Social Marketing Conversations

Dan Marks and his team place a huge value in being able to measure the ROI of their marketing.  In the evolution of the use of social media in financial services, Dan sees that right now they should just experiment a bit; try new tactics, growing follower counts and listening a lot.  As they find what works and doesn’t however, Dan predicts that as they can put the ROI model around their efforts and see the results, they will likely make larger investments.  Right now they are looking at how or if a Facebook ad might increase / improve click through for search marketing.

FTB has also seen some ‘cross pollination’ between social and traditional too.  In one effort, FTB leveraged unsolicited online testimonials to build proof points in traditional print ads.   In the ads they turned it around and invited other customers into the online conversation.  While sometimes hard to hear, they also took in the less positive comments and recognized that they served a useful purpose on what they need to be paying attention to in terms of operations or service.

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An online presence needs to be tailored to your audience and, if your audience rapidly migrates from one demographic characteristic to another, you may need to create a presence that has many faces to it.  Scott Chappell at Sessions College of Design has mastered the tactic.

Sessions has a year-round (3 semesters) enrollment model, graduation certificates that are presented monthly and classes that can be enrolled in anytime for enrolled students.  So his use is everyday for the various tools Session employs (blog, micro-blog and social networks) to connection to the audience.

What’s the biggest obstacles for the growth of social media presence for Sessions?  Scott says ‘patience’, he sees the the education product characteristics is not the commodity of a fast moving consumer good with a low price point.  His effort is to get subscribers to engage in all areas in a way that they appreciate and have a value associated with the Sessions brand.

Scott has determined that for Sessions, there is a way to use social media to establish a lifetime value with the audience – education is pretty much a one-shot sale in most cases.  The maturation of the relationship allows a prospect for Session.edu to become a student, attend classes and graduate into the business community.  At some point he can trust alumni to evangelize the Sessions.edu product and he does not find that they need to scrub or moderate content.

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In this episode we talk with Scott Chappell, who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Sessions College of Design (Sessions.edu), and a presenter at the MeasureUp conference in Chicago on March 10, 11, & 12th, 2010.   Sessions.edu offers online classes for the design community from real experts (author, educators and others) in an asynchronous format, pairing student with instructors in a meaningful dialog about how to develop your design sense and knowledge of the industry.  His presentation at MeasureUp is titled ‘Blog, Tweet, Repeat: How Social Media improved lead acquisition, sales and the lifetime value of your customers’ and in this episode, we get to meet Scott an find out about the Sessions.edu social media efforts.

Scott talks about how social media is used by Sessions.edu and how it has supported an almost 10 fold expansion of the number of monthly ‘touches’ with the Sessions Design College audience of prospective student, current students and graduated alumni.  Scott explains how he has embraced the premise of Marshall McLuhan in that “the medium is the message”, but he cautions that too many contacts to an audience can cause them to disengage.  In Sessions case, while social media has allowed them to dramatically increase the number of messages, the reality is that there needs to be quality and sincerity otherwise you run the risk of turning off the audience.

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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

Morgan Stanley Institutional Services publish a remarkable study titled mildly enough ‘The Mobile Internet’ with these five major findings -

• Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter.
• The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
• Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices.
• Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented.
• Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization.
• Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers.
• Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile.

My partner at TheSocialMediaBible.com, Lon Safko, suggests that the explosion of social media is partly based on the fact that standard emerged in the 80’s and 90’s that permitted the ease of connectivity that social media requires.  He and I talk with clients often that the next explosion will be in mobile and the researchers at Morgan Stanley have don a great job of assembling the data and presenting it in their research.  Massive props to them for pulling together this work.

As part of the work we are doing in the ROI of Social Media Series, we will be interviewing organizations who understand that mobile plays a huge role and the need to develop global, mobile-based, interactive, social experiences will determine the winners and losers in the next wave of growth.

Facebook put in play the privacy policy updates they promised on December 1st.  I blogged about it yesterday, lauding the process that will it will at least cause users to think about how they share information on Facebook – it’s likely to be the only time they are pressed to do so.

Today Adam Ostrow at Mashable posted responses from various organization who have put themselves at the front of the personal-privacy-on-the-Internet issue.  They have all come out with responses that portend the end of personal privacy on the web, should users ignore the process and just blindly accept the ‘suggested’ setting proposed by Facebook.

When presented with the dialog box and process today, I took extra time to understand what they we’re asking and what it might mean.  I do recognize that many users will not take the time, they will trust the recommendations and they will just click through the dialog boxes, permitting a level of visibility of their Facebook presence they perhaps did not intend.

If Facebook users are concerned about what they share, this process will allow them to review their setting (a good thing) and establish a level of personal visibility commensurate with their wishes.  If a Facebook user is not concerned with what they share, they will be able to quickly and easily set their account to be as open as the front door at Macy’s on Black Friday.

If later they wish to retract that level of permission, they will be able to albeit perhaps some information may ‘escape’ control of the account holder, but not because of Facebook – it would be because of a personal decision that I think Facebook is making an honest effort to help users confront.

The responses of the ACLU N. California Chapter, EFF, Sophos and Trend Micro are summed up by Adam in saying “All of these sources are essentially saying the same thing: the privacy changes at Facebook have the potential to create significant issues for those who don’t carefully review them, which, let’s be honest, is likely to be most users.”

Yes, it will be most users who ignore the best efforts of Facebook to involve them in this very important and pertinent issue, but the changes are being presented appropriately and honestly by Facebook, not being slipped in at the backdoor under some false pretense.  Instead of taking issue with Facebooks’ legitimate effort, I’d like to see the experts supporting the personal responsibility users SHOULD be taking in addressing their personal privacy, not deriding the effort by Facebook to have them address it.

Image Courtesy of Alicia Rae on Flickr

“I can’t get into social media, it’s too public – I do not want someone knowing everything about me!”  This is a popular objection for individuals and business looking into social media. 

In my opinion, privacy concerns in the US are way over-rated.  I get a sense that people are somehow expecting some degree of privacy online, but when back as far as 1999 Scott McNealy as CEO of Sun Microsystems was quoted by PC Week as saying, "You have zero privacy now, get over it", and that was back in 1999 – what do you think the environment is like now?  Privacy on the web is like looking for Hens teeth – they / it does not exist.

Moving past the implied lack of privacy on the web, you need to know that there are often excellent privacy controls already in place in most every social networks, Facebook is continuing to to enhance and simplify the process that allows you to determine just who gets to see what on your Facebook page.

Facebook is by far the most popular social network on the planet with over 350,000,000 users.  This kind of presence provides a unique opportunity for the people behind Facebook.  They can act like bullies and demand people comply with their policies and procedures, they can be benevolent dictators that establish policy and procedures they think best suit their audience or they can recognize that leadership is not something that is taken from people, it is given by people to the brands and people they trust.

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With my involvement in social media approaching it’s fourth year, I see a pattern emerging in the foundational elements of an effective online presence.  There are three elements in the strategy that encompass the tactics that I believe need to be adopted to support a presence.

I see it as particular to the timeline of an exchange or conversation and how it contributes to social capital.  The caveat is of course that no one strategy fits all companies.  If however you are not going to engage for a professionally developed social media strategy, this is a good one to cut your teeth on and get going.

The first point of the triangle is the blog.  Recently social media strategist have suggested that CEO’s and thought leaders might want to reconsider their use of the micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter.   That’s because as valuable as a CEO’s time is, posting to a micro-blogging tool that is not indexed by search engines represents content that cannot be later referenced in the conversation with an audience.  A blog on the other hand will retain the conversation, search engines will find it and those that want to, will then be able to find the content via search, by referral or via direct reference by other sites. 

The blog is the component that represents the location on the web where you would want to to open or reply to conversations regarding your public strategy, the reasons you’ve invested in the products / services you have and the virtues of the organization (your organization) behind it – it’s the stuff you want the public to know about you, your product and your company. 

It’s also where you’ll respond to comments posted elsewhere that you want to reply to that require more than a few dozen words.  Lastly, and this is a point I’ve debated before with friends, pundits and followers, do not attempt to moderate the comments made to your blog.  You can always delete spam, remove rude remarks and ban people who cannot be civil.  An attempt to moderate a blog implies you do not trust your audience – a mistake when trust is the commodity you have to trade in a social media setting.

The second point of the trinity is micro-blogging.  A lot of life and business happens between the more formal blog posts you make.  Sprinkled into the millions of inane tweets are much more salient tweets that, in a well prepared social media strategy, could serve to connect you and your company to your prospects, customers and stakeholders.  One at a time, the tweets might be irrelevant, but taken in context they can present a more human image of you and what you’re trying to accomplish.  They might also support a powerful ROI, one modeled by Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.TV in his now famous comparison of direct mail, freeway billboard and micro-blogging-based campaign results.

The third point of the triangle is social networking.  You may find that one social network is insufficient to connect to the audience you’re targeting, or you may find that there is a special-built social network that is already targeting your audience.  A Pew Internet Study shows that the majority of Internet users are participants in social networks now and their use is growing.

The social network rounds out the model by enabling a conversation unfettered by you or your company.  Unfettered, but not unmonitored.  You want your users to be able to connect with one another in a place you can connect with them.  They are going to talk about you, your product and your brand – there is just no stopping it.  By providing a platform for the conversation at least you get a chance to engage.

As an opening effort for the do-it-yourselfer’s out there, The Trinity of Social Media is complete with a blog, a micro-blog and a social network.  Pay attention to this, use at least this as a strategy and you’ll get a more positive result in social media than doing any single one of them without a strategy.

Is there a secret to it?  Only if you think there is a secret to strategy and a coordinated effort.  They need to be coordinated and developed to support one another in their operation and in the way they support one another.  Could one be implemented without the other?  Certainly – I present this strategy often enough to recognize that not everyone want to type / input their content. 

What else needs to be answered in this model? a lot.  If the blog was a video blog or a podcast would that work?  If the micro-blog was video or audio based would that count?  Which social network is the right one or should it be special constructed?  How do you get the answer?  subscribe here, join the community at TheSocialMediaBible.com or get a professional on your team and they can step your through the evaluation quickly.

Are there pitfalls to be avoided in the strategy?  Undoubtedly – but the overwhelming failure is to not engage in social media and believe you will somehow not be ignored or that your competition will also be complacent.  Actually, if you are a company and you are ignored, that is an important data point by itself – what might you be doing wrong?

[Update] I had someone suggest I create a Mind Map to help illustrate the Trinity of Social Media.  Neat idea! I used MindManager from Mindjet to create a Mind Map of the Trinity of Social Media.  Make sure you are current with Adobe Acrobat8 and Flash9 installed and this mind map & player should work (MindJet requirements)

If you’re on an Apple / Mac, you may only be able to open the .JPG of the map (click the image to the left).

Today I received a request to connect on LinkedIn from someone I had never met. 

Christy Miller of Desert Flower Does Workable Wardrobes sent me this message because she found me on LinkedIn as part of the Networking Phoenix Group there –

Hi Steven, 

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. I am the owner of Desert Flower Does Workable Wardrobes, which allows me to Enhance your Image Working with your own Wardrobe. Everyday you make a first impression to someone. That impression goes a long way. Everyday you go to your closet to start on that impression. My closet coordination is the wardrobe that works and gets you to a place where you look and feel your best! 

Please let me know if I can be of assistance with your business and networking endeavors. 

Christy

It got me thinking about the way I respond to people I’ve not met in online social networking situation.  I look an offer to connect as something more than just adding to the stats of my social media presence – I like the idea I have or might meet these people in my network offline.

The answer is it varies, depending on the social network it comes from.  Here’s the criteria I usually apply when evaluating these invitations -

Twitter – 1) be interesting, 2) have a profile you’ve taken the time to complete, 3) have a link to a page that says something about you, 4) at least one post before you’ve followed 1,000 people.  If you’re in Arizona, I usually follow, if you’re involved in social media someway, I usually follow, if you’re from somewhere outside the US, I like to follow because I like the global aspect of social media.  You’ll notice that my followed vs. follower ratio shows I do not auto-follow on my personal account. 

Facebook – there will usually need to be some common connection between us.  More than one common acquaintance is best, but if that common friend is well known to me, I’ll accept.  Others are usually accepted, but I often put them on a list with restricted access to my profile.

Second Life – in Second Life, there is a much deeper mandate to have made a person-to-person connection.  The dynamics of the environment really require more than a random friend offer.  We have to have met at a virtual event of some kind, we have to have had some level of conversation and made a request to be friends in SL before the offer to connect is even offered. 

The link above will take you to The Social Media Bible Plaza in Second Life, I often hang out there listening to an indie music channel, otherwise do a people search for Estaban Graves and tell me you read my blog – we’ll connect in text or voice.

LinkedIn – This is an enforced, ‘you-have-to-really-know-the-person’ network.  I’ve had people forget how we were connected when I’ve offered a connection often enough that they slapped my hand.  Now if I offer a connection, it’s because it’s someone I know and have actually met or talked to enough on another network that I feel like I could make a decent, legitimate comment about them in a social network setting.  I’ll also refer to how we met in the connection request, to try and prompt the recollection.

If I get a connection offer, I apply the criteria of “how did we meet?”  If I do not remember at the moment, I will ask how people how we met, or why we would connect.  Never do I connect without understanding why.  I think there are some people in my network that I may have forgotten how / why we’re connected, particularly if we’ve been connected since my early days in LinkedIn, but mostly my LinkedIn network is genuine.

MySpace – my profile there is not very active right now, but they’ve been doing so much new stuff, I will be revamping it soon… if you’re connected to me elsewhere, I’ll likely accept an invite to connect as I get that profile up and going again.

Other SocNets, Review Sites, etc. – I’m pretty open to any connection, except for adult content and people that appear to be establishing their social presence for spamming purposes only.

Back to the invite from Christy though…

I was impressed with her thoughtfulness and they way she asked to connect.  I recognized that we were both part of the same group and that is was more about a local connection.  I also like that she might be able to help me with a professional wardrobe for an upcoming presentation we’re doing with ASBA and IBM… I accepted her invite to connect, sent her a response and asked if I might refer to her very tactic in a blog post in asking for a LinkedIn connection – she said yes and I look forward to seeing how we might connect further.

(image from eHow)

Do you hear the rumble… far off in the distance?  It’s the sound of the next shift in the social media sphere – it’s the end of ‘friending’ in social media.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote about this last week and it’s taken me a few day to catch up with him on the idea, but I think I get it.  The required process of signing up on a site and then deciding who you want to link to is a model that, while very prevalent today, will likely become a passing phase of the more open, social networks that will make up the underpinnings of the paradigm of social search.

Facebook just jumped in with their announcement today of an ‘EVERYONE’ setting for your profile.  Now you can set your profile to an EVERYONE setting and your Profile, Status Updates, Links, Wall Posts, Basic Info, Personal Info, Education Info, Work Info, your Photos and your Videos will be available to anyone who happens to come across your profile on Facebook. 

I get several friend requests a week and for the most part  accept friend request on Facebook, though many get a partial profile approval vs. a full profile.  As I think about it I’m not sure what I adopted the distinction – I do not post incriminating pics or stay embarrassingly stupid things (I’ve got my blog for that I suppose).  I’ve set my to an Everyone setting – ask me about it in a few weeks.