Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’
Is Social Media BS?
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010That was the provocative question raised, and answered, by HubSpot VP of Marketing Mike Volpe in a webinar last Friday. Per Mike’s usual style, the webinar was packed with helpful information but too much for one sitting, and to get through it all Mike talks at about twice the speed of those disclaimers at the end of radio ads. HubSpot has apparently found a way to pump oxygen directly into Mike’s lungs, as he didn’t audibly pause to take a breath for the first 40 minutes of this presentation.
Traditionally, big brands used TV and print advertising, while their smaller counterparts employed direct mail and telemarketing, to reach consumers directly through interruption marketing. When marketing moved online, advertisers shifted efforts to banner ads, pop-ups and email marketing. But caller ID, DVRs and ad blocking software have put consumers in control of the marketing messages they see; traditional interruption marketing is becoming progressively less effective. Mike’s answer is to shift to inbound marketing: think like a publisher, produce valuable and interesting content, share it where people are talking about your industry or the types of problems you solve, and let buyers come to you.
Key point #1: Social media is a critical component of inbound marketing. But it’s only one part. Successful marketers can’t rely solely on social media or treat it as a silo, separate from other marketing activities. It has to be part of the fabric of marketing efforts.
Key point #2: To be successful with social media, you need to change the way you do business. Some—in fact, many—types of marketing activities lend themselves to testing. You can run a small AdWords campaign focused on a single asset to determine whether a bigger campaign is justified. You can test banner advertising on an industry publication site for a month or two before deciding to commit to a longer run. You can send a small delegation to a trade show to evaluate the potential for a big booth next year.
Social media is different, however. It isn’t another channel, it’s a new way of engaging your audience. Trial efforts are doomed to failure because it takes time to attract a following and build trust. You can’t dip your toe in the water, and don’t put an intern in charge of your social media efforts! You have to jump in all the way, and involve your best people: the ones who know your products and services inside and out, and understand the issues your customers face.
Success at inbound marketing requires that social media be integrated with other marketing objectives: branding, content, SEO, research, and lead generation. This diagram from HubSpot illustrates the relationship visually.
Key point #3: A blog should be at the center of social media efforts. Blogging makes you and/or you company more interesting online. Content powers social media success. It adds substance to your Facebook status updates and tweets.
Key point #4: In today’s world, a brand is what consumers say it is. In the old days (pre-2003 or so), brands were carefully crafted by agencies, creatively packaged, and presented to the public via one-way broadcast communications (TV, magazines, direct mail). With the rise of social networks, blogs, forums and review sites, markets now define brands. Companies can enhance (or damage) their brand image based on how they respond. For example, poor customer service? Fix it. Then humbly tell the world what you’ve done. Argument, advertising, or avoidance are all losing strategies.
Key point #5: Marketers should spend 100% of their time on social media. This was actually addressed as an answer to a question about the appropriate amount of time to allocate to social media activities. Mike’s answer was brilliant: “I spend 100% of my time on social media. But I also spend 100% of my time on SEO, 100% on developing new content, 100% on lead generation, 100% on branding…it’s all one activity, not disconnected efforts.”
Key point #6: Your buyers are now in control. It’s getting increasingly difficult, expensive and ineffective to buy the attention of your market (see the second paragraph above). You have to earn it. Thinking like a publisher and socializer rather than an advertiser enables you to earn that attention. If you don’t earn your buyers’ attention, they’ll stop following you. If your Twitter following starts decreasing or your Facebook fans begin to disappear, it’s time to take a hard look at what you’re doing and make changes.
Compelling Stats
Combining social media with SEO provides 97% more links, on average, back to a web site.
Websites with blogs attract 55% more visitors on average than traditional static websites.
Twitter users who also have blogs have 79% more followers on average than Twitterers who don’t blog (and that figure is even higher—102%—for small businesses that lack the drawing power of a popular brand).
In a recent HubSpot survey, more than 40% of respondents said they had landed new customers or generated revenue from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and/or a company blog.
Takeaways
So what should you do? The presentation included “Practical Tips” at the end of each section, among them:
- • Start a blog about your industry—not your company. Try to make it the premier publication for buyers in your industry.
- • Post blog content to social media, and put social sharing buttons on your content, making it easy for your readers to share as well.
- • Use social media intelligence on your leads. For example, if you generated a lead through LinkedIn, and that buyer appears to be very active there, communicate with him/her through LinkedIn. Don’t force them into a different channel. And watch what they are posting about, questions they ask, etc. to learn more about their needs.
- • Use social media monitoring tools to track your brand mentions, and also those of competitors. What your competitors are saying on social networks can give you a glimpse into their strategies. And what their customers are saying can tell you a lot about their strengths and shortcomings.
- • Follow your target customers. Listen to what they are saying—really listen—before responding. Ask lots of questions.
Which Brings Us To…
Key point #7: Social media is here to stay. Traditionally, all marketing channels have become less effective over time. For example, the first companies to advertise on TV were highly successful with it, but as more and more companies began running commercials, they became less effective. Today, many viewers record their favorite shows and skip through the commercials. Similarly, direct mail was a highly effective channel at first, before it became saturated and the term “junk mail” was coined. Ditto for telemarketing. And email marketing. So why should social media be any different? Because it is the only channel where the user is in control. If a thousand companies start using Twitter as a broadcast platform for 140-character ads, it doesn’t make Twitter any less valuable and no one has to quit—people will simply not follow those companies.
True, the evolution of marketing will continue, perpetually, and eventually it’s likely some new shiny, sparkly thing will come along that grabs everyone’s attention. But the user-control aspect of social media is likely to continue fueling its popularity and growth for a long time to come. Enterprises and marketers who embrace this and focus on earning attention will prevail over those still trying to buy it.
Four Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Results
Monday, August 9th, 2010While there are unquestionably many ways that social media marketing results can be measured, the debate rages on as to whether it’s truly possible to quantify the ROI from these activities. Some experts contend that because social media activity is rich in metrics, you can and should be measuring ROI constantly. Others argue that social media is a tool, not an event, so applying an ROI to social media is akin to calculating the ROI of your phone, or that at this point the business risks of ignoring social media are so great that ROI is immaterial.
Measuring the ROI of social media is challenging for several reasons, the most significant of which is the problem of “last click attribution;” just because a sale or lead “came from” Twitter or Facebook as the last click doesn’t necessarily mean that site deserves all the credit. The prospect or buyer likely had several other exposure points to your brand prior to that click (visiting your booth at a trade show, hearing someone from your company speak, seeing an ad, reading about your firm on a blog or an industry trade press article or analyst report, etc.). Assigning proper credit to each of these sources is impossible; assigning all of the credit to any one of them is inaccurate.
Still, much of what happens in social media is highly measurable, and these metrics can lead to an least indirect evaluation of the value of different media, activities, topics and tactics. Here are four areas of social media metrics worth tracking, even if they don’t provide direct ROI calculations.
Influence: a.k.a. “reach,” these are high-level measures of your brand or company’s presence in social media, such as number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members, mentions across social media (you’ll want to pick one social media monitoring tool for this and stick with it for a while, for the sake of consistency of month-to-month comparisons). This category can also include metrics like blog visitors and RSS / email subscribers. While larger numbers are generally better, keep in mind that it’s easy to inflate a Twitter following (note all of the spammy “Internet marketers” with ridiculously large follower counts) and that in terms of generating business value, quality is more important than quantity.
Engagement: A level deeper than influence, these metrics include the number of RT’s and #followfriday recommendations you get on Twitter, posts to your company’s Facebook wall, questions answered on LinkedIn or Yahoo! Answers, comments posted on your blog, etc. Anything that measures social interaction. Again, more is generally better (spammy blog comments aside), as engagement is the “social” in social media.
Sentiment: Are the comments, posts etc. being made about your company, brand, product or service generally positive, negative or neutral? This is a very important metric to track, but accuracy can be a challenge, particularly for mid-sized companies. Small companies may have so few social mentions to track that the process can be done manually, leading to theoretically perfect accuracy. Mid-sized to large firms may rely on fee-based social media monitoring tools like Radian 6, Alterian SM2, Cision or Vocus which provide automated sentiment tracking, while global brands can use tools like Neilsen BuzzMetrics or Cymfony.
No automated sentiment tracking tool is perfect (for example, “It sucks having a cold but NyQuil is helping” may be tagged as a negative brand reference for Vicks because of the way that sentence started). Accuracy is most problematic for mid-sized firms that have too many brand mentions to track manually but can’t justify the cost of the most sophisticated tools. For large brands, the number of social media mentions is so large that errors in automated tracking tend to cancel each other out, meaning that overall sentiment analysis can be highly accurate even though individual items may be mis-flagged.
Activity: Most web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can be used to track the number of visits, traffic quality (e.g. average time spent on site, number of pages viewed, bounce rate) and even conversion (lead or sale) sources. Again, while this information is certainly helpful, it shouldn’t be relied upon as a precise ROI measurement for several reasons, including the last-click attribution issue noted above, and the fact that some analytics packages (Google included) don’t measure social media referrals accurately; Google Analytics dramatically undercounts Twitter visits, for example.
Particularly in this tough economic environment, where every expenditure is receiving even greater than normal scrutiny, numbers matter. The C-suite expects justification for every dollar spent, including investments in social media marketing. You can’t afford to ignore what customers and other influencers are saying about your brand, but need to quantify the benefits of social media monitoring and participation, in some manner, as well. Calculating ROI with any precision is problematic, but there are still many aspects of social media which can and should be measured. These provide a picture of the benefits of specific social media tools, tactics and activities which can justify expenses and help guide activities—even without perfect cost-benefit analyses.
Five Social Media Marketing Reports and Guides Worth Checking Out
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Much has been written about content marketing from the delivery side. As advertising is increasingly looked upon with skepticism if not simply tuned out, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to buy your prospects’ attention; it has to be earned. Substituting thought-leadership content for ad copy—telling rather than selling—should benefit both buyers and sellers, by increasing the knowledge of buyers and shortening sales cycles (though this latter effect may be masked by current economic conditions).
For those whose job it is to generate leads and sales through content and social media, here are five excellent new resources to help increase your knowledge.
A B2B Marketer’s Guide to Great Facebook Pages from HubSpot (29 pages)
Though Facebook is generally more effective for b2c marketers than on the b2b side (as even this report notes), there are nevertheless b2b companies standing out from the crowd by getting results through Facebook. How are they doing it? This report highlights five tips, 15 examples of winning b2b Facebook pages, and eight additional resources on using Facebook for business.
Among the tips: build an active wall by encouraging “likes,” posting useful content on a regular basis, and monitoring and responding to wall comments. Take advantage of the medium using pictures and other media. Companies cited as role models include web conferencing provider Dimdim, HR software provider Taleo and telecom firm Unified360.
Don’t create a business Facebook page without checking out this report. And if your business already has a presence on Facebook, but it isn’t delivering the results you’d hope for, this report will likely give you ideas on how to improve your presence and interactivity.
Social Media Marketing GPS (91 pages)
Insights from more than three dozen social media marketing experts including Ann Handley, Marc Meyer, B.L. Ochman, Yvonne DiVita, Beth Harte, Scott Monty, Peter Kim, Liz Strauss and David Meerman Scott on topics ranging from social media research, ethics and strategy to branding and metrics—all in 140-character snippets. Yes, as Shel Israel writes in the foreword, “It had to happen—an entire book, one tweet a time, and yet it is a real book that will help you understand what SM is about.
SMGPS will tell you the why & how using social media, 1 tweet at a time. You’ll learn essentials in digestible little spoonfuls.
The book will explain why old-school broadcast practices are waning and new conversational methods are on the rise.
This is the way it should be. These days, companies cannot waste money. They need to cut costs.
And SM is MUCH more efficient.
Writing a book in tweets is like writing a very long #Haiku series.
Reading it should be both interesting and useful.”
10 Key Online Marketing Trends for 2010 (3 pages)
As online marketing continues to rapidly evolve, web analytics provider Unica surveyed 155 marketing pros about their technology usage and plans to develop this concise report. While some of the findings are hardly earth-shaking (e.g., budgets continue to shift from offline to online, and “[companies] will expand their social media participation and continue to nurture a wide variety of social media tactics”), others are more interesting.
For example, the report predicts that by the end of 2010, more than 3/4 of companies will use targeting and personalization on their websites. Two-thirds of marketers “complained about IT’s support for marketing’s technology needs,” a major factor driving adoption of on-demand or SaaS applications. And adoption of mobile marketing is expected to more than double this year, despite recent findings from groups such as Forrester that less than 5% of U.S. online users have ever used location-based applications on a mobile device, and only about 1% do so regularly.
2010 Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study (32 pages)
This report explores the state of current b2b lead generation efforts and, more importantly, provides recommendations for marketers on how to improve both the productivity of lead generation programs and the measurement of ROI. Nearly half of all b2b marketers said they can’t predict the impact on lead production from a 10% increase in budget.
But among marketers who do have the information to make such predictions, 6 in 10 indicated they could deliver more than a 10% increase in leads. Lead tracking metrics tend to favor last-click attribution and lead quantity over quality (which will hardly come as a shock to most b2b marketers). Yet marketers recognize that high-engagement tactics (such as webinars) drive higher quality leads than do “promotional” tactics such as incentives and limited-time discounts.
The report recommends using richer metrics to measure not only the last click leading to a conversion, but also the effect of other activities (e.g., social media, PR, advertising) that support that activity. This requires use of exposure and interaction metrics in addition to direct lead conversion measures.
MarketingSherpa’s Top 7 B2B Case Studies for 2010 (64 pages)
As the introduction here notes, “It’s one thing to pick up a workbook that provides you with best practices. But, it’s an entirely different challenge to implement those best practices into the real world…MarketingSherpa know(s) this better than anyone. Sherpa’s reporters spend much of their time scouring the business world for marketing case studies. And not just any case studies—but the ones that offer marketers practical solutions for their companies.”
This report presents seven hand-picked case studies from MarketingSherpa’s vast library showing how companies can improve ROI while increasing leads, generate effective content, improve search engine rankings, nurture leads through the funnel and more.
Disclosure: As a RevResponse affiliate, I receive an obscenely modest spiff for each download of the Social Media Marketing GPS report. The others I just think are helpful and interesting.
Social Media Strategy? Think Like a Reporter
Monday, July 12th, 2010Recent surveys have shown that while businesses are embracing social media in droves, many are doing so without any real strategy in place. Without a strategy, there may be no clear ownership, or definition of success, or measurement, or integration with other marketing and PR efforts—all of which can lead eventually to wasted time and effort, abandoned blogs and Facebook pages, and even the erroneous conclusion that social media doesn’t work for us.
Yet developing such a strategy can be challenging; where does one start? Most of us have, through the classroom, TV shows or somewhere in life, learned about the reporter’s questions: who, what, when, where and why. Just as these questions are critical to solid journalism, so they can be invaluable to social media strategy development.
Who: the first who question is who will be in charge of social media efforts? Responsibility should be placed as high as possible—with the CEO ideally (think Tony Hsieh, or Jonathan Schwartz before the sale to Oracle). If not possible, then responsibility should rest with an executive in marketing, PR, product management or customer service. If absolutely necessary, this leadership can be outsourced, but only as part of a close long-term relationship. Who else will be involved? In all but the smallest companies, there are often multiple individuals tweeting, networking and even contributing to the company blog. In these situations, it’s imperative to have a social media policy in place, encourage subject matter experts (SME’s) to share their unique knowledge, and remember that everyone who participates is acting as a public face for the company—social media isn’t a job for an intern.
What: what type of information will you use to attract a social media following? In b2c, contests, games, apps and coupons are popular content. In the b2b world, thought leadership content is key, but this can take different forms depending on your resources and style: blogs are the most common media, but video, podcasting, online presentations and articles are other ways to share information and education with prospects. What also refers to subject matter—in b2b, that usually means reporting on research, offering a unique perspective on industry developments, solving problems, providing how-to guides, or presenting other information that is of value to your audience and positions your people as the experts.
When: how often will you write new blog posts? Tweet? Update your company’s Facebook page? The answers will be different depending on your company’s resources, the amount of content you have to work with, the number of employees involved in your social media efforts, the specific social media tool and other factors. In general, more is better, and most companies could probably benefit from greater social media activity, not less. There is a risk of over-doing things, particularly on Twitter, but as long as your focus is on adding value rather than self-promotion, few followers are likely to complain. Most companies find that the amount of time they need to devote to social media, particularly to engagement, starts out modestly and increases over time as their blog readership, Twitter following, Facebook fan base and other groups grow.
Where: which social media sites and tools will you use? There’s no question that blogs (which usually mean WordPress), Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have emerged as the “big four” social media venues. According to recent research, these are used by 70% or more of those active in social media (no other single tool was used by more than half of respondents). Twitter is probably the closest thing to a universal social media tool for business, while Facebook is huge in b2c, and LinkedIn is indispensable on the b2b side. These are the tools to start with, but by no means should a social media strategy be limited to these: depending again on talent, resources, corporate personality etc., other tools to take into account include YouTube and Vimeo (video sharing); SlideShare (presentations); social bookmarking sites like Digg, delicious and Propeller; online forums (there are specific forums for almost any industry); Ning (for creating your own community or finding others to engage with); PitchEngine (social PR); and social profile sites like VisualCV and PeoplePond, just to name a few.
Why: possibly the most important question of all. What is your company aiming to accomplish through social media? What are your goals? How will you measure them? There are at least a hundred ways to measure social media success and more than a hundred tools for monitoring them. While measuring social media ROI is difficult to do with any precision, it’s important to use what measures you can to help gauge the impact and continually improve your efforts.
Crafting a social media strategy is vital to achieving success and avoiding wasted efforts. It’s a challenging exercise, but one that can made easier by thinking differently—such as like a reporter.
Looking Back at 100: Top 10 Posts on the Webbiquity Blog (So Far)
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010Hard to believe that this blog, officially launched just a few months ago, has already surpassed 100 posts. But here we are! Thank you for reading, and without further ado, below are the 10 most-viewed posts on this blog to date. Some of the entries are surprising, but life can be like that. These are the posts that readers have “voted” as the best by their traffic so far.
10. How to Write an Ad Agency RFP
This one surprised me. Small companies don’t bother with agency RFPs (nor should they) and even mid-sized companies use them less today than in the past. But if your company wants to use an RFP process to help in selecting a marketing agency, this post will help you craft one that meets your needs without driving the responding agencies crazy.
9. Social Media is Simpler Than You Think
A post that explains why “social media marketing is simpler than you’ve probably been led to believe. At its core, social media is not about doing new things, but about doing things you’ve always done as a business person differently.”
8. (Almost) 100 (of the) Best Social Media Marketing Blog Posts and Articles of 2009
A bookmarkable collection of some of the best thinking about social media last year, grouped into specific topic areas such as “Social Media Measurement and ROI,” “Social Media Statistics and Research” and “Social Media Marketing Strategy, Tactics and Best Practices.”
7. What is Webbiquity? How to Be Everywhere Online
The inaugural post on Webbiquity explains the concept of web presence optimization—how websites, blogs, SEM, SEO, interactive PR, content marketing, social networking, reputation management and social media can work together to make a company or individual omnipresent online for their targeted description or value statement.
6. How to Write an Effective Business Blog
A Blogging 101 type article for anyone who wants to get started blogging on the right foot, and avoid the missteps and false starts common in the blogosphere.
5. Five Big Shifts in Social Media Marketing
How social media is a reflection of and response to broader shifts in the market and culture that make it increasingly difficult (and irrelevant) to try to buy attention, but critical to earn it. For example, brands no longer control their messages—their customers do. But social media provides marketers with the tools to monitor, participate in and help shape the conversations.
4. The One Effective Use of Facebook for B2B Marketing
Given the dominance of Facebook on the social media landscape, it’s not surprising that this most is among the four most-read pieces on this blog. It’s a bit surprising however that it didn’t stir up more controversy; maybe I’m right about this?
3. Best Social Media Stats and Market Research of 2009
It’s heartening to know that as a data junky, I’m not alone. Wondering how the demographics of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook users compare? Which social networking site 80% of companies plan to use a primary recruiting tool this year? What percentage of consumers and b2b buyers read blogs? You’ll find those answers and more here.
2. How to Choose a Marketing Agency (Ad Agency)
I’m really surprised by this one. As with the how-to-write-an-RFP post noted earlier, this outlines a solid, traditional process for mid-sized companies but overkill for small firms.
Drumroll please…#1 with nearly 3X as many visits as #10 above is…
1. 11 Myths of Social Media Marketing
Social media is only for the young, it’s free, we can hire an intern to do it, and eight other myths destroyed. Well, at least some were destroyed; others sparked disagreement in the comments.
Now on the next 100 posts!
