Category Archives: Social Media

How to Improve Your Social Media Content in One Easy Step

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by Steve Allan

This article originally appeared on B2CMarketingInsider.com

Every day you can find an advice blog on how to improve your social media content. What to tweet. What to post. How often. When.

Much of the advice is helpful and full of common sense tips. The talk about engaging your audience, developing content people care about, listening and responding. I have been guilty of this, too. (See What Makes Great Social Media Content)

Social Media is a hungry beast that is never sated. In order to be a part of the conversation you have to be there every single day. One could make the argument that you need to be visible and relevant several times a day. That requires a lot of content.

How do you fill that void on a consistent and compelling basis?

One word – involvement.

No one knows your business, brand or nonprofit better than you. The goal of social media is to humanize and personalize your operation so your followers feel more connected to what you do. The creation of this emotional bond is at the core of what drives great social media.

The challenge is that most organizations are not equipped to handle this level of information development. Social Media content is a relatively new addition to the workload of many organizations. What eventually happens is that the responsibility for social media content falls on the already overloaded desk of one person. It becomes yet another daily task.

What’s worse is that most organizations do not have a cogent and well communicated plan for what they are going to talk about.

Here is a simple way to solve that problem. Empower everyone in your organization to be a content developer. From the front desk to the back room your people see stories and situations – every single day – that can be translated into solid social media content.

In essence, you want everyone to think like a reporter. They should look at what they do and what they encounter as an opportunity to share. From personal stories to brand benefits to simple acts of kindness or humor – there are a million stories in the Naked City of your organization. You just need to coax them out.

How to do that?

Make social media a team effort. If you make this an organizational mandate it will eventually filter down into everyone’s responsibility list. Once they are actively looking for social media content you will have more than you can handle. And, once they start thinking this way they will generate new and better ideas. In addition, encourage everyone to monitor your social media platforms. They can help you  watch for spam, negative comments and positive opportunities. This has the added benefit of making them more aware of what your organization is doing and saying.

Make it fun. For goodness sakes, do not make it seem like work! Don’t set weekly quotas or benchmarks. This should be a process that people want to participate in. They should get a visceral thrill of finding something post-worthy. If you want to prime the pump set up a weekly or monthly contest for the best content idea. The winner gets a free lunch. Or a day off.

Brainstorm. Have a staff lunch where you ask your people to come up with ideas. Remember, in classic brainstorming sessions there are no bad ideas (even if there are). When you use these ideas be sure to give credit where credit is due. This is a team effort. Your staff is already engaged in social media – most likely during their working hours. Use this to your advantage.

Get visual. Encourage your staff to take pictures and shoot videos. You never know what they’ll find and it adds a richness to your content.

Establish a gatekeeper. This content stream should flow through a narrow funnel of one or two people who know own your organization’s image. Empowerment does not mean anarchy. The last thing you want to do is give everyone admin rights to your Facebook page. There does need to be some order in this chaos.

Set guidelines. While you don’t want to cramp their style you do want to make sure that every staff member realizes they represent the image of the organization. This applies to what they post on their own time. Remind them that if they wish to post for the organization outside your social media space they need to be aware of what is allowable. Using your staff’s personal social networks can help spread your message but you want to be sure they are posting appropriately. The use of the ‘@’ function in Facebook posts is a powerful tool when used wisely.

I realize the title of this post is about improving your social media content in one easy step. Despite all the bold points above that one easy step is getting everyone in your organization – from your CEO to the receptionist – to realize they can have a stake in advancing the goals, cause or image of your organization.

Making this a part of your company’s DNA is a process. It does not happen overnight.

As the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Start yours today.


Making Data Relevant: The New Metrics for Social Marketing

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by Prashant Suryakumar

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Social media has come of age. Marketers now have the ability to augment their traditional marketing approaches with rich behavioral and activity-based targeting that should increase marketing ROI significantly.

However, businesses are facing an uncomfortable truth: There are no “best practices” for measuring a successful social media campaign. Crowd behavior is dynamic and context-specific, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to build a “one size fits all” solution.

A structured approach to capturing, measuring, analyzing and refining marketing strategies in near real time is essential to executing a successful social campaign. Initially, however, companies need to invest in infrastructure to make such a learning cycle possible.

Invest in Data

Measuring the impact of social media campaigns is systemically different from that of traditional marketing campaigns. Since the medium touches all the aspects of the customer purchase cycle, a holistic measurement of awareness, transactions and brand impact is essential.

Additionally, social media is a two-way communication medium and businesses need to invest in listening capabilities that capture the activities of their existing or potential customers online. Several paid and “freemium” tools that monitor online chatter can be found online.

While data is abundant, it is by nature unstructured. Integrating listening data with internal web behavior metrics captured by JavaScript tags, customer care logs, brand surveys and transactional data can enable a business to get a 360 degree view of the activities of customers across all of the purchase touchpoints.

Real-Time Monitoring

A typical online conversation has a life span of about one to two days. As a result, it is imperative for companies to respond to conversations in nearly real time. During this short window, they not only need to understand the context and content of the conversation, but also create an effective response mechanism. All of this underscores the need for real-time monitoring and analysis.

Companies like Dell and Best Buy are adopting different strategies for listening to InternetInternet chatter. These investments help keep a finger on the pulse of every conversation active on the networks.

Sentiment Analysis

Text mining and sentiment analysis are the flavor of the season for social media analytics and a common complaint is that the current tools are not able to classify a high percentage of the comments about your brand.

Step back and think about a conversation you had in the last 30 minutes. How many statements in that conversation were unambiguously positive or negative. Not many, right? Getting a 20% sentiment mapping for individual comments is a very high number.

On the other hand, think about the same conversation; Was the overall sentiment of the conversation positive or negative? That is far easier to cognitively classify. If businesses shift their focus to a conversation-based, rather than a comment-based sentiment analysis, they will be able to get a far better read on the aggregate sentiment of online chatter.

New Metrics

The need for improvisation and identification of new metrics is high. Currently, three categories of metrics need to be developed to enhance our understanding of social activities.

  • Metrics that help understand conversations and engagement (e.g. aggregate sentiment, conversation heatmaps),
  • Metrics to spot influencers in a community (e.g. influencer score, Klout score), and
  • Metrics that help in measuring holistic impact of social media activities on the business.

The Interplay Between Buzz, Branding and Sales

Measuring the impact of increased chatter for your brand might not always translate to more revenue for the business. Measuring cause and effect between buzz, branding and sales might show different dynamics for different product groups. For example, the Old Spice social media campaign saw an 800% increase inFacebookFacebook interaction and a 107% increase in sales. The numbers are related, but not necessarily 1:1.

Testing Mechanisms

Social media is a fertile testing ground, and businesses need to appreciate the importance of a robust testing protocol for social media-based actions. Having a mechanism to measure the effectiveness of comments will ensure that businesses can learn quickly and adapt to the social dynamics.

A key point to remember is that the instance and context of the test is as important as the test itself due to the temporal nature of conversations.

Some of the tests that can be conducted are:

  • Who are the right “influencers” to target for a particular product or service?
  • What is the right time to message these influencers?
  • What is the impact of competition activity on our buzz?
  • What is the impact of traditional marketing on social media and vice versa?
  • What are the type of comments that work for selling a product?
  • What are the type of comments that work for selling a service?
  • What are the right pricing strategies?
  • How should the business tap into current affairs?

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral targeting dramatically changed with online advertising, and now social media can take this effectiveness to new heights. Activity-based segmentation is far different from traditional demographic segmentation, and this is typically driven by a difference between the purchasers and the consumers of a product. Businesses can draw parallels from traditional marketing (targeting kids so that they can influence their parents) and build a unique social targeting mechanism.

Crowd Behavior

Businesses have tried to artificially stimulate a conversation by mettling in their own communities or creating artificial hype. This approach usually fails miserably. They need to understand that social networks emulate real-world interactions, and excessive policing of user generated content can be detrimental to the natural growth patterns of a network.

Math, business technology and behavioral sciences are the key ingredients for good decision making. Understanding organizational dynamics, flock behavior and complex adaptive systems are all directly applicable to social media. Integrating analytics with a deep understanding of how humans interact in a sociographic and psychographic sense can help a business stimulate a conversation within a community, or trigger flock behavior amongst customers.

Integration Into Existing Business Models

Once companies understand the impact of lead indicators, like buzz, on transactional metrics, like revenue, they can include such metrics into their forecasting models and predict short-term revenue with greater accuracy. Additionally, since a good social media campaign will improve the brand health, the long-term impact of these campaigns can be assessed.

While every business wants to understand the impact of its social media spend, it might not be so easy to integrate that into a media mix model. A good social media campaign might manifest itself in increased brand scores or customer loyalty and will impact the lifetime value of the customers more than the immediate transactional metrics. Including indirect metrics like buzz or sentiment might be one way to capture social behavior.

Product Design

Social media can be a direct line of communication with the end user of your products. Businesses can leverage this very effectively in product design by soliciting input from the end user on what features they prefer in the product. Getting feature specific intelligence from the customer can help in building a product that caters to most of the population and also helps in building a sense of loyalty among the user base. Good examples of this include Ideastorm, Vitamin Water and Fiat.

Conclusion

The framework above is the first step in helping companies understand the who, what, when and where of social targeting. The obvious next step is to integrate all this knowledge into traditional marketing and CRM.

Prashant Suryakumar is a Social Media Engagement Manager at Mu Sigma and is currently focused on social media analytics. This post was co-authored by Dhiraj Rajaram, the founder and CEO of Mu Sigma.

 

Five Resolutions To Grow And Maintain Email Lists

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by Neil Berman

This article first appeared on MediaPost.com

The holidays have come to a close, and email marketers are reveling in their swelling lists of new customers.

While no one likes a party pooper, here’s a sobering thought:  Each year email marketers lose roughly one-third of their email addresses to list churn, bounces, unsubscribes or spam complaints, according to the Email Experience Council.

With addresses on email lists turning over every three years, growing email lists must be a priority for marketers.   Good list maintenance will help reduce churn while giving you a more accurate view of your delivery, open and click-through rates.  A clean list also will ensure that you’re in compliance with CAN-SPAM laws.

Growing and maintaining lists is not difficult, but it does take effort.  To make the process easy, I’ve developed five New Year’s resolutions for growing and maintaining email lists.

1.  Find out what subscribers want.  Send out a brief survey to your subscribers to determine what kind of material they want to receive from you.  Some subscribers may want coupons and offers, while others are looking for recommended practices or how-to information.  Segment your list based on your customer’s desires.

2.  Offer a refer-a-friend incentive.  Subscribers like to share good content, especially if they receive something for spreading the word.  Grow your list by offering an incentive to your subscribers for getting their friends to sign up for your emails.

3.  Increase your sign-up opportunities.  Weave sign-up opportunities throughout your communication channels to make it easier for customers to join your email list. Include sign-up links on your website, in social media posts, in your newsletters and elsewhere.

4.  Offer a profile center where subscribers can manage their email preferences. In this center, enable subscribers to update email addresses, the kinds of communications they’d like to receive, and their preferred email frequency.  At the same time, give subscribers the ability to update demographic information that will help you better target email content.  Include fields for an address, phone number and other information.  To keep your list clean, every so often make the privacy center a bigger part of your communications.  Adding a large button at the top of an email will entice subscribers to check on their preferences.

5.  Review your past tracking results.  Segment out subscribers who are no longer active.  Either don’t communicate with this group or try to re-engage these subscribers with another approach.  If subscribers aren’t responding to your e-newsletter, try sending them a shorter version of the newsletter embedded with a video.  If email metrics are lackluster, consider sending more targeted emails to list segments.

 

4 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2011

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by Tim Ferriss

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Tim Ferriss is an angel investor (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, etc.) and author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Workweek. In his spare time, Tim has doctors stab pen-sized needles into his thighs.

Ah, social media marketing. Fewer things are so lavishly spent on, yet so poorly measured.

Here are a few predictions for 2011 related to where the smart money and dumb money will go. Special thanks to a number of high-volume retail experts for their insights, including Ryan Holiday, director of marketing at American Apparel.

Read on for our predictions and let us know in the comments what you think social media marketing will look like in the year to come.

1. YouTube Beats Yahoo — Video Will Convert

YouTubeYouTube is the second largest search engine in the English-speaking world.

That’s right: YouTube is bigger than Yahoo. Zappos, as one example, added simple videos of people holding shoes and moving them around to its sales pages and increased conversion rate from 6% to 30%. When I look at the traffic sources for my book trailer on YouTube, the biggest referrer isn’t my own blog. It’s The Huffington Post. I customized the video and text content to a niche (but sizeable) outlet that didn’t exist two years ago:Huffington Post Books.

With proper targeting and syndication, this 50 second video almost immediately propelled my book from an Amazon rank of approximately number 150 to 30, now stabilizing at number four in all books. We usedRankForest to track this sudden change.

 

graph image

 

The 50-second length was deliberate and was also later edited to 30 seconds for in-video advertising on YouTube.

Read more . . .

Images courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, grapix, Silberkorn

Why your office shouldn’t have a social media policy.

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By David Griner

This article first appeared on The Social Path.

Social junkpile

Does your workplace have explicit rules about how employees can use social media? Does it spell out Facebook and Twitter by name and dictate details down to the blog disclaimers and avatar photos?

If so, it’s probably not as effective as your HR managers might think.

Why? Because giving social media its own HR policy isn’t cutting edge. It’s short-sighted. Your company’s time and energy would be far better spent developing a policy that can be universally applied to all types of digital communication — e-mails, forums posts, blog entries, tweets, status updates, etc.

Trying to create a unique policy for each digital tool is like trying to stomp out a colony of ants one bug at a time.

Digital communication is simply evolving far too fast for any workplace to keep up with. If all you did was amend your HR rules each time Facebook changed its formatting, sharing options or privacy settings, that alone would be a full-time job. Why spend your time chasing the wind?

In its new (and free) white paper, “Is Your Acceptable Use Policy Social Media-proof?”, online protection firm M86 Security tackles this issue of creating guidelines that encompass social media without getting too lost in the weeds.

It’s a good read, even for us rank-and-file types. And while I don’t agree with all their takeaways, it’s definitely a sound starting point for managers looking to cover their bases.

Here’s the white paper’s summary on “why organizations need to be concerned about social media.”

Social media adoption is growing faster than anticipated. It is becoming the new de-facto way of staying in touch with personal contacts, and increasingly, to network with professional contacts. Users spend more time every day, even at the workplace, communicating through these new sites —typically with very little control or security enforcement. This is why organizations need to address social media activities in their AUPs. Simply blocking all access will alienate users and increasingly limit their work-related activities.

I’m sure we’re all in agreement so far. After that, we get into the weightier and more heavily debated issues, like determining “acceptable behavior” on social networks.

At this point, I’d argue the white paper encourages a bit too much granular oversight of privacy settings and parsing out which sites are “work-related.”

Some of the data along these lines is pretty fascinating, though, such as this chart illustrating which sites and tools have been the subject of corporate policies (click to zoom):

Policies by chanel

In my opinion, a digital policy for employees should be akin to the U.S. Constitution. It should convey the organization’s overarching stance on how workers should comport themselves online.

The question isn’t whether your policy includes Twitter, Facebook, LinekdIn and YouTube. The question is whether your policy acknowledges that there is no longer a clear divide betwen the personal and the professional.

You’re probably asking, “But shouldn’t we get specific about what employees can say and where they can say it?”

Here’s where management comes in. Just as the Constitution must be interpreted each day by politicains and judges, so must managers help clarify how a company’s digital policy applies on the day-to-day level. Such explanations shouldn’t be difficult, if you’ve got the right policy.

A few questions I’d recommend asking yourself while creating or amending your company’s digital policies:

• Are we creating rules we have no consistent way to monitor or enforce?

• Do we have a system in place to keep employees updated regularly about how the policy applies to the changing nature of social networks?

• Does the policy convey a central, easy-to-understand philosophy, or is it just a hodge-podge of prohibitions and finger-wagging?

• Is our policy limited to just office computers and work hours? Have we clarified what these rules mean if an employee is off the clock or posting from home?

• Does our policy truly take mobile into consideration?

• Would these rules make sense if they applied to real-world situations? (For example, when was the last time you were talking to someone at a bar and they said, “Of course, these views are my own and do not reflect the opinion of my employer.”

Let’s be clear: I’m not advocating a vaguely worded and impractical policy that attempts to apply to everything and ends up applying to nothing.

And yes, management will occasionally need to create specific rules and procedures for specific channels, especially in large-workforce environments like retail and manufacturing. But it’s vital that these rules can be tied directly to a central governing philosophy on digital communication.

Otherwise, you’re essentially just building a raft out of scraps and calling it navigation.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Photo credit: amateur_photo_bore on Flickr.


5 Reasons Facebook Will Be the 2012 Marketing Requisite

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by Patsy Stewart

This article first appeared in SocialMediaToday.com.

We are in the age of the Social Consumer, where social networks are transforming business as the attention of the consumer is focusing on their social streams. They learn, discover and share with their friends.

Facebook has generated a lot of BUZZ lately with its unveiling of a new location based “Places” with local deals. Successful companies are integrating Facebook into their marketing strategies. Fortune 500 companies are racing to see who can get the most “likes” and companies like WalMart are banking that you will share their deals with your friends.

Here are 5 reasons it is imperative that your business have a Customized Facebook Business page.

  1. Fish Where the Fish Are. With over 500 million active users and 50% of them logging on to Facebook in any given day you are bound to have clients on Facebook.  Companies embracing social media will hold a strong competitive advantage.
  2. Engage and Build Relationships. It’s not about selling your products and services but building relationships. To build relationships you need to create followers or fans of your brand, otherwise known as those who “Like” your page and content. Facebook’s Wall element provides a perfect opportunity to engage your visitors in 2-way conversations. Status updates can engage your clients by providing value as well as direct visitors to answer questions, post their comments and share their photos and videos.
  3. Effective and Reasonable Marketing (Ads). Facebook ads are reasonably priced and you control your daily budget. You can target your niche market with pay-per-click and pay-per-impression options. Ads can be directed back to your business page to grow your fan base or directed to your website to make a purchase or redeem a coupon. Facebook recently included a social element to their paid ads with a set of metrics for the ad administrator. Nielsen report claims that almost 70% of users are more likely to click on an ad previously visited by their friends.
  4. Maintain Strong Brand Awareness. You can build brand awareness with a customized Welcome page,  Product or Service page. Facebook Contests generate brand awareness especially when used in combination with Facebook ads. Users submit essays or photos and then ask their friends to vote for their entry. They can also share their entry on their wall making your brand visible to all of their friends.  You can also increase brand awareness results by integrating Facebook with traditional marketing channels.
  5. Provide Customer Value.  Value can come in the content you share, from how-to videos to customer service tips. You can offer specials for Facebook users only. Facebook
  6. Places is a location based tool for smart phone users like the iPhone and the Android. Once a business claims their place they can offer a deal or coupon for mobile users who check in at their location. The deal then appears on the users news feed where all of their friends can take advantage of too. You can also receive company value through polls and surveys and gather research from questions.

The results of these 5 elements will be the number of “fans” or “likes” your Facebook Page will produce.  How much is a Facebook fan worth?  Retailer Daily concludes,

“The average value a Facebook fan provides a brand is $136.38, but it can swing to $270.77 on average for “best” fans or go down to $0 in the “worst.”

Entwine Digital has created and managed many custom Facebook pages where clients have grown their fan base significantly. Darin Kidd’s page received over 1000 fans within the first 48 hours.  Our most recent project with Tony Williams, song writer and musician of Call the Law it’s Christmas, is to use Facebook to promote the Black Friday release of the animated video of the holiday song. Williams said, “I don’t know much about it but I do know I have to be on Facebook to let people know about my song and get the video to go viral.”

About the Author

Responsible for project management of web development and designing and implementing social media strategies as part of an Integrated Media Marketing plan. By combining her passion of social media with her networking skills Patsy successfully joins together her clients with targeted communities to expand their network and generate conversations that create relationships. Patsy is well known throughout Virginia and North Carolina as a speaker, trainer and thought leader in Social Media. She manages a recruitment team that was recognized as one of the top 50 recruiters nationally using Twitter/social media. She is a contributor to local business publications and she authored the ebook, “How to Grow Your Digital Footprint“.


Going Green and Going Social: Why Companies Fail at Both

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by Matthew Yeomans

This article was originally posted on Advertising Age.

Here’s What You Can Learn From Pepsi, Ford and IBM

Social media has forever changed the way companies communicate. The world of marketing, PR and advertising get it, yet communications professionals tasked with telling the public about their company’s planet- and life-saving corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability initiatives too often ignore social media altogether.

We conducted a survey of nearly 300 of the world’s most sustainable companies in North America and Europe around found that nearly 60% are failing to use social-media channels to involve the public in their cause-related efforts, whether it be to feed the hungry, find a cure for breast cancer or find a more eco-friendly way to power the planet. That figure is all the more striking when you consider 84% of these companies have already embraced social media for general PR or marketing purposes.

Our index identifies and ranks 120 companies that are using social media in sustainability communications. The names of the best-performing companies won’t surprise you. They are acknowledged social-media innovators like Pepsi, Dell, Starbucks, IBM and Ford. At the head of the index is General Electric, whose Ecomagination challenge is raising the bar for how companies can demonstrate their commitment to society in an engaging and social manner.

The most successful social-media sustainability communicators all are demonstrating how their companies can be useful to the greater community and they’re doing it in a way that allows true community participation and feedback. The Pepsi Refresh Project, Ford’s the People’s Fleet and IBM’s Smarter Planet are the poster children for this smart social-media strategy.

Of course, amid the social-media sustainability success stories there are some real corporate communication car crashes. That’s why, to accompany the Sustainability Index, we decided to put together “the Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a Short History of Social Media CSR.” Check it out here to see if your company or client makes the list.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: A Short History of Social Media CSR [SLIDE SHOW]

Customer Service In A Hyper-Social World

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by Maria Ogneva

This article first appeared on The Social Customer.

People talk about social support like it’s something new. Well, it is, and it isn’t. What remains constant is that service has always been a cornerstone of a positive brand experience – or at least it should have been. This is where theory and practice have oftentimes diverged in the past, but that’s a topic for a whole different blogpost. What’s changed is that we are now seeking and providing service in new channels and with new expectations as far as how it needs to work. How are our expectations different? We expect companies to respond to us quickly, within an hour (or within a day, if it’s a complicated issue), and in a channel where we are asking the question. Moreover, we don’t want to even have to ask the question — rather, we expect to be found and helped after just mentioning the brand name.

The business fundamentals of a service-oriented organization remain unchanged to a certain extent. If you are providing customer service, regardless of the channel, you need to understand how support affects and is affected by other areas in the organization.

What other parts of a business can affect service? All of them! For example, if you launch a new product, you need to understand what impact it will have on support channels, and you need to provide the feedback loop right back to the product folks. If the beautiful UI that you thought was going to be well received, ends up confusing people, your customer service requests may increase, and negative word of mouth may ensue. If the social media and PR folks do a tremendous job of covering your product or company in a major publication, you will get additional traffic, signups and hopefully revenue. You need to ensure that you are technically prepared for that load, because as you know, a website that goes down is not a good user experience. Did you ramp up your service to coincide with this new bump in popularity? You should have created a plan to ramp up support quickly in events like these.

Conversely, what areas of the business are affected by service? Again, all of them! Reports of crummy service can spread virally all through social media and destroy your brand and (current and future) customer relationships. What’s key to realize here is that your service has to be absolutely bulletproof in all channels. To truly get high marks as a customer-oriented company, you need to become excellent not in just social media service, but also in traditional channels like email, phone and instant chat. For reasons that are beyond the scope of this blogpost, social service, on average, tends to be better than traditional service. As a matter of fact, a bad service experience in traditional channels can actually detract from an excellent service experience in the social channels. Substandard service can be responsible, for obvious reasons, for an increase in negative word of mouth and eventual decrease in demand and revenues. Ineffective service (where it takes a customer several times to resolve the problem) can actually mount service costs; it’s much cheaper to do it right the first time.

Speaking of costs.. Did you know that social service can help drive traditional costs down? This happens for several reasons. First of all, problems are usually uncovered in social media first. By listening effectively and understanding the fledgling indications of problems, you can actually anticipate these problems in traditional support channels. As a response, you can beef up phone staffing, as well as quickly and effectively communicate the problem to the product techs (or whoever can actually fix the problem). You can even change your IVR to effectively communicate an outage to the customers who are calling in.

Moreover, social media can help deflect costs incurred by calling the support center. In the community help approach, like the one popularized by GetSatisfacton and Zendesk, product advocates and experts can share their insights (which can be better than employees’ insights at times), and the simple (or most frequently asked) questions can be easily resolved. Even a tweet, when pointing to the right support forum resolution, can be a faster solution than a phone call, leading to increased satisfaction as well as decreased costs. One key distinction should be made between reducing costs while increasing quality vs. cutting costs by cutting corners. You should only undertake a cost-saving initiative if and only if the quality of service is unchanged or better.

How have you seen traditional and social media play together? Have you realized any brand or revenue impact, or any cost savings as a result? The comments are yours!

About the Author

I run social media for Nimble, a modern relationship management system, which is one part external listening and engagement and one part internal collaboration. Nimble unifies the 3 Cs — contacts, communication and calendar — in order to bring you closer to your customers and unify your team. At Nimble, I am responsible for all social media strategy and execution. In addition to content written for Nimble, I contribute regular content to widely-read social media publications and enjoy sharing my passion with others. Before Nimble, I worked for large organizations, as well as smaller entrepreneurial companies and consultancies in social media, marketing and sales roles.


Why You Should Link to Your Competitors

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by Ellie Mirman

This article first appeared on HubSpot.

Sportsmanship

 

In business school, you’re not taught to link to your competitors (or so I’m told). Why would you? After all, you want your website visitors to stay on your website, not go right into the hands of your competitors. And yet, that’s exactly what Yahoo did at its start.

Yahoo, at its core, was a great directory of reputable links. When it came to users searching for information, though, Yahoo’s results weren’t complete. You couldn’t find the “needle in the haystack,” as Yahoo early employee Tim Brady describes in Founders at Work. Did Yahoo just leave it at that? No. At the end of a search results page, they included links to Internet company (and competitor) Excite – more specifically, a pre-queried page on Excite so that the user had just one click to view more results in case the original Yahoo search did not have the result they were looking for.

It’s a pretty remarkable thing to do. Why did they do it? For the user. It not only signaled to the user that they were the focus, what mattered, but also taught the user that Yahoo was THE site to go for a complete set of results – first the results from Yahoo’s reputable directory, and then all the rest from links to (yes, Yahoo’s competitor’s) additional results.

What can marketers learn from this? Become THE go-to resource in your industry by linking to others’ resources, including, yes, your competitors’. This could be in the form of:

  • Sharing interesting blog articles written by your competitors
  • Writing responses to a competitor’s blog article (and not simply arguing with their point of view)
  • Allowing your competitors to write guest posts for your blog
  • Summarize the most important news and best articles in your industry, including those written by your competitors

The benefits?

  • You will get known as the one best expert and thought leader in your industry. With your comprehensive resources, people will start coming to you as the one-stop resource for anything to do with your industry.
  • You build a brand around helping solve your users’ problems. You prove yourself to be unbiased – after all, you’re linking to your competitors when you think it’s in the best interest of your users. Your users will trust you and appreciate you for it.
  • You give your competitors a reason to promote you – by linking to them or publishing a guest blog post by them.
  • You give your users a reason to promote you. If you focus on delivering the best resources, best content, and being more balanced in your content, you give your users a reason to recommend you and become a team of the best marketers for your company.

Now go out and start connecting with and sharing the best industry content with your network!

Flickr photo by versageek

What to Consider When Building an In-House Social Media Team

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by Amy-Mae Elliott

This articles first appeared on MASHABLE.

The Social Media Marketing Series is supported by Webtrends Apps, which lets you quickly create and publish Facebook, iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Learn more about it here or keep up with all Webtrends Social products by following its blog.

Building any kind of team is a challenge, but pulling together the people who are going to represent your company in the social media arena is a particularly tricky task.

What is the ultimate purpose of your social media team? Do you hire experts from outside the company or utilize existing employees? What do you look for in a social media executive?

We talked to professionals who have gone through the process — from big global businesses to small companies — to try and find some answers to these questions.

Have a read of their advice and let us know any useful experiences you’ve had in the comments below.

1. Set Clear Goals

 

Before you consider the question of who, you need to have already established the answer to why?

“Firstly, before you set up a team, you have to be clear who you want to talk to and engage with and what your internal goals are,” says Jakub Hrabovsky, head of web relations for Vodafone UK. “Is your main aim to entertain and engage, or are you considering using social media as a sales channel? You should be clear on what you want to measure. Engagement levels, buzz and sentiment or an increase in the number of sales — or perhaps both?”

Hrabovsky also points out that your social media team members will also need to be able to help customers — they may be the point of call that connected consumers head to. “If you’re a consumer-facing organization, you should include a customer care element to complement your social engagement team as well.”

2. Create a Social Media Policy First

Every company with a presence in the social space should have a social media policy, even if it’s just a few lines advising employees how you’d prefer they reference your brand online.

Creating a social media policy before you get a team in place will help you in deciding who to employ to implement it.

“Be sure you have a social media policy in place, so that your team is clear on how the company wishes to be portrayed in the space. A social media policy should be available to all staff too,” advises Dave Delaney, marketing specialist, online communications and promotions at Griffin Technology.

“You should first consider how you want your brand represented. Your social media team is going to be speaking for your brand, so it’s important that they are able to communicate in a way that shows the personality of your company,” says Kristen Studard, social media coordinator at Threadless.

“At Threadless we’re a very friendly laid-back company and we’re very excited about our products, which is why we use so many exclamation points in our tweets and status updates.”

If you are going down the friendly, excited, exclamation points route with your social media policy, then be sure to hire people who will find it easy to express themselves that way; if you’re aiming for a more staid, professional approach, then don’t pick someone who can’t pen a line without adding a smiley at the end.

Read more . . .