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

Your Twitter Archive: You Can Now See all Your Old Tweets!

In Dec. 2012 Twitter began allowing users to see their old tweets. (Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images)

Get ready to spend even more time reading tweets and not ones from others. Today, Twitter started to roll out a feature that allows users to download and view all their tweets.

Yes, surprisingly, you haven't been able to go back in to your tweet history (or twistory!) until today.

"Today, we're introducing the ability to download your Twitter archive, so you'll get all your Tweets (including Retweets) going back to the beginning," Twitter's Mollie announced on the company's blog this morning. "Once you have your Twitter archive, you can view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones."

So how do you get to your old tweets?

Head to the Settings menu on Twitter.com and at the bottom you will see a button to "Request your archive." Click on that and Twitter will then email you with the instructions on how to download your archive.

When you download the file sent by Twitter you will be able to open the file in your web browser and view your tweets and even share them. It's an offline file, but you can view it in your browser and even view the Tweet on Twitter. You can't retweet your own tweets since Twitter doesn't actually let you retweet yourself.

Twitter has also organized your tweets by year and then month. You can hover over the months and see how many times you tweeted at a specific time over the last few years.

Twitter says this feature will begin rolling out to everyone today -- if you don't have it just yet, it's on the way. Just get ready to sift through a few more tweets soon.

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. 

Bad Content Marketing Habits to Kick Before 2013

Image Source: Forbes.com

Content marketing has been all the rage in 2012, and content marketing will continue to wield significant influence next year.  Why not commit yourself and your company to some content marketing New Year’s resolutions?  There are common bad habits practiced by content marketers.  Although they all have solutions, some may take more time and effort to correct than others.  According to Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot, companies that maintain blogs get 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links and have 434% more indexed web pages than companies that do not maintain blogs.  High-quality business blogging has real value, so start 2013 off with bang by kicking your bad habits and taking your content marketing to the next level.

6 Content Marketing Bad Habits

1.  Infrequent Blogging

The more often a company blogs, the more traffic and leads it will be able to produce.  Businesses that update their blogs at least 20 times per month generate over five times more traffic than businesses who blog less than four times per month.  Businesses that blog at least 20 times per month also generate 4 times more leads than those that do not blog.  

2.  Poor Planning and Coordination

You need a clear content marketing plan that everyone at your company follows. Your website, social media activity, press releases, newsletters and email marketing should all be coordinated and tailored to each of your various vertical markets and channels around a unified, targeted message.  In all your content marketing, you need to communicate the unique value your company can provide in solving problems and finding solutions for your prospective clients.   

3.  Not Using CTAs

Always include a call to action (CTA) in your blog posts.  Providing high-quality premium offers will increase engagement and help move prospects down the marketing funnel.  Informational offers, such as ebooks, whitepapers and webinars, function well, because people reading your blog are likely to be interested in more free information from you.

4.  A Lack of Variety

Your blog should focus on a wide variety of relevant industry topics.  Variety in content form is important as well.  While traditional blog posts are necessary and important for driving traffic to your website, there are other forms of content you can employ to add some variety and freshness to your content marketing.  It is easy to fall into a content creation rut—producing the same types of content over and over.  Here are some other forms of content that you can feature on your blog to ensure variety and freshness: infographics, webinars, SlideShare presentations, video tutorials and cartoons.  

5.  Poor Engagement

It is important to treat all your content marketing as a communication channel that provides you with the opportunity to reach your target audience.  You should always respond to comments and questions posted to your published content in a timely and friendly manner. 

6.  Not Having a Social Sharing Game Plan

You should have a concrete strategy for sharing and promoting your content.  Avail yourself of all opportunities.  Syndicate your content on sites like Business 2 Community and Social Media Today; share your content on all the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.  Leverage your content with social networking.  Who are the top influencers and thought leaders in your industry?  If you do not know, you should figure it out and start communicating with them.  Comment and ask questions across all available channels, including links to your content, when it is appropriate.  This will add to your online credibility and status.  Klout is a good site to explore and identify influencers. 

Resolving not to make the mistakes listed above can increase your reach and incite increased traffic, higher lead generation and more new business.  Get organized, and be strategic about content marketing in 2013.

Author

Monica Romeri