White Paper “ Social technology is now a mainstream part of what marketers do. ”- Forrester
by Jason Ford | April 15, 2010
Welcome to the Social Media revolution.
Social media is redefining the way customers and brands interact. It is a completely different medium than the traditional outlets of print, radio, TV, outdoor, and even online banners and search. It represents a new way of interacting with customers and prospects in a two-way dialog—more than just one-way messaging.
You probably already know how to build a marketing plan—marketers and ad guys have spent decades refining modern marketing strategy and writing books on the subject. The rise of social media does not require us to throw those books out—we just need to write a new chapter.
Our intent with this paper is not to provide an exhaustive reference for every aspect of social media marketing, but rather to provide a framework that you can use when thinking about the big picture. We group social media marketing efforts into five categories—the five pillars of social media strategy:
Who is this white paper for?
Before you invest too much time reading this paper, let’s make sure it’s going to be relevant. We’re assuming the following about you:
- You are a marketer - maybe you work for a bigger company, or an agency - most of your time is spent thinking about marketing.
- You understand the basics - we figure you already know about Twitter and Facebook and are convinced social media is important.
- You value the big picture - we're not going to dive into the depths of each social media tool - we'll look at how they all work together instead.
1. Listen
Gathering everything everyone is saying about you
and analyzing it to make business decisions.
People are talking about companies and brands all the time. This has always been the case, but social media has moved the conversation out into the open where you can see what they are saying and measure it.
Companies spend millions on research programs to understand their market and public perception of their products. Social media cannot replace those programs, but it can certainly give you valuable insights that compliment them and provide a new window of understanding into your customers and marketplace.
Social media can provide feedback in real-time. If you run a superbowl ad, you can see how many people are talking about it immediately afterward. You can measure the sentiment of people talking about events and campaigns as they unfold to determine what effect they are having on brand perception.
Social media can also give you insight into conversation trends. Are people talking more about your brand this week than last? Has conversation shifted toward more positive mentions rather than negative? Are there any new themes in the conversation that represent a shift in consumer thinking?
If your company is not doing anything with social media yet, you should start with listening.
Tools like Radian6 and and Nielson BuzzMetrics are great ways to get started listening to the social media buzz around your brand, product, or industry.
2. Create
Setting up social media profiles and posting relevant
content to build a social media following online.
This is where you start publishing content publicly - setting up a blog, Facebook page, Twitter accounts, etc. And while the channels you choose to interact in are important, what's more important is the content being pushed out through these new channels.
A common mistake made by marketers is to push out "marketing speak" through the new medium of social media. Most marketers only have one voice, and it is the polished voice of marketing speak. This is exactly the wrong kind of content for social media.
More than a collection of new communication tools, the culture of social media is open, honest, transparent, unpolished, and personal. It is about people. It is about real-time thoughts and ideas—not ideas that sound like they've been through rounds of revisions and approvals before being released.
This cultural shift is possibly the biggest barrier to companies adopting social media successfully. It requires a change in thinking that allows an engineer or product manager to post thoughts and ideas directly to the public—unpolished and unedited.
“ The culture of social media is open, honest, transparent, unpolished, and personal. ”
This is not to say that all social media content has to be unplanned. Social media presents a great opportunity for creative agencies and writers to add depth, energy, and personality to campaigns through content specifically created for social media channels.
The emphasis here is on removing traditional marketing content—things that seem to have been generated by a nameless, faceless company—from the social media vocabulary. Consumers can't get to know a company like they would a person. But they can get to know the people and personalities behind a company.
The main thing to keep in mind is that social media content must provide value to its audience. Good social media content provides entertainment value or "insider" value through personal interactions and behind-the-scenes content. Marketing for marketing's sake is almost always rejected or ignored.
A great place to get started here is to draft social media guidelines. You want to guide employees to interact in a way that is authentic, but still keeps the company's best interests in mind.
Where should you get started?
With all the social media sites out there, it can be hard to know where to get started. A good rule of thumb is to focus on the big channels first, before branching out into more niche websites.
Facebook fan pages are a great way to connect with your audience - especially for B2C brands.
Twitter profiles for companies and products give you an outlet for posting quick, timely news and updates from the “personality” of a brand.
Video content is more important than ever - and YouTube channels give you a great way to post your content all in one place.
Blogs & Podcasts
While social networks are a great opportunity to post content on sites where people are already spending their time, there is still value in the more “traditional” blog and podcast formats.
Blogs and podcasts give you the opportunity to tell a longer story and express your thoughts on your own turf — but be sure to link to all of your content in the social networks to ensure everyone gets to see it.
Niche social sites
Smaller topic-based social networks are popping up for specialized industries and topics. Make sure you understand the social media space that your audience uses — it may not be the big networks if there is a more focused community site out there.
3. Engage
Interacting 1-on-1 with your fans and
customers to resolve issues and reward fans.
Engagement is one of the more difficult aspects of social media for companies to do well. Moving beyond simply pushing out a message, engagement harnesses the two-way aspect of social media. If you have been listening, you know people are talking about your brand and products. Now it is time to respond.
One-on-one interactions with customers can shift brand perception and transform upset or confused customers into brand evangelists. Not only that, consumers are beginning to expect a response. People are posting things like "Just had a terrible experience with brand X - is anyone out there? I need help!" You can't afford to ignore them.
United Airlines learned this the hard way. They ignored posts from a passenger who's guitar was broken in baggage handling. To get United's attention, he created a music video titled "United Breaks Guitars" that was viewed by millions of people, made it on to the first page of Google results and earned negative press attention for the airline from the likes of CNN and Rolling Stone.
The United Breaks Guitars video got 8.3 million views on YouTube and became a PR nightmare for United.
Tools for Engagement
With all of the social media sites out there, it can be hard to know where to get started. A good rule of thumb is to focus on the big channels first, before branching out into more niche websites.
Hootsuite let's you manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts from one simple interface.
CoTweet is a workhorse for teams that need to do customer service from a single Twitter account.
Consumers have more power now than ever before. Social media has provided them with a platform to blast companies that are not responsive. And people trust their peers more than they trust companies. They listen to the "United Breaks Guitars" guy more than they listen to United.
The good news is that, done well, social media interaction can neutralize damages from these kinds of situations. Had United responded publicly to their angered passenger and offered to help with the damages, they likely could have avoided the situation entirely and possibly created a new advocate for the airline.
Companies need to reach out to complaining customers and offer to make things better—or at least acknowledge that they are sorry for what happened. Conversely, by thanking and rewarding customers who are advocating for their brand, companies can build an even stronger fan base.
The public nature of social media engagement makes it a cross-discipline effort that falls both in the customer service and marketing/PR functions of a business. To build an effective social media engagement program, it is critical that the leaders of these functional areas work together.
4. Promote
Leveraging all of the content and social interactions
from your company to build a social media press room.
The press release used to be the primary way businesses pushed out messages to the public. Times have definitely changed. Businesses actively participating in social media today have blogs, photo galleries, videos, executives that are tweeting, and official profiles on several social media networks.
This increase in communication is great for customer engagement, but the content being produced from companies is now scattered across the web and hard for people to find from your website. Some consumers may be aware of your Twitter account or blog, but don't realize you have a YouTube channel as well.
An important first step in this category is to promote your social media profiles on your website and even in offline communication. With the major goal of social media being customer engagement, it is important that as many customers as possible know how to interact with you in these new channels.
Slapping a lineup of social media logos and links on your website is great, but it only gets you half of the way there. The fact that you have a Twitter account or a blog is interesting, but I'm more likely to engage with the brand through those channels if I can see some of the content being posted to them. You need to promote how your company is using social media to get the most out of your efforts.
The best way to do this is through a social media press room. By replacing the press page on your website with a page that actually showcases all of the new formats of communication your company is using, you can create a destination page that gives a snapshot of the company's social media footprint.
And by pointing users to this page instead of a page with a bunch of logos, you are more likely to get them to actually jump in and start interacting.
FeedMagnet for Promotion
FeedMagnet let's you aggregate everything your company is producing in social media and put it all into one, custom-designed page on your website.
5. Maximize
Integrating positive, unsolicited social endorsements
from fans into your website and marketing programs.
Knowing that consumers trust their peers more than brands and companies, the biggest assets a marketer has are the fans of their products. Marketers have been using testimonials for a long time, but most people perceive these as hollow or untrustworthy knowing they have been massaged by the marketing department who published them.
Rather than using polished, plastic-feeling endorsements, marketers should begin using the posts from real people praising their company or products on social media sites. People are saying positive things about your brand right now—and those comments are publicly available, ready to be used to promote your products.
The trick is finding the great customer testimonials hidden a sea of user-generated content being pumped out of dozens of social sites. With all the unrelated content, negative comments, and otherwise unusable posts out there, pulling out good, usable posts can be like finding a needle in a haystack.
If you can find the people talking about how much they love your product, you have a gold mine for marketing. By showing potential customers that other people out there love your products—and are talking about them without being solicited or edited by a marketer—you can build trust and increase the likelihood for purchase.
FeedMagnet provides the technology to pull in everything people are saying about you, narrow the stream down through automatic filtering and human moderation, and then display the results anywhere you show a marketing message.
Done well, social media content can be pulled in to create a steady stream of real testimonials that can be displayed on the company website, marketing landing pages, purchase pages, and even in rich media ads or on displays at events.
The best strategy: integration
Social media should not be a separate silo in your marketing department, working independently of everything else you are doing. The best social media strategy is to integrate all five of the social media pillars with your existing marketing programs.
Create social media content to compliment your offline campaigns. Use social media to measure the impact of all marketing efforts. Integrate social media response into your customer service programs. Build social endorsements into your website, landing pages, and trade shows.
Implemented well, social media can build brand loyalty, provide valuable insight into your customers, turn brand critics into advocates, and increase the effectiveness of all marketing programs.
Getting Started with FeedMagnet
If you want to learn more about how you to incorporate FeedMagnet into your social media programs, give us a call. We'd love to meet with you and talk more about the possibilities.
Phone: 512.524.3873
Email: [email protected]