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There are many ways to acquire information on the topic of social media ranging from blogs to books to Twitter. As part of our efforts to aggregate useful resources for Online Marketing Blog readers on topics related to digital PR, search and social marketing, we bring you this fine list of the best podcasts on social media. 

Where did this list come from? I started out with a small list of my own and then reached out to the 5000+ people following @leeodden on Twitter as well as direct queries to some of the most respected social media marketing and public relations professionals on the web. The same podcasts were recommended repeatedly. 

Of course it’s not really an official OMB “best” list until readers vote for their favorites. Please have a listen to the podcasts below and then take a moment and pick your favorite podcast on social media in our poll at the bottom of the list. 

SocialMedia.biz - JD Lasica runs one of the oldest blogs on social media and produces a nice collection of videos and podcasts on social web platforms and people. (Subscribe)

For Immediate Release (FIR) - Every Monday and Thursday, UK based Neville Hobson and California based Shel Holtz come together for this well produced podcast covering PR and technology topics including social media issues and news of the day.   (Subscribe)

Marketing over Coffee -  This highly regarded podcast by marketing veterans John Wall and Christopher Penn covers both traditional and new media marketing/social media. (Subscribe)

Talk Social News - Kipp Bodnar and Wayne Sutton create and publish this weekly podcast about news and innovations in social media through interviews with industry leaders and also share their own opinions.  (Subscribe)

Buzz Marketing for Technology - As Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint, Paul Dunay has a lot to say about B2B marketing and social media through how to and interview podcasts.  (Subscribe)

Managing the Gray - C.C. Chapman produces this marketing podcast focusing on new media, social marketing and PR with a mix of tips, insights and occasional interviews. (Subscribe)

Marketing Voices - Jennifer Jones runs a marketing consulting firm and has one of the few podcasts dedicated to social media and does so for Podtech. Her podcast  talks about social media and how it is impacting marketing today through a series of insightful interviews.  (Subscribe)

6 Pixels of Separation - Digital marketing rockstar Mitch Joel gives a “marketing wake up call” with with his expertise and insightful interviews on many social media centric topics from blogging to crowdsourcing.    (Subscribe)

Across the Sound - Joseph Jaffe produces a weekly podcast that discusses the world of new marketing, media and PR. (Subscribe) 

Marketing Edge Podcast - Albert Maruggi of Twin Cities based Provident Partners operates one of the longest running podcasts on marketing and PR but the focus is definitely on social media. (Subscribe)

Find and Convert - Bernie Borges publishes one of the few podcasts that combines social media and search engine marketing.  (Subscribe)

New Comm Road - Bryan Person’s podcast about the best tools and tactics in new media (Subscribe)

Dishy Mix - Susan Bratton interviews successful media and internet execs, many of which are involved with social media.  (Subscribe)

Be the Voice -  David Spark produces a very interesting mix of interviews with social media luminaries and thought leaders.  (Subscribe)

User Friendly Thinking - Bizzuka CEO John Munsell and marketing director Paul Chaney discuss topics congruent with their company services including web design, content management, Internet marketing and social media through discussion and interviews. (Subscribe) 

Inside PR - Toronto PR professionals Terry Fallis and David Jones along with appearances by Martin Waxman and Julie Rusciolelli combine expertise and wit to create this public relations podcast that focuses on their observations of and experiences with social media in the PR world. (Subscribe)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

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Building and designing a successful social media campaign can be a lot like designing and building a skyscraper. You need to research the materials, lay a strong foundation, and continue regular maintenance to ensure your building, or social media promotion, doesn’t collapse.

In Understanding the Complex Social Media Marketing Playing Field, moderator Joe Laratro led a panel of social media marketing architects who shared their social media design tips.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, gave an overview of some of the various materials an online marketer can use when constructing a social media plan. Michael Gray, president of Atlas Web Service, created a strategic design plan for building successful social promotions. Cameron Olthuis, CEO of Factive Media, outlined best practices for interacting with social communities in ten steps. Neil Patel, CTO of Advantage Consulting Services, Inc., ended the session with a controversial look at “the dark side” of social media marketing.

Building Blocks

The strongest social media plan involves a mix of the below materials.

• Democratized Social News sites These tools allow online marketers to interact with a community by voting on content and submitting their own content to be voted on by others. Examples include Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and Newsline.
• Editor-Controlled News Sites Sites like Yahoo! Buzz accept and display user-submitted content that fits in with their editorial guidelines. These sites generally have a high profile and can generate huge results.
• Social Sites These sites are a great opportunity to build and interact with a network as well as publish original content in a variety of forms including links, news, photos, videos, and more. Examples include Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn.
• Micro-Blogging Sites On Twitter, Plurk, and Friendfeed, you can submit interesting content in 140 characters or less. This can act as an instant megaphone, allowing you to broadcast strong points of interest to a large audience.
• Social Bookmarking Sites Marketers can submit interesting URLs to sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious and Blinklist to drive traffic to specific pages. These sites are also good for research in terms of finding out what type of content interests your audience.
• Social Content Sharing Sites Youtube, Flickr, Yelp and DeviantArt all allow you to post specific types of content, from video to photos to reviews. These sites can help marketers build brand messaging and reach new, relevant audiences, and can also show up in universal search results.
• Wiki Sites Wikis are another good way to dominate the search results, as they often rank highly. Use wikis to post original content and edit existing content while reaching a new audience. Wikipedia is the penultimate example of a wiki site.
• Social Question & Answer Sites Marketers can both post questions to other users and answer existing questions on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers. This can grow brand reputation and authority and is also a good way to conduct audience research.
• Niche Sites Social sites that target a very specific niche, such as Corked for wine enthusiasts, allow marketers to reach a highly relevant audience.

Blueprints

Creating a successful social media campaign requires a well-thought out and detailed plan. Take the proper steps to ensure your social promotions are sturdy and effective.

• Background Research Find out where your audience is online. Look at the content they themselves are submitting on these sites for ideas of what interests them. Also, identify thought leaders to target in order to spread your message to a broad audience.
• Brainstorming Generate as many ideas for promotions as possible. Look at what has worked previously and build upon that without copycatting. Filter your ideas wisely in order to find something that will feasibly work for you.
• Idea Research Follow up on your ideas to see if they will work based upon what is already happening in the social media you are targeting. Be flexible and adapt your ideas if something won’t work. Don’t force a bad idea.
• Story Production and Formatting Ensure you’re writing in a viral writing style. Avoid marketing speak and obvious sales-oriented messaging. Use videos and photos to enrich your stories.
• Schedule and Launch Know the times in the day, week, etc. your audience interacts on social sites. Tie promotions in to holidays and major events to generate timely interest.

Building a Foundation

Interacting with a social community is the key to building a strong foundation for your social media marketing campaign. “It’s called social for a reason,” Cameron Olthuis points out. Be sure you are socializing within a community and following its guidelines.

• Network & Be Social Make new friends, join groups and generally participate in the community. This should be a continual process.
• Be Genuine, Authentic and On Target Stick with what your audience wants.
• Provide Value Give users something they can use, in the form of advice, expert tips, inside information or something entertaining.
• Let People Act Naturally Allow users to play with your content and have fun. Don’t force a specific interaction.
• Listen and Respond Look for both positive and negative reactions by monitoring content once it’s live. Respond to users and improve content accordingly.

The Fake Façade
Neil Patel outlined what he calls “The Dark Side” of social media marketing with some less-than-wholesome tips and tricks marketers can use to generate social media results

• Screwing People Impacting a competitors reputation by submitting useless content from a competitor’s site to social news or bookmarking.
• Social Media Rings Creating a ring of people to vote up your content. This quickly becomes a “dark” practice when abused through overuse.
• Social Media Applications Tube Increaser and Twitter Friend Adder allow marketers to automate adding large quantities of friends to their accounts.
• Forced Actions Patel mentioned iframes code, which is useful for ‘forcing’ people to automatically subscribe to content such as your YouTube channel just by visiting.
• Blog Links Certain blog formats, such as WordPress, can be hacked, allowing marketers to insert their links.

Patel also advised visiting several “light” reading resources, including SEOmoz.org, Techipedia.com and our very own TopRank Online Marketing Blog.

Create a holistic social media campaign by ensuring you’ve put time and effort into the three major stages outlined in this session: the proper building blocks, a strategic blueprint and a solid foundation. Continue routine maintenance by building your profile and interacting regularly within social communities. Conduct regular inspections of your progress by searching for your content on Technorati, Google Blogsearch, search.twitter.com and other monitoring resources. And while going to “The Dark Side” may have its appeal, following social media marketing best practices should generate solid results.

Check back with the TopRank Marketing Blog for more on Pubcon, and don’t miss photos from the conference at TopRank on Flickr.

Sponsored By: DMA Workshop on Social Media Marketing Build a business case, strategy & tactics - Dec 4-5 NYC

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1. Geeking with Jonathan, no wait, “Greek-ing with Jonathan Mendez with the speaker, the listener and the argument in “Lessons in Ad Persuasion from Aristotle“.

2. Proactive Profile Linking. Social profiles and profiles of any kind can provide benefits as part of a Search Engine Reputation Management effort since they can rank well on brand and company names. Profiles can also provide a source of crawlable links. It may serve a company well to secure the profile names before the competition does. Two tools that will quickly check user names at multiple sites include: usernamecheck.com and the social media keyword check tool from Solo SEO.

3. Opportunistic traffic fishing. It’s common knowledge that advertising, editorial/media and even trending topics on the social web drive search traffic. However, SEO efforts with content and links take time to see results. Or do they?  Combine keyword based social media monitoring (blogs, forums, MSM, Twitter, video, etc) with an authoritative blog, and you have an on-demand traffic source. When a topic relevant to your business and/or target market is warming up, publish corresponding optimized content via the channels picking it up.  High profile blogs, optimized press releases, social news and Twitter are examples of quick ways to distribute search friendly content. The key is to monitor, have channels for promotion and the ability to act quickly. If nothing else, you can use PPC ads to capture such traffic. This tip inspired by “Use the News for Cheap Pay Per Click Traffic“.

4. How should your company engage the social web? Take a look at these 237 examples of brands using social media with tactics including: blogging, social networks, online video, podcasting, widgets, crowdsourcing, microblogging, photo sharing, virtual worlds, wikis, blogger relations, social bookmarking, social news, brand monitoring, discussion boards, social PR and user ratings/reviews.

5. Directories have been a toss up but now Google’s shying away. Google dropped ODP and Yahoo directories from their published guidelines. “Directory Links Next? Google Drops Yahoo and ODP from Guidelines“.

6. Always add Google Analytics campaign tracking information to your Tiny URL when promoting specific content on Twitter- from “Twitter and Google Analytics: What to Track“.

7. Need to find links without no follow? Do follow search engine.

8. Objections to mobile marketing? People DO search and buy on the mobile web and with the number of cell phones outnumbering computers it’s only going to get better. “Common Mobile SEO Concerns and How to Overcome Them“.

9. Now that she’s left Forrester, what’s Charlene Li up to? She’s started a new company called Altimeter Group and blogging at The Altimeter.

10. Web analytics guru Eric T. Peterson and my pal Joseph Carrabis have posted the product of their collaboration on measuring visitor engagement in a new white paper, “Measuring the Immeasurable - Visitor Engagement” (pdf).

Sponsored By: TopRank Consulting Why settle for second best? Call TopRank SEO Experts: 877 872 6628

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