Category: Drew’s Articles

Marketing Insights on the Social Media Fitness Study

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of things I’ve always liked about my business is the diversity of marketing challenges that are out there. For example, it’s hard to imagine two more different situations than those faced by Stacy Braun, SVP of Marketing at AXA Equitable and Evan Greene, CMO of The Recording Academy (better known for The Grammys.)  Yet when you drill down a bit, especially in the social media arena, you’ll find that smart marketers share a common commitment to understanding their target, engaging at all the right touch points and establishing metrics for success. Both Braun and Greene were kind enough to answer some of my last minutes questions related to the Social Media Fitness Study. I think you’ll find what they have to say quite interesting.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team?
Braun: At AXA Equitable, we see the benefits of having a cross-disciplined team in driving the social media strategy and execution for our organization. Because social touches so many areas of our business, it is important to have a coordinated effort that engages all key players in our decisions around this evolving platform. This ensures we are thinking through all of the nuances that can impact our brand image, our PR strategy and how our employees, advisors and customers are engaging with our brand. While a cross-disciplined team may require more check-points along the way, the result of having collaboration and insights from all key areas of the firm ensures that we “own” the experience together.

Greene: It depends on your goal. Rather than simply using social as a tactic, the most effective brands use social as an organic part of everything they do. Therefore, a cross-discipline team, that touches many areas of the company is an effective, collaborative approach.

DN: Can you talk about the benefits of doing a social media audit?
Braun: We conducted a social media audit about a year ago and it proved extremely helpful in understanding the opportunities available to us. By looking at competitors in our industry, as well as companies in other categories, we recognized the potential of social media, which helped us set our priorities for the year ahead. It also helped us refine our social media guidelines for employees, and identify new ways to use social to proactively enhance our brand image.”

DN: What compelled you all to set up a social media training program?
Greene: With social media still being relatively new, and touching everyone either in their personal lives, or at work (and often in both places), there are no standardized rules. In fact, the rules continue to evolve almost daily. Therefore, with so much at stake with brand image and reputation in today’s fracturing marketplace, companies are well served to establish clear parameters that can be consistently applied and followed across their organizations. Otherwise, simple, sometimes innocent mistakes can happen and be disastrous to a company’s brand and reputation. When this happens, it can be very difficult to recover.

DN: What are the advantages of having a real-time dashboard?
Greene: Metrics are crucial. Listening and monitoring are really becoming the new frontier. After all, the better you become at interpreting the data, the more effective conversations you will be able to build with your social ecosystem, and the deeper the engagement you can create.

Social Media Fitness From a B2B Perspective

Posted on by Drew Neisser

A lot of people talk about social media.  Jenny Weigle does social media.  And I might add she does it really well for the socially savvy brand, CareerBuilder.com.  I met Jenny at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit back in January and was delighted to catch up with her afterwards to discuss some of the findings of the soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study.  (Thanks for the insights Jenny.)

DN: Can you shed some light on how your organization came to have a disaster plan? Did you have a disaster first?
It’s all about communication. We didn’t have a disaster take place, but if one does, we feel confident in our ability to work through it because of the strong communication across departments in our company. We have social media guidelines and a community management playbook that both outline the steps to take in a crisis. My supervisor and I collaborated with people across departments to create these documents.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-discipline team in place for social media?
In my opinion, it’s not just a benefit for social media to cross departments…it’s a necessity. A tweet or a post on your company’s Facebook wall could pertain to any topic: customer service, job openings, products, services, advice, etc. It’s essential that the person in charge of your social media efforts is in touch with every department so that he/she can provide an answer to the fan/follower as quickly as possible. That’s what makes a company stand out and stay connected to their fans through social media.

DN: How are you developing such effective content at CareerBuilder?
Our team listens to the feedback coming from our fans on social media and looks over a report on that feedback on a regular basis. Also, each person creating our social content is up-to-date and informed on our industry so that we can give our audience the most relevant information.

DN: How have you been able develop to a consistent customer experience across all of your social channels?
Again, it comes back to communication. I stay in touch with our customer service team on a regular basis (at least monthly). They’ve been fully trained on our engagement tool and I keep them updated on major changes to the social platforms. We are a team, and it’s important to know that and do whatever it takes so that all admins feel that they are a part of the team, working together to achieve our social media goals. We also regularly recognize our team members for outstanding performance.

DN: Can you offer any insight to as to why you decided to streamline your accounts and address the benefits of doing so?
If someone wants to connect with us through social media, it should be very easy for them to find us and begin engaging. By having too many accounts, a company can make this harder for a user to find and connect with them. We evaluated which accounts were most important to us, and in some cases we merged them, in others we closed them. We did this with our audience in mind and what would make it easiest for them.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why large B2C companies scored higher [on the Social Media Fitness Test] than B2B firms and smaller B2C companies?
B2B has been slower to adopt social media overall. In my opinion, it’s easier for a consumer to pick up on social media because he/she can use it and learn it on their own time. For a business to use social media, it must first consider what needs and goals it will fulfill, who will run it, what content will be shared, what metrics will be measured, etc. This takes more time, research and consideration for the business.

Optimizing Your Digital Media

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of the findings that surprised me in the Social Media Fitness Study was that large companies seem to be far more “socially fit” than small companies. I suspect the reason for my surprise is that I have worked with a handful of well-funded fast growing start-ups that totally get social and who squeeze every last drop of value out of it. One such company is TagMan, the global leader in tag management, whose Marketing Director, Nelleke Kloet offered up her input on the results of the study. Since TagMan is in the business of helping clients figure out how to optimize their digital media activities and they have data that shows the disproportionate power of social media to drive traffic and leads, it should come as no surprise that Nelleke is both a believer and a “fit” practitioner.

DN: Any thoughts on why large companies had higher “fitness” scores than small companies?
That surprises me as I think the “free” media has been explored in the past better by smaller companies. I guess with time, resources have increased and improved scores. Resources, in terms of money as well as people, resources which bigger companies have more of.

DN: Do you think social media can be even more powerful for small companies than big companies?
Yes, I think it can have better ROI for small companies and more accessible if you have limited budgets.

DN: What role does social media perform in TagMan’s overall business plan?
It’s one of the elements of the marketing mix. We ensure we know the exact role of each media and focus on that.  For example, Facebook has a specific role for employees and to get to know the people behind the company. Each Linkedin group and profile has a specific role. For example, the company LinkedIn page is about our company and the people (great for comparison to competitors business) whereas the TagMan group is about news and discussions for people working with tags.

DN: What are your goals with social media?
We use it for thought leadership mostly but we have seen, for some campaigns, it has actually worked for lead generation too. It depends on the call to action.

DN: You were among the minority in which social media has permeated all aspects of your business. What is behind your commitment to social media?
We see the benefits of social media when we run TagMan attribution reports for our clients so we know what role it can play in the marketing mix. We also use our own real-time attribution reporting for our website to help us what role it plays in our business.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having all your employees be active in social media?
All our employees are brand embassadors so they should be able to speak about your brand in the appropriate way. If you have to restrict it it actually means you have not done enough ‘marketing’ on your own employees – which is ofetn the case in larger companies. The benefits are that you can tap into their networks so more reach as well as its more genuin and not scripted which makes it more believable for the audience.

Using Social Media to Focus on Customers

Posted on by Drew Neisser

B2B companies for the most part have been playing catch up to their B2C counterparts in the social media arena. One company that is coming on strong in this area is Pega, a company that helps other companies be more focused on their customers via BPM and CRM software solutions. I was delighted to able to catch up with Grant Johnson, Pega’s CMO as part of the soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study. (BTW, CMO’s can catch up with Grant at The CMO Club Thought Leadership Summit starting April 26th in NYC.)

DN: Large B2C companies significantly outscored large B2B companies in this study. Why do you think this is the case?
While social has proven to have vast benefits for all companies that become adept at it, there’s little doubt that B2C organizations – especially those with millions of customers that come into daily contact with consumers – have more opportunities to show they’ve embraced this. At Pega our target-account approach differs from many other B2C organizations. That’s not to say we’re not embracing social media, because we are, but we’re leveraging it in a far more targeted way than most B2C organizations do based on the size of our audience.

DN: Can you speak to the role social media plays in Pega’s overall marketing mix?
Social has become an integral and formidable medium for us to leverage throughout marketing as we at Pega view it as part of our overall customer-centric market approach. We’re active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to ensure we’re engaging with our customers appropriately but also so we can continue building our brand awareness. We’ve added another dedicated full time resource to further our social media efforts and we’re confident that this role will continue to increase.

DN: You mentioned that social wasn’t gaining as much traction as you’d like. What are doing to address this?
I’m actually dedicating much more resource as traction is building faster this year.

DN: Is there a hope that if more employees are active in social that this could benefit the whole company?
We are encouraging more people to be involved in our overall social media efforts and we want to make sure the right people are engaged with customers and prospects across the whole client management lifecycle, whether it’s account executives, industry solutions, public relations, as well as ensure they know what’s appropriate and what’s not in this medium.

DN: Lots of companies especially B2B struggle to develop engaging content. Do you think this is category wide problem?
Yes. Many companies have reams of content, but it’s too centered on company promotion vs. customer and prospect engagement, when taking into consideration what stage of the buying cycle they are in (e.g. someone just surfing your Web site for the first time is not ready for a “how to pick a supplier” checklist). Also, we want to make sure we present content in the most digestible way possible. While they’ve no doubt proven useful at many things, 140 characters or 300-word blogs aren’t always the most appropriate way to do this.

Social Media: Insights Worth Copying

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I had the pleasure of catching up with Diego Pereda as part of the Social Media Fitness Study follow up interviews. Diego is the
Social Marketing Program Manager
, Corporate Marketing and Communications at Xerox Corporation and offers a number of insights, dare I say, worth copying. Thanks Diego.

DN: B2C companies seems to be ahead of B2B brands when it comes to social media. Do you think B2B marketers are skeptical about social media?
At this point in the B2C world, social media is mission critical. Consumers have demonstrated the power of social media and social media is one of the primary ways for consumer brands to interact and engage with their target audience. For B2B companies there is not always a clear connection to how their efforts in social media will translate in business results. Therefore, skepticism still exists but there are more cases from B2B companies that have embraced Social Media and are being successful with it so it is a lot easier to make the case to a Senior Executive from a B2B company that social media is here to stay, it will help their brand, or customer engagement or reduce support cost. There are many examples of B2B companies achieving just that via Social Media such as Cisco, Intel etc.

DN: How did social became a vital part of Xerox’s marketing activities?
Xerox has been developing its social marketing practice in earnest for several years, but we really stepped on the accelerator in late 2009 via a small group of what we call “social media natives” from across our business. As the practice has grown, we’ve kept track of our approaches to the work as well as some key indicators of customer engagement on the social channels. Our emerging social media gurus are engaging with prospects and customers where it makes sense for each business, and using the dominant channels – blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, customer forums, etc.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team? Was this hard to set up?
We have a cross disciplinary team that has representatives from across the company but is led by the corporate marketing organization. The team was not hard to set up as it was an evolution of the first team that started to develop social media at Xerox. A multidisciplinary team is critical as it allows you to have multiple perspectives from all the various parts of the business when developing the company SM plans and strategies. For example it is important we take into consideration when we craft our social media plans that we understand how a customer engages Xerox for support (offline and online) and understand what is the best social media platform or tool to use to help customers in seek of support.

Having a broad range of perspectives at the social media table is important so that we have access to people who are in each of the businesses and therefore our plan, strategy and tactics make sense not just from a corporate or marketing perspective, but also from a support, sales and regional perspective.

DN: Very few companies have set up a “center of excellence” for SM training. Xerox has. Can you speak to the advantages of this approach?
Our Center of Excellence is chartered with developing and executing the strategy for Social Media @ Xerox. Part of the strategy for last year was to grow the expertise of Social Media within the Xerox marketing and communications community so we developed a course for all communicators at Xerox and a series of social platform guides to teach them about using the social platforms like twitter. We also created a twice-a-month virtual get together called “Blog hour” so any of our bloggers or anyone interested in blogging can join and ask questions about anything related to blogging (technical, content, etc) or just listen to bloggers share best practices, concerns, etc And the Facebook Page administrators get together (via phone conferences) quarterly and maintain a lively discussion on our internal web collaboration platform.

The benefits we have derived from the Center of Excellence efforts and activities are that we have empowered more of our marketing and communications community to get involved in social media and to do it with the benefit of training and best practices at their disposal. We have witnessed a growth on all of our major platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) and we attribute a great deal of this growth and development of pods of social media practioners outside of the Center of Excellence to these efforts.

DN: Why do think this is so challenging for B2B marketers to create engaging content?
I think companies in the B2B space sometimes lose sight of the people making the decisions within the businesses that they are trying to reach via social media. At the end of the day whether B2C or B2B you should be producing content that will resonate with the people that that will be making some decision: purchase, recommendation, RFP decision, etc Our CMO often refers to it as B2P, Business-to-people.

DN: Only 1 in 3 B2B companies have started/completed an audit of their social media account.  What’s up with that?
I think that this is actually a good indication that B2B companies are seeing a need to audit. This is something that we are planning to do in 2012.

How to Grow Your Social Footprint

Posted on by Drew Neisser

One of the great parts of conducting the Social Media Fitness Study is that I got to interview a number of really savvy social media practitioners.  Among these is Greg Tirico, Senior Social Media Manager for Sage, a big software solution provider for small and medium sized businesses.  Greg offers insights into the role social plays in Sage’s marketing mix and of particular note, how they grew their social footprint by 50% in a month with the help of direct mail.  Thanks Greg!

DN: Can you speak to the role social media plays in Sage’s overall marketing mix?
The principal marketing focus at Sage is to build brand awareness, particularly around a key differentiator, which is a better customer experience. To that end, social media is one tool of many that supports the objective, including online, print and broadcast advertising, web strategy, PR, employee engagement and fine tuning of every other communication touch-point, all designed to deliver a superior customer experience. With each passing marketing campaign social media becomes more integrated in our overall marketing mix. Like many organizations, our social media activities started out as a silo within the marketing organization. This was important at first as it allowed the social media practitioners at Sage to experiment with their tactics. More recently, we have seen tremendous results when social media is properly integrated with print based marketing campaigns. For example, we increased our overall Like count by 50% in less than a month through a direct mail campaign in which respondents were encouraged to share their business ambitions with us on one of our Facebook product pages. People are still contributing today even though the contest is over!

DN: What are the benefits of having social media in the marketing department?
The clearest benefit to a centralized marketing approach is the ability to quickly adapt to changes coming at us from the social networks themselves. For example, the Facebook Timeline implementation for business pages is a forced change with a tight deadline. With an organized team of Social Media Leads at Sage we are able to easily adapt to this change and make sure the marketing teams have the information they need to be as effective as possible. There are benefits to a cross disciplined team as well. Many of the customer support organizations at Sage have started to participate in our internal conversations about social media and we are strongly encouraging this level of interaction through training programs and a greater level of information sharing.

DN: What triggered the development of a disaster plan at Sage?
There is not a particular instance that drove us to the creation of a disaster plan. We are in the lucky majority of social media participants that have had the opportunity to learn from other’s mistakes. It seems very natural to have a disaster plan much like a company would put a business continuity plan in place. The effort is minimal and you can test the process with minor negative comments on Twitter or Facebook.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why developing engaging content is so challenging for B2B companies?
Generally speaking, B2B companies are used to talking about features and benefits based on bullet points from a sell sheet. Repurposing this content, verbatim, for a social network is not what most would consider compelling content. At first, we all struggled with this. Now, those social media marketers that have been paying attention to their audience by channel understand what truly resonates.

DN: Few companies have been able to deliver a consistent experience across all social channels. How have you been able to achieve this?
Consistency can be interpreted in terms of visual identity or tone of voice. From an overall brand identity perspective, we do have guidelines for tone of voice – essentially that our tone should be friendly and conversational in support of our role as trusted advisors to our customers. However, there’s leeway to ensure that our people can adapt to their audiences. From a visual identity perspective, we have been working to bring all of our channels together under a Sage master brand. Sage is moving to a master brand from a series of product specific brands and our social media channels will absolutely reflect this. In this case, the visual reinforcement of the Sage brand across all of our social media channels will be clear to the visitor.

DN: Do you think there is still skepticism among B2B marketers that social can help them achieve their business goals?
Initially, there was skepticism in the B2B space regarding social media marketing activities. Today, the medium as a marketing tool is being embraced and many B2B companies are playing catch-up with B2C firms. The mix of individual channels is not always the same across B2B and B2C. For example, LinkedIn is an excellent source of referral traffic for many B2B firms. Conversely, Facebook is the largest source of referral traffic for B2C companies.