As I mentioned, social media has it’s place and it works better for certain services, products and ventures, especially those with a worldwide, online emphasis.

If you were to try something like this with the particular client you mentioned, no doubt it would be a bolt-on to the more direct type of campaign you mentioned.

Sorry I didnt respond yesterday but I was tied up in a conference.

I could give you my ideas on how to work your Mortgage client into Twitter but instead am going to show you how others are currently using it…as found from a quick serch on “mortgage”

http://twitter.com/jryedinak/statuses/834044921
http://twitter.com/wotarticle/statuses/833998226
and my favorite
http://twitter.com/mortgageporter/statuses/833992572

One thing to keep in mind is that Twitter is free so there shouldn’t be any fear to get active on it.

Saul Colt
Head of Magic
FreshBooks

Micro-blogging can have an impact as a standalone effort, but I really see it as a far more powerful relationship building and distribution tool when combined with a broader social media effort, minimally, with blogging.

What might this look like?

Step 1 – Have them blog about personal finance/refinancing strategies in the current climate. Once a week is fine, as long as it’s packed with really good info or set up as an Ask The Banker The Truth About Financing Your Home blog.

Step 2 – The blog is the foundation of their social media strategy, there home base. Plus, it will show the big personal finance blogger that they are interested in giving to the community and joining in the conversation, which will be really important for later steps. Bloggers and microbloggers don’t like people or entities who use social media purely as a tool for promotion.

Step 3 – Access to influencers strategy – Find out who the top 25 personal finance bloggers are, subscribe to their blogs and comment. Find out which ones are on twitter and follow them. Become known to them and offer value, engage them in conversation. Over time, there’s a good chance they’ll begin to evangelize your value to their followers and subscribers.

Step 4 – Direct to customer strategy – Search tweetscan.com and summize for mentions of the words mortgage, montana, refinance, etc. Standard keyword stuff. Find out who mentioned them and what the context was. Follow those people where appropriate. Respond to their mentions where appropriate. Do this every day. Subscribe to every ffed you can find with relevant info and share high-value snippets and links with followers. Use your twitter feed to (a) share breaking industry news, (b) share blog posts, (c) ask questions, (d) announce special twitter-only/blog only offers. These are just a few ideas, but you get the point.

Will this be as effective or yield as immediate returns as a direct response package or IM campaign? Dunno. It pays the greatest dividends when the market is not very narrowly defined by geographic limitations. So, a national mortgage company, could be more rewarding.

These are just a handful of ideas off the top of my head, but I hope they show the relationship-building potential of micro-blogging, especially in the context of a broader social media effort.

So, what do you think?

Saul, Jonathan: OK, I have one client who provides mortgage refinancing to homeowners with good credit scores in Montana. How would I use Twitter to market their service?

I don’t want to give away all my secrets when it comes to using Twitter but I will say we use it the following ways:

Listening to our customers
talking to our customers
holding contests
announcing new blog posts
and our most favorite….telling our customers thatcwe love them.

I would show you an example but I am on my iPhone and can’t cut and paste anything

Saul Colt
Head of Magic
FreshBooks

If you’re working with entrepreneurs, there’s a lot of them around on Twitter. If you’re selling anything, it’s a great way to follow up with people in real time.

Just for kicks, here’s a dozen or so other specific marketing uses for Twitter:
http://juhotunkelo.com/?p=45

The Twubble with Twitter!

I love it!

Actually, I’m in the middle of studying all this social stuff right now and coming to some preliminary conclusions little by little.

If you go too far left of center in an effort to get backlinks from social media like Twitter, you’ll find yourself in gaming-the-system territory.

If you go too far right of center in an effort to become a presence, you’ll find yourself back in high school trying to win a popularity contest.

But in the middle …

Well, it seems to me that what you’ve got there is basically a way of “automating” word-of-mouth referrals. And wouldn’t that be nice to tap into!

Follow that notion just a little bit further and you have essentially the equivalent of the Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) for demographics beyond your wildest dreams. It just hasn’t been quantified yet.

As to writing for it …

I’ve had some requests to write some stuff for some social media with the idea that it will create backlinks for a marketer’s primary blog.

Although it will certainly accomplish that, what he’s not seeing is that the thing you write to support the blog must also itself be supported with still other things you write and those things must be supported with still other things and so on.

Without such support — without bookmarks and posts and lenses and modules and so on — the first thing you wrote falls out of favor and off the SERPS.

HubPages, for example, actually inserts a nofollow tag into your hubpage if your “score” falls below 50 (out of a possible 100). And the only way to avert this fate is to actively “promote” your hubpage with more articles and other social media activity. Which itself has to be promoted!

Still, there’s a whiff of change on the wind that would seem to indicate that if you produce “meaty, focused writing with a point, opinion, purpose, and attitude that speaks to users and makes them ‘vote’ for or link to it,” the day is coming when the search engines themselves will reward you for that:

“The internet writing market is oversaturated; you can get content anywhere for any price, even decently written content; writing on the web is fully commoditized and has created an environment of perfect competition that is great for buyers and dismal for writers.

“This is good news for writers who value quality and have long been frustrated at the proliferation of bad writing on the web. While this in no way means that poor content will stop being profitable, it does mean that a) higher quality content will become more rewarded than poor content and b) the more user’s give value (e.g. via links, diggs, mentions) to an article in the near future, the better it will rank in the search engines.” — SocialMediaSystems

Regards, Elizabeth …

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