2013 B2B Social Media Marketing (Whitepaper) Report

There has been an explosion in B2B social media of late. In fact, 83% of all B2B companies now use social media to connect with customers and prospects and to generate leads.

The challenge: how do you make your social media investment pay off?

Our white paper B2B Social Media Monetization gives you need-to-know advice for setting social media strategies, measuring the success of your campaigns, and driving revenue.

Download your copy of whitepaper now!

Effective B2B Social Media Lead Generation in 5 Simple Steps

Over 500 people registered for our B2B social media webinar early this week and I must confess that the response was overwhelming. At first I thought that I thought that my campaigning team had done an exceptionally good job (which they have indeed) but as the webinar was nearing to end I had a realization that most of the attendees where present because of the topic - B2B Lead generation from Social Media.

Now this gave us a reason to condense the discussion and present the steps and the steps and processes towards setting up an effective and successful lead generation program for B2Bs using social and online media in simple 5 effective steps:

1. USE EFFECTIVE MARKETING PLATFORMS TO GRAB ATTENTION, INCLUDING:

Search (the number one source used in B2B purchase decisions)
Online advertising
Social advertising

2. HAVE A STRONG CALL TO ACTION
Use clear language telling your audience exactly what you want them to do. Use a big red button they can’t miss.

3. CREATE A DEDICATED LANDING PAGE
Make sure your landing page matches up with what you’re promising in your ads.

Define a clear path for your visitors
Guide users to a single desired action (one offer)
Limit friction, confusion, and distractions

4. RETARGET THEM IF THEY DON’T CONVERT
Perhaps a prospect got to your landing page but didn’t fill out the form. Use retargeting ads to get their attention again. These ads display on third party websites to those who went to your website but didn’t convert. The goal is to bring them back. Your retargeted ad could offer different incentives or a softer sell.

An example of a re-targeted ad

5. AFTER YOU GET THEIR CONTACT INFORMATION
Our jobs as marketers don’t stop when the form is filled out. Sales and marketing must work together to connect with the leads after they've completed the form and ensure the messaging is relevant to that prospect. To keep it organized, track your campaign within your CRM. This enables sales and marketing to track every action including:

Where the lead came from
Campaign details such as media costs
Next steps/directions for sales (Summary info, qualification questions, email templates)
Use your CRM to create shared dashboards between marketing and sales to give everyone a transparent picture of how things are performing.

Social Lip Service vs. Social Customer Service: AT&T Wireless Case Study

Many organizations claim to “be social.”

They claim they have social media integrated with sales, marketing, and even customer service.

They may even tout that their customer service teams are using Twitter to communicate and help customers.

The real question is… are they providing social lip service or social customer service?

Social Lip Service: 

The company assigned tweeter pretends to want to solve my problem. They reply quickly to my tweet. However, they rarely do more than point me back to a customer service department via 1-800 phone number that I probably already spent 2 hours working with.

Social Customer Service:

The key difference is that the assigned tweeter sees my problem through to resolution even if it takes more than one day! They provide relevant value in taking my time to read, respond and act on the suggestions they recommend.

The problem:

A couple weeks ago I attempted to upgrade my iPhone on the AT&T Wireless Premier Business website. It still shocks me how companies as big and powerful as AT&T can still have such a terrible user experience on their own website. However, I digress and that’s not the point of this post, although it is very much a part of it.

I was unable to upgrade my iPhone on the AT&T business website using my account. For some reason the iPhone 4G didn’t appear as an option for upgrade.

Social customer (me) tweets opinion

It was after 10 pm et and I was of course multi-tasking tweeting, watching the news & trying to take care of my dying iPhone 3G.

I sent one tweet to politely vent in 140 characters that I wasn’t having fun on the AT&T premier site. I got a few responses with others stating their same frustration. I didn’t encourage the conversation to go into a bashing of AT&T because that’s not how I roll.

Here’s the fun part…

AT&T customer service responds via Twitter:

The next day I woke up to a friendly tweet from the assigned AT&T customer service tweeter. The tweeter had a real face on the Twitter avatar, though I don’t know if that’s who was really responding. Not sure if they have numerous customer service representatives who tweet from the twitter account and assign to customer service as necessary?

I saw the tweet and replied. The AT&T tweeter asked me to follow her so she could provide me directions.

She immediately sent me a DM offering to help. She asked for my email address and phone number.

Social customer (me) doubts AT&T’s ability & commitment to solve problem

I pretty much laughed it off. I had dealt with Verizon on issues with their FIOS performance and never received more than a push back to their 1-800 line which I had unfortunately had already spent the morning on with no resolution.

However, the AT&T tweeter had such a friendly, smiling face I thought “what the heck, I’ll give this a try.”

AT&T solves my problem!

The AT&T tweeter sent me a couple DMs and an email even though I had not yet responded back to her.  It was a very busy week for me as we were out of town negotiating some major business deals.

Several days passed and she was still following up.

By the end of the week I had an email and a DM stating my problem was solved! Even better she left a voice mail on business phone stating the same thing.

I thought “Yowza! Are you serious, my problem is solved and I didn’t have to call the 1-800 number and be transferred to 3 more people, hung up on twice & still not get a resolution?”

I couldn’t believe it! I logged into the AT&T premier business website and you guessed it… it was fixed. I could now upgrade my iPhone immediately. Problem sovled!

Thank you AT&T!

What did AT&T Wireless do right?

1. They were doing social listening (they knew about my tweet)

2. They had a policy for how to respond.

3. They responded in a timely manner.

4. They were genuine in their communication.

5. They were consistent even though I got busy & didn’t respond back to them in a timely manner.

6. They followed through on what they said they would do.

7. They resolved the issue.

8. They respected my time. I didn’t have to do anything besides reply to a DM with my cell phone number and email address.

9. They provided value to me as a customer during a very hectic and busy week.

10. They inspired me enough to write this post about their excellent social customer service.

11. They kept me as a customer.

Why has the social customer service bar been set so low?

If you really think about this scenario it is quite disappointing.  It is unfortunate that we are accustomed to terrible quality of customer service from most companies. The fact that I am ecstatic about a quick response to a problem stopping me from spending $400 with a company is sad.

There is tremendous opportunties for organizations to raise the bar in their level of customer service and customer satisfaction by properly implementing and integrating social media into their business. Responding via Twitter telling customers to call the 1-800 which takes me to the same broken customer service department that I started with is not a solution. Such a scenario only makes it worse and more frustrating for the customer.

Organizations must take the time to look at the end to end process and how you can leverage communication mediums such as Twitter to drive efficiencies and improve key performance metrics. There are no more excuses. Sending a tweet as a band-aid to a broken customer service department is only going to highlight your core issues. Take the time to do it right and you just might wind up with a blog post written just like this one!

Don’t do social. Be social!

Don’t just do social media. Be a social business!  I am a social customer. If you want to communicate with me on the social turf then you need to behave like a social business! Your chosen method and quality of response on the social networks has immediate and lasting impact to your company reputation, brand and bottom line.

Your Turn:

Do you know a business that is successfully integrating or has integrated social media into the DNA of their customer service? What are they doing right?  Have you had negative experiences as well? What happened? What recommendations do you have for organizations to improve customer relations by leveraging social media?

Author

Pam Moore

Half marketing, half geek, social media addict, CEO & Founder of Marketing Nutz @MktgNutz, entrepreneur, speaker, trainer, coach. Lover of strategy, ROI, Brand, God, Family, Friends, Beach & Life! 15+ years of experience helping small startups to Fortune 100 companies, budgets teeny tiny to big in both B2B and B2C markets build brand awareness, grow new markets, develop communities.

In Social Media, Top of the Funnel is About Lead Introduction – Not Creation

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a field sales team at Pitney Bowes Software about how we can work collaboratively on our Engage Today social media marketing program to support their tactical success.

I focused the discussion on the four high-value sales outcomes we have been able to consistently deliver:

1. Lead introduction
2. Lead nurturing
3. Deal capture
4. Competitive intelligence

This was the first time I swapped out lead generation for lead introduction in a presentation.

Why the change?

As Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) has matured its business-to-business and public sector focused  “social media for sales” programs on behalf of clients like Pitney Bowes, Polycom, British Telecom (BT), Intelsat, Blue Coat Systems, Mandiant and others, we have recognized that a lead generation expectation simply isn’t realistic.

Companies place considerable weight on quantity when evaluating the effectiveness of a tactical approach for lead creation.  It’s understandable because corporate marketers can model top of the funnel leads to an anticipated revenue output.

While our programs have demonstrated the ability to produce new leads through premium content offers, they are not at a level that survives a cost per lead analysis.  It’s because of this that my recent pitch to two exceptionally qualified and interesting prospects fell short.

Lead introduction though is achievable and, in my opinion, of equal (if not greater) value in a business-to-business and public sector context.  That’s because the majority of vendors sell multimillion dollar, enterprise solutions to executive level decision-makers.

Whether a company is pushing product, service or a combination of the two, it is a consultative sell.  Executive buyers have to be educated and, equally critical, a relationship defined by trust must be established.

Education via thought leadership content and customer or prospect intimacy – those are the core tenets of an effective social media initiative.

A wonderfully composed guest post on Marketo’s blog by Andrew Gaffney of DemandGen Report validates my view on lead introduction as a realistic social media for sales outcome.  Gaffney presents three key points:

1. Executives play a prominent role in the buying process;
2. These executive rely heavily upon peer reviews, feedback and content-sharing to inform their buying decisions; and
3. Social media even more popular among executives than it is among their subordinates.

Author

Marc Hausman

Hi! I am the president/CEO of Strategic Communications Group, a social media marketing consultancy based outside of Washington, DC. Read more at: http://www.thestrategicguy.com

7 Pinterest Boards to Follow for jobs and opportunities

Is it possible to get anything but hours of casual fun out of the popular pinboard site, Pinterest? As it turns out, yes. A number of great websites and organizations take to Pinterest to share their advice, ideas and insights related to careers, job searching and professional development, while managing to turn this often cumbersome activity into a more enjoyable, visual experience.

Pinterest already is a way for professionals to organize their career plans, get job search tips, and showcase their work in an interesting, visual way to employers. To jump-start your use of Pinterest for your career, here are seven of the best Pinterest boards to follow related to employment.

InsideJobs

This organization uses Pinterest to help people with career exploration and inspiration, including career ideas, education, career coaching and career change. With only eight boards, InsideJobs updates regularly and provides insightful, useful info for professionals, much like a pinboard career coach.

CareerBliss

Self-described as a “community dedicated to finding you a happier job,” CareerBliss offers a variety of useful pinboards on Pinterest. Their boards include articles related to bosses, coworkers, employers, employee benefits, company culture, work options and having fun at work.

BrazenCareerist

If you’re looking to become a more savvy job seeker, follow BrazenCareerist on Pinterest to find advice and tips on job searching, as well as a compilation of online job fairs, career courses you can take, and specific advice for Gen Y.

CAREEREALISM

Their motto couldn’t be more true (“Because every job is temporary.”) and their Pinterest boards are a bit like job search boot camp with fun visuals. You’ll find tips for resumes, job interviews, networking, cover letters and work attire. They’ve also got recommendations for career books, work lunch ideas, office decor, vacation destinations and more.

Splash Resumes

Of course, this organization posts resume tips and tricks, but they also include a healthy dose of work wardrobe suggestions, job search tips and personal branding ideas. If you’re looking for ways to make yourself more unique and creative in your job search, these are great boards to follow.

Working Mother

The Pinterest board of Working Mother Magazine showcases the top companies for working moms, career advice, tips for multitasking, financial advice, info for new moms and a host of other mom-and-parent-specific topics. They even have an "LOL" board for when you need a good, career-related laugh.

Workshifting

Dedicated to helping professionals work from anywhere, the Pinterest board of Workshifting offers home office tips, coworking space suggestions, and technology updates and advice. Great pinboards for digital nomads.

If you’re already spending untold amounts of time pinning to your heart’s content, why not use Pinterest to advance your career, too? If nothing else, it makes job searching a bit more fun and it gives you a solid excuse for spending so much time on Pinterest.

Now a Social App that can manage Your Entire Home From a Phone.

A new app aims to reassure absent homeowners by letting them manage and monitor household items, straight from their phone or tablet.

Prizm is a 5-inch touchscreen controller that uses Z-Wave, a wireless system designed to help users communicate with home appliances. Combined with the Prizm Manager mobile app, they can turn light switches on and off, lock and unlock doors, raise and lower shades, and adjust the thermostat. Users are also notified when a door or window is opened, or when someone leaves or enters the house.

The product's creators say they have developed a cloud platform that makes it possible for users to "stay connected to your home from anywhere in the world."

So far, Prizm has raised a little over $6,000 of its $200,000 goal on Kickstarter. Would you use it? Tell us in the comments, below.

Pepsi India Reveals New Brand Ambassador Through Social Media

Creating a buzz about new brand ambassadors on social media is another trend that is catching up from 2012. The latest to follow the trend is Pepsi India for its ongoing campaign “Oh Yes Abhi”. According to Best Media Info, Pepsi has brought on board the U-19 cricket captain, Unmukt Chand, as its new brand ambassador to its “Oh Yes Abhi” campaign. The latest TVC which has been created by JWT India introduces Unmukt along with the captain of the Indian cricket team, MS Dhoni, Virat and Suresh Raina. The entertaining TVC that focuses on the impertinence of the young star to join the Indian team went on air from 1st of March.

The video in a weeks time, has already got more than 175K views. One of the reasons for the growing views could be attributed to the pre-launch buzz created on social media. The Facebook page that caters to more than 3.6M fans, created some thrill for them before revealing the video. The page moderators shared some interesting visual content that not only revealed that there is someone coming pretty soon but it also got the people talking. For example the below screen grab gives the kind of the content shared to create the initial excitement. The numbers depict the excitement too – 178 Shares and more than 1K comments.

Along with Facebook, the brand that has an amazing presence on Twitter with more than 6K followers, was not left out. The tweets focused on the new member joining and sharing the video. In addition to this, the brand created a hashtag #SeniorVsJunior and tried creating a conversation around it.

Pepsi India has launched the commercial a month before the IPL which is not surprising. Unmukt Chand, who truly reflects Pepsi’s ‘Oh Yes Abhi!’ attitude in the TVC, has been used smartly on social media too. Not that it is the first time since last year we saw FashionAndYou and Myntra launch full fledged campaigns on social media for the launch of their brand ambassadors. A trend which is going to be explored in the near future by more brands.

Prasant Naidu

About Author 
Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. Loves to experiment in social media and believes social media is a game changer for SME's. A diehard Royal Enfield fan,a voracious reader. I believe that knowledge should be shared so I often do it via training and speaking assignments on social media...

Three ideas that can revolutionize your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Social marketing can be hugely powerful: it drives new and repeat business, builds loyalty and engagement, and even inspires the holy grail of word-of-mouth marketing: spontaneous brand advocacy.

But, like any powerful tool, social requires knowledge and skills to effectively harness its might.

Before you rush out to Post and Tweet with reckless abandon, it’s crucial to have the right foundation in place to inform what you’ll say (strategy), how you’ll say it (execution), and how you’ll measure the results (ROI). Here are three fundamentals to set you up for success in social marketing all through 2013:

Get Over IMC

IMC, or integrated marketing communications, has long been the de facto mantra of the modern marketing world. Its main premise is that you should keep brand messaging uniform across all mediums.

For many big brands and old-school agencies, IMC is simply how things are done. But IMC was created with a different world in mind.

When the term was coined back in the 1970s, there weren’t nearly as many mediums in play — and they were all one-way, “broadcast” mediums. TV, radio and print ads were usually the vehicles of choice, backed up with package design and store placement. It was easy to use the same taglines, imagery and branding in a uniform way across all of these marketing efforts.

Today? Not so much. With all of the dynamic new mediums created by the internet revolution, we can’t just shoehorn the same message into all channels, digital and analog alike. For one, most marketing channels today are a two-way street.

Brands can broadcast their messages, but consumers and fans also have the opportunity to respond, remix, retweet and generally change your message. Two-way marketing channels throw a wrench in good, old-fashioned IMC.

Instead of trying to keep the message 100% uniform across all channels, we recommend focusing on the unique “personality” of each brand and on providing consistently great interactions, everywhere from your website to your social media channels to customer service and everything in between.

Think of a brand more like a person, with different facets to its character. It’s still a single, cohesive entity, but it’s a heck of a lot more complex than a label on a shampoo bottle.

Bottom line: IMC had a good run, but the end is near. That doesn’t mean you should give up on integrating your brand’s messaging. It just means you need to think about it more holistically.

Start Using Full-Spectrum Attribution

As budgets continue to rise for social media marketing, executives have increasingly (and rightfully) demanded that marketers prove their efforts are “ringing registers” and delivering return on investment. But some marketers claim social metrics are too “squishy” to align with real business objectives. Others still haven’t summoned the discipline to establish a rigorous measurement framework.

But for those marketers who have fully embraced social media marketing and invested in a rigorous measurement framework, it’s easy to demonstrate the benefits. Success stories like Samsung and Nutella are now outnumbering naysayers like GM, because marketers are using data to prove that they can leverage social to solve complex business challenges and deliver significant returns using social. 

This is only possible through an analytical process called Full-Spectrum Attribution.  In order to attribute positive results (engagement, enhanced loyalty, new sales) to specific efforts (paid advertising, applications, publishing, customer care), marketers need a highly analytical, full-spectrum view of their social media activities. 

Tools can enable this approach (more on that in a moment), but first it requires a commitment to identifying metrics and benchmarks that are specific to social and that recognize the unique qualities that distinguish it from broadcast mediums.

Find the Right Tools For You

In order to begin treating your brand’s messaging more holistically and implementing Full-Spectrum Attribution, you’ll need to find the right tools.

The right tools for you will depend on the size of your company and the nature of your brand(s). Most importantly, you should make sure that the people who are producing social content are directly and constantly connected to the people who are amplifying that content, and that they’re using the same tools.

One way to do that is to create a social media “war room.” Oreo employed this tactic with great success during the Super Bowl, pushing out fun and timely content with speed that made plenty of consumers and brand marketers take notice. How did they do it so fast? In a word, integration.

Everyone who needed to be present to make a decision (and put the creative together) was in the same room at the same time — the right time. Agile social marketing is best enacted in real time, in one room, with one group of people who can easily communicate with each other and who use the same tools to achieve common goals.

Why is this war room so important? Both content producers (for example, the people writing your Facebook posts) and content promoters (the people pushing your ads) have valuable insight into what works. If they’re both measuring correctly, they will start to see patterns.

Perhaps a clever Facebook post is getting tons of likes and shares. Or maybe a certain retargeting strategy is suddenly paying off and needs more media spend immediately. In a war room, real or virtual, these patterns can be quickly identified and used to adjust your strategy and combine owned, earned and paid media effectively without missing a beat.

To make this even easier, we recommend using automated software tools that can aggregate and make sense of data faster than humans can. When a powerful software system is combined with a “war room” full of well-trained people who can put this data to use, what results is a highly scalable approach to maximizing the return on your social marketing efforts.

So there you have it. Three important ways to think about putting social to work for you in the new year.

How will you be approaching social marketing differently in 2013?

About the Author

Jamie Tedford is CEO and founder of Brand Networks, one of twelve companies that comprise Facebook's Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer program, and a leading provider of integrated social software solutions and marketing services for some of the world’s most “Liked” brands.

Can Customer service be a new metric to gauge a brand’s performance online?

While everyone is talking about content marketing and social media marketing on the online marketing strategies, I believe all of them are turning a blind eye to a gold mine of content in context to their respective brand/service/product – Customer/Consumer created content in form of sentiment. Almost all the marketers focus the bulk of their energy on creating campaigns that will enhance their brand health, but often overlook the importance of what people are saying publicly through social media about the organic customer service experiences they have.

With this curious question in mind out team at TheSocialPeople initiated a research via our ORM tool that helps us capture the brand/industry related data on the social media space, we discovered that there is an immense opportunity for companies to win back lost customers, improve customer service experience and track the customer service performance. By doing this we were able to develop a metric that can enable businesses to define an ROI on customer loyalty & customer retention basis via a strong engagement methodology of converting a threat into opportunity.

During our research we realized that the customer service performance on the Social Media and online space includes two key dimensions – Customer Loyalty and Brand Reputation. These two factors directly impact factors like rate of customer acquisition, wallet share, sales & revenue and customer retention.

So in today’s world of Social media where a customer is brutally honest about their sentiments (positive or negative) brands needs to rigorously monitor their online reputation and ensure that every negative sentiment is well attended to ensure customer retention while every positive sentiment is propagated to all possible circles of the company’s social media ecosystem. In another world a happy customer is the greatest brand ambassador your company can ever afford – Invest more on them!

Viral Thaker, Founder & Director | TheSocialPeople
A seasoned HR & Marketing professional, Viral was one of the early adopters of social media. With over a decade of industry experience under his belt, his skills span corporate strategy, delivery management, customer relationship management, business development and operations management. Viral is a voracious reader, a travel enthusiast and enjoys adventure sports. Follow Viral on Twitter @vrlthaker

To be Successful, Social Media has to fail.

A model for success that can help marketers and executives get on the same page for social media investments.

As companies start to invest more heavily into social media, it will quickly bring out the magnifying glass. It’s a big deal. For many companies social media is finally getting its own line in the budget for 2013.  This comes with good and bad news. Executives have been struggling with understanding where social media delivers return since the first time one of their employees came in and begged to test it. Now that it has its own line item in the budget, it’s natural for skeptical executives to approve the budget and pull out their magnifying glass at the same time. Once companies start making real investments in social media, the pressure is on for marketers to quickly demonstrate real ROI. Not those fluffy reports on how many fans and followers were generated.

For all the executives out there, it’s important to take a step back from your magnifying glass for a second because you are about to destroy any chance for social media to be successful in your company. I truly believe it should be measured and it absolutely should be held accountable as any marketing channel would. But right now, social media is still in its infancy in many companies and there is still a lot of fear holding back big investments. If you measure social media only in pure ROI, you will shut down the program before it has the opportunity to show you where it has the most impact. Marketers are begging you to give social media a chance, but it’s equally important that marketers provide a framework for social media investments that make executives feel comfortable. Here’s a model for success that can help marketers and executives get on the same page for social media investments.

SOCIAL MEDIA REQUIRES A STRATEGY

The first step in ensuring that social media is on the path to success is to have a strategy. All this talk of “trying things out” and “testing to see what happens” is bullshit. Executives should absolutely call this out if it is happening in your organization. Sorry marketers, but if you say this, you know it’s because you have no idea what you are trying to accomplish and haven’t taken the time to build a plan. You may have a hundred reasons why you haven’t made the investment to do it, but it doesn't change the fact that social media without a strategy is like giving an employee a corporate credit card without a policy for how it is to be used. That is a surefire way to open the door to unforeseen risks. Understanding where social media has an opportunity to deliver success requires an investment in research and strategy development that is designed to achieve corporate objectives. If you aren't sure if this is happening in your organization, go ask the marketing team what they are trying to achieve with their Facebook page or any social media channel they have been talking about. If you get the “deer in the headlights” look then it’s time to pull back and take the time to develop a strategy. Executives should have confidence that their marketing team is using social media to drive a business objective. Businesses operate to accomplish one thing: drive more sales while reducing costs to drive a higher profit. Therefore, if your social media strategy can’t be measured in terms of sales volume, revenue or costs, it probably doesn't align with what the executive team gets paid to do, deliver higher returns. The disconnect between corporate objectives and social media needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

SOCIAL MEDIA REQUIRES CALCULATED RISKS

Every strategy should be developed to allow for risk-taking that uncovers where social media delivers the highest impact. The reality is that every strategy evolves once it’s being implemented because marketing is an evolutionary practice. We test, we evaluate, we refine. Innovative companies have learned that failure is a critical part in success and it’s important for your marketing team to understand that you encourage them to fail as much as you encourage them to succeed. This is critical because if you don’t, your marketers will put their “marketing spin” on the data you see. That’s not beneficial for anyone. We need full transparency and your marketing team needs to know that they won’t get the verbal beat down in a meeting if their data doesn't show a resounding success every time. Testing is a huge part of driving social media success, which means that each social media failure is in fact a success because it is one step closer to figuring out what will work. The challenge is that, in many risk-averse companies, a single failure can kill an entire program.

Let’s start by agreeing that in order to be successful, social media has to fail.

Did that give you heart palpitations? I know it freaks me out a little too. We can’t have marketers out there just throwing caution to the wind and risking our company’s brand and reputation in a very public forum. It’s important to put some framework around how testing will be accomplished in order to preserve the brand. So let’s control the impact of our failures by applying some rules for acceptable risks. Marketers need to be able to explain how they are taking “calculated risks” to executives with an understanding of the business and the potential fallout. Executives need to be able to determine whether the level of risk is acceptable or not before they can fully support a program that will fail before it succeeds. In essence, we want to build a testing environment that supports and even celebrates failure. Think about it as failure with hand rails.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A LONG-TERM STRATEGY

There are plenty of marketing channels that are like a light switch. We turn them on and see an immediate impact on the business. Most of those marketing channels are in the advertising space and they are very important in the overall marketing mix. But social media isn't a light switch. To be successful social media requires an engaged audience and an audience takes time to build. There are a lot of things that can be done to help build an audience faster, like integrating some advertising elements for social media content; however at the end of the day you need to give social media a runway. You need to understand that social media is a long-term strategy and the most important thing for your marketing team to understand is that you’ll give it the runway it needs provided there is progress toward the end goal.

I’m going to tell you something that may freak out my marketing counterparts. Social media ROI will be negative for at least the first year. How long will social media ROI be negative? It depends on how closely the strategy is aligned to corporate objectives, how fast the team can test and iterate and how successful the team is at creating killer content and building up the desired audience. This is another one of those calculated risks that can be managed; however, if you think your company is going to dive into social media and you are going to have a flood of cash waiting at the other end within a few months you may be sadly disappointed. And I’ll be the first to say that there are companies that have been able to drive huge sales returns using social media in what appears to be an overnight success. The untold story in those case studies is the time those companies spent before that overnight success testing and iterating before they found something that hit. That isn't the sexy part of the story so it rarely gets told.

SOCIAL MEDIA ISN'T FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

Finally, it’s important to understand that social media is only one part of the marketing mix. Companies should not be staking their success on social media alone. Social media needs integration with other marketing channels to deliver the highest return. And despite popular belief among executives, social media isn't Facebook and Twitter. When done well, social media strategies are designed to align corporate objectives with content that is specifically designed to achieve them and the channels where they can reach the largest audience. Many times through the research stage, we find that the majority of conversations that are happening around a company’s industry are happening on blogs and forums. It isn't sexy. But if 60% of the conversations around your industry are happening on blogs and forums, starting with a Twitter and Facebook strategy is just plain stupid. Social media isn't about the “cool” social media channels. It’s about being where the conversations that can drive business value are happening. That may be Twitter, it may be Facebook, but more often than not it’s happening where you least expect it. And because companies aren't starting with a strategy, they are spinning their wheels on social channels that are “nice to haves” instead of those that are “must haves”.

With all of this, I highly encourage executives to give social media the room it needs to fail so that it can truly deliver success. But don’t do it without a plan, without managing risk, and without understanding where the conversation is happening. Providing a runway that allows for failure is smart. Providing a runway that has a .50 caliber rifle pointed at isn't.

Did your organization give social media a budget for 2013? Do you have a social media strategy? Is your organization prepared for social media failures? Join the conversation! Leave a comment and let’s start a healthy debate on whether marketers and executives have aligned expectations for social media in 2013.

About Author

Nichole Kelly is the President of SME Digital, the digital marketing division of Social Media Explorer. She is also the author of How to Measure Social Media.