis of customer centric products and great marketing.

The Social Media Revolution:
The rise of social media allows you to invest money in relationship and lifestyle marketing, rather than putting another unwanted billboard in their face. Because that is what we need more of in an age of ENRON, Fanny May, and Wall Street bailouts.

How do you hire ethical social media marketing?
Tara Hunt recently wrote a fantastic piece on hiring social media consultants (SMC). Tara’s piece delves into several important issues in social media communications:

Lastly, an SMC you want to hire practices ethical marketing. Much related to the point about having influence in a community, ethical marketing practices maintain and build integrity within communities. …Future campaigns will be looked upon as suspect and time and money spent will be for naught.

She then highlights several other considerations when picking a social media marketing service providers:

• How much influence does he/she have in online communities?
• Does he/she understand market trends? What kind of feedback does he/she give on your product? Are there good ideas in there?
• Does he/she practice ethical marketing? If he/she suggests that you can pay people to digg up an item, probably not.

Other than that list, an SMC has to understand how to use the tools, know how to measure impact and how to get creative to get through the noise that is the thousands of campaigns already inundating people in online communities. But it isn’t necessarily getting through that counts. It is how that message is received on the other side. That outcome is going to mean results or rejection.

I think Tara’s piece is on-point on hiring a social media specialist and even has insightful principles for finding and hiring any variety of professional consulting service. For more info on ethical search engine optimization and white hat seo principles

Thoughts? How do you find and hire the best in social media marketing services?

What a social media consultant does | Or Why Hire a Blog Coach?

What to Look for in Social Media Consultant:

I recently ran across a pretty informative post by Michael Martine that I expanded upon here about the nature of what a blog consultant (also called a social media consultant) does exactly:

• Choosing a topic for your blog– Its easy to get sucked into talking about everything under the sun on your blog. Generally, this strategy is a dead end for most blogs. Helping you isolate the topic(s) you want to talk about and the audience you want to talk to for your blog.

• Choosing a design (theme, template, whatever) for your blog– Help provide a $300-500 design option as opposed to a $1,500 to $3,000 (Net savings = about $1,500- $2,000). And helping you choose between WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, and the rest.

• Determining the objectives of the blog– Helping create some strategic goals so that you can assess the return on investment from your blog.

• Understanding the blog’s intended audience– helping tap into your audience needs, interests, and passions.

• Advise on or perform blog setup operations– Help walk you through the process of setting up a blog or actually setting it up themselves.

• Advise on or perform theme and plugin operations– Helping you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of widgets and blog extras.

• Creating custom blog designs– Help and advise you to help present the best image for your blog design.

• Working with popular third-party enhancements, such as FeedBurner and Technorati– Helping you with the ins and outs of the technology that enables blogging to be so transformative.

I will add four more of my own suggestions to the list:

• Experienced Advice and Guidance– Advises individuals how to avoid bad internet karma.

• Business Blog Productivity– Help you get the maximum bang for the buck and stop you from spinning your wheels with little progress. Provides time saving tactics so you get to focus on what you do best.

• Professional Relationship Builder– Helps connect new business bloggers to online influentials, so that they can have readers early on. (Otherwise, you’re in danger of talking to yourself and the crickets)

• Strategic Communications Advisor– Helps business target the long tail of search, so that people actually read their blog.

So what does a social media coach do? Got any others?