This is a sequel to my post announcing the launch of the new Directis.ca.

No wonder people think social media is too confusing. To do it well, really well, in a way that actually supports positive results for your business, is complex and a bit exhausting. I say this after spending the past three-four days preparing this website and (today) trying to get as many social media integration tools as I can set up to maximize my leverage from the site.

Here’s a list (as far as I can remember) of all the ways this website is, or will be, integrated into social media:

• AddThis social marketing tool at bottom of each content piece – this is a WordPress plugin, easily installed, but you have to sign up for an AddThis account to track when/how people are using the little gadget. Another account.
• WP-to-Twitter plugin installed to allow me to instantly tweet about blog posts on this site, from selected/limited categories.
• MailChimp and AutoChimp plugins. The first is the sign-up widget for the newsletter, and the second is a script which automatically adds anyone who signs up for membership on this website (to download premium content, for example) to my newsletter list. I didn’t have this set up on the previous website and it was kind of a dead-end for making connections with people who are obviously interested in what I have to say.
• Set up Twitter account just for Directis, to keep work tweets separate from personal tweets, and so I can better analyze the business ROI from my Twitter activities. I use Hootsuite for tweeting so I can push content to both Twitter accounts simultaneously, if I so choose, or reserve content for just one account.
• Put Facebook and Twitter badges on the Contact Us page sidebar.
• Set up Feedburner to provide an RSS feed and stats for posts just from the blog categories on the site, not the other categories. This involved just a little bit of re-coding of the link on Feedburner, as there didn’t seem to be a WordPress plugin for controlling which categories go into your RSS feed.
• Set up Google Analytics tracking code on the new site – I am having problems with this as Google Analytics doesn’t seem to recognize the tracking code on this site, even though I have triple-checked it is the right stuff in the right place. I’m going to sleep on that one, I think.
• Still to do: figure out how to tie in LinkedIn and Meetup to the site, if applicable.
• Still to do: make sure Facebook is importing my blog posts from the new site properly (it was importing PictureYourMeeting.com before)
• Still to do: Set up a proper 301 redirect for PictureYourMeeting, which is being retired.

I’m not just doing this all randomly, either, which is a good thing because it’d be a darn fine waste of time if I was. See, back in July I did a wee strategic planning session for myself (a visual planning retreat, in fact) and created a map of how all my conversations with the world (in a business sense) fit into various levels of engagement and interactions, with the ultimate goal of engaging the right kinds of customers in a business relationship which will provide value for both of us.

What I recognized was that I had a lot of the pieces of social media, but they weren’t connected to each other, and there isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle everything manually. So hopefully this website redesign and overhaul will improve a few aspects that were weak, and give me a platform to do more effective marketing (both traditional and social media).