But Hitachi was willing to give it a shot if it could keep the budget low and use tracking to closely monitor results.

In her presentation, Crost shared five shortcuts learned along the way and how the test project more than doubled Hitachi’s goals for Web traffic, social engagement and live sales leads.

Her shortcuts:

• Test early and often. You’re not going to know which content is socially engaging until you start testing and trying things out.
• Segment. Provide different levels of engagement for your audience, and let it self-select.
• Amplify. You don’t need a big budget to amplify what you’re doing. Hitachi worked with partners, used its corporate site and engaged industry influencers to raise awareness for its social campaign.
• Measure. Focus on a few key performance metrics, and integrate them into your campaign. Use early results to shift resources. (For example, Hitachi found that Facebook outperformed LinkedIn and Twitter for its campaign, so it shifted focus and resources there.)
• Nurture. Social media interaction must be nurtured. Crost encouraged having fun and developing an experience map for how each touch point leads to a nurturing goal.

Watch Crost’s presentation. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Andy’s Answers: 5 shortcuts Hitachi Data Systems uses to earn B2B sales leads through social media originally published by SmartBlogs

So to build up communities around Yahoo!’s brands, the company launched a series of campaigns designed to attract and engage specific audiences. At our recent BlogWell conference in San Francisco, Yahoo!’s Robin Zucker walked us through one of the projects for Yahoo! Movies.

Her case study covered the strategy behind the project, how it was done and how it all resulted in a million Facebook fans.

A few of her big ideas:

• Focus on earning the right fans. Zucker and her team targeted moviegoers for this entire project because they wanted to build a fan base of people who love movies and love going to them. These are the people they want to build a relationship with at Yahoo! Movies.
• Find a great partner. Yahoo! partnered with Regal Cinemas, which helped promote giveaways and create a “real-world” community experience.
• Leave room for flexibility. Like all word-of-mouth ideas, you never know how certain ideas are going to play out. Some might not work as well as expected, while others surprise you with how much they catch on. Always leave room to drop something that isn’t working, and double down on what is.

Watch Zucker’s presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Andy’s Answers: How Yahoo! earned 1 million Facebook fans for Yahoo! Movies originally published by SmartBlogs

But how does National Geographic manage it all? How does it find content that fans want to share? What is the voice of the brand? At our last Word of Mouth event, National Geographic’s Brendan Hart shared a bunch of the secrets about how it is done.

A few of his big ideas:

• Define your voice and the team behind it. When National Geographic first launched on Twitter, Hart ran the account — but over time, he weaned himself off because he didn’t think it would scale with him alone. So, he turned the reins over to a core team, and, with a laugh, he said growth has been exponential since making the change.
• Who are you, and what are you trying to do? Every day, the core team has a meeting at 11 a.m. in the chief editor’s office to talk about big things happening in the world, things the team can use to fulfill its mission: inspiring people to care about the planet. This is the fundamental mission that drives the company, and it’s also what drives its social strategy.
• Put the fan first. Everything National Geographic does is through this lens: Would you want to be marketed to this way? Would you want to be talked to this way? Would you want to have a discussion in this format? This is a key behind how Hart and his team are able to establish their authenticity.

Watch Hart’s presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Andy’s Answers: How National Geographic uses social media to get fans talking originally published by SmartBlogs

At our last Word of Mouth event, former Dell executive Caroline Dietz talked about how the company developed its engagement program, launched its IdeaStorm community and started identifying and supporting online fans.

A few of her big points:

• Not all customers and conversations are the same. At Dell, conversations are separated into three buckets: customers who need support, people with suggestions and brand reputation (happy fans and customers).
• Ask influencers and fans for feedback. A great way to start and engage in a conversation is to ask for feedback. Before Dell launched IdeaStorm, it reached out to 25 key online influencers and asked them to play around with the community and provide feedback. The company also invited these influencers to tell their networks about it — and over a weekend, it had more than 1,000 ideas on the site.
• Don’t focus only on the negative. Much of Dell’s early engagement was on finding unhappy customers and working with them to fix their issues. That’s great, but in doing so, the company found itself overlooking all of the happy fans. So to engage them and help them share their voice, Dell started simple programs to thank them and customer-advisory panels to acknowledge them.

Watch Dietz’s case study.

Click here to view the embedded video.

P.S. If this sounds like how you think about marketing, you should be at the Word of Mouth Crash Course.

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Andy’s Answers: How Dell engages online fans and critics originally published by SmartBlogs

And throughout it all, Wampler faced a question that many marketers face: How do you measure this stuff?

At our last Word of Mouth event, Wampler described how she was able to measure word-of-mouth and social media efforts and how she communicated results to senior leadership.

A few of her key tips:

• Do the basics to measure direct product adoption. Wampler said so many of us forget the basics: including social media URLs in existing dashboards, using coupon codes and putting ads in our communities (if they’re big enough and you do it right). Even if you have a small fan base, this will help you get started.
• Always tie what you’re measuring to what matters. Wampler shared an example of a dashboard from an integrated campaign that included social media. She emphasized the importance of how the dashboard focused on what mattered to the company: product adoption, brand engagement and positive sentiment for the brand. Before you start measuring, ask yourself, “What really matters? What’s the goal here?”
• Work social into existing measurement techniques. Wampler talked about how you can add simple questions to surveys that you’re probably already sending to ask customers how word of mouth and social media affect their purchase decisions. The key here, Wampler said, is to not think of social media as some other entity but as a standard part of business that should be measured.

Watch Wampler’s case study.

Click here to view the embedded video.

P.S. If this sounds like how you think about marketing, you should be at the Word of Mouth Crash Course.

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Andy’s Answers: How Intuit measures social media ROI originally published by SmartBlogs

When you earn customers for free through recommendations and referrals from raving fans, you can always beat someone who pays for it. Becoming great at this gives you a recession-proof competitive advantage that will carry you through good times and bad.

At our last word-of-mouth event, I talked about how earning love from customers can save your brand.

A few of my ideas:

• Your brand isn’t what you say; it’s what other people say about you. Advertising might open the door — it might create awareness –- but that only drives people to your word of mouth: their friends, Google and online reviews. If your word of mouth isn’t fantastic, no amount of advertising will compensate for that.
• There’s love for everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you sell or what industry you’re in -– you can earn love and word of mouth. It works for duct tape, it works for Skittles and it works for ketchup.
• Would anybody tell a friend? This is the ultimate question. It challenges you to be wonderful. It’s the difference between interesting and invisible. Ask it about every product you make, every ad you run and every story you tell.

Watch my presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

P.S. If this sounds like how you think about marketing, you should be at the Word of Mouth Crash Course.

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Andy’s Answers: How word of mouth will save your brand originally published by SmartBlogs

Building one takes hard work and a long-term commitment. But if you pull it off, you can create amazing, sustainable word of mouth that will carry you through good times and bad.

An expert at doing this is Spike Jones, and he shared a bunch of tips on how to do it at our last Word of Mouth event.

A few of his big ideas:

• Take time to do the research. Great communities help their customers accomplish something. Yours might help them get a better job, learn something new or simply meet people like them. So do your homework and find the big problem or fantastic goal your community can help people accomplish.
• Be ready to commit. Anyone can start a community, but it takes real talent and commitment to get people to show up and keep coming back. There are no shortcuts here — and it’s important to remember that when starting yours.
• Give them something to believe in. Great communities stand for something. They give their fans a rallying cry, a badge of honor and something to believe in. Give them a bigger purpose — something worth fighting for — and they’ll tell the world about the reason they’re a member of your tribe.

Watch Jones’ video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you love this, check out our upcoming Word of Mouth Crash Course.

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Andy’s Answers: How to start building your fan community originally published by SmartBlogs

To better help customers, UPS is doing a pretty amazing thing: It’s using customer-support channels in social media to proactively and reactively offer support in real time.

In her BlogWell presentation, UPS’ Debbie Curtis-Magley explained how the company started the program and a bunch of lessons learned along the way. A few of her big ideas:

• Create a single place for customers to go. Early on, UPS had multiple personalized Twitter handles, but this didn’t scale. The company launched @UPSHelp to streamline everything.
• Making customers happy through social media gets amplified. When customers come back and thank UPS for its customer service, that adds up to great exposure. Since the company launched the program, UPS has accumulated more than 1 million positive impressions from grateful replies.
• Let experts lead the way. Remember that just because you’re an expert in social media doesn’t mean you’re an expert in customer service. This program required a strong partnership between the public relations team and the customer-service team.

Watch Curtis-Magley’s case study. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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How UPS uses social media for customer service originally published by SmartBlogs

In August, Meg Fligg and her team were exploring ways they could use social media to connect with college students. They discovered that next to football, students love talking about jobs — and jobs happen to be something Georgia-Pacific has a lot of.

But where to start? Should they use existing Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to start promoting openings? Should they start new ones?

In her BlogWell presentation, Fligg walked us through all of the challenges they faced and how they’re making it work. A few of her take-aways:

• Go where students already are. In the middle of trying to figure out how to best use their existing communities, Fligg and her team had an epiphany: The schools they were targeting already had online communities. They just needed to find the best ways to join them.
• Do your homework. For the 20 schools Georgia-Pacific targeted, Fligg and her team spent time researching everything from mascots to how the students communicated with one another. This made their messaging much more meaningful to the students they were reaching out to.
• Support the online conversation with offline recruiting. At each school targeted, Georgia-Pacific participated in career fairs and recruiting events — and a key measure tracked was how much it was able to increase traffic to its booth at these events.

Watch Fligg’s case study. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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How Georgia-Pacific uses social media to recruit college grads originally published by SmartBlogs

But what do you focus on? Which conversations matter? Who’s influencing the conversation? How do you get this information to the people who can do something about it? And what tools can help you do all this?

In her BlogWell presentation, Coca-Cola’s Natalie Johnson walked through all of these big questions and shared how, as one of the most-talked-about companies on Earth, the beverage-maker is able to learn so much from online conversations.

A few of her big ideas:

• Better focus means better listening. Johnson and her team focused their tools on a few key topics for each of Coca-Cola’s brands. These topics range from music to sports — and with their tools, they’re able to measure these critical conversations in more than 32 languages.
• Make sure everyone’s using the same numbers. With so many conversations being monitored by so many people, Coca-Cola established key, baseline metrics that everyone tracks. This makes it easier to compare reports and make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Train champions in departments to help it spread. Coca-Cola’s listening platform and available tools are still new to much of the company. To help earn buy-in and participation, Johnson and her team found success by training “champions” in departments who could then teach others and encourage them to use the tools.

Watch Johnson’s case study.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Andy’s Answers: How Coca-Cola monitors social media originally published by SmartBlogs