Things I’ve Learned from Lately #3

“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

Social Media Monitoring Is Essential to Business – SmartBlog has another great post this week on how social media monitoring can be used to do something actionable. Social media monitoring is one, quantifiable way for marketers to evaluate their social media efforts.

Key Takeaway: It’s one thing to listen. It’s something entirely different to do something about it. Understanding where a brand stands in social media speaks volumes when developing a social media plan, and being able to set a benchmark for where a brand stands today to compare to after a brand has taken action in the social space is one other way to show success. It can also inform your content strategy.

The Ever-Evolving Role of Social Media Within Agencies – The role of social media within agencies has changed, and in an interview with Digiday, Matt Britton of MRY discusses the role social media has played when his company was founded compared to today.

Key Takeaway: The primary role of social media services from agencies is no longer (and shouldn’t be) helping brands create Facebook Pages and set up Twitter accounts. There’s a time and place for that, but the long-term vision for an agency should be for agencies to provide a strategic lens and executional support when needed. At the end of the day, clients should own the relationships with their consumers. It’s the agency’s job to be experts on the space and to identify opportunities. It’s the client’s job to be connected to and maintaining relationships with consumers.

The Limit of Sharing – AdAge breaks down Zuckerberg’s Law, the idea that year over year people will double the amount of information they share. The article discusses how Mark Zuckerberg has worked to make this happen on Facebook and the ramifications of it all.

Key Takeaway: There is an absolute limit to sharing. People like a degree of simplicity to their social platforms. MySpace got too complicated. Users migrated to Facebook. Now, Facebook Timelines and News Tickers are being inundated with sharing, sharing and more sharing, and often that sharing is automated. Recent partnerships, like the one with Apple, will only increase the amount of sharing. Facebook must strike a careful balance between allowing apps to share to Facebook, keeping users happy and not overwhelmed with information and proving value to advertisers. All of these factors compete with each other, so it’s not an easy challenge to overcome.

Listening to Act on Symptoms

Social media monitoring is an invaluable first step for brands entering the social media space as well as a critical aspect for brands’ ongoing social media marketing efforts even if they’ve been leveraging social media for some time.

The reason is because simply listening tells marketers so much. It tells us who is talking about a the brand, its competitors and the category. We can also infer the motivations behind the conversation. Are they happy or mad? Are they looking for information or providing it?

Just listening makes us smarter marketers, and there are always insights, even if there isn’t a lot of conversation out there--it tells you that you need to do something to start conversations. The more a marketer knows about the ecosystem a brand finds itself in, the more effective execution.

At the end of the day, it’s all about execution.

Online Conversation Is a Symptom of Offline Interaction

Nine in 10 word of mouth conversations occur offline, so marketers should be aware that what they see online is only a symptom of a larger conversation occurring offline. Customer dissatisfaction with product quality being discussed online is probably only a piece of a much larger conversation that a brand cannot see and needs to address. Online complaints about the friendliness of store associates indicates a need to address issues at the store-level.

A business cannot respond to the needs of its customers unless it first understands what those needs are, and social media listening is a start. However, that shouldn’t be where it stops.

Listening Is Only the Beginning

Listening is fantastic and should be a cornerstone of any marketing plan, but listening without a plan to act (maybe not right away, but soon) can quickly turn into a waste of time. Listening allows marketers to stay ahead of the curve, identify threats and address customer needs quickly and efficiently.

Have a plan in place to turn online findings into organizational action. Some insights will be easier to mobilize than others. Execute the short-term wins and develop a plan to leverage the long-term opportunities. When you do, don’t forget to let your online customers know that you’ve been listening and have taken action on their behalf. They’ll thank you for it.

Things I’ve Learned from Lately #1

“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

Social Should Be Part of Company DNA – Giselle Abramovich gets the opinions of five digital influencers on the role social media can and should play within organizations. Spoiler alert… it’s much deeper than having a Facebook Page. Thought leaders discuss leveraging data, interlocking your marketing channels, using social proof and more.

Key Takeaway: Social media belongs in company DNA and should not be viewed as just another channel to push information out to consumers.

Social Media Under-Valued and Under-Invested – AdAge discusses Rex Briggs’ new book in which he finds that 40% of marketers’ budgets are wasted, and they aren’t spending enough on social media. Marketers are undervaluing the importance of advocacy and using social media as just another add-on for awareness campaigns.

Key Takeaway: Social media is not an awareness channel. Its role is to create and encourage advocacy, but that benefit is the result of time and investment. Social media should not be viewed as a “free” supplement to work already being done. It should be part of budget and planning considerations from the very beginning.

The Social Landscape Changes Constantly – This is more of a “wow… that’s crazy” kind of article from Jay Baer as he outlines 11 shocking social media stats, including 56% of Americans have a profile on a social networking site, and Facebook has a big influence on purchase decisions.

Key Takeaway: For every social media stat out there, you can usually find another that says the opposite, so I tend to take stats with a grain of salt unless they’re very reputable. The report the stats are pulled from come from Edison, so you can bet that it’s reputable. The biggest takeaway is that the landscape is changing constantly, so we can’t take facts for granted. What was true yesterday may not be true today. Always stay on top of how things are evolving.

Listen with Purpose – Scott Fiaschetti outlines some of the common misconceptions about social listening. It’s hip. It’s cool. Clients want to do it. Marketers, however, need to understand why they’re listening and what they want to get from it.

Key Takeaway: Social listening is one aspect of social media marketing. It’s a means to an end, and marketers need to understand what that desired end is before they start listening. There should be a desired objective. Otherwise, you’re listening just to do it. That’s a waste of time and money.

Manage Social Media Measurement Expectations - Social media isn’t lacking in data. Brands can prove the value of their social media efforts, but expectations need to be reset, according to Adam Kimiec of Campbell Soup.

Key Takeaway: Align early on a measurement framework and evaluate often (before, during and after). Social media isn’t designed to deliver short-term, immediate value when a brand is just getting started. A brand investing in social media is investing in the long-term value of a community.

Monitoring to Inform Content Strategy

Social media monitoring is becoming less of a question and more of a necessity for businesses. Whether it’s using a combination of free DIY solutions like Google Alerts and Twitter Search or more enterprise-level solutions like Sysomos or Radian6, brands accept that they need the right tools to listen effectively. But the most common reasons for investing include threat tracking and opportunity spotting, but the benefits go deeper than that.

The ability to tap consumer conversations at any given moment gives brands an opportunity to inform what they’re doing and make it better. This plays out most of all through the use of content.

Social media monitoring allows brands to do a couple things: 

1. Identify conversation whitespace and opportunities to provide information consumers are seeking
2. Evaluate the “virality” of brand-generated content for optimization purposes

Identify Conversation Whitespace

Marketers can use a combination of tools to track where relevant conversations are taking place related to their brands, competitors or categories. Consumers turn to social media for information.

What questions are people asking? Is this existing information accurate? Can we do better? Content allows brands to deliver ongoing value to social customers. Fulfilling a need that has been identified makes a brand presence that much stronger.

Looking at what isn’t being said is just as important as evaluating what is. It can inform a brand’s approach to content generation and direct what needs to be created next.

Evaluate “Virality”

Marketers should absolutely be identifying how original content spreads (virality) and who is spreading it, but these findings can also inform how the brand moves forward.

Let’s be clear “virality” doesn’t mean the same thing as a “viral” video. Virality has to do with how content spreads.

Virality findings can include: 

• The channels people are distributing the information to (Does it go/stay on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc.?)
• What form of content spreads best (e.g., text, video, photos)
• What type of customer consumes certain types of content (Is there an opportunity to invest more in talking to a different group?)

Monitoring delivers far too many insights to be limited to listening. It can make what a brand is already doing better by helping to develop the right content in the right form for the right audience. 

Focus on Micro for Macro Results

Social media marketing is about creating relationships with a brand's customers (I know, that's nothing new), but why is this so important? Well, too often we're going after the mass numbers, the macro, instead of going after what can actually raise the needle. Going after mass numbers is important, but if that's the objective, traditional media channels are the best way to achieve results.

Real social media marketing success occurs when the focus is on the micro level, building and establishing real relationships with customers. Establishing relationships builds trust between the consumer and the brand, which opens the door for the brand to provide the reasons and means for the customer to share. That's where the payoff results because when they talk about a brand, their social connections listen.

eMarketer notes that brand recommendations from friends and fellow community members carry a lot more weight in influencing consumer decisions than messages from brands, themselves.

Micro Interactions

Micro is not easy to do. It can be meticulous, and results aren't necessarily fast. Still, here are a few simple ways to get started.

• Monitor and Respond. Listen to online conversations about your brand and category to identify opportunities to reach out to consumers. Offer customer service to those in need, answer questions and reward advocates with special deals, offers and even, sneak-peak information.
• Bring Serendipitous Joy. Don't be afraid to surprise advocates. Single people out, and offer to do something for them. That's what people in relationships do. They help each other. This doesn't have to be public, and there shouldn't be a requirement from the recipient to take any action. Be nice to them, and remember, what goes around, comes around.
• Respond to Your Advocates. Too often brand channels (e.g., Facebook Pages, Twitter profiles, etc.) receive questions and comments from customers that go unaddressed. They are opening the door for a brand to enter their lives at a deeper level. Respond and prove that you're there for them. If the opportunity is there to encourage them to share more, do so.

The Set-Up to Win at the Micro Level
Only the most nimble of brands are able to create real relationships with consumers, so it's important to set the organization up for success.

1. Be internally aligned on who is responsible for social media.
2. Establish a workflow to identify how consumers will be identified on an individual level, how the response process will work and who will be needed to address questions and comments.
3. Empower those representing the brand with enough freedom to take actions to address customer complaints and reward advocates without too much red tape and hesitation.

Relationships, trust and advocacy--all the pieces build upon each other, while starting at the micro level.

Don't Force It

Image Source: stock.xchngA new report from Nielsen has revealed that 22.5% of Americans’ time spent online is using social media, making it the number one specific category. Unsurprisingly, most of that time (53.5 billion minutes) is spent with Facebook, which reaches 70% of active U.S. Internet users.

The numbers are pretty staggering, and they certainly show that social media won’t likely be going anywhere anytime soon. However, this information could be misconstrued as either 1.) proof to start using social media, if you haven’t already, to avoid failure or 2.) Facebook is the only place to be in the social space. Both are thoughts that have entered the conversation around social media marketing, and both can be risky propositions.

Consult Your Customer

Studies and statistics are always valuable, but ultimately, it comes down to your customer and how he or she uses (or doesn’t use) social media. Lacking a social media presence won’t kill a business if it’s customers aren’t there, and Facebook isn’t the social media silver bullet. With more and more brands using Facebook, it's getting more difficult to stand out. Perhaps, another platform makes more sense for you and your customers.

The missing piece is the bit of primary research to connect social media with your customers and identifythe intersections before you determine the approach.

Where, When and How

Your actions need to be determined by your audience’s actions. How do they use social media? Don’t pull the trigger without first taking aim because you’ll almost certainly miss the target and have nothing to show for your efforts.

You need to understand:

• Where: What platforms do your customers use? Is it compatible with your brand? You may find that your customers are ravenous YouTube addicts, which is great if you have the resources to produce video content. However, maybe they can’t get enough of Tumblr. In that case, it may be a better option to identify relevant Tumblr bloggers, reach out and establish a dialogue. The point is don’t just go with your gut. Understand where your customers spend their valuable online time and prioritize from there based on what they value and what you can execute well.
• When: What days and what time of day do your customers use social media? This will help you determine when to share your content to reach the maximum number of people. Perhaps, your customers are white collar businesspeople who can’t get enough of Twitter. Knowing that they probably leave work around 5:00, you might want to tweet at 4:50, as they're giving everything one last check before heading home.
• How: This is the most important factor because it’s a blending of your customer with where and when they interact. This will really determine what social media will mean for you. Your customers may prefer to be contacted by phone or perhaps by mail. However, more and more, they’ll prefer to reach your customer service department via a Facebook Page and be put into direct contact with someone using a direct message on Twitter. You need to determine how your customers want to interact with your brand. That will determine your approach.

Don’t Force It

Too often businesses try to force their social media prowess onto their customers only to see it fall flat. Forcing your customers to interact with you the way you want to interact will never create success. Understand your consumers, what they want and what they expect from you. All you need to do is put some feelers out there, find them and listen.