This post is by Lori Randall Stradtman, who designs WordPress sites and blogs about social media trends at Social Media Design and Social Media Examiner.
At the recent South by Southwest Interactive Festival, Mike Lewis of Awareness Inc. talked about his experiences and ideas about social marketing from the perspective of a seasoned traditional marketer who has worked with social networking from a corporate perspective. Some highlights from his talk:
The traditional marketing model:
- Develop a campaign
- Identify sources
- Develop compelling content
- Broadcast
- Wait
There’s a very linear progression. Everyone was using the same formula.
But social media is new and unique. The old marketing formulas don’t apply.
The social media marketing model is based on:
- Data
- Dialogue
- Contextual content
- Community
On top of that, the rules of engagement are different for each community — Facebook, Twitter, etc.
This new social model emphasizes:
- Listening for individuals who show a likelihood of buying.
- Identifying contextual influencers.
- Hyper-targeting core users/enthusiasts with contextual offers and content.
This social model presents five core challenges for marketers, he argues.
- Inability to scale: How are you going to adjust your social media strategy to accommodate growth? Usually organizations just throw more bodies at the problem, but when multiple people are handling several different account on each major social network, it’s difficult to form a coherent strategy.
- Security and control: How will manage password security across a large group of people?
- Consistency: At some companies, each department, person, etc., sounds totally different on each social platform. And at other firms you’d swear it was all being written by the same exact person. Strive for consistency!
- Reporting is ad-hoc: There’s no universal standard in place to measure and track metrics.
- Having a home base: How will you centralize your efforts?
Of course, the best news about a list like this is that all these challenges are opportunities in disguise. How will you meet these challenges?
Image credit: lisegagne, via iStockphoto
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
First off, you need to consider your audience… what would encourage them to participate in a public chat room? You should have a gripping incentive that none of your audience would want to turn down, such as a seemingly valuable reward for asking their friends to befriend your business. From there all you need to do is post cool random facts along with your business news and allow for person to person connections. Nobody wants to feel unrecognized on the internet.
-Shoot me an email of what you are trying to accomplish and I'll brainstorm with you.
I am a freshman of the University of Southern Maine- majoring in sustainable business, and I just finished my second econ class. I will be moving into macro econ next semester and would love to help if I can.
-Chad Tope- ctope2@gmail.com
Also- To avoid the problem of becoming swamped, push for building bonds. When people invest time into feeling committed to typing on your page, they build a sense of ownership and responsibility. Once you have increases of populations that you can't handle, you put out that you are accepting requests for moderators; individuals that hold slightly more power than the average consumer that feel committed to providing good service to your website in return for an emotional attachment that is rewarding a sense of accomplishment.
Great point Chad!
For some of us, there is a 6th obstacle: campaign length.
Security and control, and also consistency are easy for me, as I run the social media for my company. However, scaling my efforts is a great challenge, as more accounts are added to my realm of responsibility.
It is difficult to scale your efforts when they consist of listening to customers and responding. Still those concerns are trivial when it comes to the obstacle of reporting. Companies want to see how it directly effects the bottom line and translating social media into cold hard numbers is a difficult task.
My biggest hurdle is running significant social media campaigns in the alotted time period (product lifetime is short in my business), while also producing meaningful reports on campaign progress. So other obstacles aside, what are the metrics most people are measuring to put meaning behind social media efforts?
For me, it is the following:
Twitter – followers, rate of follower growth, mentions, retweets, link popularity
Facebook – friends, likes, page activity, link popularity
YouTube – subscribers, friends, uploaded video views, channel views
Not to mention, how do you measure a platform such as Tumblr and Flickr?
This post illustrates why major marketers are confused about "Social Media." Engagement and communication are both very important. But nothing in the "5 Challenges" above touches on the big #1: P&L.
I'm all for community, engagement, and the long-tail. Having an enterprise SMMS is important for larger marketers. However when a Brand Manager asks "How will this affect my P&L number this year?", the vast majority of social media companies start murmuring into their collars like they have bad breath.
I absolutely advise companies to have a smart social media policy. But if they think that means just publishing, managing, and measuring their content across digital channels, then they've imbibed the equivalent of a Shirley Temple. She's cute -but most Brand Managers look beyond the curls and have to show their boss the "Money." If you have 5 gazillion Fans, congrats. But if you're not measuring the impact on sales (aka ROI), then enjoy your curls and give a hug to Dean Martin for me on behalf of your brand.
Hey Scott, great feedback but I would argue this post is a great outline of the talk but doesn't actually get into the meat of my presentation at SXSW. Also, it sounds like you may have missed the larger point of the post as well. First, the point of the talk was to demonstrate how social can be used to identify and market to individuals who have have demonstrated, through social interaction, a higher likelihood of buying or influencing a product decision much earlier in the process allowing marketers to increase conversion rates. This is outlined in the section called "new social model" and is a direct impact on ROI which you outline above. Also, challenge #4 is specifically about tracking ROI. As you know, one thing to keep in mind is ROI is about measuring financial impact, which could be sales or reducing services costs. Many companies, to your point, don't take the to define objectives up front which make it nearly impossible to measure any financial impact.
Hope that helps to clarify. I'd be happy to talk to you in more detail or send you a copy of the deck if that helps.. if so, shoot me a note, you know how to get in touch.
Mike
Hey, Mike:
Sorry for the slow reply on my part. Firstly: I know you're out there on behalf of all of us putting the best foot forward for responsible SM practices – ones that improve business and help organizations manage the challenges that digital social channels present. And to that point, I'd love to get a copy of your deck for more details on your POV for tying the data available from APIs to ROI.
My suggestion is that there is so much conversation about that first level data (digital metrics like friends, vistors, comments, shares, etc.) that it has diverted attention and effort to getting to the ultimate metric: Sales.
The Social Model starts to break down in a couple key ways:
1) According to Jakob Nielsen's important study "Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Participate," in the vast majority of communities, the bulk of activity comes from a small group of people (1% are Heavy Contributors; 9% Intermittent Contributors.) The bulk of site users simply read/watch content without contributing or commenting. We certainly want to identify and lean into those in the top 10%. But what about the other 90%? That's a lot of wallets and purses that aren't being accounted for, not to mention the massive amount of brand-related conversations and activity that happens offline.
2) I agree with Challenge #4, but argue that while marketers, especially Brand Managers & C-level folks, hope SM reporting will get them to ROI, the reality is that most of the data available there is related to Engagement. Engagement is important to measure for the long-term brand health. And using SM channels to engage customers and prospects can indeed, as you point out, help reduce services costs for such things as product launches, product innovation, and customer service issues. Our friends at Cisco have a couple interesting case studies around this. However, for the foreseeable future, the reality is that most marketers measure ROI by revenue (sales.) When Brand Managers are putting together their media plans for specific campaigns as well as annual, they are being held to a P&L number. They need to be able to measure bottom-line revenue impact. The model included in Forrester's report "Social Media Metrics That Matter" is important to consider. (Overview here: http://bit.ly/eV61Tu.)
Let me end by stating clearly: I certainly don't have it all figured out either. A whole lotta people much smarter than I are grinding on the issue of the ultimate challenge. I am, however, trying to wave the flag and raise the discussion that for digital social media to a truly successful business that we need to continue to work and develop best practices that align with bottom line business metrics. How about Market Mix Model studies and Matched Market Tests?
With respect and smiles,
Scott (aka "Chewie" to Mike)
Hey Scott, Sounds like we may be saying the same thing. My point that 'reporting is ad-hoc' is exactly your point that "there is so much conversation about that first level data (digital metrics like friends, vistors, comments, shares, etc.) that it has diverted attention and effort to getting to the ultimate metric: Sales." However, in my talk I actually breakdown where marketers can get ROI. By demonstrating how social can be used to identify and market to individuals who have have demonstrated, through social interaction, a higher likelihood of buying or influencing a product decision much earlier in the process allowing marketers to increase conversion rates.
I don't mind a healthy debate – I encourage it -but it does sound silly when we are both arguing the same point. Don't you agree?
Mike
Hey, Mike:
Agreed to the extent that they can track the sales. We're both aiming for the same result.
Scott