Social Marketing Conversations

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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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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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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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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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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This is the second interview in the ROI of Social Media podcasts series.  In this episode we feature the co-founder of Alterian, Mike Talbot and the VP and co-founder of Techrigy, which was acquired by Alterian in July of 2009, primarily for their social media monitoring tool, SM2.

We’re doing this interview to explore how the social media industry views social media ROI and whether or not it is a measurable function.  Guy Powell, my collaborator in the podcast, is the author of ‘Marketing Calculator: measuring and managing the return on marketing investment’, who has made a study of the ROI question in marketing and now, in collaboration with yours truly, is bringing his knowledge to the question of ROI in Social Media.

What Guy and I are finding in our interactions is that the ROI of the two worlds, traditional marketing and social media marketing, are still very different.  We are exploring the question with an open mind, documenting our findings, producing content for you our audience and as we can, we’ll share our conclusions about this burgeoning subject.

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