Social Marketing Conversations

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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This is the final episode of the interview with Aaron Newman, co-founder of Techrigy, developers of the SM2 monitoring tool and Mike Talbot, co-founder of Alterian, which acquired Techrigy in 2009 to round out it’s offering of media monitoring tools to include social media – smart move that one.

In this episode, we conclude the interview and explore the ability of SM2 to be able to detect the sentiment and tonality of a social media mention as it is picked up by SM2 and how the tool can be ‘educated’ to provide better and more consistent results. 

Can the computer really understand tone and sentiment though? As Aaron has said in a previous episode, it’s more of an art than a science right now, but that is primarily because the nuances of human communications are more subtle than the system can understand. 

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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

Marketing has historically had difficulty in establishing a ‘hard’ ROI, that is by virtue of what many business people use as ROI.

A commonly used metric is called ‘Advertising Value Equivalence’ which attempts to establish a value for a news article or print interview by comparing the value of the article to an advertisement, an ad equivalent. (note – it is not uncommon to see this term alternately used as “Equivalent Advertising Value” or abbreviated as some combination of the letters i.e.; ‘EAV’, ‘AEV’, ‘AVE’, etc.)

In this episode, Guy poses the question about using ad equivalence as a metric in social media.  Aaron responds and cites how we’ve become almost immune to a broadcast media message anymore and that we, as a culture, are seeking more pertinent input from the community.

Social Media is at it’s core a ‘word-of-mouth’ tactic, but the technology underpinnings have extended the community to a global scope.  Andrew cites that the trust level of the community has evolved to be a more significant influencer than the marketing message constructed by the marketer.

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Social media is big right now; it’s a low hard cost tactic leveraging tools that run substantially less than comparable traditional media, but without some consideration, your efforts could be little more than just more noise.

What we’re seeing is executives at organizations large and small recognizing that they must do SOMEthing, and they want to do something NOW. Many are grasping at straws that predictably will lead no where – it’s the price of education as an entrepreneur I suppose, but it does not have to be.

There is a growing number proven tactics that can reduce the time to develop and deploy an effective strategy – corporate cultural changes, education, consulting and of course, hiring top talent.  Gone are the days when you hand it off to an intern or a young family member to ‘see what happens’ because we now know what happens when you do that – the effort is disconnected from real-world business objectives and it fails to generate an ROI that has any kind of resemblance to a sustainable business practice.

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Part three of the interview with Mike Talbot and Aaron Newman of Alterian SM2 finds us discussion the topic of how do you value a social media mention.

If social media is going to be an additional tool in the marketers toolbox, the simple mention of the brand will have some value to it – repeated mentions by the same person might have you classify them as an ‘Brand Advocate’ and worthy of special treatment, depending on what they say of course.

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“Why should I invest in social media, it’s all free and it’s just a fad right?!”

These are words that social media specialist and consultants hear from business people exploring as to why they should make ANY investment in social media.  It’s a fair question.

I also hear often enough a comment that goes something like this – (for a large business) “…our marketing intern just opened us up a Twitter account.  We’re going to see how that goes before we invest anything else”, or (for a small business) “…my <insert young family person pronoun here> has a Facebook account, I think they can handle that for us.”

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We’re past the guessing stage as to whether or not social media in a marketing sense is here to stay or not – media that includes social elements are definitely here to stay and we expect them to be come more, much more pervasive over the next few years.  The question now is about the tactics, tools and strategies of what a successful social media presence for a business or a brand looks like.

Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, a tool in social media metrics and listening technology, sat down and shared an extended conversation about how he sees companies thinking about social media.

He observes three level of maturation in the evolution of using social media in business -

• Level 1 = listening
• Level 2 = listening /engagement
• Level 3 = listening / engagement / meaningful response

Marcel suggests that there are different models for different uses of social media in different business processes.  When it comes to a model of using social media in Customer Support, he cites the Comcast experience that recognized that the customers time is just as important as the customer support departments time – perhaps even more so.  The response is @ComcastCares on Twitter and a steady effort to find and support customers. continue reading »

It might be a trend that I am just now seeing more often than ever before because of my work with Guy Powell, but it seems like lately every time I turn around, I’m seeing people discussing the ROI of social media with more and more earnest.  From my perspective, this is a good thing for companies, individuals and the industry of social media at large.  It validates our work and the years invested in developing a background in social media as a springboard for even better work.

Radian6 is one of the early developers in this space and continues to be a preferred monitoring and brand management tool in the space.  Marcel LeBrun is the CEO for Radian6 and he carved out a good deal of time to talk with us about the ROI of social media and how they see the space shaping up.

In this episode, Marcel and I discuss the question “Is social media the next enterprise application?” and we explore the use of the phrase “social phone” that Radian6 has coined and how it is a model of the conversational aspect of social media and inbound, consumer invitation-based marketing.

The previous podcast is here and the next one will be posted in a few days after I help facilitate the 4th Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, attend WordCamp AZ (maybe my blog will improve!) and my 3rd year of PodCamp AZ.  A very busy ‘Geek Week’ in Phoenix (use of the phrase Geek Week has been approved by Brian Shaler, a local Geek Week Proponent and Activist, and Brent Spore, who was interviewed by the Arizona Republic last week and ‘Geek Week’ was the headline topic!)

BTW: We introduced Guy Powell in the series, but Guy was (and is again) travelling on business.  He was not able to join us in the recording; he did get a word in edgewise on the last recording and will make it in future recording – no worries and safe travels Guy!

Play / Download Marcel LeBrun Episode 2 Podcast Here

I had breakfast with a friend this morning who thinks strategically about social media and I restated an idea other friends and colleagues have heard me utter and that is that ‘Social Media is dying, long live media that is social’.

They were coming from a position that they were getting tired of the mainstream usage of the phrase ‘social media’ and I was coming from an observation that in the very near future, all media will be social and that as a culture, we will expect, nay demand, our interaction with the media around us to provide the opportunity to be social.

The model of interaction and development of advertising, marketing and corporate communications is destined to undergo still even more radical changes based on the principals and paradigms of what we call today, social media.

The dampener on the explosion of social media is the inability of brands and corporation to control the messages related to their brand.  When this comes up, I find myself stating that “control is an illusion, at best, you can try to herd cats” when it comes to social media.

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