From the monthly archives:

September 2009

Making an impact with social media

September 12, 2009

in Social Media

Conversations about your industry concerning buying decisions are taking place regularly within social media spaces. In order to have an influence over these conversations you need to be active within social media.

However, in order to make an impact, you need to ensure that your voice within these spaces is one that represents value, respect and trust. Many marketers have taken a bold step in entering social media, only to receive a backlash from a community. Others have given up on social media outposts that have already been set up because they have not delivered immediate results.

The following guidelines will assist those already operating in these spaces and help those considering getting their hands dirty:

1. Beware of a lack of understanding
If you have not done so already, educate yourself on the seismic shifts in communication when it comes to ‘mass broadcast’ versus ‘conversation’. Read case studies to help understand what has worked.

Marketers who want to use social media must be part of social media. You need to be out there commenting on blogs; contributing to communities and using social media outposts such as Twitter and LinkedIn.You cannot execute successful campaigns if you do not understand the platforms you are using.

2. Develop a social media strategy
It goes without saying that your organisation should have a social media strategy. This should be a company-wide strategy with all business units contributing.

A well-designed social media strategy can be used as a roadmap for your organisation. At the same time, the strategy will be used to benchmark tactics against objectives showing results and return on investment.

The most important element of the strategy is listening to the conversation. By listening you are able to understand where the conversation is taking place and what challenges your clients and prospects face. Then you can produce content and start a dialogue.

Most importantly, the process of listening enables you to understand the marketplace and competitor movements.

3. Be open and honest
Social media is all about open and honest communication. This means you need to be transparent in everything you do. Instead of building a wall, come forward and admit mistakes, learn from the experience and move on, ensuring that transparency becomes a corporate objective throughout the entire organisation.

Social media has the habit of finding skeletons in closets so honesty from the outset will earn you respect in the long-term.

If you have corporate social media outposts – for example Twitter and blogs – then look to communicate who is behind them so you give clients and prospects a face and a name to communicate with. Ideally, CEOs should contribute guest blog posts and staff members should be involved in the conversation.

4. Avoid short-term engagement
Forget the quick-win scenario; with social media you are in it for the long-term. Your social media strategy will help map out forthcoming activity and include campaign activity to maintain the engagement.

If you have social media outposts that are left out-of-date then it allows your competitors to move in. Revisit your strategy regularly and plan activity that will create dialogue. This dialogue can comprise of individual short campaigns, but they must all link into one another to form one large consistent campaign. The benefits of investing in long-term engagement should not be underestimated.

5. Poor creative = poor engagement
If you are struggling for ideas on how to maintain long-term engagement then you need to look at investing in and creating social currency that will kick-start the conversation and continue the engagement. Engaging content is essential to support word-of-mouth activity. An example would be to invest in research that can be produced as a white paper and offered to the community. Similarly, branded entertainment can create social currency.

It is important to note that social media is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. Every company and industry will be different in terms of strategies and tactics, but the underlying principles are the same. What is consistent, however, is the time and effort required for planning a social media strategy and campaigns and this should not be underestimated.

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Measuring the success of social media

September 11, 2009

in Metrics, Social Media

I am certain that many of you reading this article have or will come up against the following questions with regard to social media campaigns: ‘how can we measure the value?’ or ‘where is the ROI in all of this?’

As a marketer, it is not enough to simply hope for the best with social media; you need to be able to quantify results and campaign activity.

You need to be able to justify to upper management that your marketing budget has been well spent.

With every marketing activity there are certainly ways to extract and measure value from a social media campaign or activity, both qualitative and quantitative.

The return itself comes directly from the objectives you want to address using social media and benchmarking the results against these objectives. The following should act as a guide when approaching any social media activity.

Set your success metrics
The execution of your social media campaign will be different to traditional marketing campaigns in its approach as you take into account transparency and open, honest communications – however, the planning should not differ.

When approaching social media, you first need to clearly define the success metrics you will use for the duration of the campaign before executing the strategy.

These success metrics will help you to understand where the return on investment will come from before investing your marketing budget in nurturing and supporting a new business community, paying for the production and development of online videos, product demonstrations, or even the cost of developing a corporate blog.

Without pre-defining metrics at the planning stage, you cannot feedback and refine strategies that could have an overall impact on the success of activity that will help shape future campaigns.

For example; if you are developing a strategy based on Twitter, your success metrics could be:

Quantitative: increased traffic to your website, number of sales leads, savings on customer relationship management, reduction in call centre costs, recruitment of new staff.

Qualitative: engagement with customers, types of communication, quality of followers, market research and feedback.

Social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, communities, blogs, podcasts and videos have many ways of contributing value.

Setting success metrics in the planning stage will help you identify the value social media can offer your business, at the same time as helping you measure the success and demonstrate the benefits of activity to your organisation.

Monitor, report and feedback
As your social media campaign unfolds, you should dedicate time to testing and tracking success.

By setting new or revised goals on a weekly or monthly basis you can monitor the progress of your campaign and improve and refine your campaign strategy.

Because social media is digital, you can look at cost-effectively incorporating multivariate testing (A/B testing) to see what messages or method of approach is most effective in generating quality connections, engagement, in-bound enquiries and increasing comments to blog posts. You can then filter out messages, posts, and activities that display better results from those that do not deliver good results. Refine and renew the campaign and feedback on the success.

With social media it is all about relationships and conversations. The strongest relationships in any form take time and effort to develop and sustain. When looking at return on investment with social media, think about the amount of effort you have put in and compare this to the value you expect to achieve.

The all-important ROI
When looking at ROI in relation to social media, try not to just look at the number of sales achieved as a result.

Instead, social media should be seen as a long-term investment that supports the sales cycle and customer relationship management – which later results in addition to sales and renewals.

Think of social media as a 360-degree campaign that adds value to your sales and marketing by building long-term relationships amongst communities, within your blog in terms of engagement through comments to posts, as well as organic traffic to your website.

Although these results may not immediately illustrate revenue they can, however, add value to the bottom line over time.

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