Social media and mobile marketing

April 11, 2010

in Mobile, Social Media

I would like to throw a little mobile marketing into the social media mix this month. After all, simple Darwinism applied to business thinking has proven how important it is to strive to keep ahead of the curve.

We should not ignore the impact that smartphones and social media are having on our lives. I for one probably use my smartphone more for web browsing, social networking, blogging and email beyond the workplace than I use my laptop.

Yes, this could well be early-adopter territory I’m speaking about but realistically I’m just one of 650 million people globally – according to eMarketer in March 2010 – who are now using their smartphones more and more for tasks such as email and social networking. This number is set to rocket due to the penetration of affordable smartphones within the market. Research from Comscore in December 2009 supports this theory – it found that 70 per cent of smartphone users have accessed email and 43 per cent have accessed social networks via their devices.

What is interesting is that email usage is up due to the social network usage on these devices. Research from ExactTarget has also discovered that social media and social networking have helped increase the use of email. The reason for this increase is that users of smartphones still want to keep in touch with their social network when ‘untethered’ and social networking sites use email and messaging as a way to encourage users to return.

Why convergence is key
It is not only important that we understand how new technologies affect our customers. At the same time we need to understand how they can be used to open up communication channels with them. This helps us to build stronger relationships, to attract new customers and to retain exisiting ones too.

Furthermore these technologies can complement one another, as the value of social media, mobile and indeed email combined can amount to a more successful campaign than when they are all executed individually, in silos. Here are a few key steps to take in order to optimise the success of integrated digital campaigns which include both mobile and social elements:

1. Make content mobile-accessible
First of all we should ensure that any digital content produced is accessible by all mainstream mobile devices. Many business decisions are made away from the office and as a result business persons use smartphone devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones and Android phones to access information.

2. Optimise your e-newsletters
It is also advisable to add in the functionality to share content through LinkedIn groups, Twitter and your community sites, wherever possible. If customers receive emails via smartphone devices they can immediately carry out an action to share your content with their own social network, thereby helping to increase word-of-mouth marketing. They can also be taken directly to your forum or group where they can comment instantly on a particular topic or seek peer reviews and support.

3. Encourage interactivity at events
At events, look to offer SMS short codes inviting prospects to text for more information on a product or service, or even quick response (QR) codes. An example would be to offer a prospect the option to text to receive the latest video of a product demonstration. When the prospect texts it then automatically prompts them to enter an email address to receive digital content, thus building data within your CRM. This digital content again should be optimised to be shared immediately amongst social networks.

4. Consider an app
Banks now offer smartphone applications to manage business account information. Why not look into developing a mobile application for your customers so that they can manage their own accounts and orders? Furthermore you can look to run offers, promotional or discount codes for products and services through this application to your loyal customers.

Staying up-to-date
Beyond the above-outlined campaign activities I have stumbled across a tool called Gist: (www.gist.com). This is an application which helps manage your inbox and social network accounts to give you the latest information about business contacts and their social interactions. This is available as a mobile application, so it is useful from a B2B sales perspective as before a meeting you can be instantly alerted to a prospect’s lifestream, which can help you to stay up-to-date, keep your interactions relevant, and build deeper relationships.

In the various ways outlined above, marketers can develop their knowledge of the use of smartphones, social networks and emails. By combining this with a greater understanding of how we can apply these tools and technologies to our businesses, hopefully we can all aim to develop more successful, integrated and profitable business processes and digital campaigns.

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Measuring social media ROI

March 20, 2010

in Metrics, Social Media, roi

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading voice within social media and digital marketing, predicted that 2010 would be the year that social media needs to prove itself. Well, here we are in 2010 and now is the time we start to look at whether or not our investment into social media activities has actually proved fruitful.

Some marketers may claim that measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing is difficult, and in all honesty it is, but it is possible and should be done. Marketers who claim it is impossible are more than likely those who do not look at effectively measuring the impact of any or all marketing activity. Typically those businesses who are already measuring the success of social media are those focused on putting in place metrics for activities such as enewsletters, CRM, collateral, sponsorship, advertising and have a strong understanding of return on investment.

ROI of social media
We can easily measure website visitors driven directly from social media channels such as blogs and YouTube videos by using metrics software such as Google Analytics. The growth over time for number of Twitter followers can be measured by tools such as Twitter Counter and Twitter Anaylser. Facebook Insights and Nielson’s BrandLift provides us with similar data. If the previous tools mentioned are already being employed to measure social media activity, then this is great. If not, you should look to introduce social media measurement to your team’s weekly or monthly processes.
But, the aforementioned are all non-financial impacts on a business. This is why C-level executives find it difficult to truly understand the value of PR, advertising and social media activity.

Oliver Blanchard, a business strategist, has looked in depth at the ROI of social media, supporting the theory that social media needs to be measured in direct relation to the resource allocation. For all the investment into blogs, communities, Facebook and Twitter it makes sound business sense that a company should see the direct impact these activities are having on the P&L. After all, being able to quantify the success of a campaign or activity in relation to beefing up the bottom line ensures that you are re-allocated budgets to carry out the activity in order to sustain and grow market share.

So, how can we show that our social media marketing activity is actually delivering direct value to the bottom line? Well, we start with the above process of measuring the activity using tools and processes but we also compare this activity to other business data.

What we should be looking to do is plot social media activity against sales revenue, transactions, new customers, loyalty data and market research. By comparing and contrasting both sets of data, we will be able to see a correlation between whether or not marketing activity that includes social media has actually helped increased sales before and after social media activity was introduced. If the correlation is positive, and sales activity has increased during the time that social media activity was introduced, then we can ascertain that certain social media activity has had a positive effect.

Tools such as BrandWatch and Radian6 can also be used to visualise the volume of conversation around your product and service and then you can overlay sales data over the same timeline to see whether or not social media conversation for example correlates with an increase in sales.

Deep data diving - This type of activity is incredibly effective as we are able to ‘deep dive’ into the data to understand particular conversations and the sentiment around your business and service at a particular time such as positive and negative sales spikes.

For marketers it is a case of applying a little more depth to your measurement. For example, measuring the conversations you have had on LinkedIn that culminated in forming a relationship with a prospective customer to that prospect actually becoming a customer and what additional value that has added to your bottom line.

Measuring the Twitter conversations that you have entered into that may have resulted in a new client relationship and sale. Measure the investment of time on Twitter to win that client in comparison to time spent at a networking event. Yes the measurement is more complex but it is quantifiable none the less.

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Social media marketing can put the trust back into business

January 31, 2010

in Crowdsourcing, Social Business, Social Media

I was inspired to write this post having read Mashable’s article on Pepsi executing social media marketing the right way.  The article was timely as it corresponded with my reading of Anthony Seldon’s book ‘Trust’.  I started thinking, maybe a little too deeply; how businesses such as Pepsi are leading the way to increase the trust relationship between customers and businesses.
 
In summary, as stated within Contagious: Pepsi’s Refresh Everything campaign has seen Pepsi pull its entire Superbowl budget - an amazing US$20 million - in favour of the CSR initiative.  This move will mark an end to their 23 year investment in the game. Refresh Everything launchedon January 13th 2010 to reward those with big ideas for improving communities across the areas of health, arts and culture, charity, ecology, neighbourhood and education.  From tomorrow, February 1st, the public will be able to cast their vote to decide the most worthy causes. Grants will then be awarded up to the total value of $1.3m per month over the course of the year.
The crowdsourcing activity Pepsi is undertaking is definitely not new, as local governments have already carried out similar initiatives to identify the most popular projects citizens would like to see activated.  Pepsi’s campaign just been extended to the digital realm as part of a campaign to tap into larger communities using social media tools and techniques. Geoff Northcott in his post identifies similar crowdsourcing cause marketing initiatives.  
 
So what has this got to do with trust? In short everything.  What Pepsi has done/doing, is to move away from the broadcast era of super bowl adverts into one of increased relationship building based on trust.  The campaign name ‘Refresh Everything’ signifies Pepsi’s transition from broadcast to networks.  In a time where America has completely lost trust in businesses, as illustrated in Edelman’s 2009 Trust Baromoter; building relationships based on trust makes economic sense.  According to Edelman’s mid year trust barometer report 2009, 77% of US consumers reported in 2009 that they had refused to buy a product or service from a distrusted service.  
 
Pepsi’s CSR initiative shows, that as an organisation they are taking the welfare of others seriously.  Yes, we can be cynical that the brand is using the campaign as a way of increasing sales and generating awareness of the product, but such cynicism is exactly why trust is destroyed in the first place.  We trust that Pepsi’s motives are for the greater good rather than short-term profit and career gain for those within the marketing department.  I for one applaud the initiative.  The amount of advertising and sponsorship money that has been blown on ways for CEO’s with an interest in American Football for example just to get closer to their idols for their own benefit is self-indulgence at its ugliest, rather than for the benefit of stakeholders, the industry and society as a whole, not to mention future generations.
 
In order to build and maintain trust over time, Pepsi need to ensure that it is not just the marketing and PR departments, but the entire organisation whom embrace the initiative in order for the campaign to be regarded as truly ethical.  This is where social business design comes into play whereby the campaign communication can transcend to all business units such as HR, customer services, manufacturing and supply chains.
 
Through the increased use of social media tools and technologies as part of social business design, I can see that initiatives such as Pepsi’s will become an example of how trust-organisations can flourish.  In turn, this will not only help build trust, reinvigorate our positive attitude towards businesses, but bring back purpose and legitimacy for brands.

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Social Media - The Lead Generation Game?

January 17, 2010

in Social Media, b2b marketing

The following post is taken from my monthly collumn over at B2B Marketing

B2B lead generation in its traditional form consists of many outbound marketing activities; for example ads, telemarketing, email marketing, and pay-per-click. All of these are broadcast in their very nature. However, some of these activities are now increasingly becoming ignored by prospects who favour one-to-one communications. This shift in behaviour effects not just the success of lead generation but your future marketing budgets.

Savvy marketers now regard social media as an important channel of the marketing mix whereby conversations and content referred to as ‘inbound’ marketing can attract, engage and nurture leads.

Cost effective
The value of social media used for lead generation in comparison to outbound marketing activities is a lot more cost-effective. What this means for small and medium sized businesses is that they can now compete with larger corporations because they can leverage social media to their advantage through effective engagement and creative content at lower costs. For larger corporations the risk is that, if they do not adopt or engage in social media, they will lose a slice of the prospect pie.

When looking to generate leads through social media, the first step is to get heard by cutting through the noise. This is where your social media brand outposts such as Twitter, blogs and LinkedIn communities are important as they are the launch pad for creating interesting conversations and engaging content.

Both the conversations and content you are producing can be promoted through seeding, sharing and optimisation throughout social media. This allows your content to be found through social search and increases your chances of prospects engaging with content and spreading it further throughout their own social networks.

Traditional processes still work
Marketers should look to revise traditional lead gen processes such as scouring newspapers and trade publications for new business opportunities by using social media tools. For example, you can now use RSS readers to pool RSS feeds from trade publications as well as from competitors. The RSS readers enable you to keep up to date with industry announcements and potential opportunities that you can add to your prospect database and follow up.

At the same time it is essential that you have a listening strategy in place whereby you can monitor conversations taking place within blogs, forums and most importantly Twitter so that you do not miss out on opportunities. Expanding upon your listening strategy further, effective monitoring of conversations will provide you with the intelligence enabling you to engage in discussions within Yahoo Answers, Facebook groups and LinkedIn Q&As.

You should look to develop networking opportunities using social media, for example you can search for prospects within Twitter. Once you have added them to a list, you can create bespoke content for specific leads in order to create conversations and optimise this content to spread further through your other brand outposts and social networks to increase the potential of reaching more prospects.

Make sure that you balance all content with conversations so that the dialogue is not one way to ensure you are not reverting back to the traditional broadcast marketing methods.

Securing future social media budgets
Once your conversations and content are discovered, the goal is to funnel visitors/traffic toward target destinations such as a bespoke landing page whereby the user can enter in details via data capture and become a prospect. Social media activity inevitably costs money in terms of both time and resources, therefore in order to secure a budget for future social media spend you need to generate as many leads as possible that will eventually result in sales.

Some of the best tactics used to generate leads are value-added, for example creating blog posts offering advice on how to carry out business processes that compliment a company’s products and services thus increasing subscribers and increasing ratio of leads. It is important to remember that the quality of leads is controlled by the quality of the content and targeting.

As with all marketing activity, and social media is no exception, it needs to be measured in order to determine success and increase business intelligence. Use multivariate testing within your communications, analyse the data to track visitors, leads and customers across every channel that you are using within social media. This information will help inform where future budgets are best invested and what content works.

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The social customer, social CRM and social business

December 1, 2009

in Collaboration, Community Marketing, Crowdsourcing, Reputation Management, Social Business, Social CRM, Social Media, Tribe, Twitter

The following is taken from a key-note speech I delivered at B2B Marketing event in London on 18th November 2009. All slides were images so thought I’d share the script and will look to add v/o to slide deck on SlideShare shortly… please feel free to add your thoughts as this is a fast-growth area that is definitely one for discussion.

Introducing the social customer
We the customer have now evolved, we were never stupid, businesses just kept us that way. Social media powered by technology has enabled us to break free and provided us with a voice.

Previously businesses only managed the post-purchase relationship that was used largely for loyalty: to grow value of existing relationships (be that through spend or uptrading) or to reduce defection. Although designed to help drive conversion through the entire marketing cycle, It wasn’t as efficient to use pre-purchase in converting more leads to customers. In short, it had limited application to what was a largely linear process.

We have invested in ways not to engage with customers but keep the communication channels open through providing customer support centres, direct mail and e-mail newsletters.

Now that customers have access to social tools they are no longer just consumers they are also producers and can create video, blogs, use Twitter and connect with one another forming tribes.

Social shopping has brought immense change in how people short list, research and engage with products and services. We now have insight into what triggers and influences consideration and purchase actions and grow greater loyalty and value from it.

It’s not just purchase decisions that people are turning to digital for – they are increasingly turning to it when they have a customer service issue or complaint. If they cannot find the answer on your site they will turn to Google to seek out the problem and Twitter to bash the hell out of a company.

An example of the power of the social customer is Karl Havard’s experience with Aviva. In June 2009 Karl received a renewal notification for his motor insurance policy. Although Aleksandr the meerkat is very charming, Karl decided that for the sake of a few pounds he would stick with Aviva as he couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and all he needed to do was update his direct debit details - as Aleksandr would say ’simples’. So you would have thought!!
In Karl’s case to make a simple change to his direct debit bank details he was presented with a Mission Impossible. He found himself talking to voice recognition technology that had a hearing impediment; a call centre with people offering awkward silences and you have to check whether or not they are still there; 30 minutes plus of horrendous library hold music; and an online portal that presents him with “run time server errors” and when it did work….sent him back to the call centre. What is more interesting is that at this time Aviva’s marketing communications consisted of an ATL A-List celebrities focussed on individual care and attention!
So what did Karl do? Well he wrote a letter to the CEO of Aviva explaining the problem. That was not all, being digitally savvy he decided to share his bad experience by seeding this issue on his blog and embedded a copy of his letter within his post using slideshare for all to see. He also decided to tweet about this too and share his experience within customer service forums such as Plebble, customer communities and money saving expert. The result was that the letter on slideshare was picked up by Aviva and posted internally within their intranet, this then resulted in the issue being picked up by Sales and Marketing Director who personally contacted Karl to resolve the issue. The CEO of Aviva UK wrote a personal letter to Karl addressing the issue and many employees responded to his Twitter feed and blog post with comments to apologise. Furthermore the real damage is evident through searching ‘aviva customer service’ in google which now displays negative results that influence the contextual picture of the brand.

To respond to each customer as Aviva has done is definitely not cost effective. So how can we reduce cost, churn, develop new leads, maintain existing relationships using social media brand outposts and activities that may/may not be already in place?

This is where social CRM now can also play an important role…

Introducing social CRM
By definition, social CRM is understood as the integration of social media and CRM systems.

CRM in the social age becomes advantageous across the whole of marketing activity. It benefits from conversations prospective customers have through platforms and provides opportunities for authentic conversations.

CRM in the social age means building relationships much earlier in the traditional marketing cycle based on real-time value exchange with individuals and communities, converting more prospects to leads, more leads to customers.

It is vital to understand that social CRM should not exist as a silo but should be an integral part of social business.
If you want to be social you need to start with your customers and their conversations - simple.

I use Lithium as a great example of technology used to simplify this process by:
- Turning customers into problem solvers
- Sourcing new innovations and ideas from customers
- Generating word-of-mouth referrals from customers and generate support

I’ll provide you with some examples:
Promote - customers talking together about the products they want to buy on your site/community. The more enthusiastic customers are about your products and services the more you will sell. Reviews and recommendations are an example of this, and you can look to create a customer network around service.

Innovate - Intel connect this is a recent example. Apparently there are 15 billion devices connected to the internet of which Intel have a large share so they are looking for ways to best increase. This use of ideation is very similar to Starbucks and Dell Idea Storm but with Intel and they are looking to pay out for great ideas to get customers exchanging ideas on their behalf. If you’ve read Wikinomics, Don Tapscott provides more depth to the subject of crowd sourcing and co-creation.

Support - the most common use for social CRM. With traditional CRM it is very much focussed on internal processes. With social CRM it is focussed on external and social dynamics for example understanding user behaviour and why they would support users amongst the community for free.

Introducing the social business
Begin by building a vibrant customer community and then leverage the community to generate leads and ultimately transactions.
First step is to start off with social search engine optimisation looking for people based on what they search for, and social media monitoring to understand where to find people talking.

Look at Social SEO within the community as the more content you have within the community you need to ensure that it can easily be found through search.

Make sure that you build communities that dont exist in silos but that they can all collaborate and talk with one another.
Again great customer service starts with search. Your search within your site/community must return all results federated so that they do not have to search in multiple places.

With regard to management information, in practise you can monitor from a customer service point of view those problems asked, problems answered by existing content, resolved by community and resolved by agent. As the community evolves you should solve more problems with existing content thus increasing the return on investment.

To measure success of community you use metrics such as page views, posts, registrations, searches, new threads, accepted solutions, user sessions. Improvements can be made based on content, interaction, traffic, members and responsiveness.
The main question for marketers at the moment is how do I connect social web technologies to my own CRM? As social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Communities scale in terms of positive network effects you cannot expect to have your employees watching this all this time.

You can use tools such as Lithium (I promise I’m not being paid by Lithium). They have technology that allows you to take a tweet and set it up as a thread within your own community to continue the conversation.
This technology taps into social behaviour aswWhen people use Twitter they want it to become a social response. A twitter user may not think that anyone is listening to their complaint, enquiry but instead they are alerted that their tweet is now visible and being listened to by a whole community so they should receive a response to their tweet.

You can then take that conversation which may be discussing purchasing a product or service and integrate it into your CRM system such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

In summary you need to integrate your social media strategy to your CRM strategy to become a social business. You can listen, leverage brand outposts, engage, create conversation, manage reputations and build social media community through the use of technologies and then link this to your CRM strategy.

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