Tag: social networking

How To Build an Effective Social Media Program

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Given the rapidly changing nature of social media, it is not surprising that most marketers treated their 2010 activities like straw houses, unsophisticated structures with little hope of surviving much less gaining traction with consumers. Aghast at the resources consumed with limited impact, marketers are now seeking a more sophisticated if not durable approach. To address this challenge, here is Renegade’s Social Media Success Pyramid (see detailed illustration here), with guidance on how to build an effective and enduring program brick by brick. (Note 1: This article appeared on MediaPost early this week so you can stop here if you read that. Note 2: This is a topline overview with details on each section to be added soon enough.)

Establish your Foundation
Having a solid foundation that includes these five essential planning elements doesn’t guarantee success but it sure as heck increases the odds:

  • Audit: A comprehensive review of competitive activity, best practices, internal risk tolerance and input from all possible stakeholders. In addition to gathering critical data, the audit serves to engage management and foster cross-departmental consensus, both of which are essential to long-term success.
  • Brand voice: In all likelihood, your interns should not be the voice of your brand. Defining your brand voice takes the same strategic discipline as any other marketing effort and should result in not just identifying who can represent the brand but also establishing a clear and differentiated point-of-view.
  • Resources: Despite rumors to the contrary, social media is not free. It consumes mass quantities of time for listening, responding, creating, monitoring and reporting. Resources, whether internal and or external, need to be dedicated. Ideally these resources have experience getting things done across all the departments social can and does touch.
  • Product News: The old adage, “nothing kills a bad product faster than a great ad campaign” applies doubly to social media. If your product or service is not as good as it could be, either fix this first or make this the goal of your social activities. If your product is already highly competitive, then it will be still worth bringing something new to the party since social thrives around news.
  • Road Map: With all these other building blocks in place, you can now prepare a clear road map, defining overall social media goals, setting priorities by channel and establishing key performance indices. A good road map should also include test elements as well as potential risks along with a roll-out schedule for selected tactics.

Create the Blueprint
With the foundation in place, we move closer to execution by creating a strong blueprint including these four critical steps:

  • Design: Whether you are a billion dollar brand or an ambitious start-up, design never stops mattering. Even if it’s “just a Facebook page,” look for an aesthetic that is consistent, engaging and clearly your own.
  • Keyword Research: With the search engines now tracking Facebook and Twitter, the link between SEO performance and social activity is growing stronger by the day. Make sure you know the keywords that matter.
  • Editorial Calendar: Based on your keyword research, map out an “editorial calendar” that defines what content needs to be created, who will create it, where it will run first and how it will be amplified via social channels.
  • Disaster Plan: Since the fit just might hit the shan when you least expect it, do yourself a favor and outline a few what if scenarios and potential responses. Even if nothing bad ever happens, you’ll sleep a lot better.

Gather your Materials

Moving up the pyramid, its time to gather all your materials and execute with earnest.  In the process, you’ll want to focus on these three areas:

  • Analytics: With so many free and paid measurement tools available, measuring what matters is easier said than done.  You’ll need to work with pros to figure out what’s right for your situation.
  • Content: The center building block of a strong social program, content is indeed king.  Make sure your content is engaging, enlightening and or entertaining, representing your brand in all its glory.
  • Channels & Hub: Since context goes hand in hand with content, choose your channels carefully based on your target and the quality of your content.  Also, to optimize the SEO potential, archive your social content, especially Facebook and Twitter feeds on a “hub” within your website.

Measure your Progress

Since the goal of any business is to acquire and retain customers, to be taken seriously, social media must play a role in both of these areas.  Thus the penultimate building blocks of a successful social program are the following:

  • SEO Improvements: With the right content in the right places being shared by the right people, a comprehensive social program will yield improved SEO results over time as long as you remember to set benchmarks at the start.
  • Leads & Referrals:  While listening can yield leads and referrals can occur naturally, integrating social content into your CRM program will significantly enhance overall impact.  

Reap the Rewards

Ascending the social media pyramid is not an easy affair but it is certainly worth the trip.  Hard-earned consumer trust will be rewarded with increased loyalty, stronger word-of-mouth, higher value per customer, lower cost per acquisition and even lower churn rates.  You may even start measuring CPE or cost per engagement, given the relatively low cost of engaging fans once acquired on Facebook and Twitter.   Knowing that the original pyramids weren’t built in a day but have lasted 4,000 years, think about your social program as a permanent part of your go to market strategy and enjoy the view from the top.

Social Media Success Pyramid

View more presentations from Renegade.

Ben Franklin: Social Media Enthusiast?

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The great patriot and social media enthusiast Benjamin Franklin would surely enjoy the communications revolution that has swept our fair industry and would have plenty of good advice for modern day practitioners.  Advice well earned.  At 15, he adopted the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood just to get his articles published in his brother’s newspaper.  This ruse pissed off his brother to no end and ultimately forced young Ben to flee to Philly where at the age of 21 he formed an early social network called Junto, a group of “like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community.”

Once in Philadelphia, Franklin quickly distinguished himself as an agent of change, a man Malcolm Gladwell might be forced to describe as connector, maven AND salesman. At 22, he established The Pennsylvania Gazette, essentially a printed blog of his essays and observations, a vehicle that earned him tremendous social currency.  Shortly thereafter, he set up the city’s first library, the Wikipedia of its day, complete with America’s first librarian.  A noted scientist, perhaps his least known invention is the concept of paying it forward, freely sharing his ideas, inventions and on occasion his cash all with the hope that “it may thus go thro’ many hands.”  Clearly, without Franklin there are no open source API’s on Facebook and certainly no #good tweets on Twitter.

Having established his bona fides as social media pioneer let me now call upon the ever-humble B. Franklin to offer us instruction on how modern day marketing patriots can declare their independence from social media silliness.  And while this piece is no Poor Richard’s Almanac, it will approach the topic at hand with a similar clarity of purpose and simplicity in language.  It will also do so knowing Franklin would have supported this author, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”  Finally, it will encourage marketers to take AIM, a simply acronym that befits a Franklinian approach to social media.

1.  A is for Audit

All too often, marketers take the “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to social media.  The numerous social media pundits who prescribe dabbling over diligence encourage this philosophy.  Back in 1748, Franklin would have warned you of the risks of this approach, noting, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”  Instead, Franklin would have encouraged a rigorous social media audit, offering, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Hardly revolutionary, a social media audit lays the groundwork for a successful campaign, fulfilling Franklin’s prognostication that, “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”  These audits can be done in-house but as Franklin warned, “Those that won’t be counseled can’t be helped.”  Kinaxis, a supply chain management company, sought the help of Forrester before it went on to triple its leads and double its site traffic via a rigorously planned social media program (see detailed case history http://bit.ly/cNOgPz .)

2. I is for Implementation

A great communicator himself, Franklin would have been undaunted by all the new options, evaluating each carefully in order to “Never confuse motion with action.”   When it comes to content creation, Franklin’s remarkably timeless advice to, “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing,” is as true for Twitter and YouTube in 2010 as it was for patriotic pamphlets back in 1775.  Anticipating the transparency that enlightened marketers now seek, his proverb “honesty is the best policy,” is truer today than ever before.

Franklin inherently understood social media implementation, and the critical roles of likability, entertainment and patience.  For brands that want to build fans on Facebook and the like, Franklin offered, “If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.” For brands afraid of having a little fun with their audience, Franklin encouraged, “Games lubricate the body and the mind.” And for brands in an unrealistic hurry to gain traction in social media, Franklin noted, “He that can have patience can have what he will.”

3. M is for Monitoring

As Postmaster General in 1768, Franklin monitored the routes of British mail ships to discover why it took them two weeks longer to reach US ports than private merchant ships.   Conducting his own focus groups with merchant captains and whalers, Franklin ultimately charted and named the Gulf Stream, which was acting like a firewall, slowing the movement of data from East to West across the Atlantic.  Not new to the idea of monitoring, Franklin approached even minute details with earnest, noting, “A small leak will sink a great ship.”

So too must social media marketers monitor their activities with rigor and respond accordingly.  While lots of free tools are available to monitor everything from conversations to web traffic, organic search performance to lead generation, Franklin reminded us that, “Lost time is never found again,” thus the anticipating the use of time-saving paid services like Radian6.  With such a disciplined approach to social media, marketers can, in Franklin’s words, “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.”

Even 220 years after his death, Benjamin Franklin remains a beloved character bestowing a treasure trove of wisdom for good citizens and good brands.  In fact, among the 12 virtues that he drafted when only 20 years old, you will find the single best guidance for any brand I’ve ever read, “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”  (This article originally appeared on MediaPost.com)

Members Project Submissions Due 8/19

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Both VISA and American Express have been on the leading edge when it comes to leveraging social networks. I covered VISA’s recent programs with Facebook rather extensively in my article for iMediaConnection. So here’s a quick update on one of the more interesting efforts by American Express called the Members Project including this overview from MediaPost’s Marketing Daily:

For its second year, American Express has expanded the scope of its social responsibility, “Members Project,” making it easier for people to help shape projects that fit their interests, beefing up its online presence, and devoting more money to more projects.

“We’re putting more focus in how we leverage online,” says Belinda Lang, vice president of consumer marketing strategy at American Express. “We’re trying to make it that much easier for people to engage with us.”

To help get the word out about the Members Project and the individual ideas, American Express has developed a vast array of online tools, from Facebook and MySpace presences to widgets and online badges people can use to promote their projects. The initial phase of the Members Project–where people create and hone ideas for good works– will also be advertised heavily online, Lang tells Marketing Daily. “This is an online experience–our goal is to take advantage of what’s going on with that space,” she says.

A quick visit to the Members Project site and you can see this is a well thought through program and one that they expect to grow over time. With $2.5 million in “seed money” to support 25 projects that can “make a difference” locally, nationally or globally, AmEx is hoping to empower card holders to take charge instead of just charging (some more stuff). It is hard to imagine a more fulfilling “service” for AmEx to provide than one that helps their customers change the world for the better. And oh by the way, if saving the world is your thing, submissions are due 8/19!

Update:

One of the five finalists offered this video appeal:

Dance with Your Customers

Posted on by Drew Neisser

As you may remember, I gave a webinar a month ago for the PRSA called “What Recession? 9 Ways to Cut Through Regardless of the Economy.” It was a bit strange presenting to over 200 people I couldn’t see but the audience seem to enjoy it (or so I’ve been told.) Anyhow, in that speech I talked about the idea of “dancing with your customers” as an aspirational goal for customer engagement:

The notion of having a conversation with your customers has almost become a cliché in our industry. Conversations are nice but why not strive for something more intimate, more emotional, more dynamic—something that gets you truly in-sync with your customers needs and desires. Use all your charm and style and dance with your customers both physically and virtually. Physical “dances” can take place on your premises or at events ranging from street encounters to massive exhibitions. Virtual dances also come in a variety of shapes and sizes from websites to widgets, virtual worlds to social networks.

Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods, has about 800,000 registered users that it supports with forums, blogs and a ratings system. All this was good and has helped them build tremendous loyalty among the crafters and artisans that support their marketplace. But the real dance began when Etsy started supporting the social networks outside of the company’s domain created by Etsy fans. One such site, We Love Etsy has 2800 members with their own profile pages enabling a deeper kind of interaction. 50+ other Etsy related sites exist and Etsy recently started a trademark-permission program to avoid misuse of their brand. Etsy has found a way to dance with its fans transforming the relationship from customer to brand advocate.

Having re-read that speech recently, it occurred to me that Etsy’s support of its user base is also a terrific example of marketing as service. Rather than spend marketing dollars on chest-beating messaging, Etsy has used its marketing efforts to deliver real value to its customers via social networking, increasing loyalty and revenue while they’re at it. Its enough to make me dance.