Social Media - Fire, Aim, Ready

Dur­ing a meal with a client the other day, she men­tioned that a divi­sion in her com­pany was deploy­ing a task force to develop a social media strat­egy. Whilst I under­stood the sen­ti­ment, I explained that this seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was obvi­ously accused of heresy and ignor­ing the most impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion in mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions since Johannes Guten­burg devel­oped the print­ing press in 15th Cen­tury. After all, which self-respecting com­pany doesn’t have a fully defined social media strategy?

Let me explain. Back in the bub­bly days at the end of the last mil­len­nium, every­body was talk­ing about how to define and adopt a new media strat­egy. These days, nobody would con­sider a new media strat­egy, but instead how dig­i­tal should be used as part of a broader mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan. It’s the same with social media.

Don’t think about engag­ing with your cus­tomers in social silos or hav­ing a knee jerk reac­tion to your CMO say­ing “we need a Face­book fan page”. Look at first under­stand­ing your tar­get audi­ence and what you want to achieve through your com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This should then help you to define your com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy. It’s only at this point that you’ll be able to define which mar­ket­ing chan­nels to use and whether social plat­forms are even rel­e­vant within this plan.

Reas­sur­ingly, a work­shop at our recent Social Media Hud­dle made me realise that we’re now at a point where many of our tech­nol­ogy clients are truly start­ing to inte­grate social media into their mar­ket­ing plans. By doing this, they’re now able to add higher lev­els of engage­ment, col­lab­o­ra­tion and cre­ate dia­logue with their prospects, cus­tomers and chan­nel through social plat­forms. With­out los­ing sight of the fact that these activ­i­ties are part of a broader mar­ket­ing mix, involv­ing paid media, search and more tra­di­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehicles.

How Salesforce.com do social

The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

• Sec­ondly, cre­ate your own branded chan­nels on exist­ing social plat­forms. Use lis­ten­ing tools like Radian6 to under­stand what peo­ple are say­ing and where they’re say­ing it. Engage with peo­ple where they spend their time and dis­trib­ute your con­tent across YouTube, Twit­ter, Flickr and Slideshare.

• Finally, cre­ate con­ver­sa­tions across the web on sites where you don’t have branded chan­nels e.g. Twit­ter, third party blogs, forums and part­ners sites. And, make sure your social media guide­lines are up to date and dis­sem­i­nate the poli­cies to your con­tent creators.

A good sug­ges­tion that came out of this last pil­lar was how to cal­cu­late a rough ROI for your social activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, first cal­cu­late how much a video costs to cre­ate and to upload to YouTube. Then, ascer­tain the £/$ value of a video view (that’s the tricky bit, but any media buyer should be able to give you a fig­ure). Mul­ti­ply this value by the num­ber of views and divide by the cost. Easy!

There was also a debate about whether peo­ple should have mul­ti­ple accounts on Twit­ter e.g. their “work” pro­file and their “per­sonal” pro­file. The audi­ence seemed split on this topic. I per­son­ally pre­fer a sin­gle account @Wrigsy where I Tweet about a broad range of top­ics (from climb­ing moun­tains to our lat­est new busi­ness wins). But, I sup­pose I’m lucky that I can also Tweet through our Ban­ner account @BannerCorp when the topic is purely focused on work.

If you’re a salesforce.com user, start using Chat­ter. It’s their most suc­cess­ful prod­uct launch to date and gives users the sort of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion they expect from plat­forms like Facebook.

POWNAR - the power of news and recommendation

CNN have cer­tainly pushed the bound­aries when it comes to explor­ing the power of rec­om­men­da­tion and the value of shared con­tent. Their global research ini­tia­tive Pow­nar, illus­trates why peo­ple share con­tent, how they share it and the type of con­tent they pre­fer to share. In the US and Europe, peo­ple tend to share con­tent for altru­is­tic rea­sons, whereas in Asia, shar­ing con­tent is more about broad­cast­ing your sta­tus. As you might sus­pect, arti­cles with embed­ded video and images are most likely to be shared. And, Face­book is the pri­mary plat­form used for sharing.

Most inter­est­ing from the research is the effect that shar­ing has on the per­son who is shar­ing the con­tent and those receiv­ing it. Peo­ple are 3.7 times more engaged with con­tent that has been rec­om­mended. And, those who share the con­tent are 2 times more engaged.

There’s also an inter­est­ing uplift in brand met­rics. Shared con­tent increases brand con­sid­er­a­tion by 12%, brand rec­om­men­da­tion by 19% and brand favoura­bil­ity by an astound­ing 19%.

The key actions to take from this research are to assess your con­tent to ensure it’s opti­mised for rec­om­men­da­tion and make it share­able. And, find a lady in Paris to be your indi­vid­ual broadcaster…

Take a look at the attached press release to under­stand how semi­otics, con­tent arche­types and bio­met­rics can be used to under­stand the effect that shared con­tent can have on your brand.

CNNI POWNAR — the power of news and recommendation

Getting the most out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the content.

The new inPages Platform

 

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Plat­form. Our Hud­dle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for our company.

So, what does inPages enable mar­keters to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – rec­om­men­da­tions from per­sonal acquain­tances are the most trusted form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – and intro­duced a new tab on the com­pany pro­file page called Prod­ucts & Ser­vices. This areas of the site enables com­pa­nies to fea­ture infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts, with onward links to their cor­po­rate sites.

LinkedIn Com­pany Prod­ucts and Ser­vices Page

But the clever bit here is that the new plat­form enables mem­bers to fea­ture in their pro­files the prod­ucts and ser­vices they use and to rec­om­mend them. This gives rec­om­men­da­tions a new level of cred­i­bil­ity – because they’re directly linked to a person’s pro­file. Thereby over­com­ing the con­cerns that many com­pa­nies actively “mas­sage” prod­uct rat­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions on other third party sites. I sus­pect that many tech mar­keters are already in a mad rush to get their prod­ucts and ser­vices listed.

How­ever, on reflec­tion, this new plat­form does raise a num­ber of inter­est­ing questions:

• Will com­pa­nies need to update their social guide­lines to encom­pass their employ­ees rec­om­mend­ing their own prod­ucts or those from other companies?
• If your pro­file fea­tures a large num­ber of prod­ucts and ser­vices, does this just open you up as a tar­get for sales guys? You’re clearly a per­son who influ­ences the pur­chase and based on the num­ber of prod­ucts, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Look­ing at the demo of the plat­form, there doesn’t seem to be the func­tion­al­ity to pro­vide neg­a­tive feed­back. Surely these are often more impor­tant than pos­i­tive recommendations?

I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Creating content for pancake people

Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.

I also used to enjoy get­ting stuck into long arti­cles and curl­ing up with an 800 page novel. Truth is, these days I find it chal­leng­ing to read a lengthy online arti­cle with­out fol­low­ing the mul­ti­ple links embed­ded within the page, the lure of check­ing Twit­ter, my netvibes news feeds and my mul­ti­ple email accounts. Appar­ently, I’m not alone – there is a per­cep­tion out there that the inter­net is chang­ing our brains (and not always pos­i­tively), how we con­sume infor­ma­tion and retain knowl­edge. In effect, Google is becom­ing a replace­ment for our long-term mem­ory and almost as quick at retriev­ing infor­ma­tion (take a look at the new Google Instant).

Pan­cake People

Back in 2005, the play­wright Richard Fore­man wrote a piece about ‘Pan­cake Peo­ple’, and it’s even more per­ti­nent today than when he wrote it:

“I see within us all (myself included) the replace­ment of com­plex inner den­sity with a new kind of self – evolv­ing under the pres­sure of infor­ma­tion over­load and the tech­nol­ogy of the ‘instantly avail­able’. A new self that needs to con­tain less and less of an inner reper­tory of dense cul­tural inher­i­tance – as we all become “pan­cake peo­ple” – spread wide and thin as we con­nect with that vast net­work of infor­ma­tion accessed by the mere touch of a but­ton.“

Ear­lier this year, a client told me that peo­ple don’t read web pages any­more and that much of the beau­ti­fully crafted copy that we had pro­duced was a waste of time. Instinc­tively, I fought back against this state­ment and zeal­ously defended our work. After all, pro­duc­ing con­tent and pub­lish­ing web pages is one of the rea­sons we’re in busi­ness. How­ever, there have been a num­ber of arti­cles lately that have re-ignited the dis­cus­sions and changed my mind as to how the inter­net is alter­ing the way our brains work and, there­fore, the way we con­sume information.

Have we reached a point pre­dicted back in 1985 by Max Head­room where blipverts will be the most effec­tive way of get­ting our mar­ket­ing mes­sages across to our tar­get audi­ence; where high-speed, con­cen­trated, high-intensity com­mer­cials last­ing about three sec­onds are used to sub­lim­i­nally brain­wash the masses?

We may not have reached that point yet, but chang­ing trends in media con­sump­tion must have some real impli­ca­tions for mar­keters. Is the long copy ad dead? Will tech­nol­ogy decision-makers no longer have the time or incli­na­tion to value whitepa­pers? Do we need to fun­da­men­tally address the tax­on­omy and con­tent hier­ar­chy of our web­sites? And, do we need to estab­lish new mea­sures of audi­ence engage­ment? After all, a page view doesn’t mean a page has actu­ally been read…

Bite-sized pay­loads of mar­ket­ing gold

 

If the answer to any of the above is “Yes”, then we need to ensure that we’re pro­duc­ing con­cise mar­ket­ing mes­sages that are laser-targeted at our audi­ences. Let’s not cre­ate reams of writ­ten con­tent that lan­guish on our cor­po­rate web­sites. Instead, let’s embrace the notion of cre­at­ing more engag­ing for­mats of con­tent and dis­trib­ut­ing it in bite-sized pay­loads to the plat­forms where our audi­ences are spend­ing their time. So that means fea­tur­ing con­tent on ser­vices like Scribd and Slideshare and find­ing new ways to fea­ture con­tent on pub­lisher web­sites. It also means mak­ing your blog one of the pri­mary des­ti­na­tions for your mar­ket­ing mes­sages. After all, the con­tent changes reg­u­larly and is gen­er­ally mer­ci­fully short.

Thank you for read­ing to the end of this post. It must have been dif­fi­cult not to fol­low any of the embed­ded links or check­ing the sta­tus on your social uni­verse… I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts.