Social Media Marketing Challenges in the Biotech Industry

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Posted on January 31, 2024 by marc meyer

I once heard this line in a podcast, “Take what’s important and make it interesting.” It resonated with me immediately. If there was ever a direct call to action for all that we do in social media, particularly social media marketing in the biotech space, then that would be it.

I don’t see a lot of “how-to-do” social media marketing articles that focus on the biotechnology industry, and there’s probably a good reason for that. It’s hard. To counterbalance that, I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk about the challenges of navigating through it with a clear path and understanding of what it’s going to take to “win”.

I’ve been in the biotech space with Revvity, for the last three years. Overall, I’ve been in the social media “space” for over 15 years, so I’d like to think I’m fairly qualified to lean in on the topic of social. Depending on your background and experience, I may be preaching to the choir here, but the bottom line is this; The social media challenges that exist in biotech are no different than they are in retail, tech, finance, or sports.

It’s Always Going to be About Content.

Till the cows come home, it’s always going to revolve around content frequency, freshness, and the types of content that are created. At a high level, we can chisel that previous sentence into the side of a mountain. Factor in strict FDA and FTC guidelines and sprinkle in some HIPPA compliance for extra measure and your team has quite the mountain to scale. Fresh content or not, you’re probably asking yourself, how can I tell my company’s story if I’m not allowed to “really” tell my company’s story?

The challenges, however, are this, and I think this is applicable across all industries. Once you get past the creation of said content (including copy, image, and landing page), and of course making sure you’re coloring inside the lines of whatever industry you are in, you’re not done. The emphasis then shifts to the audience and the platform. Is your stuff being seen by the right people on the right platform?

In other words, you must ask yourself (and your internal teams) if creating a TikTok video on cell and gene therapy geared towards chief scientists is really going to have the same impact as a gated white paper on the same topic offered up on LinkedIn. For now, I think we can say with some confidence that at least from a chief scientist’s point of view, they are not gathering market intelligence on cell and gene therapy solutions from TikTok.

As if your content, audience, and platform selection aren’t enough to keep you up at night, let’s factor in the desired outcomes of your content? What is the desired outcome that you want from that content piece? What do you want the chief scientist to do? Let me just say, you don’t have much time to get them to the dance…on time..

The Right Content + The Right Audience = The Possibility of Some Type of Action

At its most basic, fundamental level, you must fish where the fish are. Are we trying to cast a wide net? Sure, we are. But we’re also looking for a specific type of fish that might be interested in our bait. For starters, and this may seem silly, but you must ask yourself another pointed question, and that is, is your audience online? Are your decision-makers online? If so, in what capacity? What do they do when they are online? What types of content are being consumed by them or offered up to them? Do they engage with the content?

All of these answers can be partly arrived at by setting up social listening posts, which is highly recommended. At a high level, your listening posts will tell you IF they are out there, what are the content types being offered up to them, what’s working, and what’s being said. Listening posts, done correctly can give you a lay of the land of what’s possible. I highly suggest that you set this up and you always leave it on. Those insights will fuel your content ideas and your messaging.

When I was with Accenture, we had internal discussions amongst ourselves and with stakeholders every day with the primary goal of trying to understand what content would resonate with our target audiences (white papers, infographics, industry data, videos, our latest thought leadership, etc., etc.), where did they want to consume it (usually LinkedIn but not always), and when did they consume it (on the way into work, at lunch or on the way home). If you and your teams are NOT having those types of conversations, then you’re just yelling into the void.

It’s imperative to dig into your audience personas. i.e., the who, what, why, when, where, and how that comprises your target audience. Your audience IS online, you just have to find the sandbox that they’re playing in. In the past, we have found that LinkedIn user groups have been mildly successful from a targeting standpoint but even that can sometimes be an inexact science as well-, but it is worth trying.

For the sake of this discussion, we must assume that your target audience is online and is impatiently waiting for your creative message/post. You must understand that not all audiences are like you. In other words, there’s a high likelihood that they are NOT in front of a machine from 9:00 to 5:00 like you. Thus, you have very little time to get their attention. The window is half closed already. Thus, you must put yourself in their shoes. Give them what they want, how they want it, and in a manner that doesn’t waste their time.

Picture yourself as the customer. Where do you go for your information? Where do you go for market intelligence? How do you like your content packaged and delivered?

And thus, assuming you have done the work, it comes full circle. You found your audience and now you have to give them what they want.

What is good content?

In our example above we mentioned chief scientists who hung out on LinkedIn. Why not Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter/X? Simply put, LinkedIn has the best distribution of executives, chief scientists, lab managers, and essentially all of the target audiences we are interested in as a biotech organization.

So, if we’re now thinking about that particular piece of content that will resonate with our targeted audience on LinkedIn, then there are a couple things in play. Do we create long-form pieces of content? A video? An infographic? Or do we go with short-form, staccato-like pieces of content? What should the CTA or call to action be that can drive the user to a landing page? See, there are a lot of different variables there that can affect performance. But at the end of the day, let’s decide. Let’s commit to a strategy and consistently measure it. Let’s think about what we want to do here. We have a piece of content. We want to get the most eyeballs on it. We want to get the most qualified eyeballs on it, and we want them to act on it. Are these things possible? They are, but you have to put the work in to understand the lay of the land. It’s no different than scouting your opponent in sports, doing your homework so that you’re prepared the next day or practicing your scales in music.

The last that I’ll add is that you should “always be testing”. One thing that working in social media will always afford you is a front-row seat to people and organizations trying new things. You should do the same. Start with different types of creative, copy or calls to action. Test them against each other. See what resonates and what doesn’t. The proof will be in the metrics and the metrics will be your friend. Be data-driven. Cancel that, be data-obsessed. It will tell you whether you’re fishing where the fish are and whether the bait you have, is working. Now go forth and take what’s important and make it interesting, your chief scientists are waiting for you!

The Key to Success in Enterprise Social Media

Posted on January 31, 2018 by marc meyer

Lately, I’ve been thinking way too much about organic B2B social media marketing. For obvious reasons, it’s where I play and have played for the last eight years. In that time, I’ve worked for some of the largest companies in the world and If you were to ask me what keeps me up at night it would vacillate between how can I do more with the tools and resources I have available to me and what am I missing? This is the great struggle for the enterprise in social media. Where does it fit? Does it fit?

I can tell you answering any of these questions requires some soul searching. The bottom line is that creating a solid, measurable, B2B social media strategy is extremely difficult, and to say that the enterprise just doesn’t have a clue, though it makes for great copy, just isn’t true. They know what’s up, to a degree. Whatever their degree of understanding is, the stark reality is that the pressure is on every CMO to make something of the potential that social media might offer the organization.

Let’s talk about business value

That clock you hear in your cube at the office? That’s for your benefit. It’s ticking and you need to figure out real quick where social media fits within your org. I’m of the opinion that social has to be part of any org; and where the rubber meets the road is the understanding or lack of understanding of those that are entrusted with managing it. My quick and dirty argument is that if you don’t use social then what are you going to do?

But let’s back up. You see, the challenge in your organization as it is in every other B2B organization, is that solving for X in social media, boils down to closing the chasm between conversations and conversions. It’s brutal at the B2B level.

Conversions in social media in general, in the purest sense of the word, can be few and very far between. But the same goes for conversations. Can we get people to click on content? Yes. Can we get people to talk about that content? Not really. We can get them to like, share and retweet but those are passive activities. They’re easy and lazy forms of what everyone defines as engagement. Now snap B2B on top of that. Uh-oh.

To put this in terms we can all relate to. A home run in B2B social media from an engagement standpoint for some companies might be 1%. That’s right,1%.

Time to temper those expectations or time to innovate.

I have a suggestion though. Maybe we need to look at B2B social media metrics differently and perhaps weight them differently. If you can get the data right, you can get the analytics right, right? Maybe I’m suggesting that conversations at the the B2B level, are so tough to come by, that maybe we need to measure them differently? Quit looking at them through a B2C lens.

Let’s simplify this. Would you agree that essentially, B2B marketers, are relying on a definition of engagement that a) really doesn’t mean much anymore in social media and b) shouldn’t apply to them? One could argue on behalf of both points.

The way engagement is and has been measured has been fairly consistent from the very beginning, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. What I’m really saying is that in place of more quantifiable metrics, the best that we have or the best that is presented to us as metrics by various tools and platforms, is how we’re measuring success. Likes, loves, mentions, favorites, follows, shares. expands and clickthroughs are our barometers for success in social media. Those are good but we need more, we need better.

For myself, I look at all of those things the same way, they’re good metrics and they give me a glimpse of something, a taste of something, a start, a start to something, something that could turn into something more. That’s it. It’s a pulse and it might be the closest we can get to a customer, client, prospect or partner, short of being with them in the flesh; and that’s pretty damn compelling. However, if we want to move the needle, then we need to do a better job of measuring customer engagement. Why? We need a better snapshot of who does what with our content. Should I care, that you took a millisecond to share, like or re-tweet a piece of my content? Not really, but if I know more about you. then maybe I can gauge and measure your INTENT.

You’re only as good as your content

The driving force behind this will be content. Content is driving everything. Great content, bad content, middle of the road content. All of it, in all its many different forms, is driving e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g…. We call it content, but back in the day it was a newspaper insert, a magazine ad, a radio spot, a 30 second commercial on TV. The form has changed but not the function. Get our attention.

What’s consistently baked into that content? A brands message. The point of that message? Buy our stuff. And Social media? What’s its form? What’s its function? Buy our stuff. The difference between the old and the new, social can be a more direct conduit to the customer. The problem? One voice to two ears. Multiply that exponentially and what do you get? A funnel with noise.

Social media marketer doesn’t mean social media analytics guru

If we can’t get comfortable with a firm definition of engagement where the only thing that matters is, if there is some type of conversion behind it, then we need to at least get a better idea of who our followers are; or who is most engaged with our stuff. The keys will be your content and how your audience is engaging with it.

The bottom line will be the data that’s derived from your content. Quality data, not just likes and mentions. Once we have the data, then we can make better decisions and informed decisions on what’s working, what’s not and how we’re going to reach those that matter. I’d also like to suggest that having a robust and separate social media analytics practice would be one of the wisest investments the enterprise could have going forward. Translation: Just because you might be a CMO or a director, doesn’t mean you’re a data scientist. Maybe you are but in my opinion, it’s the only way the enterprise is going to move the needle forward in 2018 with social media. Take the analytics side of the equation seriously and fund it properly.

With social media and its various platforms we do what we do and it is what it is; and because of that, you can do anything, try anything and say anything. For brands, that’s the great potential.

Conversation Gained-How to Determine Influence in B2B Social Media

Posted on January 12, 2018 by marc meyer

I don’t know a marketer out there that would say that influence in social media is not a commodity, if you know how to leverage it.

I do however, know a lot of marketers out there, who struggle with determining and identifying influence in social media and because of that, can not leverage it; and that’s NOT a commodity!

Discussions on influence in social have been around since social began. For me, those postulations and assumptions began back in 2006, so I’ve got 11 plus years of data and experience on what I think and what I think I think. Yea, we were forced to think about it just as much back then, as we’re doing today because influence mattered. Then and now, and thus, the more data a marketer has, the better the decision they can make. Right? Especially in a B2C setting.

Now B2B marketing? B2B influencers? Just as important. Just 5X to 10 X more challenging.

It’s amazing to me that in 2018, the questions on influence in social are still pondered as if it were the latest work-out fad, “Yea but will it give me abs?” The reality is that we shouldn’t be surprised that the questions still persist. Over the years, the definition of what true influence is, has kind of changed, at least in the context on how to measure it and what the criteria is to measure it. The bottom line is this:

Influence is a nebulous but nevertheless, powerful “thing” in B2B social media, and you my dear marketer, need to understand how to determine it, identify who is influential within your space, and then decide what you’re going to do about it.

Pro Tip #1: If your org is using social media of any type, you should have some type of social media influencer strategy. Even if it’s low impact.

The whole reason is simple. The more you know about your space, the easier it is to decide how to market it to it. And… Having some type of influencer strategy will allow you to know more about the space that you’re marketing in and to. It’s a reciprocal arrangement that mutually benefits both parties.

By “owning your space,” individually, organizationally and operationally, you become the true master of your business and social domain. Knowing your industry backwards and forwards becomes one of your biggest strengths; and yes, ideally industry expertise should extend from the c-suite all the way down to the lower junior or new hire levels. For your newbies, it should be about continuous training and boots on the ground experience so that they can become SME’s ( subject matter experts).

Additionally and theoretically, by ‘owning it,’ you should now know by default the answers to the below questions that slightly resemble a SWOT analysis:

What makes your company great?
What makes your company and its products or services better or different?
Who is your greatest threat? Which competitor do you pay attention to?
What does your company not do well?
How can we improve the #CX? The #UX?

Ironically, The challenge to this pragmatic, common sense thinking is that we’re all situated in a unique moment in time in which, whether you like it or not, there’s a high likelihood that your organization might be in the midst of some type of digital transformation. Which means that your company might be culturally changing its digital capabilities as it pertains to process, product, services, technologies and assets in all to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer value and the customer experience, manage risk, and uncover new opportunities to compete and make money. That’s a mouthful…

The translation? The key to being a good social media marketer is what? Exactly! It’s your ability to answer an expanded list of the above questions:

How well do you know your space? Posed as a question and a statement
How well do you know your company, your service, your product and its people?
Do you have a social/digital mindset? You’ll probably need to be somewhat adept at that aspect or understanding. Do you know what that means?
How “good” are you at social media engagement? If you can’t hold a conversation, don’t understand context and are taking yourself too seriously-this might not be for you
Do you know what you’re doing? Like, really know what you’re doing? Managing your personal social accounts helps, but this is different.
Do you know what the strategy, tactics & goals are for your organization?
Can you execute a social media marketing strategy?
Do you know what success is? Can you define it?
Do you know who the players are? Do you know who isn’t?
Who moves the needle in your space? *Hint: These might be (are) your influencers
Can you measure your results?

Keep in mind that anyone can “do” social media marketing especially in a B2C setting but can you be the special person that can own it in a B2B setting?

Pro Tip #2: You don’t need any tools to do B2B social media marketing effectively.

So the grand point of all that I’ve been saying up to this point is this. If you know your space, you’re a social media marketing worker bee, you’re managing some initiatives and you’ve been doing it for over 9 months, then you should be able to tell me pretty right away…Who your industries’ influencers are. Could you do it?

You don’t need a tool, though it can and could make it easier in identifying some ‘people’ that may not be as active and yet are still effective and impactful within the space. Point being, if you’re actively engaging, managing and participating, and you are the owner of the branded social media accounts of your organization, then you know what’s up. You’ll be able to answer the above questions. You will be and are the master of your social domain and you’ll know who the influencers are.

Pro Tip #3: Influence needs to be qualitative not quantitative

Here’s how I measure influence in social media. particularly Twitter. I look for those that are authentic voices and experts within their space. Authentic Voice being the operative term. I look for practitioners. I look for ‘normal’ activity. Not ridiculous participation. I’m looking for success not excess.

If you’ve written a book on Big Data and analytics in social media for example, and that’s what your interests are, and that’s what you talk about on social platforms and you share things that pertain to that on social platforms, and your feed shows a balance of content mixed with conversations and your numbers, i.e., your number of followers, the number of people you are following and your number of tweets, are balanced, I would consider you an influencer. I would follow you. A big key for me going forward, however, would be how well do you engage?

Should we consider the person that has tweeted over 600,000 times, has a 150,000 followers and is following 150,000, an influencer? Here’s more context. Is that same person an influencer if they occasionally write or tweet about the Internet of Things, AI, VR, AR, MR, machine learning, digital transformation, digital disruption, design thinking, 5G and cloud computing? Are they an expert in all of those things? Are they an expert in one thing? What if they don’t engage?

By the way, that’s the description of an actual person on Twitter that brands and sells themselves as an influencer. You can come to your own conclusions on that but here are some more qualifying questions that might help you decide and determine true social media influence

Do they enhance your experience?
Do they engage?
Do they share your content?
Do you get the sense that they don’t even pay attention to their feed?
Are they a SME? An expert?
Are they an industry resource?
Who do they work for?
Do they push out their own though leadership?
Could they solve your organization’s most difficult problems?

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, “What do I want out of my relationships with the influencers that I have targeted and or have followed in social media?” Once you’ve narrowed down who the influencers are, once you have thoroughly vetted them, then you can start thinking about your influencer strategy and tactics in order to get the most out of your B2B social media marketing initiatives and the influencers that are in your space.

Conversation Lost-How to Align B2B Social Media Marketing Efforts with the Right Strategy

Posted on October 4, 2017 by marc meyer

B2B Social media success is like the American ninja warrior TV show. Everyone makes it to the starting line and yet very few make it to the finish line. In fact, those that can make it just halfway through the course can sometimes advance to the next round, based simply on how difficult the course can be. They’re deemed, somewhat victorious for just getting ‘that far.’ The same holds true for B2B marketers. B2B social media marketing can be brutal but it’s not a loser.

If you’ve never watched the show, it’s essentially an impossible obstacle course that takes a lot of balance, agility, strength and sound judgment to complete. Those challenges, metaphorically speaking, completely exist in B2B social media in 2017. For those that were around in the “early days” of social media will be the first to tell you that today’s social media is a far cry from what it was back then. Understatements be damned, one could say that social media has evolved and still, others could say it has regressed.

So what is a marketer to do? Where does social media fit in the marketing mix? Should your organization have a social media strategy? The quick answers are: There is a path, it does fit into the marketing mix and yes but let’s quickly review what’s been happening.

Over the past 7-8 years, the act of truly conversing has slowly dissipated on most social networks, Twitter in particular. On other networks, however, see Snap for example, the act of communicating has escalated and changed. In reality, communicating in social media hasn’t so much as gone away, as it has been replaced by different types of communicating dominated more by imagery and less by conversations.

For marketers though, the one-way, scream it and blast it style of pushing out messages disguised as conversations, still exists today. Partly because a) they are struggling with a medium that deemphasizes the written word and embraces the emoji b) a general lack of understanding of how to use that medium and c) it’s not the only channel.

It used to not be like this. Social Media was at one point this living, breathing, conversational thing. Somewhere along the way though, marketers started to misunderstand the platform and treat social media and its content like it was an arms race. It became a content battle wrapped around the quantity and output of messages and how quickly follower ratios could grow.

Beyond that, companies became enamored with vanity metrics. Those are your typical likes, mentions, retweets, etc. In fact, orgs of all sizes still like vanity metrics, we all do. Why? Because it’s a tangible hard number that we can wrap our arms around. Like a unique visitor in the world of website traffic. How many times have you heard or have asked the question, how many uniques do you have or what’s your traffic like? It’s how we quantify and quantified success. The parallel is exactly the same as asking. “How many followers do they have?”

Recently I told someone that the same metrics that revolve around direct mail and direct e-mail success now apply to organic social media. Meaning that getting a 1-2% organic engagement rate via social is about equal to what you might see or hope to see in direct mail open rates. It’s almost considered a ‘win’ but not quite. It’s average. You would think that social media and social networks might have an advantage but social media marketers are generally not working off of lists. So for them, it’s all about the content and the creating of content. Engagement? That’s a bonus. Measurement? Maybe.

The crazy thing about social media content today? It’s not bad. In fact, it’s more visual than ever before. There are some great content creation tools these days and the whole process of creating content for social is an industry in and of itself. It’s not boring. It’s dynamic, it’s compelling and dammit, it’s clickable. But the kicker is, you have to see it. You have to find it. So really it’s not how the content is being packaged and it’s not how it’s being created or delivered. It’s more about when do you push that content out? It’s where and it’s why. Oh yea, and to whom matters too. Social media in a B2B setting is effective when the right content finds the right people at the right moment.

Blame it on growth and blame it on the “noise” that growth created but that’s the ‘other’ new reality. Getting the B2B customers’ attention is more difficult now than it ever was before. Your new digital marketing challenge is to figure out where social fits in your marketing mix. Keep in mind that it has to be there, you just have to decide which platforms you’re going to use and what the distribution of dollars and resources will be. Let me reiterate. Social Media efforts in a B2B setting have to be there for the simple reason that the customers are there.

Does engagement really matter?

What is engagement? Or rather what did it used to mean? Loosely defined in social media. it means that an action occurred, some type of reactive action occurred in the form of a like, a retweet, a mention, or a share. All of those actions dependent on, in theory, you, the user, doing something. Some, thing. Oddly enough, the actual true meaning of engagement could not be more diametrically opposed to what is happening here. You have either a formal agreement to get married or an arrangement to do something or go somewhere at a fixed time. Neither of those really pertain to social media, do they?

In social media, because an ‘action’ did occur, marketers measured it in a positive fashion. The problem occurs or occurred, when nothing happens or happened after that. Thus, marketers were and are ostensibly hanging their hats on hollow metrics.

In email marketing or direct mail marketing, we can measure click through rates, open rates, conversion rates, leads generated and of course sales. These are things that happened after the fact. We don’t call it engagement. These are definite and distinct actions. We have a crumb trail we can measure. We have user data before and after the mail is sent. We can create a snapshot of the user based on that data. We can tailor content and give them what they want. Social media marketing on the other hand, organically speaking has to be more strategic in order to be effective. The tools and data are there but marketers are lazy.

Let’s explain it a different way. What kind of crumb trail or user data do you get from an egg with one name, no bio, following 50, with 10 followers and 5 tweets? Not much. Marketers will recognize and acknowledge the retweet, the mention and the share of the egg-but what does that really mean? Nothing.

In part two, let’s look at what a marketer should do. Let’s talk about what the distribution of marketing and social media strategies, tactics and activities should be and let’s talk about bang for the buck. The operative word being, buck, as in dollars, which should be your clue.

Seriously, What’s “A Like” Worth on Facebook?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by marc meyer

A good friend who is the SVP of marketing for a very large Fortune 500 company recently asked me via email the following question(s)

Do you believe in the Klout score? If you were to set a KPI for success in social, would it be FB likes? and if not, what would you recommend? My view on this is that FB likes is not the right metric, but I am not sure what is….

Great Question isn’t it?

Here was my protracted, elongated and expanded version of the original answer…

You’re views on the right metric are dead on. I’m surprised that there are still marketers out there hanging their hat on a metric based on total numbers only, but there are. Lots of marketers have tried to peg the value of a Facebook fan/like in fact I recently read that when a Ticketmaster user posts a specific event they are attending, or may want to attend, to Facebook, it generates $5.30 of direct ticket sales

Another company called Vitrue, figures that bringing a customer on as a fan was worth between 44 cents and $3.60 in increased sales from the engagement that Facebook encourages.

The best KPI in social should be attracted to what you want to achieve. i.e. We’re going to use social to drive sales, for lead gen, for referrals, for bookings, for awareness through brand mentions etc. etc.. I don’t gauge success in social on an arbitrary growth metric of total likes, followers etc.. Initially marketers and myself included a number of years ago, thought that social success was reflected in growth of followers and likes but sadly though, you can’t. But it’s easy to get caught up in that.

Look at a Starbucks, who became early on, the darlings of social media and engagement because of the fact they grew to a million Twitter followers rather quickly. So it was assumed that a) Starbucks had mastered “social media” and b) Their “campaign” was successful because of their explosive growth in followers. But what was that growth based on? In other words, what did Starbucks do to get the million followers? A massive push? Killer engagement? No. Nothing out of the ordinary. It was really because they are the brand, Starbucks. It just happened, but tons of pundits/people and social media consultants were looking at that million follower mark as social nirvana. As if SBucks had just rewritten the books on how to engage- when at the end of the day, they didn’t do anything other than just set up a Twitter account early on. It was just a number.

The question then becomes larger-What are you doing with the million plus followers? I think SBucks does a great job now of engagement but initially they were just as guilty as every other brand back then feeling their way around social. Push style engagement focused on growing fans, followers and likes.
I’m with you though- growing FB likes and patting yourself on the back for growth, doesn’t cut it. Now if marketers can tell us because of those likes we were able to convert them into x amount of bookings or sales, well now we’re getting somewhere. I know, there’s still that whole social branding for awareness thing that in a sense could be tied to the growth of likes, but then let’s measure it appropriately right? Let’s understand that we’re leveraging FB for specific and measurable purposes and work off of that notion.

While Facebook can provide real names of people who “like” a product, it doesn’t provide data to us on what sites are sending traffic to a fan page, how long your visitors are spending there and how they’re moving around inside the pages. No additional analytics services can be installed on Facebook pages thus we’re absolutely at the disposal of Facebook regarding these metrics.

I believe in what Klout is trying to do, maybe just not in the metrics they are using to measure influence. But right now the space is so nascent, what else is there right? A lot of brands are starting to attach themselves to Klout because they want to engage with those “uber” champions in their respective fields identified by Klout’s social metrics algo. Klout is breaking new ground in this space and I anticipate it getting better in identifying people who can move the needle for a brand.

Hope this helps

Marc

Three Plateaus in Social Media

Posted on June 21, 2011 by marc meyer

For those of you who are new to the social space, this post does not entirely apply to you, though it perhaps eventually will. So you can keep reading to see what will might happen to you.

Plateau #1

You’ve created half assed personas in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin
You’ve added and perhaps bought followers, fans, likes, subscribers and contacts
You’ve created a blog and have added a few posts
You have pushed out some weak, self serving content on all of them
You had no strategy
You quit because, you see nothing gained and you claim that social media does not work

Plateau #2

You have done everything in Plateau #1 and…
You have added/bought thousands of people to your networks
You push out content on all of your networks but it’s over the top and self serving
You monitor all of your networks…sort of
You have engaged with people somewhat
Your activities have tailed off because it takes too much work and you’re not seeing the results and you’re not convinced that social media works. Pretty soon, it dies a slow death.

Plateau #3

You have identified and created personas in the right networks that fit your needs
You understand that it’s a marathon and not a sprint
You manage and grow all of your networks thoughtfully and effectively
You measure all of your efforts effectively
You create and meet all of your existing KPI’s
You adapt and you create new KPI’s
You create, adjust, and redefine your strategy accordingly
You thrive

As you can see, the 3 plateaus are fairly well defined and quite different. Most of you have done all or parts of each. Those that can get to the third plateau can certainly speak to the other two. Those that have quit after one or two, certainly know why they did. What’s your smell test?

Social Media Conundrum #12: Justin Bieber is popular, but he’s not influential?

Posted on February 18, 2011 by marc meyer

I can’t believe I’m going to weigh in on this, but I saw a tweet from a notable social media analytics consultant in which the following was stated for the umteenth time.

Popularity does not equal influence…

I immediately thought, “Could Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga sell product”? Isn’t that influence?I then had to go look up a quick definition of influence.

in·flu·ence

ˈɪnfluəns/ [in-floo-uhns] noun, verb, -enced, -enc·ing.

the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others

First I wanted to check something on Twitaholic: The top 15 people being followed on Twitter.

This is a list of the top 15 most “popular” people on Twitter. Let’s look and see who could sell or who does sell product. Let’s pare the list down first.

We have Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, Ashton Kutcher, Ellen, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Oprah, 50Cent, Ashley Tisdale and Selena Gomez. 12 Celebrities from the world of entertainment. Immensely popular. But are they influential? Can they produce a compelling action on someone to buy product? Could they change behaviors and opinions? Can they influence people to buy stuff?

Lady Gaga sells video sunglasses for Polaroid, headphones for Beats by Dre, phones for VirginMobile, and a host of items and services via product placement in her videos. All this adds up to roughly $5-$10 million per year.

Rather than quote the whole article from Guy Kawasaki, read about Guy’s experience at a Justin Bieber concert and the machine behind his persona.

Britney has deals with Elizabeth Arden and Candies. Taylor Swift has deals with Sony and CoverGirl. 50 Cent has deals with Reebok, Vitamin Water, Right Guard, PlayStation, and Steiner Sports.

We could easily go through each celebrity on this list and view the products that they sell. They sell the products because they can influence buyer behavior based on their celebrity, based on their popularity. Am I wrong? I know sales are one thing and fame is fleeting, but because of their celebrity and popularity they can influence buyer behavior right now. Right?

How can you possibly say no? Isn’t that influence? What am I missing here? Help me out.

November 10th #Socialmedia topic-Social Media’s Impact on Business and ROI

Posted on November 9, 2009 by marc meyer

Social Media’s Impact on Business (and ROI)

Feeling like stirring the pot a bit this week so we thought a discussion on ROI should do it.

ROI certainly can stir the pot.  But, saying that most of everyone’s conversations on this topic are not actually ROI, rather Impact on Business (IOB), takes the act of stirring and turns it into a blender. Ahh, much better!

So let’s start by saying that just because it’s “social” does not mean it should be held up to standards typically defined by financial returns whether in business, government or non-profits. Someone can start a blog or join twitter simply to better understand the tools or to connect with associates they just met at a conference. This becomes truly social and may at some point have an impact on your business whether financially or some other measure but does not need to be tied into sales goals just because an employee wants to post office pictures so other offices can see how they decorated for the holiday party. That’s a beginners first step into social computing but not what we are interested for this discussion.

What we are looking for here is to better define and understand what we sometimes mean when we refer to ROI as a verb instead of referring to ROI as a financial metric. The real definition of Return on Investment (ROI) is: gain from investment minus cost of investment, then divided by cost of investment. Business books are written, classes are taught, and undergrad studies are derived from this very straightforward metric.  When I talk about ROI, I try to dumb it down a bit into either: 1) increase revenues, 2) decrease costs, or 3) increase in shareholder value and that assumes a financial investment of course. So why then, does the term ROI get thrown around so much in the context of social media when no financial gain or costs saved are referenced?

Impact on Business (IOB) is the actual term that should be used when discussing things like: # of followers, brand awareness, mentions, impact, conversations and what ever else you can think of that is not related to a financial calculation. The impact of an employee being nice on twitter is great. The fact that the customer decides to continue service (Retention) as an indirect effect does not make the time that employee spent on Twitter an actual case for ROI. It is however, IOB. Olivier Blanchard actually was the first that I know of to begin this discussion a few months ago here. Companies all over are using social media to have an impact on their business like Kodak measuring Smiles or any company promoting their Facebook fan page.

Many industries discuss IOB like fast food, IT, or big box retailing and it affects every company’s business in some way or another. You can even consider different departments of a company and the impact of HR, Payroll, PR, Sustainability, Operations play in a company. Although often not connected directly to revenue, a company would have a difficult time without those departments. Impact is easier to measure if you don’t have to tie it back somehow to ROI and ROI is much easier to measure if you don’t try to include calculations of impact. To lead our discussion this week is Jacob Morgan, a principal at Chess Media Group, who focuses on Social Media ROI. Jacob is well versed in this type of discussion and brings a lot of expertise to the table. The questions will attempt to progress the discussion from ROI as a catch all phrase to the differences between Impact and ROI for businesses and how to align them. They are:

1. Whether Impact or ROI, what “Investments” could be measured to prove out value in Social Media?

2.   How can you prove value from Impact or ROI to executives to continue or try Social Media?

3. What are some examples of businesses attaining true ROI from Social Media?

Plan on joining in this discussion Tuesday 11/10 at noon EST. To join either follow #sm33 on Twitter or follow our LIVE site.