Social media can help businesses serve customer needs across the lifecycle, not just at the top of the sales funnel.

Lee Odden  |  Social Media Smarts  |  December  5, 2011 |  4 comments

Yes, Facebook is dominant in most countries (but not all), Twitter is toppling governments, LinkedIn is getting everyone head hunted, and Google+ is at 67 million users in no time. However, these social networks have a combined worldwide market share of 78 percent (see Wikipedia); they are often not your social network of choice especially in many Asian countries, such as China, Korea, and Japan. {READ THE REST}

If your target market is one of those in the 22 percent, the landscape is often very fragmented, broken down by ages and topics. Care must be taken to select the social network that best represents your target demographic.

When faced with many choices, the temptation to be on all of them is high. Don’t, because building word-of-mouth successfully in social media is about creating high quality engagement. A bunch of half-hearted presences is only detrimental to your brand.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

It’s important not to be too self-centered when building up your social media presence. Apart from sprucing up your page/group and making it lively, it is also critical to know what is going on “out there” away from your page/group. Many tools can help you do that, to gauge the ”temperature” on your topic of interest, or to find out exactly who’s-saying-what-from-where-and-when. Granularity of your need is directly proportional to their costs – the deeper you want to drill, the more expensive the tools tend to be.

How to select these tools is easily another long article, but the main point here is that you will need some tools. Don’t think you can do this meaningfully manually (there is only so much those interns can do!).

7 Tips to Enhance Your Brand on Social Media

To build your brand encompassing the shorthand marketing messages that create emotional bonds with consumers built into your social media marketing, break it into its component parts and consider how to apply each to your social media execution and content.

1.What’s your brand promise? What’s the one thing your brand always delivers to your customers? It has to be easy to describe so prospects, customers, and fans remember it. Blendtec’s Will It Blend videos consistently show its industrial strength blenders by humorously testing them with a variety of well-known products including iPhones and iPads in a lab setting complete with hard hats, protective eyewear, and white lab coats.
2.How is your brand positioned? Jack Trout and Al Ries taught that positioning is what you do in the mind of your prospects and consumers who own your brand. American Express Open created a social media forum for business owners to help them build their dreams. By providing premium quality, useful content their customers need, American Express helps businesses while positioning its brand.
3.What’s your brand’s personality? To extend this to social media, think about which social media platforms you plan to engage on. How will you engage with prospects, customers, and the public? Remember, you must be consistent in your social media approach. Cable provider Comcast created ComcastCares on Twitter to interact directly with its customers and give its customers another conduit to reach it. This has helped Comcast’s brand image.
4.What logo, icons, or other graphic elements represent your brand? Think in terms of how you represent your brand across various media formats, including text, photographs, video, and audio. Wrapped in its blue and white packaging, Oreo’s Facebook fan page puts the classic circular sandwich cookies and its customers at the heart of its social media presentation with weekly photographs of customers eating Oreos. [Read the rest here]

HG: How do you encourage people to engage in actions that benefit Dell (follow, fan, share, click, buy, etc.)? Can you give specific examples?

RD: Sure:

1. Incenting employees to create content is one thing: you can put hard metrics in their performance plans or propose a little friendly competition and the promise of something appealing. But incenting people outside your company can be a challenge. This requires companies to build brand loyalty – something Dell accomplished with its creation of CAP days. Dell’s Customer Advisory Panel (CAP days) takes some of Dell’s greatest supporters, as well as some of Dell’s biggest critics, and brings them together to hash out what’s working, what people like, and what they think Dell must improve upon. This breeds brand loyalty that goes far beyond a simple “like” or “share.” While we realize this is a large-scale project and that not every company is capable of constructing something similar, the underlying goal can still be accomplished in much smaller ways.
2. Providing great thought leadership content on a regular and highly frequent basis encourages people to connect with us to get access to the content in their streams. Our Enterprise Efficiency and Tech Center communities do a great job of keeping customers engaged with great content.

HG: How do you think social media marketing drives revenue or saves money for Dell? Can you give specific examples?

RD:Sure, here are a few:

1. A McKinsey study recently found that 69 percent of surveyed companies gained measureable business benefits from social media, including product innovation, more effective marketing spend, lower cost, and higher revenues.
2. Social media drives people to our purchase process on our website. Social content on our website increases the number of people who convert to revenue.
3. Online customer support and communities reduces the number of people calling into our call centers.
4. B2B communities allow people to get access to experts to push them down the purchase funnel.

HG: How do you measure the success of your social media marketing – what are some of your main metrics/KPIs? Can you give specific examples?

RD:The whole point of your social media efforts is to address pragmatically fundamental business goals. You need quantifiable insight into how online engagement with customers can improve the key value drivers of your business.

1. We look at the links between customer behavior in social media and revenue both off and online (which I mentioned earlier).
2. We also look at the impact on costs (in customer support, for example), loyalty, product innovation (by incorporating social feedback in product roadmaps), and brand reputation.
3. One relevant metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures the loyalty of your customer base and lets you identify opportunities for increasing your overall brand health. It also enables you [Read the rest here]

Tracking the customer experience, though, is a multi-faceted challenge. Experience is broadly an attitudinal outcome that results in a set of behaviors. The digital marketing industry has historically focused on tracking the customer experience through behavioral observation using tools like web analytic systems. This has had limited success, as it’s possible to see what is going on (like a shopping cart abandonment), but it’s not that easy to see why it’s happening (poor usability, price issues, etc.). If measuring and understanding the customer experience is a multi-faceted challenge, then a multi-faceted approach to the problem is required.

The diagram below maps out the customer experience data ecosystem. The ecosystem is two-dimensional. One dimension is from behavioral data to attitudinal data, and the other dimension is from tracking to diagnostic. There are five main classes of data/tools that sit in the ecosystem. [Read the rest]

This is why:

Today’s world has four active generations of media consumers:

The baby boomers: They have disposable income and time. They have a keen interest in the news as their retirement and social security is potentially at risk in the near future. They need to keep up with the latest trends, as well as with their busy family. Many of them have adopted technology (like the iPad) in order to enable them to stay connected. That said, they are still from a generation where print ruled the world.

Gen X: These are the middle-aged working population. Managing extended families, a declining economy, and rapidly changing technology, much of which is now required for their children at school. They yearn for technology that supports simplicity. How can I get more things done faster and better than I have in the past? They grew up writing “C+” code as a first step and then living through the debut of the Internet. They love flash, and being entertained. Truly a mixed bag, they marry old-school with new-world reading habits.

The millennials (Gen Y): Their life is online, even though many of them were not born into the online realm. That said, they grew up in it. They are the Facebook generation. For them, it’s all about creating the best story, and sharing stories visually through imagery. The more open and social they can be, the better. Consuming, well, everything online is the way to go. And device choice doesn’t really matter as much, as long as the return is high fidelity, high engagement, and highly shareable.

Gen Z (also known as Generation M for multi-taskers): These are truly the first generation of digital natives. Ubiquitous access is key. If you can’t see it on your Android, iPod, and refrigerator at the same time, it’s worthless. There is still a good bit to learn about this generation, but early findings (see this study) suggest this segment may privatize themselves a bit. Kind of of like the “me generation” of the 80′s – just digitally.

These four generations paint a picture of media consumption that is vastly different from each other. It becomes a fascinating challenge to determine how to build a strategy for success that will be not just sustainable, but booming in 10 years from now. [Read the rest here]

Here’s a quick version of what Poptent is (for a longer version, visit its site). Poptent is a crowdsource community for creating videos. The way that it works is that creative people sign up, for free. There are thousands of people on the site, along with a few small agencies, all with the ability to build a video, totally on their own.

Coupled with these creators are agencies and brands who give out assignments. For example, Southwest Airlines has recently posted an assignment asking creators to produce a video that will “grow awareness and understanding that Southwest Airlines is different than other airlines in its focus on doing what’s right for the customer.” Creators browse through dozens of these assignments, find one they like, and then, produce and post a video. The brand then chooses one or more of these videos to buy, outright, for a set fee (usually $7,500).

That’s right: the creators post full, complete, HD videos that are fully cleared on rights and usage. The brand can buy a video on Monday and have it run on TV on Tuesday. Creators don’t post concepts or write-ups or storyboards or animatics. They post up the full finished deal. [Read the rest here]

During a session at SES San Francisco this week, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern presented data from Facebook ad testing system optim.al that hinted at accuracy problems for Zip code-based ad targeting. Specifically, Facebook’s estimated addressable audience in several Zip codes in Fremont, CA and Pleasanton, CA did not match to census data for those places.

In the case of at least one Zip code (94566), Facebook’s user estimates are grossly inflated compared to the U.S. Census count. Facebook pegs its audience at 808,000 for that Pleasanton postal zone, whereas census data puts it at 41,000. [read the rest here]

Gregg Stewart  |  May 5, 2011   |  0 comments

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There is one fundamental element that connects your ability to tap local, mobile, and social advertising: your business listing. That’s right, the simple name, address, and telephone number information that you’ve had forever is key to ensuring customers and prospects can find you and learn what differentiates you from your competitors.

Seems simple, but inconsistent and inaccurate business listing information is a real problem for the local search business. In fact, the problem is so large in social media websites, that one in three abandoned their local search because they cannot find accurate information during the local search process. (Source: 2010 15miles/comScore Local Search Study.)

For many years the print phone book – white and yellow pages – was the most accurate source of listings. But with the breakup of the former Bell companies in 1984, that complete data asset has been diminished. Today, a single database of all local businesses that is completely accurate does not exist. The landscape exists of major data providers that begin with the phonebook data (now fragmented by regional and local providers):

* Localeze
* Axiom
* InfoGroup

While there are many other providers, but these three companies represent a significant mass of listings and distribution sources to which they push this information.

In addition to the database aggregators, a credible business listing management program needs to feed data directly to a number of sites that represent the largest consumer usage points, including:

* Google
* Yahoo
* Bing
* Citygrid
* YellowPages.com
* SuperPages.com
* Yelp
* YellowBook

These sites have facilities to allow single business and multi-location businesses to submit and update their business listings.

Before you say “Well, that sounds easy… take one source of you listing information and feed it to the above resources and voila, problem solved,” let’s explore some pitfalls to avoid:

Business name: Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world.

Do not:

* Include marketing taglines in your business name.
* Include phone numbers or URLs in the business name field.
* Attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business in the business name field.

Business location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

Do not:

* Create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
* Use broad city names or cross-streets.
* Create more than one listing for each business location.
* Form multiple listings for one business that services numerous cities.
* Establish multiple listings to cover the various specialties of a business.
* Include information in the address line that does not pertain to the business’s physical location.

Website and phone: Provide a phone number that directly connects to your individual business location and a website that represents your individual business location.

Do not:

* Use a call center number if possible.
* Provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or refer users to landing pages or phone numbers other than that of the actual business.

[read the rest]

Recent news events have certainly indicated a new rush of attention toward Twitter:

- The service has seriously been investing in new ad formats and (more importantly) new advertisers. Jack Daniels most recently bought ads on the site, becoming the first spirits brand to do so. The company is reporting not only a great engagement rate, but also that the brand spiked in tweets, not necessarily related to the ad.

- Twitter is also experimenting with new text ads appearing on the site in the side bar. This seems to be a small test now, but it clearly hints that Twitter is trying out a few different formats to figure out which is the most effective at generating revenue.

- A new forecast seems to have picked up on this activity. An outfit called BIA/Kelsey is predicting that ad sales on Twitter will grow at 65 percent (compound), which is twice what regular old boring display ads will do.

- Twitter seems intent on recapturing come control over the Twitter experience. There are ridiculous strong rumors of Twitter buying TweetDeck, a highly popular desktop client for the service. Of course, Twitter already has a desktop client (which is quite good), but imagine if there was some other way to access the iTunes store, besides iTunes?

- And, finally, Twitter has had its big breakthrough moment in the U.S. operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The particular nature of this event meant that the U.S. media announced that a special report was coming from the President, but wouldn’t say what is was. But the news was already out and all over Twitter. In that moment, Twitter trumped television as the place to go for immediate updates, in very much the same way that television trumped print before it. The idea has been established in the minds of the media public. Check Twitter first. [read the rest]