This weeks #Social Media Topic: Connecting With Consumers Through Social Media

Posted on May 3, 2010 by marc meyer

Posted: May 3rd, 2010 By: Jason Breed

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

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

Jake McKee 90-9-1.com

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

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

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

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

Topic: Connecting With Consumers Through Social Media

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

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

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

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

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

This Weeks #Social Media Topic: Managing the Marketing Mix: Which Channel is More Effective?

Posted on April 27, 2010 by marc meyer

Posted: April 26th, 2010 By: Jason Breed

On its surface, this topic is a “status quo” topic, one that fits into the traditional advertising model that says radio, television and print are channels therefore the Internet is a channel too. Agencies and old-school marketers feel comfortable when discussing digital as just another channel. They figure if a portion of their budget allocated to digital and they tweak their messaging to match the medium then Whoalla! we are all new-age digital marketers.

The problem with this approach is it assumes consumers are the same and want the same messaging pushed at them to interfere with their online entertainment just like they consume television or radio entertainment. Consumers have changed! Consumers do not shop the same, communicate the same, consume content the same nor do they react the same to advertising. When it comes down to it this topic cannot be about marketers adding a new channel, it has to be about those marketers who can adopt to changing consumer behaviors and those who cannot.

Consumers no longer want to be talked at, they want to be engaged with. They want to see who prepares the food and talk with the baggage handlers, they want to feel they have a voice in determining the features of their next car model and want to help select what charities their soda maker donates to. The majority of companies today are not set up to handle this new consumer. Decades of closed systems and legally approved content are getting in the way of companies trying to interact with the consumer.

So what is this post about then? Even though consumers are changing their behaviors by the second, companies can not move that quickly. Companies need to have some transition period to move from traditional to digital and it’s not just in the way they advertise. This is a cultural shift, a systems shift, a shift in processes and approvals to a more distributed workforce. This is much more than simply a messaging shift.

This post is about transitioning. Many times, the only way to move the needle or to convince traditional executives is with proof. That proof comes in comparing what they already know and are familiar with and in a way that they understand like reports and measurements that can compare traditional apples with digital apples (apples to apples). If you measure traditional marketing with reach (ie. magazine has 100k circulation + 2 times pass along and costs $5k) and sales (call volume rises when our infomercial airs and conversion increases 12%) then your digital marketing reports cannot use language like followers, subscribers and linkbait, they must be consistent. The good news is with proven success comes additional funding and a higher tolerance for experimentation.

Once you are able to measure and report consistently across traditional/digital and begin to show positive results, how do you determine how much is the optimal amount to spend on each? Again, a fully integrated interactive marketer does not allocate a bucket of monies per channel. Integrated messaging and consumer engagement is determined by the need at the time. If a customer makes an online mess, it may require an online video response or it may require an actual television ad to express your point-of-view. In order to stay flexible and meet your daily needs you cannot have a pre-allocated budget based on channels that was set 9 months ago.

In staying with the theme though, you need to be able to show value as you transition from traditional advertising to more integrated. You have to show that any investment is worth the return before executives will release additional funds and approve more experiential marketing. In light of that, what is the right mix? Ford transitioned 25% of their marketing budget to social. Seems like an arbitrary number but what is the right mix for your company as it transitions from what it was to what it needs to be?

To help us get a better handle on the right marketing mix for your company, we are bringing in a moderator this week who not only understands the measurement and monitoring side, she also understands the business side and promotes the advancement of companies into a more integrated marketing approach. Amber Naslund, the Director of Community at Radian6, understands organizational change is just as important as technical change is and knows how to get people there. While there is before digital (traditional) and after, more importantly there is a during or a transition that not many can talk to except Amber. This week’s topic and supporting questions are as follows:

Topic: Managing the Marketing Mix: Which Channel is More Effective?

Q1: How do you know your traditional marketing efforts are effective?

Q2: How do you know your digital marketing efforts are effective?

Q3: What is the right budgeting mix between traditional & digital?

Be sure to join us Tuesday April 27 at noon Eastern and participate by following #sm57 from any Twitter client or simply goto our LIVE page during the event.

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

Children, Parents and Social Media, the need for education

Posted on April 21, 2010 by marc meyer

This past Monday, I sat on a panel in Naples Florida where we talked about social media and children. It was put on by the Collier County School Board and the panel consisted of law enforcement officials, representatives from Naples High School, and an individual from the Naples Daily News as well to name a few.

Throughout the 2 hour discussion I was amazed at what I heard but not surprised, and thus I jotted down some things. Three of the recurring themes coming from everyone’s lips on the panel were:

Education-It might seem as if that is a redundant thing to say in this type of setting, but it cannot be stressed enough how important it is to not only educate your children on the perils of certain aspects of social media, but how important it is to stay on top of it as well. the big follow up question to this was, “Where are we supposed to go for that information and education?”
Accountability-Social media has now made everyone accountable for what they do and what they say now. Yet children do not realize the larger implications of their online actions and interactions in social networks. As parents it’s important to understand the broader implications of social media missteps.
Communication-Ironic that the “thing” that helps us communicate with more people, seems to reduce the amount of communication amongst us. But in order to stay on top of what your child is doing and who they are doing it with, what they are saying and who are they saying it to, and what they are sharing and uploading and who that is with, you have to communicate and you have to do it a lot. In other words, talk to them, ask them questions, be proactive not reactive. Don’t be afraid to dig a little.

Along with the discussion were a few links that I had suggested that parents take note of:

Knowem.com-KnowEm allows you to check for the use of your brand, product, personal name or username instantly on over 350 popular and emerging social media websites.

UsernameCheck.com Similar to Knowem.

123people.com-123people is a real time people search tool that looks into nearly every corner of the web to find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles.

Facebook.com/help/?safety-Facebook takes safety very seriously and strives to create an environment where everyone can connect and share comfortably. Find answers to a variety of safety questions here.

DirectMarketingObservations.com–Monitor your social space with 7 tools and 16 minutes of setup.

It starts with this and continues with a willingness to educate and share. Social Media is not bad and I had wished that we might have spent some time on the positive things of social media-Perhaps another session is in order for that.

Monitor your social space with 7 tools and 16 minutes of setup.

Posted on April 19, 2010 by marc meyer

If you’re the average person, you don’t have time for paid monitoring tools; and furthermore, you really don’t want to mess with complicated social media monitoring tools or setup either. So what do you do if you want to monitor your space, your company, your name and your competition?

You check out these 7 easy tools with even easier setups.

With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted.

1) Meet. Google Replay. To check out this feature, do the following:

Go to the Google homepage, click on the show options link, and then click on updates. Make sure you have already typed in a search term and then see what happens. A waterfall of real time data coming from Twitter. Time elapsed: 30 seconds

2) Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Time to set up: 5 minutes

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

monitoring a developing news story
keeping current on a competitor or industry
getting the latest on an event
keeping tabs on your local news or teams

3) Monitter is so simple its scary, just plug in words or terms in each of the three columns and go watch the firehose of data coming from Twitter. Time to set up: 1 minute

4) I’ll add Social Mention, though sometimes the results are a bit odd, but the setup might take one minute, which is what we’re talking about here. Time to set up: 2 minutes

5) and 6) The next 2 are great for seeing where someone might have a social profile setup. Knowem and Usernamecheck are both solid. Set up time: 7 minutes

7) Backtype takes about 30 seconds and allows you to monitor stuff. Time to set up: 30 seconds

Honorable mention: Watchthatpage Notify.me

This weeks #Social Media Topic: Managing the Effectiveness of Your Social Programs #SM55

Posted on April 13, 2010 by marc meyer

Effective social media programs? Yeah right, how would you ever prove it? That’s the struggle of corporate social media marketers. There are tons of systems that help you listen and monitor, there are a lot of publishing tools that let you update multiple accounts and personas in the same dashboard, hundreds of social platforms and a few reporting tools. The problem is they are all just that, all disparate systems that are not connected and certainly not integrated.

So back to the question, How do you manage the effectiveness of your campaign? If you are like most social marketers today, there is little support for the social manager who is typically part of the marketing or communications team. Left to their own devices, they usually use the free tools and simply infer the results that they can patch together.

There is a new suite of tools coming onto the market that proclaim Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) that begin to couple two or three components together. Here’s the problem, even the specific SMMS solutions don’t provide a real look. The current SMMS solutions are tools. They were created as tools to measure other tools. What’s missing are the actual use cases, the tools that marketers need to track, analyze and report campaigns. In general, here’s a list of what’s missing:

Central Database – to pull the results together and create a single platform to analyze and report from
Proper Reporting – that integrates the different systems and provides true enterprise analytics and reports
Advanced Sentiment Analysis – not just positive and negative either.
CRM Integration
Traditional Marketing Comparison

Take a look at that last point. To truly understand the effectiveness of your social programs, you have to have something to compare them against. Think about it, a platform that could listen, suggest influencers (based on advanced sentiment), provide a place to respond from, track internal links and their paths/subpaths, manage digital ad spend, then monitor traditional ad spends, effectiveness and finally compare and recommend an optimized marketing mix based on real-time results and all at an enterprise scale. The panacea of managing the effectiveness of your social media programs. (From my experience, I have only seen this solution from one provider, Accenture Interactive (Disclaimer: Jason Breed works for AI)).

The reality is that only the top brands require the type of solution mentioned above. Every marketer has unique needs and unique results that will all have different values for each marketer’s brand. There is one marketer that has the experience to help us work through what’s most appropriate for all needs. That marketer is Tac Anderson. Tac has experienced the brand side at HP and the agency side from his current position at Waggener Edstrom. He will lead the discussion around the following topic:

Topic: Managing the Effectiveness of Your Social Programs

Q1: What type of planning should go into your social media campaigns? What is your process?
Q2: What metrics should you always be looking at?
Q3: What should always be on your scorecard to measure effectiveness? Are there any constants?

We invite you to join the conversation on Tuesday 4/13 at 12 noon EST by following #sm55 from any Twitter client or from our LIVE site.

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

The cult of social media celebrityism

Posted on April 12, 2010 by marc meyer

I’m starting to become acutely aware of the extreme amounts of entertainment vehicles, media outlets, media devices, content consumption and content creation that are being produced at massive levels all around me. Social media can do that. It can expose you to a lot.

But I’m also coming to a conclusion too.

From a media/content standpoint, what we consume and how we consume it for some of us, is in direct proportion to what we create and why we create it. Social media seems to be central to this theme that we need to be and can be validated through this “instant recognition”. We see it and we want it too.

Call it “social media celebrityism” if you will. In other words, we the content producers, want to be noticed, we want the attention that we see the “others” getting.

Why do you write? Why do you create vlogs? Why do you tweet? Why do you share your content? Are our motives altruistic? What is the bottom line reason? I don’t know your motives but I would guess that most of you don’t create content out of a vacuum.

What this really means is that all of us content producers have one goal in mind whether we care to admit it or not. We want to be noticed. We won’t shun it if it comes our way. In fact, on the contrary. We’ll embrace it in a heartbeat. I don’t turn down many opportunities, do you?

It’s like we all want, at the least, the 15 minutes that has been afforded us. Most of us would take more if we could too. We laughed when Warhol first said it, but the more I continue to sit back and watch how our wired world is evolving, I see a public that obsesses over being famous and in turn obsesses over the famous.

Social media has made us vain. Social media has made us want more. Social media has lowered the bar and social media has lowered the barrier of entry into this world.

Social media has made us conscious of the attention we can get and it makes us want it all the more. Most won’t admit that, but most won’t turn away from the recognition if it is somehow bestowed upon them by accident either.

There’s nothing wrong with it. but my concern is that as we become more desensitized to and inundated with UGC, either our desire for better quality will increase-which would be OK, or our expectations for more outrageous, salacious content will need to be met, or we will feel the pressure of sacrificing quality over sensationalism. Sadly, that may have already happened…

Being digitally shallow and outrageous will take on new meaning thanks to social media and search. Our 15 minutes of fame will be compressed and zipped to 7 1/2 minutes…

This isn’t happening to everyone but I dare someone to say that they have never written something that didn’t possess a certain amount of link bait. Who’s to blame? Me, you, our readers, new media, old media, technology..We’re all to blame and yet there’s not a thing we can really do about it. It is the world in which we live in now.

10 social sites you might have missed

Posted on April 9, 2010 by marc meyer

I haven’t supplied you with a post that directs you to some cool social sites lately, for that I apologize. So here we go.

1) Check out Tagxedo. It’s Wordle, but on steroids. Though you will have to download Microsoft’s Silverlight to really see it in all of its glory.

2) Start selling in 60 seconds with Tinypay. You want to see micropayments in a down n’ dirty fashion? This is it!

3) I love this deck, The Tipping Points of Social Media

4) If your not a fan of Social Media Today, you should be. Pay attention to this post by Coree Silvera titled 36 Twitter Resources: Advanced Twitter Search for Business, It’s loaded with advanced Twitter search tips you probably don’t know about..

5) Check out the funky named Goomzee. Goomzee helps increase sales through innovative solutions, specifically designed to connect buyers and sellers. It’s essentially a mobile advertising and lead generation tool for real estate sales and marketing professionals.

6) You knew something like this was going to be created didn’t you? Teneros has created a product called Social Sentry which provides corporations the ability to monitor the social networking communications of their employees. Delivered as a SaaS offering, Social Sentry enables businesses to monitor employee activity on all major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

7) Tungle is cool. Get your personal profile and custom URL to display your availability, and let others schedule meetings with you (without having to sign up). Choose your availability, who you share your page with and when meetings get booked.

8. Though we all read a lot every day, Mitch Joel compiled a nice list of 20 books that you should read. The Digital Marketing Essential Reader

9) This is hilarious. The PPC Blooper pay per click humor blog, with the appropriate URL of…Yourppcsucks

10) Sign up for this and keep your eye out for Nebul.us

Lastly I want to give a quick shout out to the folks over at Junta42 they just released their eighth installment of the Junta42 Top Content Marketing blogs list. I was honored to place #7 on that list! Thanks guys!

10 little things SMB’s might be missing when launching social media

Posted on April 5, 2010 by marc meyer

I use SMB’s as an example here, but when reading Todd Defren’s latest blog post, apparently it is something that permeates organizations both large and small. What is it?

What are companies (SMB’s) usually missing when jumping into the social media waters?

They’re missing the point.
They’re misunderstanding the commitment
They think you can outsource it
They think it’s a switch
They don’t try as hard as they could
They don’t measure it or…
They measure the wrong things
They lack knowledge
They’re expectations are unrealistic
They don’t give it enough time

That’s it.

But you know what the great thing is about all of the above bullet points? They all can be fixed.

How?

Education. Education will help them get the point, but they need to know where to get that education. You can help them.
Understanding the hard work involved will address a lot of the unknowns. We can all relate to what happens with hard work. But there needs to be an emphasis and a complete understanding of how labor intensive social media can be.
You can outsource it, but it’s easier to understand when you don’t, the more you understand, perhaps the more capable you are of knowing what you can and cannot do internally.
It is a switch but when you treat social media as such, others can tell, they see your lack of commitment-they see the half ass effort.
If you don’t try, then what should you expect? I’ve always said, if you give 100%, then no-one can ever say that you didn’t try. You can take it out of the equation. But make sure you’re working smart.
You measure your efforts when you sell, when you advertise, when you hire, when you buy etc. etc. so this is no different. You just need the right tools to measure the right things.
Look up the definition of social media ROI and that will tell you what you should measure with social media.
Social media changes daily; the tools, the sites and the cool things, they change daily. Stay current. Pick 10 sites and dump them into a reader and read it every day.
Create reachable goals. Teams and coaches create goals-you should be no different.
Set up your expectations tied into your goals and give it all a legitimate time frame. But know it is a long term deal.

Now go get it done!

Social Media thought leader infographs

Posted on April 1, 2010 by marc meyer

I see social media folks who have, or don’t have the chops, called everything from guru, ninja, and thought leader, to strategist, heavy hitter, expert and beyond. With that being said, I’d like to keep this light on words and more on the visual of what some of those labels or designations mean to me.

I guess first and foremost, when I hear the word Ninja, this is what comes to mind..

So I’m not really feelin’ the whole “Social Media Ninja” thing..Do you know people who work like that? or go to client meetings dressed like that? I just don’t know if I ever would want to be called a Social Media Ninja, what about you? I can see it now, “This is Marc, he’s a social media ninja, he carves people up and destroys them with lethal precision…” uhh sweet, you’re hired.

Next up is the Social Media Guru

Is this the image that comes to mind when someone is referred to you as a Social Media Guru? Do you want to be a Guru? Do you know what the definition of a guru is?

A guru (Sanskrit: गुरु) is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (teacher). (wikipedia) Ironically, look at this “other” definition:

In Western usage, the meaning of guru has been extended to cover anyone who acquires followers, though not necessarily in an established school of philosophy or religion.

Is it me or does that sound like a traditional definition of Twitter… which would mean that perhaps a social media guru might look something like this:

What’s the word, smarmy? The above Guru, may even have some sort of social media certification..Who knows? I know of one person who I could slap the tag of social media guru on, and it would fit, but for a myriad of reasons.

What about thought leader, what does that really mean to you? To mean when I think of a true thought leader this is what comes to mind.

But ironically if you do an image search on the term “thought leader”, all you get is a bunch nameless, obscure, people you’ve never seen before, trying to self promote themselves as a..you guessed it…thought leaders.

There are just a few, true, social media thought leaders, but I think my problem with the term lies in the fact that there are too many. We slap the label on people too quick. and the label is affixed based on false numbers. The problem lies in the fact that we have diluted it.

What about heavy hitter? Here is what immediately comes to mind for a heavy hitter.

Yep, The Bambino was a heavy hitter, because he was heavy and he could hit. I will let you at this point, come up with your own list of social media heavy hitters.

Then there’s the social media expert. I’ll leave it at this which I got off of Brian Cuban’s website:

Here’s a quick “Universal search” exercise for you, go do image searches for all of these terms mentioned above to see what comes up when you add the word social media to the front of them. You get some interesting results. Essentially, you get nothing, which means, Universal search aside, the labels mean nothing..Call yourself a social media unicorn if you want, just bring the results.

In conclusion, I would like for us all to go lighter on the labels and heavy on the results. Sort of like this last image. He might be the exception. He had the label and the results.