Always Respond

The second worst thing you can do is not respond to customers comment. The worst thing you can do is give a generic response leaving the customer feeling brushed instead off valued.

It is important to respond to all comments, whether they are positive or negative. If a customer posts a positive remark about your brand, thank them and share their comment socially. This will encourage them and others to continue in providing positive feedback.

For negative comments, it is best to connect with the person directly and quickly. You may post a public comment in response to theirs so others know that you take all concerns seriously. It is important to also respond to each negative remark directly and address the customer’s specific concern.

Media Bistro recently released a study stating that companies contacted customers who complained about their brand via Twitter, only 29% of the time. But the small amount that were contacted were very pleased with the outcome.

Be Consistent

Your branding across all platforms should be consistent so your company is clearly conveyed. How you present your brand online and offline should be the same. This should apply to everything you do, including color schemes and fonts.

Show a Personality

People trust people. If you don’t give your company a face and personality you will never fully gain their trust. Social media platforms make it easier than ever for brands to be transparent and authentic. You do not want to always force your product on them, rather share links to interesting articles and start conversations instead of just participating in already existing ones. You must also educate through experience. It is not your job to tell your customers your values but rather show them by how you interact with them.

Gather Stories

Stories are one of the most powerful marketing pieces you can have. Social media platforms are a great tool to gather your customer’s stories by asking questions, posting pictures and videos, or hosting contests. Once you gather positive stories about customers’ experience you can amplify them by sharing them online. It is a great place to find out how people first discovered your brand or hear positive memories they have about your products or services. Even if you gather a lot of content from your customers, you must still produce and share your own.

Keep Going

Once you establish your customer’s trust they’re more likely to be engaged with your company. You must keep the momentum going so you can continue building a relationship with your customers.

Take Bank of America. They knew that customers constantly had questions but wanted an easier way to access the information they needed. In response to this, Bank of America established a Twitter account, @BofA_Help. This account is used solely for customers to raise concerns or ask questions that they want a direct and quick response to. Bank of America took it one step further by including the names and pictures of their customer service representatives on the Twitter background so their customers actually know who they are dealing with.

Ultimately a relationship is based on trust and to keep it going, you must continue to prove why you deserve your customer’s loyalty each and every day.

Experiential Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing methods typically emphasize approaches that illustrate features and benefits. The call to action is aimed at triggering awareness and shortcutting the sales funnel. Measurements in this channel focus squarely on leads and sales. However, experiential marketing taps into this process and helps bridge the gap.

While bottom line goals are the same (to sell products and services and encourage existing customers to buy more frequently), experiential marketing inserts itself into the path between consumer awareness and sales. Experiential marketing also plays an important role in terms of branding and conversions.

Sensory Connections that Build Trust
In essence, experiential marketing requires brands to think outside the box and relate to the consumer more like an individual than a corporation of faceless products and services. However, building trust with consumers is not just about “being nice” or providing good customer service.

When executed correctly, experiential marketing appeals to the senses. Audiences connect with brands for a reason and while those reasons may be different for different people, one motive appears to be commonplace among consumers who relate to their favorite brands – the feeling that the individual associates with the brand experience.

Feeling, when it comes to marketing, is how the best brands connect and build trusted relationships with audiences. For some brands, their audience is purely seeking information. Others seek to be entertained by a creative storyline, imagery (through pictures) or sights and sounds (through video). Some audiences value the opportunity to participate by sharing their thoughts and opinions.

Empowering the Feeling
Creating the experience and feeling that represents a brand can be a challenge. In many cases, generating feelings of connection in an audience requires more than a broadcast or series of videos. Much like a salesperson that builds genuine rapport over time, instead of performing the hard sell, experiential marketing can inspire evangelical fans. Experiential marketing empowers the brand and the consumer. In the end, creating a true brand experience can have a measurable impact on the frequency and yield of the sales funnel.

The answers –surprisingly– are not much different from the way most businesses use the traditional form of marketing in order to generate and track revenue.

Soft Metrics?

For most C-level executives, anecdotal measurements resulting from social marketing campaigns such as public relations, engagement, numbers of fans and followers as well as customer service are all fine and dandy, but in essence these are what might be called “soft metrics.” Soft metrics do not always equate to measuring successful revenue generation.

To understand how social marketing fits in with monetization we must understand and connect this marketing channel into measurements that matter.

Influencing the Sales Funnel

In order to monetize social media, it is fundamental to identify how the current sales processes and social media can adapt and integrate within the sales funnel.

For most brands, the initial process of lead generation begins with awareness. However, unlike traditional forms of advertising, the social channel offers opportunities to have an effect on the communications process when consumers seek out information regarding products and services.

The power under the hood is that the social channel provides a way to influence consumers in the “consideration” phase of the sales cycle.

Metrics Benchmarking

Most self-respecting and successful organizations have goals. They measure every aspect of the process, according to online click-through rates, website visits, or sales. These same measurements are essential to understanding and setting goals for social marketing.

Setting specific and measurable goals and objectives for social media increases a brand’s ability to follow a path toward success. For instance, if the overall business goal is 100 new business leads in Q1, a social media goal may be expressed as generating 25 new leads via social channels in Q1.

Similarly, you may break down objectives to direct leads from social channels into an online lead capture system. One example may be expressed as converting five new lead signups via Twitter in 30 days.

Your social endeavors will create tactics that drive social audiences to take specific actions that (hopefully) result in meeting your goals and objectives.

Justifying Your Social Campaign

As opposed to soft metrics that only anecdotally lead to the belief that goals and objectives were met, hard metrics help you to justify the success or failure of your social media campaign. Setting up robust analytics tools will help you track the path of your social audience. For instance, you might learn that Facebook is driving a higher rate of traffic to a lead capture page on your website. Other hard metrics include bridging your converting sales leads from social sources into revenue while subtracting out your costs for implementation.

For example, you may calculate things like:

–Cost of Outside Services (design, software, writing, etc.)

–Media Buy (i.e. Facebook ads, Google, print, etc.

–Staff Time in $

Measuring your costs and subtracting them from revenue generated via social media will help you answer the ROI question with more confidence.

Expressed as a percentage ROI can be found using the following formula:

(Net Revenues – Marketing Investment) / Marketing Investment X 100 = ROI%.

So what is the value of a social follower? It may depend on what your numbers say.

Google; they’re always finding new ways to improve their products. The latest update from them is their photo tours.  According to the video, when you click on a landmark within Google maps, there’s a photo that will pop up.  If there’s a link that says, ‘Photo Tour’ underneath the image, click through and it will take you through a 3D tour of the spot.  However, thanks to TechCrunch, they were able to provide us with a link of current places that have this feature enabled.

Facebook + Windows

If you’ve got a Windows phone, we’ve got some good news. Facebook announced that new changes to the layout, appearance, and functionality will be updated for Windows phones.  What’s nice to hear is that they incorporated a lot of the changes that Users wanted to have in this update.  It’s in the final stages of testing and will be rolled out in the near future. Changes are great; especially when it’s the ones we want!

Twylah!

We just discovered Twylah here and are excited about this new platform. It takes your twitter feeds and creates a web site out of it! As of right now it’s in the beta stage and is invite only. Yes, it’s another digital tool but part of staying current is finding out what the latest and greatest is.

The Science of Social Timing: Infograph

HT to The Next Web for this gem. Kiss Metrics is a company that puts together these awesome visuals and data. Here’s one that we thought was just too good not to share.

How do you manage your social life?

Your social media life that is. One of the services we provide for our clients here at Alaniz is social media. How does social media provide value for your brand? ROI can be a tough challenge to measure, but there are tools out there that can help a brand get the hard data to determine if the direction they’re going in is right or not. Click through the image for more information (analytic tools are linked at the end of the article).

Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Big news outlets such as Time, Information Week, and Wired are all writing about the latest attempt to pass a bill that would not recognize our Individual Privacy on the Internet. Should you be concerned? Our world has become so influenced by technology that much of our lives are spent to some degree or another online. We hope these links will help to inform you of the latest changes in our online world.

Good ideas.

Via zeb.tumblr

Just Tweet it.

Nike is one of those iconic brands that have a devoted following. They’ve decided to launch the release of their next shoe using Twitter to reserve your next pair of coveted kicks. This is a great example of how big brands are using free technology to simplify their job. Click the image above to get more details.

8 Media Trends

Whoa. As soon as we saw this list, we knew we had to share it. There are so many new technological innovations here that we don’t even know where to start. The one that stands out the most, creepily so, is Audio Watermarking. I’m not sure I want subliminal audio signals sent directly to a digital device that’s sitting on my coffee table while I’m watching t.v. What do you think?

The Other Side

Caution: this find is a bit of a forecast post. Want to know what’s on the other side of that wall in your office? Well, wonder no more. Some brilliant scientists have figured out a way to create a chip that when it’s incorporated into your cell phone, will allow you to see what’s behind that wall! Incredible? Indeed.

Instagram + Facebook

This week Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. How will this acquisition be tied into the Facebook platform? Do you like it, love it, or hate it? It will definitely be interesting to see how it unfolds. Read about the highlights of the deal here.

 Talk about a Smart idea.

We love seeing creative uses of social media. This week we’d like to share with you a really cool, ahem, smart idea that was put together by BBDO Argentina to roll out the Smart Car on Twitter.
There are so many ways to use social media for brand messaging. The only limits that exist are the confines you put on your brand. How far do you want to go?

Trade ya!

It’s amazing what you can do with your phone. This week we’re featuring an app for all you baseball fans out there. Being that a few of us here at the office love sports, we thought this was too good not to share. Did you know that you can now trade virtual baseball cards with your iphone or ipad? Imagine that. While traditional cards are still available to buy, here’s an app that lets you engage in your passion without ever leaving your couch.

+1

Are you on Google+ ? There’s a lot of opinions on the internet’s latest social network. There are many who argue it’s pointless and others who say that because of Google’s personal search algorithm that you can’t ignore this network. Well, we’d like to share with you the update. They have revamped the look of G+ with a significant redesign aimed at providing users with a more personal experience. Frustrated with the changes? Here’s a write up that helps you get through the latest changes.

 I care.

I care. Here’s a great, innovative tool to use around social causes. The employees at DDB brought this new social tool button to life to use instead of using the ‘Like’ button when raising awareness around sensitive issues. MTV is currently using the button on it’s Voices platform. I think it’s appropriate to care vs. liking a cause that supports victims of natural disasters. It’s an idea that brilliantly simple. Wish I would’ve thought of that one!

Obviously, there are some pretty strong proprietary feelings here. You tend to feel that whatever is on your page or in the name of your business is clearly yours. So Facebook has a challenge keeping things contemporary and fresh while never departing too drastically from the notion that the stuff on the Facebook personal and professional pages belongs to the people that put it there.

Since this is user generated content, anybody can say almost anything which means that content ranges from worthwhile to worthless, but the freedom to say what you want to your friends and friends of your friends is an immensely attractive proposition.

When everything seems to be moving along smoothly and you like your page and what it says and how it’s looking and then Facebook decides to rearrange the pages, make little images bigger, and vice versa, and start messing around with personal and professional content, well you might get a little perturbed if not disturbed. You might even get angry because nobody asked your permission to change what you thought was yours.

That being said, someday in the very near future (Facebook has set and reset deadlines many times) your Facebook page and the pages belonging to 800 million other members is going to look different—like it or not. Content will remain the same and, in many ways, will be enhanced with the ability to post historic photos and other descriptions that demonstrate change over time. (There are numerous other ramifications of the new format and the mandatory nature of the change.)

Facebook says the transition to Timeline is going well with the more than 8 million brands and companies that have already made the switch. Big companies and brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Dr Pepper, and Ford have claimed that Timeline strengthens customer interactions.

However, the new look still remains disturbing to some people, especially the baby boomer and senior demographic. They’re not very enthusiastic—understatement here—about learning how to use something when they thought they had already done that. It’s going to be an awkward period of adjustment unless Facebook takes a timely and active orientation role.

Responsible orientation to Timeline should be sponsored by Facebook beyond the reverberating confines of forums and third party blogs to help the shyer and less savvy members adjust to the new look that they never asked for.

Perhaps Facebook should lay down their arms and call a truce with Google for a couple of weeks and take some time to create step-by-step guides, post current FAQ’s, and provide readily accessible information for those members who felt they had finally found a place to settle and have a decent conversation without a bunch of unexpected interruptions.

Employers asking for prospective employees to hand over their Facebook and Twitter passwords? We couldn’t help but ask ourselves, what kind of Pandora’s box would this open?  Luckily, the Password Privacy Measure fails in the House. Here’s a quick scoop on the latest result from this act.

The Pitch.

Ohhhh, the heat is most definitely on. We are really excited about this new series coming out on AMC that gives reality TV a new insight into what happens in the ad world. Mad Men, move over the big dogs are coming out to play.  Enjoy the trailer for the premiere of The Pitch on AMC.

Office Design: Inspiration

We’re in the process of expanding our office space. In search of some inspiring ideas, we came across this lovely site. Talk about utilizing space in new and exciting ways! All of you home decorators out there will love this post!

Twitter’s takes a Sh*tter?

Every now and then we like to take a break from our worldly tasks here at the office.  So, guess what? It’s app time again! Sh*tter is a new app that takes a twitter feed and turns it into, wait for it….toilet paper. No further explanations needed.

Facebook’s Timeline: The Design factor

This Fast Co. Design article is a really good read on the thinking behind the new Timeline. Some love it. Some hate it. But one thing is for sure, you can’t escape the visual aspect of it all.  Companies are now able to showcase their brands through pictures along with the traditional postings.  Read their interview with Nicholas Felton, one of Facebook’s top designer.

Are you flawsome?

There are a lot of small businesses that don’t have the capacity to engage in social media as they know they need to. Hiring outside firms to handle this , some brands can miss the mark when their agency attempts to show the human side of the company. What to do when something goes wrong? Here are some insights into what being flawsome is all about.

http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/flawsome/

SXSW: Infograph – What’s hot in Social Media

There are a lot of reasons we love infographs. It gives us a visual snapshot of the topic at hand and quickly informs us of what’s going on. We’re choosing this infograph to share for a couple of reasons. One, for those of you who want to see what’s trending this week at SXSW but don’t have a lot of time to read through a bunch of articles online. And two, if you notice down at the very bottom there’s a nice footnote that credits where all of the data is coming from; Meltwater! This is a shameless plug, but one of Alaniz’s values to our clients is that we use Meltwater for not only our PR database but for other research as well.  Here’s the link for the full view of the SXSW infograph. Enjoy!

http://mashable.com/2012/03/13/sxsw-day-4-whats-hot-on-social-media-infographic/

Social Media Personas: Understanding them and what they mean.

We love it when big companies do all the work and then pay it forward. Here’s some awesome research that the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council of North America and The Integer Group did on distinguishing “four different social media personas and key insights about how they engage with brands and shop”.  When developing a social media strategy it’s important to do some homework on who your audience is. Once you know who you’re talking to, it’s much easier to know how to talk to them.  Scroll down to the bottom of the article for the link to download the research for free.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/169713/understanding-social-media-personas-is-key.html

Stop the Presses!

Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer be printing its Encyclopedias.  After a quarter of a millennium they are shutting down the presses.  It’s a iconic name that most of us are familiar with, and grew up with.  Times have changed and like any other company keeping up in today’s market, innovation is key.  It will be interesting to see what their other ventures will be.  Thanks for the great run EB!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/13/encyclopedia-britannica-ends-print-edition-for-good/

Visual.ly

What can we say about this lovely piece of software, other than awesome?  When it comes to doing one of a kind presentations for clients, using visual information that separates the wheat from the chaff, we’ll do what we can to show our clients that we’re up to speed on the latest technological tools.  If you’re ever in need of creating visual data, please head on over to this site. It will not disappoint!

http://create.visual.ly/

This video hits a little too close to home…