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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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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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.

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

Lon Safko, Guy Powell and I all wish you a very Happy Holiday Season, hope that your 2009 Christmas was enjoyable and that your 2010 New Year celebration is both safe and relaxing.  We too are getting ready to launch a new year here at TheSocialMediaBible.com and undertake an even more extensive library of content revolving around social media for business, business marketing a and media.

In this episode of the ROI of Social Media Series, we explore the question of assessing Sentimentality and Tonality in social media, an area that as Aaron reminds us, is still more of an art than a science.

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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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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.

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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