Social Marketing Conversations

Social interactions provides a draw for AllRecipes.com cooks off the site and provides a bit more distraction, but they do not displace anything they are doing.  Integrating AllRecipes.com into the social media ecosphere however does help to extend the brand experience, ala a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter presence that spans not only AllRecipes.com news, but country specific IDs for Australia / New Zealand, Quebec, the UK, Nederland, and France.

In our last episode, Esmee Williams, VP of Brand Strategy shared ideas about the way they tailor the presentation of content for the platform the user opts to access the sit with.  In the first episode, we met Esmee and she gave us tips on how AllRecipes.com grew to become the worlds largest food and recipe site in the world.

What’s the most important metric for AllRecipes?

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In our previous episodes of this interview with Andrew Pickup, Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft in Asia Pacific we’ve learned about the 3 digital networks that are an integral part of the marketing campaigns that Andrew and his team work with.  We also caught a glimpse of the tools and tactics they use to manage the 100’s of thousands of posts in social media that are made about them every day and in the last podcast, Andrew talked about the challenges the culture, communications infrastructure and geography pose for him in managing the far-flung reaches of his region.

In this episode Andrew shares that the best ROI for Microsoft in social marketing come from the owned and operated media network they manage.  With over 650 million visitors a month to their owned and operated media assets (Bing, Windows Live, etc.), it easily represents the best place for Microsoft of promote and market their own products and services – but how do they get people there?

The flow of consumer awareness and engagement goes from the paid media Microsoft can buy, which helps create interest and engagement in consumers who produce their own content about Microsoft (both good and not so good) in the earned media network and ultimately, the engagement will draw consumers to Microsoft’s owned and operated media network where again, they can best represent the brand and products they sell to consumers and businesses.

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Andrew Pickup is the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft Corporation in the Asia Pacific Region.  We were very excited to get the opportunity to speak with Andrew and find out about the work they are doing in Asia Pacific.  Joining Guy Powell and myself for the interview also was our co-author, Jerry Dimos of LiTMUS Group in Singapore.  Good to have you on the call Jerry!

We begin our interview with Andrew as he shares a few bullets from his presentation at the recent ad:tech conference in Singapore on the Windows7 Launch.  The campaign focused on the aspect of the development of Windows7 that leverage consumer input and ideas and with 8 million beta users, the campaign put real users in front of consumer in a way that helped people to see themselves in the role of “I’m a PC and Windows7 was my idea’”.  The campaign was a great success for Microsoft and helped support the worldwide launch very effectively.

Microsoft’s approach to social marketing comes from a perspective that they should be a leader in social media and able to engage very effectively.  With 93 of out every 100 PC’s sold coming with the Microsoft operating systems and the majority of people are buying a PC today to connect to the Internet, most computer systems today present an opportunity to connect consumers with their social media presence.

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In this final episode of the podcast with Jeff Katz of Twitalyzer we cover the tonality and sentimentality of automated analytics and how it still requires a good deal of human intervention.  Jason Falls / SocialMediaExplorer.com had a post about this idea and a great product / service from Sentiment360 – this is where this process is heading, at least for the near term.

Jeff observes that at least we can get some trending data from the existing tools, but the art & science of tone / sentiment analysis is still fairly human-centric and that organization would do well to put a person into the process.  The vagaries of language, jargon and the constantly evolving nature of slang will make this a task fit for human for quite some time to come. 

Where is Twitalyzer going and what’s keeping them up at night? The biggest concern for Twitalyzer is handling the continuing changes pouring out from the data providers, but they’re confident that the challenge is manageable and it is the work they are about.  Twitalyzer recognizes their part in answering the question of how social media is used for business and Jeff cites that social media analytics tools are at about the same place web analytics tools were about 5-10 years ago – growing fast and changing often.

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If a marketer relies on social marketing to help drive awareness and driving consumer behavior, does it lower the demand for good creative?

I read an article today over at AdAge.com by Pete Blackshaw titled ‘Who Owns Social Anyway?’ and enjoyed one thing in particular in his article.  Pete pointed out the left-brain, right-brain battle many of us feel in social media. 

For me at least, there is a desire to place some structure around our behavior and activity while simultaneously wanting to rebel and rail against structure in the pursuit of a social presence that is genuine and honest in the content and thus, often produced in the spirit of a just-in-time, get it our the door to share mentality.

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We begin this final episode with Joan Koerber-Walker, CEO of CorePurpose a global management consulting firm based in Phoenix, by comparing traditional and social platforms and how engagement with an audience, or a lack of engagement, becomes more obvious the deeper you go into a social media presence.  Many business people are still looking at social media as just another media channel or a project you can establish and then ‘set-and-forget’ and it is anything but and a lack of engagement becomes painfully obvious.

The use of social in a business-to-business setting is really an extension of the idea that people do not do business with businesses, people do business with people; the transparency that social media afford is relevant and is important as the adoption of media channels with social elements emerge and are more widely adopted.  The consumer, whether in business or personal transactions must first trust and believe in the people and team behind the brand.

The value of an online presence and how it translates to an offline presence is relevant for business as well.  A listener in the audience of the Blogtalkradio.com broadcast we did asks about the use of social media to create a real-life connection.  Joan responds that she sees “meet-up” as opportunities to gauge the effectiveness of the online strategy, but whether the meet-up is impromptu or planned weeks in advance, the events that begin online allow people to meet and share their passion.  These days it is often a passion about social media. So she dive a bit deeper and suggests that a meet-up that is a meet-up with other social media people is often not an application of time CorePurpose invests their time in.

She also explores how the use of social media has benefitted a non-profit she heads up, that would be the Opportunity Through Entrepreneurship Foundation, or OTEF (disclaimer: Joan and I both serve on the board of OTEF).  She shares her educational journey in social media on her blog where she chronicles the things she has learned during the last year through trial & error and a little help from her friends.

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CorePurpose’s adoption of social media did not occur until January 2009, so while Ms. Koerber-Walker claims ‘late bloomer’ status, her results speak volumes for a consistent, conscientious approach in using social media.  Her initial goals for metrics were exceeded relative to her expectations and she claims that they have led to additional prospects and customers for CorePurpose. 

The primary application of social media for CorePurpose is for community building and advertising, so metrics are not necessarily revenue related, but there are key performance indicators (KPIs) that support an understanding of how a social media presence leads to to revenue.

How does CorePurpose monitor their presence and what are the metrics she uses?   The tools are simple enough; Google Alerts, Google Analytics, Feedburner, and YouTube stats.  They do not employ any of the for-fee tools to track their segmented presence right now.

The various KPIs are pretty straightforward too; where did they access a resources that their social media presence made possible, where did CorePurpose make a connection that was directly related to their social media presence, did they get a customer that came from a social network or were they able to find a piece of information for a client or research that the social media presence provided?

CorePurpose monitors the number of hits a blog posts receive, how comments made by visitors and from those indicators, they get a sense of what people are looking for in terms of the online content they post – and based upon the result, they move to determine if an engagement might result in a productive off-line, real-life relationship.  So another KPI is ‘of those conversations that begin online, how many convert to an offline, person-to-person conversation.’

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A frequent topic in conversation with businesses looking to leverage social media is ‘what do I talk about?’  It’s a fair question and one that many of us have had to deal with in varying degrees.  I have friends who come to social media from journalism and are very prolific and then I know others who have come from marketing, technology or entrepreneurship and we are (yes, I am one of them) sometimes struggling to find regular topics to explore that are of interest to our audience.

Joan talks about accepting the challenge of developing her own content for her presence and reveals the genesis of her #BeOriginal blog / project and how she overcame the challenge of developing meaningful content for her worldwide social presence, and how she has used social media as a tactic to reach out and connect with other thought leaders, regardless of their location on the globe.

What kinds of obstacles does Joan face in using more social media or using it better?  As an established business leader, writer and public speaker, Joan cites that social media was not a start-up strategy, as it is for many businesses, it is an expansion of the thought leadership, visibility and publicity programs she already had underway and she compares the use of social media in a traditional marketing / advertising model for institutional companies vs. the tactics and tools used even a few years ago.  She cites how social media as an institutional advertising tactic is quickly emerging and how CorePurpose has transitioned all their institutional advertising to online and an expanded, long term ‘word-of-mouth’ campaign.

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Joan is the CEO and principal of CorePurpose and has a background in the practical application of social media in a small to medium business setting and it’s use in personal branding. 

This episode is from a BlogTalkRadio.com session which was presented live on December 15th 2009, just prior to the Christmas holiday.

Talking with Joan we discover that CorePurpose was founded in 2002 to support organizations with resources that they needed to make their efforts more successful.  She works with medium to large organizations around the globe.

Her journey in social media has been one that questions the time that was needed, from a beginning of a single blog, a single twitter account and a LinkedIn profile, she has connected with customers and prospects. 

For Core Purpose, social media is a communication medium to meet and stay connected with her audience.  The lessons learned in her journey include moderating her shares and making sure the content she produces are relevant.

Her realization is that the message needs to be about the audience, not arbitrary and not about the communicator.   The lesson was sometimes hard learned, she shares about how she dealt with the sometime harsh commentary from people listening to her messages, but she also will admit it has made her a better communicator and user of social media tools and technology.

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Equating a successful social media presence to a well-planned cocktail party is a common comparison.  When plotting a strategy consider a variety of techniques based around the cocktail party model.

One of those tactics is a drawing or door-prize that uses a contest model.  The conversation on how to develop an online contest has come often enough and over the holiday break, I took the time to use my favorite ideation tool to develop a model.

There are two legs to this model – one is low ‘hard cost’ and just requires a good deal of manual labor to implement, monitor and manage.  The second leg assumes most all of what is in the first, but allows for a more robust implementation assuming a funded budget for custom programming and monitoring tools.

What would be the results of this kind of a campaign?

• Increased awareness of the brand / message
• Increased followers / fans
• Some combination of the two

How would you determine the ROI of the effort? Begin with tracking the initial investments and setting the baseline of what’s happening now.  Establish what a success looks like and monitor measure and readjust as needed.

There are probably a few more aspect than I have considered here though – what would you add?

The model used MindManager from Mindjet to create the Mind Map of the Online Contest Model.  Make sure you are current with Adobe Acrobat8 and Flash9 installed and this mind map & player should work (MindJet requirements).  Mac users may have issues – contact me to send you the MindMap itself if you have the Mac version of MindManager.

FCC Disclaimer – TSMB Media is a registered reseller of Mindjets Mind Manager products and receives no remuneration / compensation