Social Marketing Conversations

Social media applied to business is marketing and we’re seeing the use of the phrase ‘social marketing’ being used more and more by marketers – we agree.  Dan Marks and the gang at First Tennessee Bank are at the forefront of testing and learning what works best in social media.

Dan’s day-to-day concern is the question of “am I missing something that might be important?”.  Based on what we heard during the interview, I do not think so.  Dan shared an example of something that could not see the ROI on and they decided to test it.  They placed an ad on a job hunting site – the job site was a social site for sure,  but as it turned out job hunters were not good banking prospects.  So they ceased the campaign.

The team at FTB keep an eye on the acceptance by consumers of messages by brands in social media.  If they sense that social media participants begin to actively resent overt advertising and marketing, it might impact the ability of the bank of adopt social elements more deeply.  Social is merging with traditional and fast becoming a feature of ‘Web3.0’.  Dan sees that consumers will be able to interact in social regardless of the platform they use to connect to the web.

According to Dan, the issue for marketers advertising with social is a leverage point; if you got a good product people will know about it, likewise if you have a bad product, people will know about it.  Product flaws and operational errors in the organization will be discovered and commented on, not in attempt to be derogatory, but possibly just a way to be more helpful.  The ability to hide from the conversations is not feasible any longer; you’ll be a part of the conversation whether you decide to participate or not – how you decide to respond will impact the brand.  Participation can enhance your brand, while ignoring the discussion will not.

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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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The behaviors in social media are broad, but not so broad they cannot be identified.  When you visit a blog, you can only do so many things –

These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite. 

Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so.  Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article.  Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.

The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.

Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic.  The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.

Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table.  My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me.  From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.

I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.

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

There is quite a bit of talk these days with organization looking to get their house in order for 2010 in regards to social media.  It’s happening in the C-Suite, the V-Suite, online and off line over a cup of coffee in the local Starbucks.

We’re seeing non-profits, for profit SMB and large organizations all coming to grips with the understanding that a social media presence is essential in connecting to their customers, stakeholders, prospects and employees.  What we see is very, very smart people struggling with how to involve themselves with various social media components.  With a klaxon going off in their head and their hair on fire, they are looking for tactics to implement right away.

We’re seeing varying approaches.  Some are staging a social media campaign, others are creating a social media position within the marketing department and others are undertaking tactical deployments of particular set of tools and then waiting to see what happens next.  What these all have in common is a short-horizon demand to prove what social media can do for them.

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The first installment at www.BlogTalkRadio.com/StevenGroves has concluded on the topic of Web3.0.

Many, many thanks to the participants and panelist.  The interaction was lively and the topic engaging.

Jay Thompson / www.ThePhoenixRealEstateGuy.com, Tyler Hurst / www.TDHurst.com, Zane Burnett / www.HouseofZane.com and of course, the ultimate instigator of this whole event, Eric Bryant / www.MyRECoach.com.  Guys, just a whale of a good time and thanks for being a part of it.

I had a lot of fun using the Masked Mexican / Lucha Libre Wrestler theme too… Eric weighed in with a jump from the ropes about 1/2 way in and you could hear the crowd cheering or booing along with the ring bell. continue reading »

Eric Bryant came up with the idea of holding a discussion with various practitioners and consultants on the topic of ‘Web3.0’ as a follow on to his post at TheGeekEstateBlog.com, and I accepted the challenge of making it happen.

As I thought about it, I recognized Eric’s involvement in the real estate industry (and with my roots in the real estate industry,) I wanted to cover the impact on social media real estate, but not just real estate. I approached Tyler Hurst at Podcamp AZ and asked if he might be up for a discussion and he leapt at the topic, expressing several opinions.  Zane was the first comment on Eric’s post and when you read it, you’ll see he has a few opinions about it as well.  Lastly, but really the first person I though of as Eric and I talked, was Jay Thompson, an ace practitioner in social media and, of course he happens to also be in real estate.

I wondered how these guy would interact and get along and I realized, it did not matter at all – every opinion about the future of social media is valid and some may actually be sharply contrasting so I moved ahead, accepting that there may be some debate on the topic and then it struck me.

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