Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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Measuring Social Media Influence Versus Popularity

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Am I looking for popularity or influence?  It’s almost a quality vs. quantity.  Do companies or individuals actually understand the difference?

Marketers have been conditioned to grow brands by popularity over the years.  Show enough TV spots and billboards, add a catchy tagline and consumers will recall your brand when they are in stores.  This has worked well for many consumer goods products for decades.  Until now!  In the world of push marketing where consumers had no choice but to trust what you were saying (it was your brand why would you lie?), popularity worked.  If more consumers knew your name, the more you came up in general conversation, the check-out line and in your home.

The world is different now though.  The web and all things digital have changed the game on us.  Influence is quickly becoming the currency of choice on the web.  So what changed?  Now there is the expectation of a conversation not just a press release or a slogan.  Some of the most popular brands in the world have been smeared in the social dust (think Nestle, United Airlines, & Dominoes Pizza).  But these are all the most popular brands in their respective markets, right?

Let’s look at this issue from the perspective of individuals not businesses.  Everyone is in a rush to get the most followers on Twitter, the most friends on Facebook and the most viral views on Youtube.  That would equal popularity for most people.  Yet according to a recent study by ForeSee Results, Facebook ranks at the bottom for customer satisfaction.  What?  500m people and no one likes them?  That, my friends, says very clearly that you do not need popularity to have influence.

Or another example from the Bureau of Labor Statistics cites that in 2010 the most popular job (by volume) is that of a shop clerk.  The $20+k job has more than 4.2m people doing it, yet some of the least popular jobs (actors 40k and athletes 14k) carry the most influence.  When is the last time you saw a shop clerk with a Nike contract?

Whether an individual or a brand, what is it you should aspire to online, Popularity or Influence?  To help us with this discussion is Chuck Hemann.  Chuck is a social media director at WeissComm Partners and has been in the space for many years.    He is going to lead the conversation for the 75th #socialmedia event this Tuesday.  The topic and questions are as follows:

Topic: Measuring Social Media Influence Versus Popularity

Q1:  How do you define influence and popularity?

Q2:  What metrics can help define influence or popularity?

Q3:  Which (popularity or influence) is more important?

Join us for this event Tuesday 8/31 at noon eastern by following #sm75 from your favorite Twitter client.

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Posted in Branding | No Comments »

Social Media for Non Profits

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

The not-for-profit marketing mantra:  I don’t have a lot of money for marketing, I don’t have a big staff, but I have a lot of people who would help if I had a good way to connect them. 

Sound familiar?  Not-for-profits have always been understaffed and significantly budget constrained almost by definition.  As marketing goes, social media has an opportunity to be the equalizer, the force multiplier and the inexpensive alternative for non profits.  The trend with companies is to market under a cause.  They are attempting to tie their brands to non profits, charities and other causes that have a real or perceived value to their end users.

What’s interesting is that overall, non profits have yet to capitalize on this movement.  With social media being as effective as you make it and possibly the lowest cost form of marketing and advertising that a non profit will use, they are still using it as a way to push interactive newsletters and help automate content distribution channels.  In fact, according to a survey earlier this year from CharityVillage more than 80% of non profits use social media to promote awareness as a primary function and second place use for social media was Personal (60%+)!  Excerpt of results below:

When asked what purpose they are using social media for, they told us:

  • Promote our organization – 83.3%
  • For personal use – 61.1%
  • Attract new members – 55.6%
  • Increase event registration – 44.4%
  • Receive donations – 33.3%
  • Attract youth support – 27.8%

Other uses:

Research, Networking, Prospecting, Volunteer and staff communications, Public awareness/education, Promote a cause, Provide knowledge and research to other not-for-profits, Build fundraisers vs. donors (support network +)

What’s more interesting is that the next question they asked about was how much of the non profit’s budget was going to social media.  An overwhelming 75% claimed less than 1% of their budget was going towards social media.

Companies in the private sector are moving billions of dollars to social media resulting in large percentages of their overall marketing budgets and the one’s who could benefit the most, non-profits, are not yet fully realizing the potential that social media can represent.  What is the disconnect?  I might argue that non-profits in general are poor marketers so why would this be any different.  On the flip-side, I would argue that non-profits ARE stronger operationally.  However there are many ways in which non-profits could become much stronger operationally using social media too.  With that, I may simply be a lack or education, creativity and know how.  If that’s the case, we may have the answer.  For our moderator this week, we have invited Beth Kanter to lead this discussion.  As the CEO of Zoetica, Beth is one of the foremost authorities on social media for non profits in the world.  For our discusison, we will cover the following topic and questions:

Topic:  Social Media for Non Profits

 Q1:  How can social media work for non profits? (Backstory: we know they have time and need money / sometimes volunteers. Can social help this & how?)

Q2:  What is the easiest way for an NPO to figure out how to do social?

Q3:  What are some of the best case studies of NPO’s using Social and what was the impact?

Join us Tuesday 8/17 at noon eastern for our weekly discussion.  Beth will start the first question at 12 noon and introduce the follow-up questions every 20 minutes from there.  Feel fre to participate or follow along using #sm73 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in Non Profit | 1 Comment »

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Stop Wasting Your Time!

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

I enjoy hearing about companies having success with social media and I am certainly intrigued in understanding how they got there.  After researching dozens of case studies (as many as I have been able to get my hands on) one theme rings through.  Most of these companies have had success with little more than a tool, a concept and someone willing to figure it out through trial and error.  Noble for sure, not usually very sustainable or repeatable though. 

Then you hear about all the companies developing their social media strategies.  This becomes the plan behind a tool, a concept and someone willing to figure it out through trial and error.  Noble for sure, yet not very successful usually.  Why is this?  For one, the conversation usually starts with “We need a blog!”.  The boss needs to be able to cover their trail, so they require a strategy to go along with it.  The team creates a strategy full of love and happiness, the boss has no clue what it means and three (3) days later…violla!  The blog is in place.

The point of this (yes there is a point after all), is that no where in here did anyone tie a social strategy into a business objective.  You don’t hear much around “we created x number of new sales or x reduction in costs because of our social media strategy”.

Having a social policy or code of conduct for how employees should represent the company (both internally and externally) is needed.  Having some thought around governance and a crisis plan is certainly good measure.  However developing a social strategy that does not tie back to meeting some corporate objective is simply a waste of time.  Instead, create a business strategy that includes social media to help solve a problem faster, better, cheaper (assuming that it will). 

In the end, it really doesn’t matter what you want to call your efforts.  Call it a social media strategy, call it a business strategy or call it a Bazinga!  Whatever you call it, it has to tie back to some real value to the business.  To ensure that we do tie it back to the business, our host this week is B.L. Ochman.  B.L. is a 2nd time moderator for us (#sm45) and is recognized for her contributions to this industry.  For the chat she will cover the following topic and questions: 

Topic: Creating a Social Media Strategy? Stop Wasting Your Time!

Q1:  Should you create separate social media strategies or business strategies?

Q2:  How do you budget for social?

Q3:  Do you train staff for social or hire for it?

 

The chat will take place Tuesday 8/3/2010 at 12 noon eastern.  Follow along by monitoring #sm71 from your favorite Twitter client or simply goto our LIVE page (www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live).  The chat will begin at noon as B.L. tweets the first question and the conversation will start.  Then at 12:20, the next question is asked and 12:40 the final question.  The conversation is fast-paced and full of helpful insights from the people who are blazing the trails in this industry.

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Posted in ROI in Social Media, corporate, social media | No Comments »

Buiding our own Frankenstein: Is engaging with customers via social media required, or optional?

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Social media is the greatest boon for business since, well, the cash register right?  I mean just log onto twitter and grab some Facebook love and sit back, watch the customers start lining up and make sure your cash register is full of change.  It’s that easy.

Listen to a few “experts” and they make it sound that easy.  Some agencies focus on creating Facebook pages, widgets and applications and sell it to everyone who will buy it.  Just change the colors and voila!

The fact is that social media is not the savior for everyone.  Social media is not the silver bullet, the people behind it are.  Some companies will be poised to take advantage of new forms of engagement and new ways of interacting with customers, suppliers and employees.  Then again, some won’t.  

Just having a tool will not make you successful, the purpose, strategy and planning you do first might.  The way you integrate it into the entire campaign or initiative might.  Having a clean user experience may make poor tools perform better.  Even as simple as configuring the tools to support the initiative and not using the tool to define it.  Understanding the science of networks, the phsychology of why people participate and making that work for you and not against you is another way to make your social initiative stand out.  Once again, it’s not the tools, it’s the heft of the planning and purpose behind them.

Some companies have figured out how to make television work and some are still trying to figure it out after 60+ years.  For some companies, radio works great and is less expensive than alternatives.  Your business cannot be forced to go social, it has to be ready for it. 

So how do you know if your company is ready to go social and what do you use first?  This week’s host of the 70th edition of #socialmedia chat will help us explore just that.  Jay Baer has been weeding out the social media overgrowth for a long time and has ben helping companies figure out their right marketing mix for more than a decade.  This week’s topic is:

Topic:  Buiding our own Frankenstein: Is engaging with customers via social media required, or optional?

 Q1:  What are the circumstances when a company should NOT engage with customers via social media?

 Q2:  What are the organizational drawbacks to engaging with customers in this way?

 Q3:  How should companies modify their interactions, based on individual customers’ influence (if at all)?

Join in the discussion Tuesday 7/27 at noon eastern by following #sm70 from any twitter client or simply goto our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in corporate, social media | 2 Comments »

Mobilizing Your Social Strategy

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Mobile devices are becoming smarter and smarter.  Devices are able to handle most functions of a computer to some degree and users have adopted smart phone use internationally.  As a marketer, your plans must include social.  Whether your business is large or small, social can play a significant role in marketing to those customers on the move.

Our host this week reigns from the digital agency Red Urban.  Tom Edwards has been around both the social media and mobile media blocks a few times and brings a true blended expertise that is tough to match.  Tom will help us understand what to look for and why to get the most out of mobile and social media. 

Topic: Mobilizing Your Social Strategy
Q1) How are you integrating mobile to extend your social initiatives?
Q2) How are you maximizing the mobile web?
Q3) What tactics are you considering (Proximity, Augmented Reality, QR Codes) to extend digital/social
into retail?

Join us for this week’s chat Tuesday 7/13 at noon eastern.  To participate follow #sm68 from your favorite Twitter client or simply follow along from our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in Mobile | No Comments »

How to Get Measureable Results From Your Facebook Presence

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

When it comes to social networks, Facebook is certainly the 800 pound gorilla in the room.  For this reason, Facebook is (or at least needs to be) a staple in most every company’s social media strategies.  While there are other social networks out there, none hold the attention or capture the market share of consumers especially in the US market.  In fact, here are a few stats from the Facebook stats page:

People on Facebook
  • More than 400 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • Average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activity on Facebook
  • There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
  • Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
  • Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
  • More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global Reach
  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

As a marketer Facebook is one of those places you have to be in order to interact and engage with your customers and also as a way to be seen as relevant and impactful.  A marketer without a meaningful presence on Facebook for their company will not last long in that position.  Therein lies one of this era’s greatest challenges, making your Facebook presence work for you and not against you.  Anyone with 20 minutes can throw up a corporate page on Facebook and call it a presence.  Like anything else though, it pays to spend the time and resources to make your presence work for you. 

One of the key things to remember when considering your Facebook presence is how it will fit into your overall digital marketing strategy and what it will accomplish as part of it.  What are some other key take-aways you ask?  We decided to bring in the queen of Facebook marketing to help us answer that question.  Mari Smith will be hosting this week’s chat on the topic.  The coauthor of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, Mari brings a wealth of practical experience to us.  The topic and questions will be:

Topic: How to Get Measureable Results From Your Facebook Presence

Q1:   How do you gain momentum with a Facebook fan page?

Q2:   What should you be measuring on Facebook?

Q3:   How do you scale Facebook engagement?

Join us for this week’s chat Tuesday 7/6 at noon eastern.  To participate follow #sm67 from your favorite Twitter client or simply follow along from our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in ROI in Social Media, social media | No Comments »

How News Brands Use Social Media and Social Gadgets To Connect With Audience

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Photo: www.oweb.com

While everyone depicts the demise of newspapers, the art of news gathering has never been stronger. 

We’ll get this out of the way first, the newspaper industry as a distribution model is in a downward spiral.  Newspaper printing and physical distribution is an expensive proposition and with circulation in decline, the money (advertisers) are moving to greener pastures.   Advertisers are going online where they get broader exposure for cheaper rates with more access to return on investment numbers (analytics, click-throughs, etc).  That puts the traditional newsprint model in serious jeopardy.

News gathering on the other hand, has exploded.  If you consider the amount of content being created across blogging sites, video site (YouTube), podcasts, social networking sites and micro-blogging sites the numbers are astounding.  What’s subject, you might argue, is the quality of the content.  Therein lies the problem, with so much noise (content) out there, it is much harder for traditional content creators to match the velocity (speed and distribution) that news has taken on.  Journalists must fight fire with fire, not a garden hose.  Interestingly enough, journalists had the exposure, the resources and the networks to be able to do exactly what bloggers and other new-age news gatherers are doing today, just not the necessity.  As the early bloggers received much fanfare for regurgitating news found on the web, professional journalists resorted to this as well as a way to get the news out faster, not better.

Now the tides are turning.  Journalists who understand story-telling and fact-finding are now beginning to get necessity.  They are exploring new ways of developing news and planting seeds to better understand news as it happens.  There are some good examples already that I got from Vadim Lavrusik, who writes for Mashable, like the living stories project between Google and NYT’s and the invent of news streams, or news as it happens from sources like Twitter that break news sometimes hours before traditional media taps in.

What’s missing though is the transformation.  Journalists and newspapers are still doing the same things just with shinier toys and fancier widgets.  That’s motion not transformation.  Let’s stretch a bit and see what we could come up with.  How about if….

  • Journalists became masters of their networks. Use Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to manage a network of experts around any topic that might come up.  Have a local chemical spill?  Might help to know that there are 17 local chemical engineers and 7 local retired hazmat experts from the government within 10 miles of the accident.  With all the social networking, no one is connecting the dots locally.  The one who does, will become the modern day tribal leader.
  • News organizations teamed with Gov2.0.  Every government agency is falling over themselves to get up-to-speed in the digital world.  Think of the mashups you could create with the resources of the newspaper and the data of the local government.  If something happens, look who’s sitting on the data streams and information already.
  • Local advertising.  Newspaper sales used to be the only ones in town with access to every local business.  Why they did not offer every local business an enhanced listing on a Yelp type site is beyond me.  There was an opportunity to take over the yellow pages and I believe there still is.  Newspapers will never out Fox, FOX News, however no-one should ever out- St. Louis the St. Louis Post for instance.
  • Location based services – that leads here.  If newspapers were cross matching their data, they would already know what business locations were closest to me and make offers accordingly.  At the same time with just a little effort, they could greatly enhance my profile by simply offering me a profile and providing me a compelling reason to say which types of food, activities and shopping that I enjoy.

 These are just a few ideas that I came up with and I know when enough is enough.  From here, we’ll let the expert take over.  Brian Dresher will be this week’s moderator for the HashtagSocialMedia event.  Brian brings years of managing content distribution and customer acquisition for a news brand and certainly understands necessity as the Manager of Social Media and Digital Partnerships for USAToday.  Brian will help us open up the possibilities of an industry under-siege so you can take these lessons and apply them to your own industry where digital is changing the landscape.  This week’s questions will be:

Topic: How news brands use social media and social gadgets to connect with audience

1.       What role should Twitter and Facebook play in journalists engaging with users?

2.       How do devices like iPad and iPhone influence news consumption?

3.       How will location-based services impact future of news gathering?

Join us for this event Tuesday June 29th at noon eastern.  Follow along using #sm66 from your favorite Twitter client or simply goto our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

Updated post 7/2 to accurately reflect Brian’s role. Thanks again to Brian for leading a great discussion.

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Posted in Content | No Comments »

Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media

Monday, June 7th, 2010

“We took a chance on bending the rules a bit on our experiemental deep water drilling platform and kinda got caught.  What’s the big deal? Give us an A for effort?  C’mon, everybody makes mistakes!”

These are the types of musings that  have been entertaining more than 137,000 people on Twitter and millions more on ABC News, CNN, USAToday, Wall Street Journal and more.  Using a fake account, the twitter handle of @BPGlobalPR has been tweeting over-the-top posts that poke fun at BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, his wife and other leutenants at BP as a way to bring attention to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

In contrast, the BP corporate twitter handle has 12,000+ followers and is following 51 people.  How did this happen? 

Why would an oil behemoth like BP think they would have to engage through social media in any meaningful way?  In fact why would an electric company, pharmaceutical company, semiconductor company, etc have to worry about developing a social strategy?  This event and @BPGlobalPR should be a wake up call to every company who produces anything.  Some event will happen at some point and your company will get overrun if you are not prepared. 

What should you do, you ask?  Well, that’s what we asked this week’s moderator Gavin Heaton to work through on this week’s chat.  Gavin gets my bid for two awards this week.  He wins for coolest handle: @ServantofChaos and moderates at the oddest local time yet (2am his local time in Australia).  Coolness aside, Gavin brings years of experience in digital marketing and strategy development and has proven to be a goto person for Brands of all types.  Our topic and questions this week will be:

Topic:  Crisis Management for BP Using Social Media

Q1:  How has @BPGlobalPR affected perception and should they have shut it down?

Q2:  How is BP using social media to address the situation and what should they do better?

Q3:  What can other companies learn from this about managing a crisis & the impact of social media?

The event will begin with Q1 at noon eastern followed every 20 minutes with the next questions.  To follow along and add your POV simply track #sm63 via any Twitter client or follow along via our LIVE page.

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Posted in Public Relations | No Comments »

Quick & Legal: How to Make Social Media Less Scary for the Legal Dept

Monday, May 24th, 2010

There’s a saying in software development that customers want to get their projects done:

Cheap, Fast and Good.

The typical IT joke is that you can have 2 but not all 3.  I have a feeling that’s where the legal department’s position is with the other departments who are deploying social and have a need to engage with their customers.  Where the CEO ideally wants the response to happen Quickly & Legally.  The joke here is that Legal departments say “Quick” OR ”Legal” but not both.  There have been a couple of big brands on the wrong end of that joke lately and therein lies the importance of incorporating the legal department as a founding partner of your social efforts in the beginning rather than trying to “bolt” them on afterwards.

To be fair, there are a lot of reasons that the Legal department should be a significant partner in your efforts.  This deck from Daliah Saper does a solid job identifying all the reasons that mitigating risk in social is important.  Here are just a few:

  • Privacy Laws – Like HIPPA in medical
  • Negligence – in assuming a duty and not following  through on it
  • Trademark – confusing a consumer about your Brand and it’s use
  • Copyright – using/sharing something that’s not yours
  • Discrimination – especially when used in the hiring process & checking up on current employees

The marketing reality though is that Brands simply don’t control their messaging the same way in which they used to.  Responses to outcries from promoters and detractors alike that are measured in days or worse yet weeks is simply unacceptable today.  Speed is of the essence and customers just want to hear the truth.  That puts legal departments, who are in place today to mitigate risk, in a precarious position.  Where their primary job is reviewing the actions of employees it typically takes longer to get tasks completed.  Much of the time now executives who take the time to run through legal are actually opening themselves and their companies up to increased risk of being perceived as non-responsive and contrived (or not authentic).  The damage from being too slow can sometimes be more than acting quickly and genuinely.

What are companies to do?  Our moderator this week, Lucretia Pruitt, has been working on answering this question as well.  A veteran of the digital space, she has had her share of run-ins with the legal debate and has agreed to help all of us work through this.  Following in our tradition of 3 questions spaced 20 mins apart, Lucretia will lead the chat starting at noon eastern with the following questions:

Topic: Quick & Legal: How to Make Social Media Less Scary for the Legal Dept

Q1: How can big companies advocate for less regulation to reflect realities of social media engagement?

Q2: Should you train legal in SM and what does it look like?

Q3: How do you create SM policies/strategies that legal will accept?

We invite you to join in the conversation to share or learn or both!  Follow along by using #sm61 on your favorite Twitter client or simply follow along on our LIVE page.

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Posted in Privacy, corporate, social media | 1 Comment »

Connecting With Consumers Through Social Media

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

"Take a look from the outside looking in"

The title of this post pretty much sums it up.  So often we get caught up in frameworks and checklists and strategies and everyone is running around looking busy.  Meanwhile, back at ranch where the real work happens, consumers are still being marketed at even online.  How could this be?

It is helpful sometimes to take a step back and take a look at what you are doing from the outside looking in.  Consider how your consumers view you online and where they view you.  You might begin to understand why your social programs are performing the way they are.  So many strategies stop at the tools so you end up with a blog or a Facebook page and the strategist goes home.  Inevitably the same marketer or communications person does what they know and starts blasting messages.    As a result, the consumers that you were trying to get closer to actually end up further away.  To translate this back into social media jargon, you end up with an audience of lurkers (assuming they stay that long) when you are attempting to get those consumers engaged.

Jake McKee 90-9-1.com

Jake Mckee’s infamous 90-9-1 pyramid comes to mind.  If you do not make it easy, fast and safe for consumers to engage you will end up with more than 90 percent lurkers trolling your content.  On the other hand, if you take the time to create baby steps of engagement like a simple “thumbs up/down”, share this, or even a one question “quick poll” your audience will begin to engage more.  This helps to establish trust as well.  With trust comes responsibility though.  If you allow members to digitally attack each other via comment threads, etc then you will end up with the same 4 people running your site like street dogs marking their territory on trees.  Curating community content to keep it safe will go a long ways for members to want to contribute and connect with greater frequency.

Once they are connecting with higher frequency, what’s your plan then?  What messages do you want those consumers sharing?  Your consumers have 2 experiences with every interaction they have with you.  Those 2 experiences are perception and reality.   If you ask for suggestions, get them and never respond or even acknowledge them, the consumer’s perception is that you really don’t care.  All of these experiences get crafted into a story that is told and re-told online, at dinner parties, at the gym and anywhere else someone brings up your store, brand or product.

If consumers are your storytellers, then shouldn’t you have a plan to help shape that story every chance you get?  Two main themes are emerging: 1) enable consumers to connect with you more frequently and 2) have a plan in place to help mold their story about you once you do connect.  Sound straightforward?  If it does then you have never had to a) manage a community first hand, b) never been responsible for results or c) all of the above.

By design, our moderator has a lot of experience doing both.  Kyle Lacy is the head of Brandswag and a highly sought after social media practioner for businesses.  Kyle will lead a discussion around how to better connect with consumers by converting more passive consumers into active consumers of your brand and what to do once they become active.  This discussion will follow our weekly Tuesday event schedule taking place 5/4 at noon Eastern.    The topic and questions will be:

Topic: Connecting With Consumers Through Social Media

Q1) What are ways to move customers up the interactive chain from lurker to influencer?

Q2) What’s the value of storytelling vs. messaging?

Q3) How can you get customers to take action on your behalf and tell the story for you?

The event will begin with Q1 at noon eastern followed every 20 minutes with the next questions.  To follow along and add your POV simply track #sm58 via any Twitter client or follow along via our LIVE page.

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Posted in Content, social media | No Comments »

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