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People Have the Power: How Social Media is Changing Business and Why the Old Guard is Terrified

February 9th, 2011

By Barry Libert, Author of Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business

For as long as anyone can remember, the expression “those who have the gold, rule” has worked. But times are changing. Today, the power is shifting to the masses, and they are using the power of the sheer size and capabilities of the Internet to make sure their voices are heard. And this is making the old guard—existing management teams, boards, and investors—terrified for lots of reasons.

Most companies and their leaders have perfected business processes and competencies focused on making, marketing, and selling “things”—not listening, facilitating, and sharing information and experiences. The skills and technologies (command and control and assembly lines) required for the former are different from those required for the latter (empathy and compassion and social media). However, I think it is time for the old guard to get on board and recognize they have a unique opportunity to participate in the revolution—or risk losing their heads the way Marie Antoinette did.

Understand the Power of Social Media

The unprecedented growth of Facebook (550 million users), Twitter (200 million), bloggers (150 million), and text messaging resulted because there were tremendous unfulfilled demands by customers and employees that were not being met by traditional organizations or tools. These demands were basic: to communicate and connect. Further, the demands were profoundly valuable and important to almost all constituents—to be heard, connected, recognized for their contributions, and ultimately, self-actualized.

Facebook and other social media entities surfaced to satisfy those needs and reap the benefits, along with the organizations that invested in them.

Embrace the Voice of Your Customers and Employees

Most traditional organizations don’t have a team—let alone a senior ranking professional—charged with building their social media initiatives and developing their communities. If we look back just 10 years ago when e-commerce was first taking off, traditional leaders of brick and mortar companies thought that e-commerce was just a passing fad and would only be used for selling technologies. Obviously, they were wrong, and the same is true for social media and community engagement.

We are just at the beginning of a structural shift to the socialization of organizations. It’s important to build your social media team now, so you can join the conversation and hear what your constituents have to say. Don’t let the voices of your customers and employees go unheard.

The Crowd Can Help You Grow and Prosper

Regardless of what you think of your employees, customers, prospects, or alumni, there are more of them than you. Most importantly, you never know where the next great idea will come from, which could include your existing people or people from outside the four walls of your organization (and by extension, your partners). Research has repeatedly shown that crowds have wisdom, expertise, and passion that can help you grow and innovate.

It doesn’t matter how big your company is or how long it has been around. The growing size and popularity of social media signals a seismic shift from institutions and their leaders to individuals and their peers (e.g., communities). It’s time for a new organizational model: “business by the people, for the people” (not by the leaders, for the leaders). Leaders have to learn to become true followers of their constituents (customers, employees, partners, etc.) and join the social media revolution. It’s time to ask yourself if it’s better to be terrified of the masses or to join them and ensure your future success. It’s your choice.

Posted in Barry Libert, Blogs, Crowdsourcing, Customers, E-Commerce, Engagement, Facebook, Innovation, Listening, Marketing, Text Messages, Tools, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Using One-to-Many Technologies to Create One-to-One Experiences

February 2nd, 2011

By David Harkleroad, Chief Marketing Officer at Hay Group

I’m re-reading Neil Rackham’s B2B classic, Major Account Sales Strategy. While written in 1989, it is still remarkably relevant—and he would have included a section on social media had it existed at the time!

Neil asked experienced B2B sales professionals about the hardest part of selling, expecting to hear, “getting a consensus of needs when several different people are involved in the decision” or “getting customers to see that the need is urgent enough to justify action.” Surprisingly, they said, “getting in the door in the first place!” He concluded, “if you’re trying to penetrate a new account, the easiest starting point is to find a receptive individual—somebody who’s prepared to listen.”

To find those receptive individuals, B2B firms traditionally rely on business developers—or, as any Mad Men aficionado knows, the Roger Coopers or Pete Campbells—who leverage relationships, cold call, or, in its modern day equivalent, spam (does anyone ever open those?) to get in the door. As an aside, many B2B business leaders confuse these prospecting activities (a one-to-one activity) with marketing (one-to-many), much to all of our chagrin.

Today, social media, as many thoughtful B2B marketing peers have learned, offers real opportunities for marketing success by, in essence, using one-to-many technologies to create one-to-one experiences. To build those connections takes time, creativity, repetition, and the right content—similar to any other marketing approach. The challenge is tweaking that content to raise brand awareness, and more importantly, to create sales leads and conversations. A few simple, cost-effective ways to experiment:

  • Make it easy for people to opt in to your content. Listen to what your targets have to say, and create content that both supports your marketing objectives and matters to your online audiences. At the same time, think through a clear call to action for every touchpoint you have online. Offer a clear and simple way to connect for additional information, and track those leads.
  • Have a content hub. A blog isn’t realistic for everyone, although that is the ideal. Consider creating a robust microsite as a center for information on a key topic. It’s a nice platform for external audiences but can also effectively rally internal audiences and salespeople. Or, for those without the corporate resources, a social media news release, such as those found at PitchEngine, can house a variety of multimedia content. Whatever the method, offer clear ways to connect or to solicit input.
  • Build relationships with bloggers. As Kevin Briody notes in The Very Basics of Blogger Outreach, you must identify the right bloggers—and get to know them. This is the time to roll up your sleeves, because there is no “easy” list. However, there are some sources that can help point you in the right direction: Alltop, Google Blog Search, and Technorati. Once you identify a few key bloggers, look around their sites for any helpful information on blog rolls or lists they might produce themselves, such as this one, which offers a robust community of management and leadership bloggers.
  • Engage on Twitter. It’s critical to build your followers before you launch a social media campaign. Adam Holden-Bache provides six useful steps to find your B2B audience on Twitter. Listen for a while. Check to see if your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter. Scan for any customers, prospects, key bloggers, and competitors.

At Hay Group, these efforts have already generated one-to-one meetings with organizations we want to do business with. And our consultants report much more receptivity to meeting requests, which is perhaps the most satisfying result, since it increases their confidence to go open some more doors.

What tactics have worked for you? Please share your successes, so we can all learn.

Posted in Awareness, B2B, Blogs, Competitors, Content, David Harkleroad, Google, Lead Generation, LinkedIn, Marketing, News Releases, Prospecting, Public Relations, Relationships, Sales, Spam, Trackability, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Reaching Beyond Your Own Space

January 5th, 2011

By Jay Miletsky, Co-Author of Perspectives on Marketing, Perspectives on Branding, and Perspectives on Social Media Marketing

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a very interesting trend among people—small business owners and managers, especially—looking to improve their marketing through social media efforts. They started out skeptical (can this really work for my company?), moved on to anxious (I’ve got to start a social media marketing program, fast!), graduated to proud (I’ve started a blog and a Facebook fan page!), and have now increasingly settled on disappointed (this social media stuff really hasn’t done much for my business).

It’s a sad state of affairs, really, that so many business owners and marketing managers are reaching a point of disillusionment when it comes to their social media marketing efforts. But it’s a virus that seems to be spreading—a quick search on Facebook through practically any industry will show a veritable wasteland of abandoned fan pages that seemed to be launched in earnest, updated with regularity, and abruptly forgotten about when new wall posts failed to generate user interaction and fan counts never reached much beyond an early round of invites to friends and family.

The problem isn’t social media as a discipline, however. The problem is that too many marketers take the lazy way out—or at least fail to realize that small business success in the social space requires more effort than simply launching and updating a fan page and expecting people will engage you there. Even a remote control car only moves when someone’s at the controls steering it.

To gain a following (blog readers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, etc.), marketers need to reach beyond their own social space:

  • Don’t just write posts on your own blog. Reach out to industry blogs to guest write for them.
  • Read popular industry blogs on a daily basis. Zero in on one or two posts you feel strongly about—or at least have an opinion on—and leave a comment. Make it thoughtful and informative, and, if possible, leave it early in the morning, so it’s one of the first comments of the day. That way, other readers will be more likely to read what you have to say.
  • When you comment on someone else’s blog, always remember to leave a standard signature with your name and company name, as well as links to your site/blog, fan page, and Twitter site.
  • Don’t simply leave wall posts on your Facebook fan page. Look for larger organizations on Facebook that have fan or group pages where you can reach a broader audience. For example, suppose you’re marketing a hospital. Don’t limit your interactions to your own wall and fans. There are Facebook groups on general health topics as well as specific topics like breast cancer that literally have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. Posting topics there or commenting on other posts will help expose your brand page to many of those followers.
  • Find #hashtag conversations on Twitter related to your industry, and join in those conversations to build a following.
  • Check out LinkedIn Groups and see where you can add your thoughts to existing conversations or start your own thread based on topics that will be relevant to you and the group.

Most of all, as with any other form of marketing, success requires a consistent effort. Results are rarely, if ever, seen immediately, and only those who persevere through audience droughts will be around to feel the flood.

Posted in Blogs, Consistency, Disillusionment, Facebook, Hashtags, Jay Miletsky, LinkedIn, Marketing, Twitter | No Comments »

Engage Your Most Dissatisfied Customers for Radical Thinking

December 29th, 2010

By Dr. Philippe Duverger, Assistant Professor at Towson University

I agree with Tom Quinn’s recent post on the SMM Magazine blog—By Invitation Only: Letting Your Customers in Behind the Velvet Rope—where he advocates for a by-invitation-only brand community that leverages customer engagement in a private and exclusive environment. Facebook Pages and other initiatives that inform and lead your consumer base (customers and potential customers alike) to follow your brand and try your services and products is a different strategy than listening to your most valuable customers. Both strategies are valuable and have their place in the social media environment.

A social media strategy using Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other open-to-the-public environments will raise awareness, trial, and traffic. But it will also allow competitors to listen in on the conversation. If you are in need of radical service ideas and want to mine your customer base or test new ideas, you should create a secluded environment where only trusted and creative clients can participate.

This is where the dilemma exists. Should you invite only your loyal customers to participate in idea generation through online brainstorming sessions? Or should you invite your most dissatisfied customers? I advocate for the latter strategy.

Your most dissatisfied customers are probably thinking about switching providers. They are more likely to feel underappreciated or have experienced sub-standard service from you. They might have logged a complaint, only to receive an unhelpful administrative response, which further enraged them, thereby increasing their dissatisfaction. So it is more likely that they can tell you what is wrong with your business.

You might not want to hear it, or you might dismiss the complaint as a rare occurrence or subjective to the customer’s unrealistic expectations. And you might be wrong. That customer could be a visionary who will feel compelled to find a service provider that will satisfy her needs. If none of your competitors provide it, the customer might decide to provide it herself (assuming she has what it takes), become your competitor, and drive you out of business. Too far, you think? Take entrepreneurs like Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Kemmons Wilson (Holiday Inn), or Howard Schultz (Starbucks). They all have a common characteristic: they did not like what was available in the market and went on to create it for themselves.

Interestingly, Starbucks recently engaged in a Web-based brainstorming exercise where anyone—including its competitors—could participate and watch. Starbucks collected thousands of ideas. Great… except that only one radical idea would suffice to make a winter-coffee company an all-season coffee and smoothies company. The Frappuccino, according to Schultz’s memoirs, was a customer’s idea and now accounts for almost half of Starbucks’ revenue.

Certainly, among the tens of thousands of participants, there are bound to be creative consumers, satisfied or not. But the most dissatisfied and creative ones either won’t participate or will be outnumbered by the conservative, happy, and loyal customers.

Cyberbullying is explained by the balance theory where a customer posting a radical idea might preface it with a complaint, leading others to defend the brand by bullying the culprit out of participating. The solution? Segregate your behind-the-velvet-rope communities between radical thinkers and those who only have improvement ideas. Or, more practically, have a radical-thinking community composed of your most dissatisfied customers. And then listen.

Posted in Blogs, Brainstorming, Competitors, Conversations, Customer Experience, Cyberbullying, Engagement, Facebook, Listening, Philippe Duverger, Relationships, Strategy, Tom Quinn, Twitter | No Comments »

The Perfect Bundle: A Netbook and an Aspirin

December 22nd, 2010

By Jeff Hasen, Chief Marketing Officer at Hipcricket

I’ve always thought that a drugstore was a place to treat a headache, not to receive one. But we’re in dangerous territory these days. No, not the kind of danger where your wife or girlfriend asks you to pick up a feminine product that will be in your hand just when your buddy—armed with a mobile device and Twitter and Facebook feeds—is in line for his daily dose of beef jerky.

Consumer electronics have found a home at CVS between the deodorant and Pepto Bismol. How convenient, you say? How crazy, I say.

Why? It’s illogical to ask the consumer, or heaven forbid, the stockboy to be informed about consumer electronics products being introduced virtually every hour in the era of technology on steroids.

CVS began selling a $99 Sylvania netbook computer over the Labor Day weekend and quickly sold out in many locations, according to news accounts. It features a seven-inch display, 128 MB of internal memory, and 2 GB of NAND Flash. The computer runs Internet Explorer on Windows CE 6.0. How wonderful.

If you walked down the street or into your local CVS store (otherwise known as your consumer electronics destination of choice), do you think more than three in 100 could tell you the benefits and downside of 128 MB of memory and 2 GB of NAND Flash? What the heck is NAND Flash anyway? None of your Facebook or Twitter followers can help here.

Consumers were driven to CVS by Sunday circulars that proclaimed the “New Netbook… Wow! $99.99.” InformationWeek reported that “several users said they hoped to find a way to eventually download some Android apps to the netbook.” If you are going to hold your breath for this one, please consult the pharmacist. Other users said they bought the netbook for their children, while still others said they would give the machines as holiday presents. Shouldn’t this treatment of children be reviewed by the authorities?

The netbook can’t run Microsoft Office 2007 but gives lucky buyers WordPad, DocViewer, XLSViewer, and PDFViewer. Not to mention the headache that can be treated by CVS’ aspirin. Which brings us to the consumer electronics stores.

Whole new categories and operating systems are—or soon will be—for sale. Tablets are being offered that promise an iPad-like experience for a fraction of the cost. Smartphones are so plentiful that you have to wonder if every device can be that smart.

The better retail experiences will feature informed, patient salespeople educating the eager and uninformed. They will deliver on the “moments of trust” for the store and manufacturer. But that will likely be the exception, given staffing levels and the near impossible task of having anyone keep up with all the products and services that the tech world is introducing.

You’ll be hearing all about the pain on Twitter, Facebook, and a blog near you. It’s fortunate that aspirin is as mobile as the netbook and smartphone.

Posted in B2C, Blogs, Customer Experience, Facebook, iPad, Jeff Hasen, Mobile Marketing, Retail, Smartphones, Twitter | No Comments »

Three Questions the Savvy Executive Asks about Online Marketing Strategy

December 15th, 2010

By Stephanie Diamond, Author of Web Marketing for Small Businesses: Seven Steps to Explosive Business Growth

If you’re a leader whose business has an online component, you’d probably like to find some guidelines that make it easier to develop and sustain an online marketing strategy. There are lots of conflicting ideas swirling out there about what to do online. If you followed many of them, you’d be spinning your wheels with no revenue in sight.

As someone whose has worked online since 1994, I’ve watched the marketing “shiny object” change from Web site to newsletter to blog to social media network. And on it goes. I know that getting locked into a tactic with no clear strategy in sight is a common mistake.

If you’re uneasy around the topic of social media strategies, you’re not alone. Because you’re not down in the trenches tweeting and posting, you probably don’t have the “hands-on” feel you have for other areas of marketing.

If you attempt to delegate, employees suggest all manner of tactics to engage customers. You’ve heard that you need to engage with Twitter and Facebook, study ongoing analytics, present sparkling content, and co-develop with customers. Great advice. But without the strategy behind it, your campaigns are destined to fail. Like every other area of business, you need to create the strategy first and make sure it flows down to everyone in your organization.

In formulating an online strategy, here are three questions to consider:

  1. Value. Do your employees know the real value consumers place on your products and services? If you don’t develop and constantly hone that message, your employees can’t communicate it in their social media efforts. In turn, all the ratings and comments that show up about your company will not engender the “word of mouth” referral power they could. If your customers aren’t selling for you, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful weapons you have today.
  2. Intellectual property (IP). Are you encouraging your employees to mine the intellectual property hidden inside your business to create information products and services? I’m not referring to the patents or formulas your company owns. The IP in companies today can be found in their vast stores of information. The key is to evaluate that information based on enhancement of the customer’s life. Think broadly. Consumers today are hungry for quality information that solves problems. Can your staff take that information and create videos, e-books, and other downloadable properties with that in mind?
  3. Competitive advantage. Do your employees understand who your real competitors are? I’m often surprised when I work on competitive strategies with my clients that they overlook several real online competitors. It’s a mistake to focus on only those who sell your exact product/service in exactly the way you do. The Web provides the opportunity for your customers to pick and choose from a variety of options. For example, if you sell sales training courses, your competitors are online video portals, coaches (both in-person and online), downloadable audio courses, etc. Make sure your staff has looked at all the possibilities.

One more note—there are many visual thinking tools (like mind mapping) that your team can use right now to gather ideas from all internal disciplines. Consider using these techniques to get ideas from programmers and marketers alike. In today’s marketplace, you can’t afford to overlook a great idea.

Posted in Analytics, Blogs, Competitors, Content, E-Books, Facebook, Intellectual Property, Marketing, Mind Mapping, Stephanie Diamond, Strategy, Twitter, Video, Word of Mouth | No Comments »

Embracing Social Media Measurement

November 24th, 2010

By Deirdre Breakenridge, Co-Author of Cyberbranding: Brand Building in the Digital Economy

If there’s one area of marketing strategy that deserves significant attention, it’s measurement. Back in the days of traditional communications, marketers were always held accountable for the results of their campaigns. We had to know if the marketing efforts raised awareness, created consumer loyalty, and moved products off the shelves or if our initiatives helped the brand’s reputation. However, much of our measurement was based on eyeballs or impressions. How much did that advertisement cost and how many people actually saw it in their favorite magazines or heard it on the radio during their morning drive to work?

Then we morphed into digital communications and were able to target our campaigns to capture activity and sales from clicks to conversations. And we became no strangers to the terms PPC and CPM. Today, as a result of social media marketing, we are focused on conversations and participation in the social sphere. Consumers are becoming more active in their Web communities and trusting the advice and word of their peers over the brand’s messages. As a result, marketers know they need to create opportunities for brands to engage with their consumers through high levels of interaction. Of course, social media engagement can lead to any of the following: awareness, perception, reputation, education, conversations, authority, leads/sales, etc.

With so much listening, monitoring, and measuring that needs to be done, how do you select the right tools to capture the metrics that show value to the brand? How can you tell the difference between the high-level/high-value interactions versus the Facebook “like” or follower on Twitter that never leads to a product sale? I’ve found a couple of different measurement techniques that show good value for any brand that takes the time to invest in these types of measurement. They are “share of voice” and “social influence marketing (SIM) score.”

If you are unfamiliar with these two metrics, here’s a brief overview:

Share of Voice

A brand’s share of voice includes any type of brand mention, which could appear in social networks, blogs, microblogs, message boards and forums, video and photo sharing sites, wikis, etc. Share of voice lets you hear what people are saying and where they are saying it, how they perceive your brand, and what they think about it. You can compare your brand’s share of voice to that of your competitors. You can also capture those communities that have a greater share of voice, allowing you to capitalize on any brand champions speaking on your behalf by building better relationships with them as they continue to be your advocates. It’s also a good practice to evaluate any weak areas where you can create stronger ties with your stakeholders and engage in more meaningful interactions.

Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score

The SIM developed by Razorfish supports a brand’s attempts to track, analyze, and improve net sentiment by setting benchmarks against itself and also by comparing the SIM scores to that of its competitors. The SIM score is calculated by looking at the brand’s positive, neutral, and negative mentions in relation to total conversations, both for the brand and the brand’s industry. For example, net sentiment for a brand (which is calculated by positive mentions plus neutral mentions minus negative mentions) is divided by total conversations (positive plus neutral plus negative) to get a brand sentiment score. The same calculation is used to obtain the net industry sentiment score, calculating the positive plus neutral minus negative mentions, and then dividing by total industry conversations. The SIM score is equal to the total net sentiment divided by total industry sentiment.

These are only a couple of the metrics that can be used to measure the results of social media marketing. With so many conversations to capture from our consumers and other stakeholders in Web communities, we must embrace social media measurement. Whether you are using free tools (such as Social Mention and Alterian) or automated services (including Radian6 and Sysomos), it’s critical to turn up the volume on our listening/monitoring and measurement practices and show our executives that no matter where we market, there are results, and we are accountable.

Posted in Blogs, Brand Champions, Branding, Conversations, Deirdre Breakenridge, Engagement, Listening, Loyalty, Measurement, Microblogs, Monitoring, Share of Voice, Social Influence Marketing Score, Video, Wikis | No Comments »

Will Social Media Courses Enable a Cultural Shift in Higher Education?

November 10th, 2010

By Dr. William Ward, Adjunct Professor at Grand Valley State University

“The times, they are a-changin’.” —Bob Dylan

Universities are using social media through their institutional marketing departments to attract new students and communicate with alumni. Various academic departments have reluctantly added social media courses. Some progressive universities are even hiring new full-time faculty to teach these courses. To all of this I say congratulations—but has the higher education culture shifted?

This is a bigger question than should we offer a social media course or who is qualified to teach it or what college or department should be responsible for teaching social networking. A cultural shift in higher education is needed, but a social media course is not the answer.

David Armano, Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital writes about three social business models: “closed,” “collaborative,” and “open.” Closed organizations are recognized by silos, rigidity, and information hoarding, while collaborative organizations freely share information and knowledge internally. Open organizations connect internal and external communities for mutual gain.

So, how do you tell if a university is closed, collaborative, or open?

If you ask, all universities will report that they are open and collaborative; but, digging deeper, may not tell the same story. There are five questions that higher education institutions must answer to determine if they are acting the culture they seek:

1. Are university presidents and administrators personally using social networking or blogging to engage with faculty, staff, and external publics?

2. Are all faculty members creating content using social media, blogs, or collaborative digital tools like Google to communicate and share with their colleagues and industry for research and learning?

3. Are all faculty members using social media to communicate and learn with their students for all of their classes?

4. Are students using social media for learning, communicating, creating, and sharing in all of their courses or just in their social media courses?

5. Are universities (and accreditation systems) measuring social media and digital output and the new ways of sharing and publishing beyond traditional academic journals for tenure?

Unfortunately, most universities talk about collaboration and being open but have rigid academic silos that make real collaboration challenging. Social media courses and initiatives being added as part of existing academic silos are not enough to create the change needed in higher education for truly open cultures.

To become an open organization, university presidents, administrators, and faculty must model the behavior they seek to create for higher education. Assigning student interns or individuals in a department to be responsible for social media is not the answer. Everyone in the organization must be actively engaged.

You are what you measure. Universities (and accreditation systems) must measure and reward individual social media and digital output to empower change. If academic journal publication is used as the sole research measure for tenure, then social media will not be integrated to create an open organization.

Social media is a powerful tool for research, learning, communicating, collaborating, and creating, but the real power is in the cultural shift to a dynamic and open organization.

Posted in Blogs, Collaboration, Culture, Google, Higher Education, Research, Social Media Courses, Universities, William Ward | 10 Comments »

Could Big Brands Learn a Thing or Two from Singer Leann Rimes? Hell, Yeah!

September 15th, 2010

By Aaron Strout, Chief Marketing Officer at Powered

I have always been a music enthusiast, but I’ve never been that interested in country music. And while I’m not ready to race out and fill my iTunes account with the likes of Kenny Chesney and Garth Brooks, I recently purchased a few songs by the lovely and talented Leann Rimes. Why the sudden change of heart? If you must know, it was because of a single tweet. Well, it was actually two tweets… and the fact that during a show I saw at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing event, she was authentic and genuinely made an attempt to connect with the crowd of 1,500 senior marketers.

As someone that embraced Twitter back in 2007, I regularly use it to learn, engage, and build relationships. To that end, I often make a point of acknowledging people, companies, and organizations when I feel like they are doing a good job. This may or may not mean anything to them, but it’s my style, and so far, it’s borne a lot of goodwill and business value for me.

Getting back to Leann Rimes and her performance at the ANA conference last week: as she was wrapping up her set, I took the time to look her up on Twitter and send her a thank you tweet. Imagine my surprise when she actually tweeted me back!

The reason I’m sharing this experience is not to show off—although who doesn’t love having a successful female country singer tweet them back—but rather to point out a lesson that big brands could learn from this experience. For starters, it doesn’t hurt to follow Ms. Rimes’ lead and ensure that your brand is perceived as credible and authentic. That was the thing about Leann that got me to tweet her in the first place. But more importantly, the fact that someone as busy as she must be took the time to tweet back to a potential fan was huge.

Did she do it because she knew that I was on the fence about liking her? I don’t think so. Looking back in her tweet stream, it appears she does that with a lot of people. It’s just who she is. What I can guarantee is that while she is a very talented singer, one of the main reasons she has become so successful is because she engages her “customers.”

Now would I have been as excited if a brand like Lexus or Starbucks tweeted me back? Probably not. But I do appreciate it when a brand takes the time to acknowledge me, and it has made me more likely to stick with that brand. For example, in the case of WiFi provider Boingo, I’ve actually become one of its biggest fans, primarily because Boingo regularly engages me in conversation on Twitter. Now Boingo only earns $120 per year from me, but I tell everyone I know about Boingo, have mentioned it in blog posts, and have even gone so far as to be interviewed in an article about Boingo and the “network effect of super fans” on the FASTforward blog.

So is your company engaging its customers? It doesn’t take a lot to get started—just a good listening tool and an internal and/or external resource that can help reach out to customers (or prospective customers) who are mentioning you. You’ll be surprised how far a tweet, a blog comment, or even a Facebook “like” will go in turning people’s heads.

Posted in Aaron Strout, Blogs, Branding, Engagement, Facebook, Listening, Marketing, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Is Farming Out Selling Out?

August 4th, 2010

By Phyllis Neill, President & CEO of WeMentor Social Media Marketing

The more we learn about social media marketing and management, we realize that the devil is in the details. We now know it’s not enough to simply be in social media, but we need lots of relevant, compelling content, frequent updates, and ongoing efforts to find followers. Most importantly, we need to inject our authentic brand voice, which cannot be outsourced. Or can it?

The good news is, there can be a happy medium. The secret to success is knowing what to farm out, what to keep in-house, and having a strategic plan that helps you do both.

What You Should Farm Out

You could feasibly farm out the creation and posting of 70 percent of the educational content you need to be providing:

  • Make a list of the top 10 to 15 sites where your target and current customers spend time, such as blogs, online news sites, niche social media sites, etc.
  • Engage someone to do a weekly “listening” campaign, where they select the top two to three articles or blog entries from each of the sites you identified.
  • From the list of top articles and blog entries gathered, engage someone to turn them into educational tweets, and have them post these three to four a day throughout the week for you.

What You Should Keep Within Your Company

Even if your business is trying to establish itself as an expert in a specific field, you will need to do more than have highly relevant article link tweets to get you there. Part of the appeal of social media is the intimacy factor; the ability to really get to know a company and its people like never before. Therefore, it is critical that you are able to inject your brand personality into your social media efforts, or people simply will not continue to follow you:

  • Create mini-blog entries. Have your social media marketing company create an editorial calendar that maps out suggested blog topics for each month, giving you the ability to give out guest blog assignments way in advance with a topic already suggested.
  • Post company events on Facebook. If you had a summer picnic, a charity fundraiser, or a trip for your top salespeople, post pictures of these events with personal captions under each picture. Nothing gives a customer or prospect a better feel for the company brand and culture than getting a peek inside how the company celebrates.
  • Develop a relationship with Twitter followers by commenting on other tweets and retweeting interesting articles.
  • Create real-world interactions out of social media meetings. Plan once-a-week LinkedIn lunches to stay top of mind with your LinkedIn contacts. Or write a handwritten note to someone you’ve met through your social media efforts.

The Importance of Strategy and Relationships

The bottom line is that it is possible to outsource a lot of the legwork involved in your social media strategy and still remain highly involved in the messaging. Just make sure to stay strategically involved in the relationship-building piece of the program, and your social media program will be a success.

Posted in Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Listening, Marketing, Outsourcing, Phyllis Neill, Strategy, Twitter | No Comments »

Social Media Marketing: So Much More than Tools

June 23rd, 2010

By Frank Reed, Principal of Frank Thinking

With the whole field of social media marketing coming together over the past few years, there has been a feeling of constant change. Twitter has gone more mainstream in the past 18 months, Google Buzz has jumped into the fray, Facebook fan pages have gained momentum, and corporate blogging is getting the true attention it deserves. As a result, it will be important to quickly recognize what actions a company must take in this frantic environment so time and resources wasted are limited.

The first focus, and perhaps the most important one, is avoiding what I call social media “tool mania.” This condition results from people getting caught up in the swirl of experts and gurus crying out for everyone to be using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and any other tool that is available in today’s social media marketing marketplace. The implication being if you are not using these tools, you are not an effective marketer.

What has thus been created in this initial wave of social media marketing efforts is a focus on the tools to be used with little or no consideration for the business application of the tools. I tell people that while a screwdriver is a fantastic tool, you are not going to paint a house with one. The same basic theory applies to social media marketing. If a tool such as a Facebook fan page or a blog simply does not fit your business needs, then you may not need to have one. Social media heresy, I know, but more often than not, these ill-conceived efforts end up costing companies valuable time and resources with little or no return.

So why the rush to apply these tools without the appropriate assessment of the business application? Well, people don’t want to seem like they are not current or cool. Since “everyone” has a Facebook fan page or Twitter presence, then I have to as well, right?

First, the statistics don’t bear out the “everyone is doing it” theory. A Burson-Marstellar study published in February 2010 shows that 65 percent of the Fortune Global 100 had active accounts on Twitter, 54 percent had a Facebook fan page, 50 percent had a YouTube channel, and 33 percent had corporate blogs. While encouraging, these numbers really say little, because having a presence is no indication or guarantee of success. Just look at the graveyard of Facebook presences that haven’t been updated in months and blogs that have been left to rot on the vine. These do more damage than good, so were they really a smart use of resources? Not likely.

So what are we to do? Well, it’s pretty basic. Research where your customers are, determine how your competition is engaged in social media, get the right resources in place, establish KPIs that are truly measurable, and then proceed with business acumen and solid business common sense. Be careful, though, because many of the social media “tool purveyors” don’t have the business skills and knowledge, due to lack of overall business experience.

A general who takes his troops into battle with plenty of weapons but no battle plan would be labeled a fool. My question then becomes is there any difference in a social media marketer doing the same thing?

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