Social Marketing Conversations

Our conversation with Aneta Hall / Emerging Media Manager for Pitney Bowes (PB) has been very informative to say the least.

If you would have told me a year ago that a 90 year old company would be an innovator in enterprise social media, I’m pretty sure I would not have believed you.  After the time spent with Aneta, I can tell you that a 90 year old company is being really innovative in the enterprise deployment of social media and they’re showing a measureable ROI.

In the last two episodes we’ve covered elements of how PB has done it too.  First, they approached it from an understanding that social media is not a set-and-forget proposition; they recognized a need for needed a sustainable program that at the same time, did not inhibit individual participation.  They also understood that they needed to put some tools in place, watch key performance indicators (KPIs) and apply metrics, looking for the ROI; those efforts have led to a $300K saving in call-center deflections in a 3 month period.

I know that Guy and I are looking forward to connecting with her at the MeasureUp event in Chicago next month and to put a live presence with the enthusiastic personality she has  shown in the podcast series here.

In this episode Aneta lets us know that while they do set certain measures and metrics in place, they are certainly open to evaluating them and updating policy as PB learns what actually makes a difference to their customers and to the bottom line.   We open the discussion referring to the Twitter, Facebook and online forums that PB maintains, but Aneta tells us that social media at PB is not about an overarching corporate social presence. At the end of the day social media is about people connecting to people, and it needs to be a sustainable level of one-on-one social media interactions with PB employees taking the lead.

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In episode 1 of the interview with Aneta Hall / Emerging Media Manage at Pitney Bowes (PB) and a presenter at the 2010 MeasureUp Conference in Chicago in March, we talked about the need to develop a sustainable effort and a need to provide guidance to the staff that supports the interaction with customers, prospects and stakeholders.

In this episode, Aneta talks with Guy Powell and myself about how the elements of a relevant online strategy for PB includes traditional elements, like before social media came to onto the scene, but now it has changed many of the ways PB structures campaigns to their audience.

In 2010 a major goal for PB is to bring structure to their investment in social media.  The investment includes technology, and organizational structure and people.  Aneta shares how PB now makes the effort to evaluate interactions relative to the ROI of the time and resources it takes to connect to the audience, ‘No more free lunch’ says Aneta.

She shares the 3 tiered model for measuring social media that PB uses, each have several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) beneath them.  The major categories are -

• Attention,
• Engagement, and
• Influence.

All these help understand the contribution to the leads, sales, and brand awareness for PB and it’s business units.

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Social media in the enterprise is creating a huge shift in many companies, but what happens when a 90 year old company decides to invest in a process of listening to their customers and actually letting them talk to one another?

As part of the series around the ROI of Social Media, and leading up to the 2010 MeasureUp Conference in Chicago next month, we interview Aneta Hall, the Emerging Media Manager at Pitney Bowes.  She is a presenter at the 2010 MeasureUp Conference in Chicago, where her topic is “From Fear to Trust – Employee Engagement in Social Media”.

Aneta introduces us to the processes Pitney Bowes (PB), as a 90 year old company, has adopted using social media to connect with prospects, customers, employees and stakeholders around their mail and information needs.  The changes have driven real change in the various business units, particularly as in the last 10 years they have acquired a variety of businesses.  PB now provides a broad range of solutions to the market, not only in mail instruments and document management, but also location intelligence, traffic pattern analysis, predictive intelligence, and relationship marketing.  Aneta shares how sees social media technology supporting the ability to tell the PB story to the market.

The role of the Emerging Media Manger at Pitney Bowes is to help the organization understand and constantly analyze the evolving landscape of social media.  In her role, Aneta teaches other how to use the technology and she often presents the model outlined in Chris Brogans’ awesome book, ‘Trust Agents’.  She also maintains the strategic roadmap for PB and is often glued to the PB Radian6 console, because of the value she places on listening to the conversation in social media versus trying to use social media as just another channel to broadcast the same messages used in traditional media.

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In this episode Lewis Goldman of 1800Flowers.com shares some of the successes 1800Flowers.com has had along with some of the lessons learned.

The first is the booming growth in the adoption of mobile, their application for placing orders on a variety of mobile platforms is growing rapidly.  Today you can use your Blackberry, Android, or iPhone to place an order from the 1800Flowers.com Mobile Gift Center in several categories for personal or business.

1800Flowers.com has not been afraid to try out new ideas has often been a first mover in many areas to stay connected to their audience and they try a lot of things, sometime uncertain of the outcome; case in point was the effort in creating a 1800Flowers.com store in the 3D social platform of Second Life, which they discovered was not the right platform at the time to connect them to their audience.

A success is the development of the ideal customer model, which they have named ‘Tina’. Tina is the aggregate persona of the ideal 1800Flowers.com customer, which embodies the characteristics of the buying behavior they see in the market overall.  Lewis shows us how they referenced Tina in the ‘Spot-a-Mom’ campaign leading up to Mothers Day in 2009.

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In this episode, we get to talk to Lewis Goldman of 1800Flowers.com.  Lewis is a keynote speaker at the MeasureUp Conference (www.MeasureUpEvent.com) in March 2010 in Chicago.  Guy and I were able to get a few minutes of his time before the event and find out how 1800Flowers.com is using and measuring their social media presence.

Lewis shares a little on the background of 1800Flowers.com founded in 1976 by Jim McCann (still Chairman and CEO), who started the venture when he was looking to extend his income.  They have been an mover in the online commerce space, even in the early days by support their customers by helping them ‘express and connecting with the important people in their lives.’  They do that by providing a quick and easy way to let people easily give flowers, chocolates and small gifts to one another using the phone or on the web.

Jims topic at the MeasureUp Conference is titled ‘Social Media and e-Commerce – Fad or Fundamental Change?’ and he shares some of the points he will present in his presentation, all based on his 14-year background in online, ecommerce initiatives.

He suggests that social media is not new and points out the community and ecommerce experience in the early days of the web ala Geocities and online networks.

The difference today, he points out, are 2 key component differences -  the demographics have changed on the web, and people are a lot more comfortable using ecommerce and accepting the recommendations of ‘trusted authorities’ from social media communities.

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In December we had a BlogTalkRadio.com session with Jason Baer of Convince and Convert.  The session included Jay, Guy Powell and myself and we had several listeners who stayed with us for the 50 minutes of the program.  When I got the show downloaded, we discovered that the quality of the recording was intolerable and, much to my disappointment, I am unable to provide the podcast here, but we did get a truly HUGE effort from our transcriber, Cynthia Propst and we did the get a transcription of the episode.  The session was great and well worth the time to read!

Here is the transcript posted at Scribd and here is a summary of the points we discussed.

• How to develop metrics for an engagement and how the non-financial metrics are tracked and what they can mean
• His perspective on agencies supporting a clients social media presence
• Comparing an effort for a B2B vs. a B2C effort
• How companies are starting to invest in social media and see social as an aspect of most all their media
• The ‘lifetime value of a customer’ concept as it relates to social media
• Why an online community connection does not mean ‘customer’
• Opt-in messages in social media re much more powerful than traditional media exposures
• Comparison of Word of Mouth and social media marketing tactics and how they are similar
• How social media tactics are used in short term campaigns to support customer acquisition and retention
• The computer and information technology group in the corporation is being driven out of the equation and marketing is taking over
• He shares some simple tactics for checking the success of social campaigns

The event was a lot of fun and we appreciated Jay’s participation.

Next up in the series – Twitter influence measurement; see you all soon!

To support the effort in uncovering the ROI question in social media, we’ve set up a Fan Page at Facebook, and a LinkedIn Group.  Come join us and let us know what the pressing issues are in your efforts to determine an ROI in your social media presence!

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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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.