The Social Media Policy I Followed to Drive Over 36 Million Pageviews

Secondly, brands should identify all points of private contact on social platforms. So on Twitter you could click the link on their profile to find contact information on their blog or Facebook profile. Or if you follow each other, use the Direct Messaging feature to work out partnerships, guest posts, bank robberies, terrorist attacks black mail with sex tapes and S&M photography of him getting whipped by Ricky Martin in a executioner’s mask.

Thirdly, study popular sections of the social platform like the Digg front page and Twitter’s trending topics. For other digital networks where popular sections are not as obvious, Google the name of the social platform plus phrase “case study,” or a names of popular tactics of which you already know. So when you see how Moonfruit’s Twitter contest got a subscriber to build a private website for an abortion clinic for nuns who bathe Pope Benedict. You could hold a contest in response, which allows participants to guess in which Vatican bath house the Pope impregnated those nuns.

Optionally, you could identify influential top users who are also interested in your industry’s topics. You use the private messaging methods you learned in the 2nd step to reach out to them and get them to participate in your campaigns, which are composed similarly to popular campaigns you researched in the 3rd step.

So when you see a viral story on how Sarah Palin is being offered $25k by marijuana advocates to speak at their next event; hold a webinar with Michael Phelps announcing that he’ll do it for free as long he could give away his new line of Phelps Olympic Bongs. Follow the webinar on a tweet chat with a #hashtag called #olympicbluntologist and you’ll get weed smokers jumping in the conversation from every staircase on the planet.

From New York, “Yo, I got this new line of gold toothbrushes to go with that gold medal, baby; check it out!” #olympicbluntologist from the dirty south, “hey, playa; I got some hydro soaked in redbull that’ll give you fins, baby” #olympicbluntologist from Jamaica, “hey ya blood clot, send tree a them bong to Kingston” from Los Angeles, “sign my petition to get a law passed to lets us pay for marijuana with Medicaid.” #olympicbluntologist

Now, I know most of you will say how could I use a three-part system to master any of the thousands of digital communities on which my brand’s target market may or may not be present? Remember, this is simply a start. Ultimately, you have to complete your custom social media engagement strategy. I could tell you everything I have done to leverage social media platforms for my benefit, but odds are that everything I have done wont work for you unless you put some work in to learn how to use your tools; different rules for different tools, different strokes for different folks, different personal brands, different organizations, different professional brands, different target communities, different lingerie size.

I mean you could take bits and pieces of my tactics, but it won’t pop without a piece of your person involved. Michael Jordan can tell you exactly what he does to slam dunk a basketball, but that doesn’t mean that Shaquille O’Neill will be picking your pubic hair out of his teeth anytime soon.

You have to develop your own expert proficiency using the digital tools your target community employs. Now its in style to knock anybody who calls them self a social media expert;

“oh if somebody tells you they’re a social media expert run the other way until you’re eating scorpion shish ke bobs in Beijing.”

Let me tell you something, as I break it down for you on your hooker stop of the information super highway, if you are not a social media expert, you’d better go hire one. Not just because he screams that he is the social media Neo: the One, the prophecy states will kill the PCs and have humans make slaves of Terminator robots and have them chop onions at 50 slices a second that are run on Mac OS XX aka Cheetarah; but somebody has actually pushed the decimal point to the right a few digits on a bank account in the name of the organization with which he has worked.

But such expertise is not the only requirement; there is another. Never forget your ultimate objective, no matter how much of a tech ninja your mugshot profile on the FBI hacker watchlist says you are; you are communicating with people, not direct messages, not tweets, not @replies, not diggs, not stumbles, not upvotes… people. Just because you know how to dial a phone does not mean you could hypnotize somebody into stripping butt naked and sliding down razors into a pool of alcohol or buy your product or service. Think of a Direct Message as a speed dial and the Stumbleupon share feature as a conference call on your speakerphone. Like the phone, these digital platforms are mere tools; you wont get the girl to come over to your house just because you have a 10th generation droid phone, unless you can convince her she wont throw up and pass out after smelling the skid marks on those crappy speedos in the hamper and that you’ll keep the rats from nibbling on her toe jam.

Lo and behold the social trinity; the roadmap that I have followed to driver over 36 million pageviews to web properties worldwide; a lot of which for search traffic that helped me close a few million in back end sales; a media conglomerate with which I worked can account for 10% selling ad space at $70 cpm; $280k in four months time.