social media marketing

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.

Tagged as: measuring, Metrics, roi, Social Media, social media marketing

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“A third of the population has reviewed something online and any one of those reviews can be read by millions of people,” according to Andy Sernovitz of Fast Company. This is the power of social media: user-generated comments and conversation that can build or destroy a brand. Ignoring a conversation in social media and not responding effectively could impact your company’s bottom line.

Scenario: Your client tweets about a bad customer service experience, immediately alerting his or her social graph (all their connections within social media) to the issue; or if they blog, they document the bad experience and publish the post. Through the multiplier effect this information is spread on the web often unedited and/or commented by new authors. These headlines appear on sites such as Digg or Technorati and are indexed by Google. The news is fanned by Twitter and citizen journalists, resulting in a full-blown reputation crisis within a few hours – are you prepared?

The above example is extreme, but if the cost is simply to monitor the conversation with a few search engines, social networks, forums, blogs and respond to negative buzz when/where appropriate then it would make sense to do so. The cost benefits of monitoring social media far outweigh the damage to your brand if you choose not to.

Start by listening to social media
You need to track down the entire buzz around your brand within social media to get an idea of what the negativity landscape looks like. Free tools such as whostalkin.com or socialmention.com can help you to identify the conversations around your brand. Simply list relevant keywords to search – for example brand, product, model number or CEO name. The tools will then return results and categorise them by channels i.e. blogs, forums, networks, news and video. If your company is global with a huge web presence, it is best to use a social media agency to produce an audit – manually searching the voicescape is very labour intensive. Do not forget that Google alerts are a great way of monitoring the conversation based on brand mentions.

Join the conversation
If you discover negative or factually incorrect buzz, it is important to react quickly so the information is not spread further via blogs or micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

Simply by responding to the post/comment or contacting the detractor directly shows that your brand is open to dialogue and portrays that your business is listening and values the customer. Do not be defensive as it will encourage further negativity – instead explain your position and invite feedback.

Transparent communications
Social media within any marketing context is all about being open and honest. If something goes wrong – such as your server crashes, or the development and delivery of a product is delayed – then tell your customers. Let your customers know how you are rectifying a situation. Failure to communicate will open your brand up to the mercy of social media.

Social media strategy
If you have a company blog, you can respond with a formal blog post making sure that its title features keywords that match the negative posts or content. This will help to add positive search engine results, pushing down negative posts indexed by search engines.

Also, counteract anonymous and negative comments by highlighting testimonials from some of your best customers. In support of the blog post you can use your Twitter account to raise awareness of your response. Depending on the scale of the negative reaction you can respond via video or audio in the form of webcasts and podcasts. If you have an online community, you can host the conversation on your own website, confining the negativity to one area and allowing you to respond immediately.

Make it a habit
Remember marketing 101: a recipient of good customer service will tell five others on average. Yet a recipient of bad service will tell ten people and many more – maybe even hundreds if they are a blogger or active on social networks. It may not prevent a crisis from occurring, but the earlier you learn of dissatisfaction the faster you can react.

Key to managing and maintaining your reputation within social media is to be part of the conversation and for your brand to have a voice that is respected. This comes only through investing time in engaging with customers through social media, building relationships and in turn developing trust.

Tagged as: b2b marketing magazine, online reputation management, Social Media, social media marketing, Tom Chapman

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This blog post is going to be very brief as the more engaging content is to be found within the video shorty that was brought to my attention by Jeremiah Owyang and Leslie Carothers, who in turn was influenced by @GabrielRossi - great example of connected marketing in action here.

The timing could not have been more perfect as I am currently putting together a slide deck for my guest lecture that I am presenting to London Business School’s MBA students in February.  
This video is far more entertaining than a few picture slides on the history of marketing and how we have got to the stage of social media and its impact on traditional marketing.  
I hope that the LBS students enjoy this video shorty as much as I have done.  

Note: When viewing, for a moment disregard the marketing content and admire the production of the video too.

Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

Tagged as: jeremiah owyang, leslie carothers, london business school, social media marketing, video

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The original Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens published in 1843 was written when social observances were in a time of decay. 
As a reader of this post you already know that advertising and marketing has experienced rapid decay in its relevance to consumers in recent times and that social media is proving to be a vital catalyst for building trust and loyalty between a brand and its consumers. 

Advertisers and marketers worldwide are currently going through a period of redemption based on their past activities of mass media ‘push’ but coming out the other end with campaigns that embody the true spirit of social media employing one to one communication and engagement marketing.

As we look forward to 2009 we should encourage and educate the ‘Ebenezer Scrooges’ of our world to get with the times and understand that social media is here to stay and there’s no running away from it.

So take heed Mr Scrooge!  If you are a brand that has devoted your life to the accumulation of wealth at the expense of building trusted relationships and at the same time doing social injustice you should be worried. Those who still do not understand the importance of social media within the workplace, throughout their business practices and beyond will be haunted by their competitors who do – and if they do not change their ways, the business will end up dead and buried.

OK, let’s take a brief look at the three successive Social Media spirits this Christmas and please feel free to comment at the end of the post…

Social Media Past
John McCain will be reflecting on his electoral loss by overlooking the potential of social media and the value of tapping into the Groundswell. You can read more about the use of Obama’s use of social media.
McCain should be the poster child for all those businesses that have ignored social media within industries where others have adopted and seen growth.  I hope they will now be looking to place importance on social media within their marketing mix, focusing their efforts on consumers, not the brand’s love for money.

Social Media Present
Again the Obama campaign has to be the most publicised example of social media success in 2008.  We can also identify that the campaign had a measurable ROI as Barack’s seat in the white house speaks for itself! 
Here in the UK, the Conservative Party has recently announced the appointment of a digital spokesperson in hope of replicating the same success in the forthcoming UK elections. This is good news as social media will filter through the establishment.

Throughout 2008 we have seen many great campaigns this year and the most successful were recognised through industry awards, for example the Interactive Media Awards in the UK and the Forrester Groundswell awards in the US.

With regard to formal research and a blatant plug for my own work.  In October I personally issued a detailed report outlining how brands can engage with social network consumers.  This was well received by the industry.  Thank you to those who requested the free report and if you would like a copy drop me an e-mail: info [at] socialnetworkmarketinguk [dot] com.

Social Media Yet to Come
Even though we will experience tough times for the next 12-18 months based on the fragile state of the world economy. For social media there are some fantastic developments and countless opportunities to look forward to.

Below is a brief list of articles/posts featuring the opinions of industry experts on what brands and social media can look forward to in ‘09 and beyond.

• Cheerful news for UK digital agencies as UK firms are to spend more on social media in 2009 – Brand Republic
• 8 experts including Charlene Li and Chris Brogan predict how Web 2.0 will evolve In 2009 – Fast Company
• Predicting the future of social media from a social media marketing perspective – Jason Falls

Overall my personal hope is that the Ebenezer Scrooge’s we all know will have an awakening over this Christmas period.  C-level executives from all business units need to listen, learn and understand the fundamental media shift that is already happening and, as a result become more willing to adopt a new social media persona and mindset.

Have a so so so, social media marketing Christmas everyone.

Tagged as: brand republic, charlene li, fast company, groundswell, ima, jason falls, obama, Social Media, social media marketing, social network marketing, Tom Chapman

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