THINKing

Time To Plan

There’s usually some downtime at work around the holidays. What are you doing with your break? I’m using mine to meet with clients and prospects and to complete my planning for 2010. Do you have a marketing plan for the year? What new items are you incorporating into your plan?

Here are a few things I’m thinking about for 2010.

How much should I budget - both in terms of my time and money - toward marketing and PR? Does it make sense to spend it in traditional marketing, in PR, in direct marketing, in social media or in some combination?

Have the media habits of my clients and prospects - marketers and HR executives in Fortune 1000 companies - changed? With which media are they spending more time and which ones have they abandoned? Where is their pain in 2010? Are they still short-staffed and looking for outside resources to round out their teams?

Based on some of the research I’m seeing, it looks like marketing budgets will be up a bit this year.  According to eMarketer,

Next year, while broadcast television, radio, newspaper and magazine spending continue to downsize, though more slowly than in 2009, online ad spending will enjoy a nice bump-up: eMarketer currently forecasts 5.5% growth. And the increase won’t all come from search—banner ads will grow 3.3%, and online video will jump by 40%.

This is shaping up perfectly for My Creative Team, since we have a great deal of expertise in the online environment and in developing flash animation and corporate video for online use.

LinkedIn now connects me to 52 million professionals. Is there a better way to utilize my nearly 600 connections on this social platform? How can I use LinkedIn’s advertising capabilities to reach my target audience, specifically the HR audience? We develop a great deal of employee communication and training materials for Nucor, and would like to expand into HR with other Fortune 1000 firms.

Does a My Creative Team presence on Facebook still make sense since we are focused on Fortune 1000 contacts?

Tell us what you are thinking about. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how you plan to market in 2010.

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Social Media Confuses Businesses

It seems businesses of all sizes are conflicted about how to use social media effectively. In a recent CitiBank/GfK Roper study, about 75 percent of small businesses said that social networks are not working for them.  On the other side of the equation, Gartner says that most Fortune 1000 companies will delve into social media by 2010 but more than half of them will fail.

First of all, small businesses may not clearly understand how social media can help them. Nor, do they know how to measure the impact of social networks.  For instance, friending a brand may not always result in immediate sales. So, the small business reporting that social media doesn’t work is probably not giving the program sufficient time to develop.

Additionally, like businesses of all sizes, small businesses have trouble focusing their efforts. They want to jump into Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter all at once. Now, I believe in utilizing all three of these networks, as does Paul Chaney. However, small businesses should pick one platform that makes the most sense for their customers and master that one before adding another one.

And most of them don’t have the necessary resources to make the most of social media.

We’ve written about this often: strategy should drive tactics, no matter what type of business you run or what type of program you are planning to implement.

Duck Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch agrees that the most successful organizations approach social media with a strategic bent. According to Jantsch,

It’s about connecting, not automation. The best companies are using the latest communication tools not for automation or as “just another tactic,” but to truly connect and create relationships with customers.

Are you having any luck with your social media forays? Wade into the discussion and let us know.

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Connect With My Creative Team

Are you connected with My Creative Team? Here are the ways to get and stay connected:

Facebook

Friendfeed

Think (our monthly enewsletter)

THINKing (RSS Feed)

Twitter

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Stand By Your Brand

With apologies to Tammy Wynette, who warbled the song, Stand By Your Man, now is the time to stand by your brand. If you don’t, someone could hijack it or do it irreparable harm.

Prior to the rise of the Internet, marketers had a reasonable amount of time to respond to misinformation being spread about their brands. That was in the day of the daily newspaper. Instantaneous digital communication now makes it imperative that you be ever vigilant to online conversation about your brand.

You can’t afford to ignore it. Blake Cahaill, senior vice president at Visible Technologies, speaks to this today in a column for Marketing Daily.

Mounting pressure to be the first to break a story, and garner the highest click-throughs on salacious headlines - coupled with the rapid decline of resources allocated to ensure fair and objective reporting - have enabled inaccurate and biased information to flood the Web, often leaving a lasting effect on both businesses and personal identity. 

Complicating this picture is the flood of people joining social networks. Twitter has grown by leaps and bonds recently, according to Mashable. And as OMMA points out in a recent story,

Facebook’s seen its 35-54 demo membership blow up by 276.4 percent between June 2008 and January 2009. The 55-and over contingent grew 194.3 percent in the same amount of time. In comparison, that ever-so-sought 18-24 group bounced just 20.6 percent. The total number of Facebook users aged 35-plus in October 2007 totaled just fewer than 845,000, while as of this past January, their combined might totals just less than 8 million - 18.9 percent of the total Facebook pie.

Boomers, if we are not happy with a brand, will talk about it anytime online or offline. You need to protect your reputation. It is a bankable asset that must be kept safe. So, take Tammy’s advice, stand by your brand.

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Links - 5/22/2009

Here are a few item we are reading today that you may also find of interest:

Consumers Like Newspapers Less Than They Do Airlines

In the first quarter of ‘09, newspaper customers’ satisfaction rating was 63. To put this in some perspective, those surveyed expressed a greater deal of satisfaction with airlines (airlines!) which scored 64. And cell phone providers (cell phone providers?) which score a 69.

Yahoo Helps Newspapers Book Local Ads

About 150 or so papers have started using a new platform meant to simplify ad targeting and selling that Yahoo delivered last fall. Another 350 or so are up next. The new platform was largely responsible for a 30% increase in online-only ad sales across Scripps newspapers in the first quarter, according to Scripps.

E! Harvesting Celebrity Tweets

E! is planning to harvest the power of Twitter for “Celebri-Tweets.” The network will run tweets from a number of celebrities in the news crawl at the bottom of the screen during its programming. In addition, E! will feature a “Celebri-Tweet” widget on its homepage keeping users up to date on what the celebrity Twitterati are saying in 140 characters or less.

Email Continues To Perform For Retailers

Compared with last year, 56.4% of retailers report their typical sales conversion rate for an e-mail marketing campaign remains about the same. More than one quarter of survey respondents, though, report conversion is up: 22.8% say up slightly and 3.7% up significantly. Only 17% report conversion is down: 13.7% say down slightly and 3.3% down significantly.

FaceBook Fights Phishing Scam

Facebook was hit with another round of phishing attacks Thursday, cluttering members’ inboxes with messages attempting to send them to sites to steal their login information. 

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Get Social Fresh

I’m part of a group which is presenting a social media conference, Social Fresh, in Charlotte, Monday, August 24 at the Holiday Inn Center City. Consider this your invitation to attend. You can register here. Here’s what we have announced so far:

We are very excited announce our first round of speakers. From left to right above, Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid, Keith Burtis of Best Buy, and Social Media evangelist Wayne Sutton, Laurie Smithwick of Kirtsy.com, Chris Harrington of @VoteWoz, and Social Media developer Mike Rundle. These experts and panel announcements can all now be found on our Content page. We have many other speakers in the works from Fortune 500 companies, hip new social media companies as well as social networking power houses.

This is a solid group of social media experts. If you want to learn about where technology is going and how social media can be harnessed for business purposes, then you need to attend.

Additionally, we are accepting sponsors for the event. If you are interested, please sign up here and we’ll get back to you to discuss our sponsorship packages.

Keep apprised of more announcements by following us on Twitter @sofresh.  Below is the rest of our contact information. Hope to see you at the first Social Fresh.

Links

Site - http://socialfresh.com
Tickets - http://sofreshclt.eventbrite.com
Twitter - @sofresh
Contact - info at socialfresh.com
Hashtag - #sofresh
LinkedIn - Fresh SM Pros
Facebook - Social Fresh Page

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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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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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