Having used Hootsuite since 2008, trained dozens of executives about using it and featured as a case study for using Hootsuite to generate leads, I like to think I’ve learnt a few tricks about this great tool.

What this partnership means is that I can introduce you and your company to the wonders of Hootsuite to achieve great efficiencies. This is particularly relevant for large companies with limited social media resources.

If you have such need do get in touch, I’ll be happy to talk to you.

In the meanwhile have a look at this great video about team management via Hootsuite

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Post tags: hootsuite, partenr program

It so happens that Collaborate Meetings Magazine has included me in their “40 under 40” list.

The magazine put together a list of the 40 future leaders of the meetings industry under 40 years of age. They thought to include your beloved and I am most grateful for it.

In other news, I will be at #IMEX12 and I’d love to meet you. Here is my schedule.

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Post tags: #imex12, 40 under 40, achievements, collaborate magazine

Here it is.

For those interested I am holding a free webinar on the presentation on the 25th of January 2012. You can sign up here.

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Here are the notes:

This presentation is aimed at those willing to work with social, small businesses and those willing to get more out of social media.

Strategy is as important as overhyped. Truth is that sometimes you don’t need a detailed plan. By the time you will implement it the scenario could possibly change. I share the thinking of @GuyKawasaki, read more here.

Nonetheless you need to have an engaging approach otherwise the result is opt out, this is an interesting research ExactTarget did on the reasons why we unfollow brands on Social.

At the end of the day with Social Media the end result is what counts.

My social projects always start with a simple question: What’s the Objective? Is your social media objective Traffic, Revenue, Reach or Customer Satisfaction?

I’ve found out that Social Advertising works specially to generate Traffic, Revenue and Growth.

Social Advertising is ideal for those with limited audience, time ad resources.

Your Social Advertising options span from Facebook to LinkedIn covering all social networks.

@eMarketer tells us that in 2012 3.9$B will be spent on Advertising on Social.

3 reasons to choose Social Advertising: it’s Measurable, it’s Accurate, it delivers organic clicks.

Let’s have a look at Twitter Ads. The analytics are quite detailed and cover engagement metrics on top of traditional campaign indications. I love how Twitter allows the advertiser to segment the audience to further target them in ads. It also suggests the most followed accounts by your followers. This is an extremely helpful benchmarking exercise.

In terms of Organic opportunities, this study by Nielsen – although on Facebook – sums up very well the impact of context for organic opportunities as well as increased Awareness, Recall and Purchase Intent.

I’ve calculated that Social Advertising is 12 times cheaper than traditional social campaigns. This obviously depends on the context, budget and market you are operating in.

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Post tags: facebook, facebook ads, google ads, remarketing, social advertising, social media marketing, social media strategy, social networks, twitter, twitter ads

Each network has it’s own language. There is no point in streaming the same message to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter at the same time.

Not anymore.

At least in regards to Twitter and Linkedin synchronisation.

LinkedIn introduced some changes to Profiles and Home Page that really make it a mini Twitter.

First the Follow Button:

Second the reorganised Updates:

It was an easy decision to sync it. I immediately saw the benefit with increased engagement on LinkedIn. Replies to updates like I’ve never seen before.

Boundaries between LinkedIn and Twitter are blurring, time to take advantage of it.

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What makes the case study particularly brilliant is that I am featured in it

I worked with the amazing Nichole Kelly of Full Frontal ROI to analyze the work I’ve coordinated on a recent campaign.

Here it is:

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In fact, social networks seem to have fully grasped what was the question most decision makers were asking. What’s the ROI of Social Media?

I’ve delivered a presentation to a crowd of 1100 people (700 live) during a Webinar about increasing the reach of social activities and measuring the impact.

I am going to write down some of those thoughts as they are applicable to most businesses experimenting with social.

Some Assumptions

Before I start though, I’ll make a couple of assumptions:

1. You understand the true spirit of social media where good content is king, spam is a virus and continuous self promotion is a terrible idea.

2. You have a clear funnel in place for the social channels you set up. You have a store on your Facebook page to sell products (if that is your objective), you schedule promotions via Twitter, you designed your blog really well with a clear call to action to your conversion page.

3 Common Problems

Assuming you’ve done the above, a common scenario is that you will immediately face 3 problems.

1. You want more people to follow you, Like you, subscribe to you – you want to increase the reach of your activities. Having your friends and family to join your Facebook page won’t be enough if you are a marketing professional.

2. You want the right people to follow you, only those that will buy (if your objective is to sell) or will be genuinely interested in participating (if your objective is to build awareness through great content).

3. You want to know what worked and what didn’t, you want to invest in the channels that work for you, not where the hype is.

These issues are usually solved by devoting large budgets to agencies, who seldom really deliver. Well I am here to tell you that you do have an alternative called social advertising

Introducing Social Advertising

What is Social Advertising?

Social Advertising exposes social media friendly content to more people via means of ads, sponsored content, promoted updates.

The main differences with other types of online advertising, such as paid search ie Google Adwords and Display Ads are as follows:

The 1st difference is that the target of social ads is indeed social media friendly (blog posts, facebook, pages, videos) instead of a traditional landing pages, more focused on conversion, for example the page where you sell your product.

The 2nd difference is about innovative metrics revolving around engagement such as Likes, Retweets that give measurability to non-monetary objectives.

What is the impact of Social Advertising?

Let’s look at some statistics that eMarketer put together:

Problem no.1, How do I drive more people to my pages?

Via targeted social ads.

I’ve laid out a nice table for you that summarises my experience with such tools.

On the first column you’ll find the type of content you are trying to push.

The second column highlights the best tool for that specific content.

The third column will give you an overview of what type of objectives such platforms serve better whether it is conversion or engagement. Some channels have stronger conversion potential, some others drive more engagement and therefore represent a better opportunity to influence awareness and perception.

Problem no.2, How do I drive the right people to my pages?

You are probably asking yourself whether it’ll all be a waste of time and that in fact you will get exposure but not to the right audience,

I invite you to drop the b2b vs b2c mentality, it does not apply when thinking social advertising. Social Networks have in fact created amazing tools to target users on the basis of their interest.

Therefore if you are marketing a gardening product, you will be able to target those interested in gardening whether the use the tool for business or pleasure.

Of course there is a major difference in the main purpose of Facebook and Linkedin, but if you play well with advanced targeting and you have a defined persona that usually buys your product, you will be able to substantially narrow down campaigns.

Problem no.3, Where is my ROI?

Most of these tools offer great analytics that will tell you exactly what you have generated through your campaigns.

They also introduce new metrics such as retweets or likes and give a monetary value to it.

This is in fact the revolution not lots of people understand. Scoping tools within Facebook or Twitter advertsing platforms give you an exact idea of how much a tweet or a like will cost.

Here is a sample of the metrics available:

Traditional:
- Traffic
- Click Through Rate (CTR)

Engagement:
- Retweets
- Facebook Likes
- StumbleUpon Score (% Thumb up/Thumb Down)
- StumbleUpon Likes
- StumbleUpon Reviews
- Youtube Comments
- Youtube Likes

Once you identified the costing of both you will then be able to work out what each campaign cost, what level of engagement it generated and how much money did it convert into.

No timelines, no undecifrable man-hour models.

A Sample Case Study

This brings me to elaborate on a sample case study summing up my experience with these tools over the past 2 years. Unfortunately I can’t be more precise as some data is under NDA but I can definitely share these 3 findings:

1. Outreach campaigns performed by agencies/consultants/experts/gurus etc tend to cost substantially more. At the end of the day I was able to establish how much does a generated tweet cost!

2. Most of the platforms give you organic opportunities. A promoted tweet can in fact be retweeted, a page can be liked by a user’s friend who saw the update on their wall or a StumbleUpon internal recommendation system.

3. Content with more traffic indexes better in Google. I’ve proven this on a number of projects and the amount of traffic you generate through these tools is increasingly having an impact within Google’s algorithm.

Photo by Hugo 90

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In short my experience tells me that Social Pay Per Click (PPC) is a game changer. It provides scalability and reach. These two little bastards (scalability and reach I mean) were quite tough to get in the past.

Having worked on a number of outreach campaigns I can comfortably say that gaining momentum has always been difficult. Moreover, exposing a piece of content to those who matter has never been an easy task, ending up lost in translation most of the times.

On top of that outreach strategies have been extremely costly, a solid foundation against Social Media ROI models.

Social PPC has given value to a Tweet, a Stumble or a Like.

I have worked on campaigns where one tweet was valued at 50£. These costing kills the business and makes an awful reputation to social media practitioners.

On the other hand, smart social networks are giving brands tools to properly reach out. Proper scale is obtained when you can target down to the very interest and in big numbers. The whole influencer bull%^&* will take you nowhere.

What I love about Social PPC is that you can count on outstanding targeting and deliver for the masses. Platforms such as Facebook or StumbleUpon have developed great dashboards to deliver extremely precise campaigns. Such accuracy is something traditional media can only guess, making your social marketing bet much more of a tangible one.

In conclusion I believe that as a social marketer you don’t have to be social, engage or enter any conversation. You just have to know the technology. Social PPC is here to stay and will deliver the most tangible results to those smart enough to understand its potential.

Photo Credit: batintherain

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Post tags: facebook advertsing, social ppc, stumbleupon, twitter ads

I can call myself someone who has something to do with social although I come from an event planning background and I dedicated my higher education to marketing.

I started investigating the possibilities of applying marketing in social media in 2004. This is not too long for those who can be called ‘experts’.

Nonetheless, I developed a great interest and spent everyday (12 hours a day, weekends included) for the subsequent 6 years investigating, learning, tweeting, blogging and coding (a little coding I must say).

My theory is that no matter what, 5 key characteristics define qualities of those who can be taken as legitimate social media practitioners.

1. Inclusiveness

Scarcity and unreachability define someone who is maybe a good PR person, but not a good social media practitioner. Lots of ‘I am social’ types do not reply to tweets or emails. Apart from the rudeness of the behaviour, I think this is a clear sign the person is not fit for the job. How can a customer service representative be arrogant by nature? How can a comedian be dull? Some skills you can’t learn. In some instances I have never got replies from people I wanted to hire, silly.
Seth Godin always replied to my emails in my early days. Chris Brogan used to although it looks like he is a bit busier lately. Update: Chris Brogan still does, despite the incredible volume of contacts.

2. Technical knowledge

Knowing the tech development that fueled the rise of social media and social networks is fundamental. I am not saying a social media expert should be a developer, but they need to understand the technical implication of going open vs proprietary, supported or unsupported. They need to know what’s new in APIs, why Ruby on Rails got popular, what jQuery achieves.
Knowing the technology aspects has saved the company I’ve worked with thousands of pounds, dollars and euros. This is about making the right choices. This is key when there are a number of agencies and vendors willing to sell ‘revolutionary’ services readily available for free on the market.

3. Have a blog

I am sorry but a twitter profile with 12K followers is not enough. It can easily be achieved with automated tools. The fact you share links about social media, does not make you an expert. What I impressed by is a well crafted blog with an original point of view. A good take on social current affairs is welcome. Popularity come and goes. Your opinion stays.

4. Being a geek

Slightly different from knowing the technology, although most of the time intrinsically connected. Being a geek to me means analysing, deconstructing and giving alternative answers to common issues. How to avoid paying premium on particular social networks and achieve the same results is a way of being geek. A posh picture with a drink in hand is usually the opposite of that.

5. Non-conformity

Real social media buddies do not necessarily conform to traditions. They understand that conformity means they are out of job. They innovate and adopt early. On the same perspective, disobedience is quite a useless opposite extreme. I have seen dozens of free spirits, citizens of the world becoming literally homeless because of their independence. This is not a skill, it is a weakness.

I wrote this post because I redefine everyday what my title means – I guess this was 2010.

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Enter the Fan Seeker:

What is the point mate? I simply don’t get it.

First of all I don’t know who this person is. He got in touch through a shared group. Well no worries on that, at the end of the day LinkedIn is meant to explore the new.

I am not asking to target your message to my profile, which would be ideal, but he’s pushing the boundary. Asking me for an action on an another social network is just creepy. Plus LinkedIn launched company pages, which make the request even more inappropriate.

It has to be said that the chap in question appears to be young and inexperienced. However you’d be amazed to know how many such requests I get from ‘seasoned professionals’.

My commitment is to expose them for your enjoyment.

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