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.

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

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Following on from the great post over at Headstream from Chief Digital Officer - Steve Sponder about brands need to adopt different mindsets, models, approaches and strategies. To help brands adapt to this change, myself and the team at Headstream have been working closely with Steve FivebyFive (Headstream is an agency of FivebyFive) to develop a Social Media Strategic Framework. This framework will enable brands to strategically navigate through, as opposed to just blindly rolling out the latest, must-have tactics.

Our Social Media Strategic Framework (SMSF) sets out a number of key areas for organsiations to consider:

1) Social Media Strategy - As organisations start to understand the far reaching implications of social media they quickly appreciate the need to define a social media strategy that mutually supports other strategies within the organisation.

2) Influencer Networks - Influencers will play different roles within different market-sectors, so the key here is to understand how to identify them, the role they play and how to engage with them.

3) Brand Outposts - Don’t just set-up a Twitter account because everyone’s doing it. Take a step back and think about how your outposts will support your social media strategy, who will run your outposts and where the content will come from?

4) Reputation Management - Arguably, real-time eavesdropping on what people are saying about your brand is one of the most immediate benefits of social media marketing although, conversely engaging in a negative conversation could escalate in a full blown crisis so again a clear separate strategy is required here.

5) Brands with something interesting, useful and/or relevant to say should be aiming to start conversations, using branded content as social currency. A distribution strategy will then ensure that engaging content has the best opportunity to kick-start a conversation.

In conclusion, the strategic intent should be for organisations to be an authentic part of the social media community and appropriate conversations, along the way there will be immediate, tangible results although like branding, social media is about the long-haul. It’s about systemically and consistently building the reputation of the brand where the pay-back is ultimately brand equity.

I hope that you find the Social Media Strategic Framework interesting and that it builds on, and continues, the conversation.

Tagged as: FivebyFive, headstream, Social Media, Strategic Framework, strategy

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Tagged as: measurement, Metrics, qualitative, quantitative, roi, Social Media

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In April 2009, Jeremiah Owyang and Forrester released their latest report, ‘Future of the Social Web‘, which illustrates how social networks and marketers will have to change their strategies going forward.

The report suggests that within approximately two years, social networks will be more powerful than corporate websites and CRM systems – this can be further defined as the ‘era of social commerce’. One significant finding that marketers should make sense of and start planning for is Social CRM.

What exactly is Social CRM?

The traditional CRM system assists an organisation by bringing together data from all areas of an organisation, giving a 360-degree view of a customer for marketing and sales to make informed decisions on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. At the same time, this data can be used to shape marketing strategies and corporate communications.

Social CRM, on the other hand, is your existing CRM that has the ability to leverage the social web and automate the conversation process. The social CRM can be used by marketing and sales teams to listen to conversations, craft appropriate messages, join in immediately with customer conversation and offer them value in terms of information and solutions.

Social CRM has the ability to:

• Convert content to conversations therefore humanising a company so that customers regard the organisation as a trusted peer.
• Extend conversations into collaborative experiences, putting the customer at the core of a company’s strategy.
• Transform these experiences into meaningful relationships based upon real customer engagement.

When thinking in terms of ROI for setting up this system, the value is in developing relationships and long term loyalty that serve your business over time.   Social CRM will help generate marketing intelligence, providing the marketing department with insight that will assist your company to source better leads and reduce customer support costs through self-helping communities.

Adopting the Social CRM mindset

To begin with, marketers should dedicate time to working with brand advocates, involving them in shaping the product and communications. This is how social CRM is supposed to work; through the integration of customer social networks.

You should find that your existing customers belong to social networks and openly add more information to their profile than what you have in your traditional CRM system. Therefore you should think creatively of ways to integrate your customer’s networks into your current CRM.

If you think about it, a customer’s LinkedIn profile probably has more information than your CRM system would ever accommodate. A LinkedIn profile for example, would feature education, awards, associated groups customers identify with, furthermore their personal/company blog and Twitter feed can be fed into their profile. Most important is that you have sight of their entire business social network, including colleagues, suppliers and partners.

Now is the time to give some thought on how to connect social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter to your existing CRM and look to share information in a two-way manner. At the same time, it is important to be mindful that your customers should be able to control what information is shared with you, as social media best practice is all about giving customer control over the dialogue.

Going forward

Marketers need to understand that social networks and communities will influence CRM; resulting in corporate sites and marketing communications being able to recognise social relationships and customers preferences and deliver customised experiences to them in real-time. We are still some distance from this scenario; however companies such as Appiro and Salesforce are already leading the way in Social CRM.

Earlier this year, Appiro developed a Facebook application that can easily be rebranded by marketers for campaign activity. This application can be distributed at the same time sharing information, recommending information to peers, and used for other purposes such as recruiting, word of mouth, and other typical social network activities. As the information is shared, it can then be passed to a landing page where users can submit information in a web form that is stored on Salesforce.

Social CRM is both exciting and daunting, but by taking tiny steps to understand social media, and experimenting through integrating social tools into your CRM system now, then testing and improving, you will be very well prepared.

Tagged as: facebook, LinkedIn, Social CRM, Social Media, social networks, Twitter

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