Here’s an rock solid presentation on social media return on investment (ROI) to your CEO (or your boss) by Olivier Blanchard on slideshare. He made these available 2 years ago; that’s a long time in Internet years, maybe even longer in Internet marketing years. But his message is still quite relevant today and will be still relevant tomorrow. For business leaders who (still) have challenges in understanding this social media thing, this should help make things clearer.

Takeaway points:

• Social media is not free. It takes 1) people, 2) technology, and 3) time.
• Social media, like everything else in a business, must help reduce cost and increase revenue.
• Analytics only reports on non-financial impacts of social media.
• Social media performance needs to be tied to financial impact.
• To measure financial impacts of social media efforts, try the following:
  1. Establish a baseline (pre-social media measurements,)
  2. Create and report on social media activities timelines (social media activities over time,)
  3. Compare sales figures, number of transactions, net new customers before and since social media started; and be sure to include plenty of specific details on transactions.
  4. Measure transaction precursors such as new mentions, store traffic, website visitors, click through rates, blog comments, etc.
  5. Overlay all timelines to view transactions cause and effect together at the same time.
  6. Look for trends and related patterns.
• Then make business decisions to enhance what ‘s working and rectify what’s not.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

The Basics of Social Media ROI

Lee Odden posted a spot-on article on the Top Rank Online Marketing Blog called 5 Deadly Sins of Corporate Social Media Marketing. As the title indicates, Mr. Odden observed 5 sins that a company needs to be aware of when trying to implement a social media marketing strategy; what not to do in corporate social media marketing, so to speak. While I completely agree with everything Mr. Odden described, and we all should heed his recommendations, I want to take it another step and get down to the real source of the problem.

The real problem is not about knowing what to do or not to do. That can be learned. The real problem is corporate social media marketing management are creatures of habits.

Social media personnel (in-house) and consultants (outside help) run into this problem all the time. In fact I think it’s one of the most common problems after a company decides to pursue social media marketing. To understand this, first let’s look at Lee Odden’s 5 deadly sins.

1. Fear - It’s the “What if someone says something bad about us?” syndrome. We’ll get criticized and will look bad.
2. Arrogance - It’s the “I’m too big to care about anyone” syndrome. Not my customers, and certainly not my competitors.
3. Frugalism - It’s the “Let’s get our toes a little wet and see what happens” syndrome. Let’s just test a little bit here and there and don’t commit yet.
4. Egocentric – It’s the “What’s in it for me and my company” syndrome. Let’s push our messages out there first.
5. Pigeonholing – It’s the “Let’s just do this and this, and let’s not worry about those” syndrome. Management knows what’s good for our company so we’ll just do these things for now.

Can you see a common thread running through these sins? We can compartmentalize and categorize sins all we want, but I think it really doesn’t matter that we have a list of 5 or 10 sins, there will always be a common thread across them. What is it? Well it’s what I call the doing-business-as-usual, comfort zone syndrome. It’s the psyche in the vast majority of us as humans to keep gravitate back to our comfort zones, back to our protective shells.

Sure there will be the initial excitement of the new, the buzz and the cool, but short-term ROI will always win out when the dust settles. Companies start social media marketing either with in-house talents or by hiring an outside consultant to get going. The problem is that management’s expectation of the payback period is too short. After a short time has passed without clear tangible results (yet,) there is a “need” for management to step in to intervene and help guide and fix the process. That’s when the old process, what old school marketers know best, kicks in. This results in the many sins described above.

So what to do?

I wouldn’t say social media marketing is a mature branch of marketing as yet. On the other hand, considering the speed of how fast things progress on the Internet (technology, products and processes) business understanding of social media and its adoption is still sorely lacking. This is the reason why social media marketing professionals must continue to stress education as part of their initial marketing and sales presentations, then continue to carry the education portion right through the service phase and wrap up phases.

Actually if a company implements social media marketing correctly, there should be no wrap-up phase. Rather, social media marketing should become part of the company’s business best practices.

What do you think? Do you agree that much of social media marketing ills can be cured by readjusting our own habits? Share your opinion with us by leaving your comment below.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Social Media Marketing Deadly Sins – It’s Our Own Comfort Zones Stupid

Contemplating a business-to-business (B2B) social media marketing program at your organization? According to Dave Evans, Author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day, consider these three areas as the starting point:

1. Go where your customers are online. Find out where they are and participate in a transparent manner. No soft-sell, no hard-sell, in fact no selling at all. Just get involved, share and contribute.
2. Don’t try to control the conversation. Instead, understand, participate and share. You can share your viewpoints, but you have to respect others’ as well. The social mass is a smart group, so just bring and share your knowledge. The mass will appreciate it.
3. Leave the institutional voice behind. No marketing spiels, no business promotion, no company speak. Just get involved with the facts, good viewpoints, and be yourself.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Three Things to Do to Start a Social Media Marketing Program at Your Company

Everyone knows that advertising isn’t cheap. This is why social media is becoming a very important advertising channel. When done right, this low-cost “advertising platform” beats out all the other advertising methods hands down in terms of cost and effectiveness. A small or medium business should have six social media elements, according to Heather Lutze in a recent article at Tech Journal South called “Social media advertising strategy: six profiles you must have.”

Called the “Social Media Advertising Formula,” Ms. Lutze says there are six essential platforms that business owners must have to garner the potential of social advertising. Each platform offers you specific ingredients that only it can offer, so you’re not duplicating your social media effort when active on each one while targeting your message to targeted audience. Additionally, each platform allows you to optimize your presence and message best suited to its strongest points, furthering the effectiveness of your presence online. Targeting your audience and optimizing your presence equal best social advertising potentials.

Let’s look at the six.

• LinkedIn. This business profile site ranks well in search engines and is a great platform to keep business associates updated on your business events. To optimize your profile on LinkedIn, select one core keyword and use it frequently, but not without being spammy or sacrifice user experience.
• Facebook. This is a closed community so it does not rank in search engines. It is an effective place for personal profile online, but you can also use your business keywords to optimize your marketing effort. To optimize your profile on Facebook, select one business keyword and aim to become the subject matter expert in this community.
• MySpace. This is an open community, ranks very good in search engines, and allows full profile for businesses. To optimize your profile on MySpace, again use a specific keyword for your business, and take advantage of the search function to create an effective MySpace outreach network.
• YouTube. This is the biggest and most well known video sharing platform, and still is the best for viral marketing campaigns. You can run marketing campaigns for your own business and for your clients as well. To optimize your YouTube campaign, use each video to target specific keyword, and use the same keyword in both the video title and its description.
• Blog. You blog is one of the most important and easiest platforms to get yourself ranked high in organic search engine results. Blogs are also a great tool to build trusted followers as you build your (or your business’) own reputation. To optimize your blog, use specific keyword(s) for each post and use the same keywords in the meta title, meta description, and in the body of the post itself. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
• Twitter. This is the hottest micro blogging platform currently. Though it has several limitations, Twitter can be an effective tool for business as many can attest. Twitter posts are open so they also rank well in search engines. To optimize your presence on Twitter, brand your profile to reflect your product/service expertise, while using keywords in all your Twitter posts.

Read more on Heather Lutze’s “Social media advertising strategy: six profiles you must have.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising

JD Lasica recounted the Your Brand, Their World event at Razorfish on August 18 in San Francisco. The goal was to draw social media thought leaders and experts together to “discuss the ways in which social media is changing the relationship between customers and brands, and what it means to marketers, merchandisers, product developers, customer service organizations, R&D and senior management.”

Participants included Garrick Schmitt, GVP Experience Planning for Razorfish and an expert panel consisting of Megan O’Connor, Levi’s; Michael Brito, Intel; Marisa Gallagher, Razorfish; Sam Faillace, Shutterfly, and Jon Swartz, USA Today (moderator.) In addition, an engaging audience of social media and marketing specialists was present to share their views.

Here are some of ideas and highlights coming out of the panel and audience interaction.

• An interesting tweeting strategy for business: the 80-20 rule. Michael Brito tweets 80 percent personal and 20 percent business, which is a great reference for both beginner and experienced tweeple. If you are not sure about what mix your messages should have, this is a good starting point.
• Social media should not be the ultimate marketing tool but must be an important element in the marketing mix. Not all companies need a Faccebook or Twitter account. Ultimately, the key is to know what you want to achieve with social media and select the appropriate tools to meet your goals.
• While return on investment (ROI) is not an easy thing to quantify from social media marketing activities, Marisa Gallagher mentioned one of the best metrics: sales. This is right on because regardless of your goals for a specific campaign (brand awareness, survey participation, opinion gathering, etc.) what really matters to all company is sales.
• On Twitter followers, following and the value of realistic interaction, a great bottom line message seems to emerge. It’s this: “You can effectively interact with maybe a small finite number of people, but do not discount the benefit of having many more followers/friends. They may be lurkers and never interact with you, but they have their own networks, can like/don’t like what you say/offer, and will share their opinions about you with the world.”
• Someone from the audience offered a clear, simple and easy to understand roundup of inbound vs. outbound marketing. “Outbound is the traditional form of interruption advertising (commercials on TV, a billboard interrupting your thought process), while inbound marketing is about people opting in or getting recommendations from friends.”
• Here’s a little “Ah-ha!” moment on why a company decided to deploy (or not) social media: “The auto companies don’t have as much fear jumping into social media as some of the other incumbents because it’s do or die for them,” as commented by Gallagher. Sure, we all know the phrase: “Live everyday like it’s your last.” That’s how you make a difference.

There are a bunch more great takeaways from that meeting. Read more of JD Lasica’s post “Social media, brands and the way forward” over at socialmedia.biz.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success

Pear Analytics recently did a study on how people are using and consuming Twitter. The study took 2,000 random tweets from the public timeline in English and in the U.S. over a period of 2 weeks, from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and was posted by Ryan Kelly. While I applaud the effort and think they are on the right track on providing a super-value added study to the public and marketers, I wouldn’t call this a conclusive study. Ryan mentioned that they will update it regularly so that’s a good thing.

Here are the results of the study with the categories defined by Pear Analytics:

• Pointless babble 40.55%
• Conversational 37.55%
• Pass along value 8.70%
• Self promotion 5.85%
• Spam 3.75%
• News 3.60%

You can read about the details of the study yourself (link at end of this post.) Some of the most surprising results are the following:

• Self promotion and spam are not as prominent as many have complained about.
• News represents a very small amount of activities, despite recent media buzz.

So it looks like issues that affect many people (like the Iran election and spams) that receive huge news coverage also tend to pump up public impressions about Twitter and exaggerate their real impacts. The real numbers seem to show that these are not much of a problem; you just think they’re big problems because they’re constantly in your face or they annoy you a lot. With more refinement (such as extended time of day included in the study) we may see an increase in these numbers.

I look at this study as work in progress with better updates to be expected. Here are a few issues I see that should be resolved to improve the study value in the future:

• Pointless babble is not necessarily a negative thing as its name may suggest. This category needs more refinements as this big group represents many important pieces of information, both to consumers and marketers. For the consumers and individuals, it is exactly the social aspect of social networking, and people will continue to socialize the way they want to. All you can do accept it and understand it, not control or eliminate it. And this social spaces and activities are exactly where marketers need to be to understand consumer behaviors.
• The time periods of 11:00 am to 5:00 pm CST is too limited to really understand Twitter users in the U.S. It’s only 6 hours of each of the time zones. At a minimum I think the study should begin at 6:00 am to midnight for each time zone. As it is, it merely tracks only the lunch to early evening hours of east coast time (noon to 6:00 pm, entirely missing 12 hours of east coast tweets,) and includes only the mid morning to mid-afternoon hours of west coast time (9:00 am to 3:00 pm, again entirely missing 12 hours of west coast tweets in the morning, late afternoon and evenings.)

See the original Pear Analytics post on “Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

So I had a problem with Bing claiming to help you make decisions (see Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine.) But a recent post by Benj Arriola from BusinessOnLine really put the nail in the coffin.

Through a tip from an SEO friend, Benj demonstrated in a simple search test that Bing search results are way biased, or inadequate for a major search engine, or both. The test consisted of searching for the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” in each of the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine. A very reasonable task, I should add.

Guess what the results were? In a nutshell:

• Google search engine: Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results. No surprise because that’s what you’d expect for well-known sites.
• Yahoo search engine: Same expected results. Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results.
• Bing search engine. The search on “Google” gives a single result on google.com. The search on “Yahoo” gives a single result on yahoo.com. But the search on “Microsoft” yields plenty of results on both the company and its various products and services!

You can test all of this by conducting the searches yourselves. It’s totally duplicable, at least for now. Below are my own tests.

Google search engine results.

Yahoo search engine results.

Bing search engine results.

These are real funny results. Heck, the term “yak” (or substitute your own term) returns more results than “Google” and “Yahoo” combined, according to Bing.

Oh and another thing. If you look at Bing’s search results for “Google” and “Yahoo” you’ll see to the right of the single result in each case is a list of similar search engines. And Bing is at the top of this list. But when you search for “Bing” on Bing, there is no list for alternative search engines to be seen anywhere. It’s like google and Yahoo don’t exist. Pretty odd.

The bottom line: I don’t think users of Bing is getting unbiased search results. You can make your own conclusion.

Read Benj’s post “Should I Trust Bing’s Search Engine Results?“

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

Regardless of how popular or visible Twitter is currently, your corporate social marketing and new media strategy still need to maintain an effective blog. Twitter or FaceBook alone cannot solve all your marketing challenges, but a corporate blog remains a very strong and viable marketing channel. Whatever you do, you’ll need to pay special attention to 2 key elements of corporate blogging: content relevancy and trackable analytics.

Content Relevancy

Content has been king, and will always be king for your corporate blog. It’s hard to defeat great content using anything else, tricks or otherwise. If you don’t have great content, then whatever you do won’t affect your site’s popularity or traffic in any meaningful manner. In fact the goodness of your content correlates directly to how relevant you are to your prospects and customers. Are you providing the right information that your prospects are looking for, at the time they’re looking for it? Are you making available help to solve your customer’s dilemma in a timely manner? Are you providing solutions that eliminate your clients’ problems before your competition does? In short, your corporate blog is a very powerful tool, and it can help you provide relevant content that is totally under your control.

Trackable Analytics

Analytics play several different important roles. One, it can help you find out what visitors are looking for and how they are finding them. It can also show you how your company may be able to satisfy that need. Two, it can be used to help guide your content generation plan. As we discussed before, relevant content is critical, and knowing what content is relevant before you generate it is a no brainer. As a bonus, trackable analytics can also give you a roadmap with which to directly engage with your audience, at the specific time and place in the blogosphere when they congregate.

Tips to Running Effective Corporate Blog

So how do you maintain a strong corporate blog in order to engage with your customers, build your brand, while at the same time drive potential sales? Consider these following tips:

1. Go where the buzz is. Know where the conversations are taking place that either talk about your brand or discuss something that your brand can help solve. Get involved with genuine desire to help, to build relationship and to establish yourself as subject matter expert. No marketing spiel is needed here; just stick to the facts. That’s what people are looking for. To help with this discovering and listening task, there are social media “listening tools” available to help.
2. Making and maintaining contact. Once you find out where you can beneficially contribute to the conversation, interact with both those already familiar with your brand and those new to it. Think carefully before you engage to make sure you understand the conversation and meaning behind each and every conversation thread. Again your involvement in the conversation must be relevant and helpful, or at least contributes on an informational level, otherwise you’ll be looked at as someone just out for personal gains. Lastly, maintain all social networking etiquette at all times, because you need to. To read more on social networking etiquette, here are a couple of articles to help: SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools, and Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox.
3. Maintain a powerful corporate blog. Make it exciting. Make it attractive. All rules about good website designs still apply, including easy and clear navigation, fast loading speed, simple yet effective interface, etc. And most importantly, post fresh and relevant articles often, and invite interaction and feedback.
4. Stay in control and work smart. A successful corporate blog doesn’t have to cost an arm or a leg. Once you established your plan and strategy, it’s easy to post new posts, it’s cheap to use monitoring tools and follow/track the blogosphere, and it’s painless to participate in dialogue to help other people. Corporate blogging does take time, so it helps to keep it simple and institute a routine and stick with it.
5. Continuously develop your social networking and new media skills. Common stumbling blocks abound. They include falling behind with regular posting of fresh and relevant articles, failing to follow and keep engaged in conversation threads, running up against corporate policies that should have been created at the beginning of your corporate blogging venture, and not taking advantage of all possible effective social networking traffic channels. You may be leaving free customer traffic on the table without realizing it.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

“What Women Want.” That’s how Ford did it.

Getting bloggers involved. Prominent, well-known women bloggers. And get instant buzz in the process. It’s focus groups at work in the new social media space. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s not a new trend. Pepsi did it in their Pepsi rebranding campaign. The Air Force is doing it in their Air Force social media push. And you remember 3M’s Post-It Note Carjacks? Now Ford is doing it with refined social media skills. But really, bloggers watch out, you may be part of a bigger PR machine without realizing it.

Check out any of these Ford YouTube videos. Here are some samples of blogger reviews.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU-A6kCnbTA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDC1sBQY038

Ford describes the event in an article titled “Ford Wants to Know: What do Woman [sic] Really Want?” which included breakfast with a Ford executive, a day packed with hands-on tours, test drives and roundtable discussions, and I’m sure schwags. By the way, the event was conducted during the 5th Annual BlogHer ’09 Conference, July 23-25, 2009. Quite timely and convenient.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always advocated that businesses need to get more into social network marketing and develop strong new media strategies. But there’s a grey area that both companies and bloggers need to be careful not to cross. In this case, to me anyway, if Ford really wants to get women’s input to help design future cars, the company probably won’t get them just from this narrow group of women demographic. But they will get a lot of free blog posts and discussions out of it, that’s for sure.

The final score: thumbs up for Ford marketing, a “huh, what were you thinking?” for the bloggers.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz

Think lawyers are expensive? Maybe so. But it’s cheaper to bring them in before you have a problem. This common wisdom holds especially true for your corporate social media strategy, which is why your social media team should have a legal representative as well.

It should be a requirement to make legal professionals part of your team from the inception. Bringing them in on the back end to clean up a mess is never desirable. Plus it doesn’t make for a great collaborative relationship, because you messed up and you now need legal’s help. And solving legal problems on the back end is never pleasant. It’s far better to know and establish legal rules of the social media road before you’re entering into and engaging in conversations on social media sites. Let’s face it, corporate social media activities are really public relations (PR) in the new social networking space. Therefore it makes sense

Part of the POST method, your new media team should, at a minimum, get legal involved in the O (Objectives) and S (Strategies) phases. At a generic level, legal can help you stay out of trouble, guide you in all policies relating to news media and customer-facing communications. Legal can also provide you with guidelines on what an employee can and cannot (or should and should not) do in the social media arena. Here are some specific roles of legal participation within the social media team:

• Social Media Policies. Comments, backtracks, discussions on and off of your site. This covers locations both within your own websites, blogs forums, and on other websites, blogs and forums. It also controls how your employee(s) should start new topics, and how to resolve complaints and negative feedback. Legal can provide guidance.
• Authorized Corporate Bloggers. If you’ll have just a few key individuals actually doing the engagement with the outside world, establish rules for them to follow. Otherwise if you encourage a wider employee participation, then have a different set of rules applied to all. The key words here are guidance and coordination, not hindrance. Legal can help establish rules.
• Social Media Interaction. We all know that the Internet is always open, and with the global reach that it provides, the corporate social media team (and therefore your company) is also always open. Consumers worldwide are active in the social media space all the time (and especially after work within their local time,) your social media team must be ready to engage at any time of day, within reason. This is especially critical when a potential issue (positive or negative) about the company and its products is going viral. So you’ll need to be involved early. Legal can help define the dos and don’ts.

With all these guidelines in your pocket, you are now ready to go all out and promote your company, products and services. They will protect you while you’re out there engaging, supporting and solving your customers’ problems.

So go ahead. Build your social media team. Select the best and sharpest marketers, PR people, and technologists. Just don’t leave out the legal rep.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team