THINKing

Social Media Questions

In part 1 of this series we talked about the strategic approach to social media. Now, it’s time to start asking some serious questions about your target audience.

Is it going to be the end consumer, strategic allies or channel partners? Architects, for instance, could deliver more value to you than the person living in the home. This doesn’t preclude you from having a program for all channels. But it is best to go after the best customer first.

So, who is your best “customer”? What demographic, psychographic and geographic attributes do they have? What do they need or want from you?

Where will you find them? What are their media habits – both online and offline? What’s the best way to reach and interact with them?

Based on this knowledge, what should be the focus of your online or social networking presence? Are they looking for fact-based information, inspiration or both? Or perhaps a digital customer service approach is the best way to go.

When you answer the questions above, the other tumblers will begin to fall into place. Should you be on FaceBook,  LinkedIn, Twitter or all of the above? What about a blog, a wiki, or Youtube? Your audience definition answers will tell you your next steps.

We’ll do some more social media planning in our next installment.

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Social Media: Strategic Or Tactical?

A friend asked me recently to come talk with him about social media. He has an international client that still focuses on the traditional methods of reaching influencers, the channel and consumers. He wants to think through whether social media is viable for this brand. So, that got me thinking about the nature of social media. This is the first in a series of posts about social media planning.

During my more than 30 years in communications there is one thing that has become clear to me: strategy should come first. So, it’s no surprise that I believe that you should outline your social media strategy first and then the tactics will typically fall into place. Lee Odden has a good post outlining the possible outcomes a social media program might include:

• Gain insight into a community of interest -You can run all the customer surveys you want, but some of the most interesting and progressive market research can be found within the social communities where your customers interact, share information and make recommendations. Tapping into the streams of dialog is a great start to engagement and social participation with your brand.

• Build brand visibility and authority – You’ve heard it before, “Conversations are happening online about your brand, with or without you.” You might as well participate and do so in a way that pays close attention to the interests and needs of your customers – providing them with information and interactions that further support your brand.

• Influence and promotion of products/services – Providing information to educate customers about your products in the formats and media types they prefer can go a long way towards building the kind of buzz that results in new business. By promotion, I mean advertising on social media sites.

• Link building for traffic and SEO – Creating linkbait and promoting it to social media news and bookmarking sites can attract a slew of links from bloggers that read them. However, sustaining high levels of promotion to the same site or with the same user accounts will quickly be outed as social media spam. Creating value for the community is not the only rule, creating value and behaving according to formal and unwritten rules is what sustains social media sourced link building.

• Drive traffic for ad revenue models – Becoming a power user of several social communities involves consistently contributing quality content, rewarding those who vote positively on that content as well as growing a large base followers. That base of like-minded connections can serve as an effective distribution channel for unique and interesting content which drives traffic to ad supported blogs that host the content. The linkbait suggestion above not only attracts links, but also attracts traffic. However, many ad supported sites report that traffic from social media sites is notorious for not clicking on ads. It’s the bloggers that write about linkbait content first viewed on social media sites that drive the kind of traffic which results in ad clickthroughs.

Now, not everyone of these outcomes is right for every brand. To determine which ones are right you have to ask some questions. We’ll delve into that next time.

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Everyman 1, Influentials, 0

Back in the 20th Century, you might remember, PR people were advised to determine who were the influentials in their market and spend the majority of their efforts reaching these elites. The theory was that if you reached these centers of influence – the media or someone who could influence popular culture – you could develop more targeted programs and avoid a mass approach. Approaching influentials was less expensive than mass communications.

The internet changed all that. Information and influence have now been democratized. Like the corporate world, culture is less hierarchical and has fewer layers.We now have a cheap way to reach a mass audience. That’s not to say there is no place for influentials in your marketing program. Although, Duncan Watts disagrees. He thinks it is a waste of money to try to target what Malcolm Gladwell called “tastemakers.” But that is a story for another day.

The media is losing much of its power and its mass appeal thanks to its lockstep liberal media bias and the rise of citizen journalism. I still think PR pros can utilize the media to help reach key audiences, however there are new ways to spread your message. Blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter are the new media PR practitioners need to master.

Guy Kawasaki has some excellent advice for anyone who wants to master these new tools for profit. You’d be well advised to read and put his thoughts into practice.

By Harry Hoover

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Links – 4/24/2009

Here are a few things I’m reading today about journalism and the newspaper industry. Thought you might have some interest:

NY Times Has No Plans To Go Private

The Newspaper Biz: More Poison Please

McClatchy’s Ad Revenues Fall 29.5%

Wikipedia Founder: How To Save Newspapers

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Social Media Generates Leads For Mainstream Marketers

More mainstream marketers are jumping on the social media bandwagon. The Center for Media Research reports,

According to a social media study by Michael Stelzner for the Social Media Success Summit 2009, 88% of marketers in a recent survey say they are now using some form of social media to market their business, though 72% of those using it say they have only been at it a few months or less. 

The study further indicates that “64% of marketers are using social media for five hours or more each week, with 39% using it 10 or more hours weekly and 9.6% spending more than 20 hours each week with social media.”

Why the sudden surge? Because it is working.

More than 80 percent of the survey respondents say social media has generated exposure; 61 percent say it has increased traffic, subscribers, list; 48 percent say it has generated leads, and 35 percent say it has helped close sales.Small business owners are most likely to report positive benefits from using social media. Its low relative cost levels the playing field.

Twitter leads the way among marketers, with 86 percent saying they have tried it. Twitter now beats out the New York Times in terms of traffic. Today, there are 10 million users, a growth rate of more than 1,000 percent in the past year. If you are new to Twitter, here is a quick overview of how to get started.

Are you using social media effectively? Tell us about it.

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Creative Destruction

It’s happening all around us and has been happening here in America since Europeans hit the shores. It’s the “creative destruction” that economist Joseph Schumpeter borrowed from Nietzsche. According to the 20th Century economist,

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.

Newspapers, broadcast TV networks and old line ad agencies are just the latest victims. They got complacent and didn’t see the tiny mammals carving out a new niche right beneath their feet. Mass media got left behind by the fragmented masses. Old line agencies didn’t see that the media world was undergoing revolutionary change right before their very eyes. And they didn’t notice that corporate clients were tired of paying their overhead. Instead, clients were looking for a new way to do business. Creative destruction is working its magic once again and the victims decry it.

If you are going to be a successful business in a capitalist society, you must always be looking for the a better way or you too will become a victim on the roadside of creative destruction.

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Tap Employee Passion

Meriwether Lewis set the stage for the Corps of Discovery’s success before one single “employee” had been hired. From the outset Lewis and Clark engendered a communications culture that brought in the right prospects, then kept morale high and increased the productivity of those eventually hired.

More important, Lewis’ communication culture not only outlined the day-to-day duties of Corps member, it imbued “employees” with a sense of mission and meaning.

He ruthlessly searched for just the right recruits. Lewis sought the strong, skilled and eager, rejecting the weak, ignorant, and unmanageable. And through properly communicating his needs, he was able to get the people who could learn and live his “brand” to apply.

Prospects were told openly and honestly about working conditions: you will be in hostile territory, surrounded by hostile people. You must rely on your own devices for food and shelter, and you could die.

They learned about benefits: “great personal rewards will be bestowed upon you by a grateful government,” if you are selected.

Lewis took his “employees” one step farther: you will go, he told them, where no non-natives have gone before. You will help find the Northwest Passage. You will aid in the advancement of science, discovering new places, new species and new peoples. The mission is one of critical importance to the security of the new nation.

It was this open, honest communication of the emotional aspects, the meaning of the job that unleashed the potential of the Corps of Discovery as “brand emissaries.”

Why Bother Communicating With Employees?

Sure, you’re saying, when it’s a matter of life and death, and you must depend on the person next to you for your survival, it makes sense. But, we’re just talking about business here.

The same goes for business. Employees are your most important audience, and that they hold the keys to your organization’s success. Let’s examine the facts to find out why this assertion is true.

Companies spend millions of dollars each year developing mission and vision statements, identifying their brand, and then communicating their brand promise through various media.

Employees are the primary “media” in the majority of brand contacts. In most companies, employees don’t understand the brand promise well enough to communicate it, let alone live it and articulate it clearly.

Gallup research of 300,000 businesses indicates that 75% to 80% of your people are achieving much less and feeling far less enthusiastic about their work than they could be. If all your employees were “fully engaged”, Gallup says, your customers would be 70% more loyal, your turnover would drop by 70%, and your profits would jump 40%.

The research also found that consumers who felt fast food restaurant employees did a great job were five to six times more likely to come back to that brand. At banks where employees stood out, the customer was six to 20 times more likely to continue the relationship.

Additionally, great employees also tend to engender “passionate” customers. For example, customers who praised store-level associates were 16 times more likely to be passionate about the retailer’s brand.

Get employees on board from an emotional perspective and they carry their passion out to customers. Passionate customers carry it beyond to prospects through word-of-mouth.

Need an example? Let’s look at SAS Institute, a company with a clear mission. In its mission, SAS embraces lifelong learning for employees and service that is focused on customers with improvements driven by those customers.

Employees want a company that understands they have a life outside of work, that they have a need for learning and development beyond the strictly job-related.

Recognizing this, the company built a 200-acre corporate campus, landscaped to encourage outdoor leisure. Thousands of acres adjacent to the SAS campus were bought and made available for employees to buy and build their homes. A private junior and senior high has been opened on campus so parents can have lunch with their kids.

Employees are treated like university faculty and are helped by the company to pursue their own intellectual interests, as well as their job-related ones.

As a result, instead of the typical 20 percent turnover of software companies, SAS has had turnover of less than four percent. SAS has a 95 percent annual renewal rate among its customers, and revenues increased from $653 million in 1996 to $1.13 billion in 2001.

So, take a lesson from Meriwether Lewis: communicate your brand position with your employees, tell them openly and honestly what’s happening inside the company, and unleash some passionate results of your own. What do you think? Are employees integral to success or just another piece of equipment?

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Links – 4/9/2009

Today’s post is for sharing a few things I’ve come across in the past couple of days, and to resurrect a post or two from our dusty archives that speak to job-hunting. Let’s get going:

Even In Recession, There Are Jobs In Media

How Not To Get A Job With Social Networking

How Not To Get A Job

Remember, You Are Naked Online

Out Of Work? Don’t Be That Guy

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Communicating In Tough Times

I didn’t need a new Nielsen study to tell me that a financial institution can improve customer confidence through advertising. It only makes sense. If the bank has the money to advertise, the perception will be, that it has the money to pull through hard times. Could be a totally false perception, but there it is.

The study shows that,

When asked about their own banks, insurance companies and investment firms, 55% of respondents who said they had seen more advertising for their financial institution reported having “complete confidence” in the financial health and soundness of their financial company and only 18% said they had “little or no confidence” in their company. However, among those who said they had seen less advertising, only 18% had “complete confidence” in their financial company and 45% said they had “little or no confidence” in their company. Overall, a minority of respondents said they had “Complete Confidence” in their financial institutions.

So, you see, not advertising leads to the reverse perception that you are on the way out of business. Again, it may not be true, but perception becomes reality.

For a PR guy like me, the best news is that editorial coverage is more important than advertising in communicating the health of a financial institution. Here’s what the study found about factors that would increase confidence in the safety and soundness of their financial institution:

• Reading positive stories in the press about that institution (44%)
• Seeing regular advertising for that institution (25%)
• Receiving regular mail or email offers from that institution (25%)
• Regularly seeing internet offers/advertising from that institution (21%)

This holds true for any business, not just financials. Agree? Let me know.

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