Improve your Social Media Marketing

In last week’s blog I spoke of my recent trip to Silicon Valley where I had meetings with high tech investors such as Roger McNamee and with social media giants Google, Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter. It generated much “food for thought” and I shared some general insights with you.

This week I’m going to look at some of the more specific tips I picked up and how they can apply to your business.

Social media is booming. As I mentioned last week, in the US, growth in the use of portals and email is down or flat at best, but social media is up 52% year on year. This represents huge opportunities for the companies that are savvy in social media marketing. Those who are not, run the risk of being left behind.

It no longer matters which sector you work in – most of your customers are now communicating with one another online so it’s vital to have a sound social media strategy. Fear of negative feedback is no longer a valid reason not to interact with your customers – if people are discussing your brand anyway, why not embrace that engagement opportunity?

Facebook has certainly played its part in driving this growth and changing the internet from the “what” to the “who”. They understand the truism that personality plays a big part, that’s why it’s called “social” media! For example one of the reasons Facebook triumphed over Myspace was because its personalities are “real”, rather than having a username or handle.

Understanding social media is about not only knowing how the personality of your brand comes across, but also your fans and followers are all real people who are constantly interacting with one another. Of course the key is how to get your brand to be part of those interactions.

To leverage the power of social media, products and campaigns need to be “social by design”. Facebook have advocated a great model, the CEII Process:

Connect-->Engage-->Influence-->Integrate

What I like about this model is that it’s not only very successful for advertising on Facebook but can (and should!) be applied across most of your social media activity.

Connect

The starting point is to get your customers to “like”, “follow” etc your Facebook page (or other social media real estate). These fans become the cornerstone of your social media marketing. To generate fans, ensure you promote your Facebook page offline and online – across all the touchpoints you have with your customers.

Engage

Once connected with your brand, the next, more difficult, part is getting people to engage with your content, so they can distribute it to their own friends. To be engaging, brands shouldn’t just talk about themselves but also about their customers and their experiences. Create content and stories that can start conversations and generate engagement. Rather than relying solely on ads, use ads and stories.

Influence

Try to extend your influence by asking your customers to introduce your brand to their friends and invite them to join your communities. Provide high-quality content that your customers can use to influence a broader set of friends. This will increase your circle of influence to include those who will view and engage with your content. A Facebook Ad is 68% more effective if “Liked” by a friend. Also remember the “Like” button can also be made a social plug-in on anyone’s website.

Integrate

Make your marketing (and even your product) social by design. Products such as Spotify and Netflix have elements that are designed to be shared with friends and are integrated with social media. By building social into the brand experience in a way that makes it better to use, it’s value increases when shared with friends.

This is an era of huge opportunities for all companies but especially small ones. The CEII approach does not require the large advertising budgets that used to be a barrier to entry for SME’s. Now, being creative and understanding how your customers use social media, is a better measure for success.

Brands must now constantly look to create opportunities for fans to build and maintain relationships with their friends. You also need to understand what is being said about your brand online, and the key drivers that influence your customers’ and fans’ behaviour.

For marketing success in social media, you need to develop an online personality for your brand, create a presence, build your target audience and engage with them. Then you can amplify your messages through their network and begin to reap the benefits of their online advocacy.

Do you still use your company intranet? While websites have become more interactive and social media savvy, the company intranet now feels rather old-school, almost prehistoric. If you are looking for more efficient internal communications then developing a Facebook style social network in-house, has many advantages over the old standard intranet.

When NationalField set up an internal network for running the Obama presidential election campaign in 2008 a new way of working had been established. NationalField now boasts an enviable client list of blue chips exploring the benefits of a private social network. Many high tech organisations, have also documented their use of internal networks, particularly multinationals, such as Nikon, Dell and Symantec.

But it’s not just the corporate giants that are joining the party. IT companies like SalesForce (with its Chatter platform) and Yammer are offering entry level networks for free and paid for versions with extra functionality. It would appear that it’s only a matter of time before having a private social network becomes the norm.

The benefits of internal networks

The walled garden. Organisations large and small are always fearful of their staff being loose cannons on public social networks. There has been a litany of #twitterfails, career suicides and PR disasters prompted by individuals making inappropriate statements on social media sites. A private social network acts as a relatively safe walled garden. While members may be judged by their peers, at least they can get involved without the added concern that their opinions are being made in the public domain.

Increased productivity. There are increasing levels of dissatisfaction among CEOs about the amount time wasted on internal emails. Some such as Thierry Breton, CEO of information technology services giant, Atos, are now looking to a mixture of instant messaging and internal networks as an alternative communication tool.

Improved efficiency. Private networks can more effectively locate people and resources. In setting up project teams, for example, they can be used to search and find key employees, flatten hierarchies by removing the usual reporting lines from the process, and so allow the formation of virtual teams to set up and operate quickly.

Corporate information centre. These social networks can also replace many of the functions that used to be provided by intranets. News and information can be housed and updated in one area – internal newsletters, press releases, employee news and company announcements can be made without internal email. Corporate strategy can be made clear to all so everyone can the same vision. Equally the network can act as an internal library for housing training materials, tutorials, guidelines, marketing material and product information.

Generating and nurturing ideas. Private networks are not just top-down instruments to improve efficiency and drive corporate strategy. And this is where it gets a lot more interesting for market research specialists. They can also play a key role in the creative side of the business - stimulating idea generation and nurturing collaboration among employees. Not only can ideas be shared, developed and acted upon – it also provides a bonding experience for employees across different departments and markets. Much has been made recently about the increased use of co-creation – and how organisations have worked with customers to build upon their ideas and help to develop new products. Many employees also feel they have a voice that needs to heard when it comes to new ideas so the internal social network is an ideal way to harness them and provide reward and recognition for the most deserving cases.

Online research opportunities

Leveraging online communities for the purpose of research is not an entirely new concept for our industry. We have become more skilled in getting members engaged in online discussion groups and forums. And these techniques, coupled with video and other online prompt material, can play a greater role in researching new ideas and stimulating co-creation for product development. Online qualitative techniques which we already use for online communities, can be easily be adapted for use among staff within an internal social media platform.

As with community panels, if the network becomes large enough, then research conducted within it can also be more quantitative in nature. For companies conducting big employee surveys, this may be an issue that is both an opportunity and a threat. Organisations which set up private social networks have all they need to run their own employee engagement surveys and collate feedback. They also have the added advantages of an online community, in that they can top-up and ask additional questions to sub-groups when they want and how they want. New corporate initiatives can be tested and measured to see how they impact on benchmarked norms.

I am interested to see if internal networks become the new normal over next 10 years and whether they are generally used as a tool to cut costs, or to encourage creativity and genuinely drive innovation. If it’s the latter then we need to ensure that research can play its part in adding value to the creative process.

It was bound to happen. Google is now officially a player in the MR world. The global giant launched Google Consumer Surveys, a new service businesses can use to survey online audiences and publishers can host. This replaces paywalls or ads to generate revenue from site visitors. And the tagline is: custom market research made easy.A classic case of disintermediation, marking the removal of the middle-man in the market research process? Sir Martin Sorrell had this to say about distintermediation in the context of media (in an article published some time ago in AdAge):

"Our established agencies are not moving fast enough" to adapt to the change”. Rather than disregard the fledgling technologies, like those used by start-up SpotRunner which could replace companies' need for creative and media ad agencies and ultimately put much of WPP's holdings out of business, his global giant would rather invest in them. "We could ignore it," he said, "but I'm not prepared to preside over a company that gets disintermediated."

In fact, Sorrell referred to Google as a “frenemy”, seeing how they staked out a commanding position in the media space. And it was just a matter of time before they played in MR as well, as part of a natural progression.

Clients can use Google consumer surveys to conduct online market research. Google then places the questions in front of targeted individuals on the web when they land on a premium content page in Google’s publisher network. The researcher pays $0.10 to $0.50 per response, depending on targeting preferences, and Google and participating publishers earn money from each response. Even the content viewer who responds to the questions benefits, as he/she doesn’t have to pay or sign in to access news articles or videos that might otherwise be found behind paywalls.

It is not a full-service market research service, being rather a largely do-it-yourself solution (with sample added to the mix) in the quantitative space. As an industry we should not bury our head in the sand and hope Google and other potential “frenemies” will be just a passing phase. They, or something equally challenging, will be a regular part of the marketing landscape from now on. We need to get used to the idea.

I recently had the good fortune to visit Silicon Valley as part of a Digital Media & Marketing initiative arranged by the Young Presidents Organisation. While we were there we met with the social media giants Google, Facebook, Linked-In and Twitter to gain a greater understanding of what made them successful and get a glimpse of what the future will look like. It was a truly awe inspiring trip which offered many insights into social media in general and how businesses can use it better.

In the first of two blogs I’ll share with you some of my general insights and in the second, I’ll give you some specific tips and business applications.

Firstly I need to set the scene, as Silicon Valley is the place for start-up entrepreneurs to be. It is a hive of energy, positivity and enthusiasm - nothing seems impossible and entrepreneurs are encouraged to dream the dream. The positive vibe is matched by the magical landscape: Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Mountain View are beautiful life affirming places. This dream environment can also be measured in dollars - Sandhill Road, where the biggest venture capitalists are based, is the most expensive real estate in the US.

Positive attitude, wonderful creative surroundings, the best brains and world leading products all contribute to a virtuous circle where success breeds success. Sadly I can’t pick up Silicon Valley and transport it to Central London, but I can adopt some of its vibe and energy, and learn from its latest thinking.

Ideas fail

Silicon Valley is a hotbed of ideas and innovation. Positivity is a key part of nurturing ideas and bringing them to market. We can all try to create positive and stimulating environments that help employees with idea generation. We all have creative people who work for us – nurturing that creative talent is the challenge. The next step is to bring ideas to market and it’s important to recognise that failure plays a big part in success – especially for start-ups. In an environment geared toward innovation it’s clear that only the best ideas will survive so how we deal with failure is important. Fail fast, fail smart is the maxim from Silicon Valley. No matter how good the idea may be to the inventor, there is no point wasting time and money on an enterprise heading for failure, so it’s important to have clear criteria for success and to test and measure performance quickly. Failure should be viewed as an affirmative learning experience – enhance your ideas and move-on.

Key trends – portals and email down, social up

Portals may be on their way out. Also email, as a communications tool for certain age brackets, is steadily being replaced by social media. Email has a lot of “friction” it demands a lot of keystrokes, sending attachments is often clunky, slow and memory intensive – it has a lot of limitations when compared with social media networks. And I think it’s worth pointing out that this applies to both business and personal communication. See our other blog on internal social networks, to get an overview of how businesses are already using their own “private Facebooks” to improve efficiency. Part of this process is reducing time consuming email traffic through social networks. All of which means use of social networks are booming. Year on year web stats from the USA, saw portal use decline by 21%, search use stagnant at 1%, but social use up by 52%.

As well as being a societal change this affects you directly. For example are you recruiting panellists or marketing to clients through email or using social media?

Be mobile

We used to access the internet via PCs and laptops - now 50% of the internet content is accessed through smartphones. It is estimated that in 2011 Windows devices accounted for less that 50% of all internet connected devices for the first time. It’s worth noting that this is down from 95% just 4 years ago. This represents a massive shift in the take-up of smartphones and tablets and the way we access and interact with the web. Roger McNamee was a very energetic and inspiring speaker albeit a bit biased toward the two companies he was invested in….Here are his 10 Hypotheses for Tech Investing.

In today’s business everything you do on the web needs to be as easily accessible via smartphones and tablets as we have reached the tipping point. (Microsoft Word™ please take note and recognise “smartphone” as a word!)

The next generation

We are all “digital immigrants” said Rick Milenthal from Engauge. When we speak digital it is with an “accent” but our kids will not – they are growing up fluent in digital.

Children are growing up with computers in a completely different way to us. I’m sure most of us clearly remember the first time we used a PC – our kids will not, for them it is like learning to walk. Furthermore the under-8s of today may never use a PC in the traditional sense. For these children of the digital age a computer means a smartphone or tablet, or whatever is the next big breakthrough device. We currently use three generations of screens in our everyday lives, the TV, the Computer, and now the Mobile screen. Who knows what the 4th may be? How we use mobile media and social media in our businesses will be crucial in the next few years. So be sure to adopt some of the Silicon Valley spirit, keep stimulating great ideas for new applications and above all don’t be afraid to fail!

If, like me, you have a love/hate relationship with the organisations that you bank with, then occasionally you may be moved to comment about them. People used to write letters or pick up the phone to register complaints or praise. Nowadays letter writing seems to be a dying art and unless you like listening to pan-pipes while you are put on hold interminably, the phone is often used as last resort.

In the digital age, if you wish to make your views known about your bank or any other service for that matter, then it’s done on the internet. Whether it’s a quick tweet commenting on the queues at your local branch or discussing the best interest rates on a financial forum, the public’s praise and opprobrium is now documented for all to see on the internet. Therefore all brands and banks in particular (as they seem to provoke extreme views in people!) need to be very careful how they manage their online reputation.

Of course if I were a bank I would be very interested to see what is being said about my brand and my competitors in public. But here lies the problem, because so much is being posted on the internet each and every day – how do I get an overview of what is positive and negative about my brand? How can I filter out what is unimportant? And despite the deluge of comments on the net each day, what would really help is summary analysis of data for a whole year, in order to reduce the impact of seasonal anomalies and fluctuations.

Capturing an entire year’s worth of internet conversations and making sense of them, interpreting them and creating actionable insights from them is no simple matter and yet DigitalMR have done just that with their UK Banking Social Media Report. It analysed over 200,000 bank related comments, posts and mentions on the internet for all of the UK’s key banks across January to December 2011.

It provides a window into the banking world from a customer’s perspective. For the first time banks will be able to view what is being said about them across the entire year: which bank attracted the most comment, praise and criticism, and what customers think about the different services they offer.

The report includes recommendations for all the key banks and strategies to help them make better business decisions from more effectively analysing the comments people make on the internet.

To find out more about this unique report please click here.