strategy

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.

Tagged as: branded entertainment, marketing, Social Media, strategy, tactics

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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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The foundation of social media is conversations.  As a B2B marketer you should look toward social media, in particular communities as an opportunity to create dialogue between your organisation and customers.  

Marketing is, after all, about understanding and satisfying customer wants and needs.  What better way to do this than to provide your customers with a community where like-minded individuals can come together and interact with both the company and each other.  

Great organisations such as Dell, Oracle, IBM, already use communities as a channel to communicate with their customers on equal terms.  At the same time providing a collaborative work space where their clients can provide feedback and assist in the development of future products and services. 

Where to start?
Well I’m certainly not going to follow the tired formula of ‘build it and they will come.’  B2B marketing is all about initiating the program, pulling the strings and orchestrating the story so here is the best way of building a community for your company:

First, as with any plan you need to define your business objectives; do you want to co-create future products/services with your customers, build stronger relationships or identify current trends and understand how your products or services are used?  Next you can look at resources and what investment you can realistically dedicate to the community as time and effort play a large part in the success of a community.

The cost to develop a community can be minimal and can be launched immediately for free using tools such as Facebook brand pages or groups.  So, if budgets are tight or, you do not have time to wait for budgets to be signed off for a bespoke interface as part of your corporate website, you can start building your community immediately.

Create a stir
Having identified your objectives and platform you then need to target your key influencers; these will usually be the customers who provide regular feedback to your company via e-mail, surveys or have an active presence through blogs and will be willing to participate in a community.  Furthermore these key influencers will help you to build the community through dialogue with other members. 

Contact the key influencers via e-mail informing them about your new community and invite them to join first.  Seed content such as company information into the community to kick-start the conversation and educate the key influencers on how the dialogue should take shape.  When the community starts to buzz, use your CRM e-mail database to inform all your customers about the community and invite them to participate in the discussion.

Promote, promote, promote
Once the conversation is taking shape you still need to maintain the momentum.  To do this you can run promotions or competitions amongst the community.  Set up a tiered system whereby members are ranked or rewarded based upon their contribution to the community.  Make the recognitions public to encourage other members to follow suit.

If you gather real insight into emerging trends within your industry via the community why not write a report and issue a press release to raise awareness of the community’s value.  Through effective digital pr you can boost community activity whilst at the same time recruiting new members.

Integrate other business units
Your community should shape what your business will eventually become – open, honest and highly effective.  More importantly the community should be integrated with not just marketing but other strategic business units, for example: customer service/support, product development and finance, this is because all units can benefit from the knowledge, insight and collaboration of the community as they are all brand touch points.

Fundamentally history shows us that those businesses that go on to succeed and reap the benefits are authentic.  If you provide a platform where customers can share values with your company, meaningful conversations with different business units and interact with other community members then they are more likely to stay loyal to a brand.  We’re all well aware that it costs twice as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer.  A community based approach can help lower costs at the outset but when budgets are tight they may increase rewards when (if) success blossoms.

Tagged as: b2b marketing, Communities, Social Media, strategy, Tom Chapman

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I have just finished reading: ‘Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom‘ by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.  This book provides a fascinating chronicle of social media to date that is heavily influenced by history and social anthropology.

One chapter in particular fired my rockets which was all about social capital.

Social capital
From a marketer’s perspective social capital by definition is no different from economic capital that is invested in order to deliver a return.  This means that when brands use social media, they are essentially investing social time and effort with the overall aim of achieving a return on that investment.  The same applies to consumers use of social media too.

Brands increasing social capital via their social graph
When putting together a social media strategy, brands are looking to increase their social capital through increasing the number of friend/fans/followers on social network platforms.  

Brands also use blogging outreach programmes targeting key professional bloggers who have great influence over a brand’s target audience in hope of improving the quality of their social graph.

At the same time brands are also building social relationships with advocates and consumers via campaigns, communities, outreach programmes, widgets, wikis, social games, building in engagement marketing in hope of achieving trust and loyalty, again increasing the quality of the social graph.  

This social graph can then be leveraged by the brand through promotions, offers, market research, crowd sourcing and collaboration to hopefully deliver a return on the original social investment that adds value to a brand’s bottom line.

Individuals increasing social capital through building a quality social graph
For individuals looking to increase their social capital through social media, marketer Jim Connolly recently put together a fantastic post ‘How I attracted 8000 followers in 14 weeks! illustrating how to increase your own social capital through selectively following Twitter consumers who add value to your social graph.  Jim’s strategy in his post can also be applied to brands as well as other social media tools and platforms.

As with all strategies, campaigns and activities the more time and effort you put into something, the greater return on that investment you will achieve, but you must have a goal in mind: prestige, recognition, loyalty, value, information, influence etc… Savvy brands know that through engagement marketing and one-to-one communications they can increase their social capital but they must invest time, money and effort with long term goals in order to experience a significant return - it’s all out there!

Tagged as: IAM, Individual as Medium, marketing, SCVA, SoCap&Brand, Social Capital, Social Capital Value Add, Social Graph, strategy, throwing sheep in the boardroom, Tom Chapman, Twitter

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