Posts Tagged ‘social media strategy’
How (and Why) to Map Your Company’s Digital Landscape
Friday, March 30th, 2012With more than 90% of companies now using social media to find employees and 82% having a Facebook page, there’s no question that business use of social media has become commonplace. But “use” and “success” are two different things. Many organizations, having now realized that the “build it and they will come” model doesn’t work in social media and that it isn’t just another channel for promoting news releases and marketing brochures, are stepping back and retooling their social media strategies.
If you’re developing a new social media program, revamping one that’s failed to achieve hoped-for results, or just trying to make an existing strategy more successful, one key component to start with is an analysis of your social media or digital landscape. This analysis will help you understand:
- • Where your prospective buyers are congregating in social media, and what they are talking about.
- • What your competitors are doing in social media.
- • Which voices are most influential in your market space.
Here’s a four step plan for creating a digital landscape analysis for your organization, to help build or rebuild a successful social media marketing strategy.
1. Evaluate how your competitors are using social media. For both strategic and benchmarking purposes, create a spreadsheet listing your top competitors and, for each, showing:
- • Social features on their website (e.g. do they have a blog, how prominently is it featured, social bookmarking links, social media account links, etc.).
- • Twitter metrics (followers, following, frequency of tweets, general level of interactivity).
- • Facebook / LinkedIn / Google Plus metrics (i.e. followers/fans/circles, how complete is their profile, level of activity).
- • YouTube metrics (total videos uploaded, subscribers, video views, recency of last update).
- • Other social activity and presence (Flickr, SlideShare, Wikipedia, etc.).
Collecting this information is Phase I. This will give you a rough benchmark for your own social media activity (if you already have an active program) and will help you identify any positive outliers—competitors who are far more successful than average in social media—to take a closer look at.
When creating your strategy, you’ll revisit this data and take a closer look at exactly what these competitors are doing (particularly the more successful ones). The point is not to copy anyone else’s strategy as your company’s approach should be designed to capitalize on your own unique strengths, but rather just to see what you can learn from competitors’ success and make sure you aren’t overlooking any obvious tactics or techniques.
2. Identify the key influencers in your market. The next step is to identify the influential voices in your community that you’ll want to reach out to, connect with, and begin building relationships with. These are the journalists, bloggers, analysts (industry or financial) and others who can help amplify your content, spread your story, and lend credibility to your messages.
If you’ve got the budget, the quickest and easiest way to build a list is by using a PR and social media monitoring tool such as Cision, Vocus or MyMediaInfo. If not, or to supplement the results from those paid tools, do some manual research using free tools like AllTop, Technorati and Google Blog Search.
These tools will tell you who is talking about a particular topic, but not necessarily how influential or important any individual source is. In an ideal world, there would be a standardized measure of some sort. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, use influencer rating tools like Klout and Kred in conjunction with checking which blogs are featured most often on blog rolls of target bloggers (an informative though imprecise measure of influence) and the Pagerank of each blog. Combing these measures provides at least a rough guide to the relative influence of various sources.
3. Find relevant groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. This is as simple as searching within “groups” on each social networking site for your primary keywords and recording the results. Note how many groups you find, how large the groups are, and how active they appear to be. Business-related topics will generally have more, larger groups on LinkedIn than Facebook, while the opposite is typically true for consumer topics.
Once you’re in the execution phase, you’ll of course want to monitor, contribute to and interact within the most important and active groups on your list. But in the digital landscape analysis, it’s enough to flag these groups for further investigation.
4. Look for other places where people are talking about your industry. Your prospective buyers are likely having conversations in places well beyond the big five social networking sites. If you’re using a professional (fee-based) social media monitoring tool, start there to identify these message boards, forums and other sites where people in your market are asking and answering questions.
An excellent free tool for conducting this research is Google Discussion Search (run a search on Google, click “More” in the left sidebar then click “Discussions”). It takes a bit of manual effort, but you can build a fairly comprehensive list of discussion forums and message boards by running multiple searches on Google Discussion Search, capturing the results to Excel using SEOquake, then sorting the list by frequency.
With these four steps completed, you’ll have a comprehensive picture of your company’s digital landscape in place to serve as a basis for developing a new or revised social media strategy and tactical plan.
10 Ways to Use Social Networks for B2B Marketing
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011Social networks are essential for expanding your web presence—not only for creating social signals now a key component in search engine rankings, which makes your website and blog easier to find in search, but also by giving you more places to be found online.
Creating your profile on each of the major social networks is a first step, but just that. A profile alone won’t get you much. As with most things in life, you’ll get out of social networks what you put into them.
Once you’ve filled out your profile (particularly including your core keywords and links), the basic process for using any of the more than 500 social networks now in existence is pretty much the same:
- Find interesting/relevant/influential people to follow/like/connect with.
- Grow your influence and attract followers/friends/connections by sharing interesting and relevant content—your own, from third parties, and from people you are following / would like to have following you.
- Interact (e.g., ask and answer questions).
- Recommend.
- Repeat.
The “big 5″ social networks have a definite “order of familiarity” to follow for proper social media etiquette:
- • Twitter, YouTube and Google+: you can follow/add virtually anyone you find interesting/relevant/influential. Don’t be offended if they don’t follow/add you back immediately; they may very well do so once they’ve gotten to “know” you better through your social networking activity.
- • LinkedIn: it’s best to have some familiarity (real world or online) before trying to make a connection. This is a level deeper than the majority of more superficial social networks. This also applies to other professional / social networks (e.g. Plaxo).
- • Facebook: liking a brand page (or asking someone to like yours) is fairly superficial. However, friending someone on Facebook is widely viewed as a deeper level of social networking connection. Put another way, the common pattern is to have more Twitter followers than LinkedIn connections, and more LinkedIn connections than Facebook friends. Only the gauche and boorish would try to friend someone on Facebook that they have no prior connections to.
With those basics established, here are 10 ways for small (or really, almost any size) businesses to use social networks for marketing and PR.
1. Create valuable backlinks for SEO. Links from your profiles and social network posts / updates all help to increase the authority of your website and blog with the search engines, leading to higher rankings. What helps most, however, is having your content shared and passed along by others with high influence in your market space. To encourage sharing, in addition to being active on the leading social networks, place social sharing buttons on your site.
2. Expand your online presence. Google, Yahoo and Bing aren’t the only places people go to look for information. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube all include their own powerful and popular internal search capabilities, and there are numerous social search engines that specifically search social networks and other social media sites. The only way to found on social networks is to be active on them.
3. Develop reputation as a thought leader (or something equally positive). By sharing relevant and helpful information, whether your own of from other sources, you increase your value to those following you, and expand your network. Sharing content developed by others makes you social; sharing content written about you by others enhances your brand image; and sharing your own thought-leadership or other helpful content solidifies your reputation as a smart, valuable resource that can influence decisions.
4. Promote your content / increase web traffic. It’s been written that, “If content is king, links are queen.” In other words, as essential as it is to develop great content, the search engines won’t give it much weight and few people will ever see that content if it doesn’t get linked. Social networks are a great place to build quality links, again particularly when key influencers within the various social networks share your content with their followers.
5. Expand your network of connections. In almost any major city, on almost any day, there are various types of business networking events: breakfasts, happy hours, seminars, forums and other types of events where local business people can meet each other and form new connections. Social media makes it easy to expand your network globally—or at least well beyond the confines of those who either live nearby or travel to major industry events. Social networks are invaluable for helping you make connections with prospective customers, additional contacts within client companies, industry journalists, bloggers and other influencers that it would be difficult if not impossible to connect with otherwise.
6. Develop and build relationships. Making connections is just the beginning. Social sharing and interactions enable you to develop relationships that can be very meaningful and rewarding, over time, with people you’ve never physically met, perhaps even never spoken with by phone. These relationships can lead to increased online exposure, expanded knowledge, new insights and ideas, partnerships, referrals, and ultimately—increased business.
7. Perform competitive and market research. Social media isn’t all about you, of course. Knowing what kinds of questions your prospective customers are asking, what problems they are trying to solve, and their opinions and observations about competitive firms can help you develop content that better meet market needs and set you apart from competitors.
8. Spot opportunities for innovation. Knowing more about the issues and concerns of your target prospects can also inspire ideas for product enhancements or new products, services or processes that lead to increased sales, greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, and/or new market opportunities.
9. Improve customer service. Traditional customer service channels are great for capturing information about and resolving specific customer issues (e.g., product malfunctions or “how do I…” questions). Social networks, however, open up possibilities for learning about other types of issues that may never lead to a customer service call: your product disappoints in some manner, your online form is too long and/or complicated, your website content is confusing, a particular piece of information or contact phone number is difficult to find, etc.
10. Generate leads and grow your email list (carefully!). There’s a reason this item is last on the list: while the goal of social media marketing is ultimately to produce an ROI, where the “R” is usually generated by increased sales, it’s crucial not to promote your offerings too blatantly or too early in the social networking process. Engaging in self-promotion too early will get you labeled as a spammer, damage your reputation and hobble your ability to grow a productive network. Promoting too blatantly is never advisable. Rather, once you have a network established, use social media to promote “gated” content like white papers or reports, invite followers to register for webinars, and promote your newsletter on your blog and other content pages in order to build a list for lead nurturing.
Establishing a presence on the leading social networks and utilizing an effective social media strategy will enhance your online presence and “findability” on search engines as well as within the social networks themselves.
How to Approach Business Social Media Strategically
Friday, January 14th, 2011A big part of the appeal of social media is its simplicity. Any teenager can set up a Facebook page and start sharing status updates with their friends. Any mom or dad can set one up to share pictures of their kids (and keep tabs on their teenagers). Anyone can record an event with a Flip and upload it to YouTube. Anyone can get on Twitter and follow Ashton or Oprah.
That simplicity, however, can make social media dangerous for business. It can lead to well-intentioned but poorly executed rogue company Facebook pages. Inadvertent but damaging revelations. Oafish attempts to treat social networks like just another one-way promotional channel. “Build it and they will come” approach disappointments and subsequently abandoned efforts. Selecting tactics based on perceptions and opinions rather than data. Poor results, or worse—no clear idea of what to measure or what kinds of results to expect.
Executives who would never build a factory and then decide what to produce in it nevertheless set up a Twitter account or Facebook page with no clear plan for how to attract followers, or who exactly they want to attract, or what type of content they are going to promote, or who’s going to produce the content, or what the goal of the content is, or how many fans/followers/friends they should expect to attract, or how they are going to retain the interest of those people once they get it, or what results they hope to achieve, or what they will measure, or how they will measure it, or…you get the picture.
What’s needed is a strategic approach to social media, starting with listening. Who is talking about your industry? Where are they talking about it? What are they saying? Which voices seem the loudest, the most influential? These are all questions to ask, and answer, long before worrying about the background image you’ll use on your company’s Twitter account or what tabs you’ll need on your Facebook page…or even if your business really needs a Facebook page.
Then plan: what do you need to do? Who will be assigned to do it? Where do you need to be active? What types of content will you need? What are your objectives? How will you measure them?
The Four Essential Phases of Social Media Adoption is an attempt to provide a strategic framework for using social media for business. It’s a start-at-the-beginning-and-not-in-the-middle, walk-before-you-run approach. It’s not dip-your-toe-in-the-water—that doesn’t work with social media. Social media success requires a sustained commitment, over time. But this strategic approach is, to stay with that metaphor, an approach to determining the depth of the lake, the temperature of the water, and the kind of fish you’ll be swimming with before you jump in.
For all its simplicity, social media is an incredibly powerful tool. It can fundamentally change the way companies market their products and communicate with customers. And it will for many businesses. If your organization is still struggling with “if,” “when” or “how” questions with regard to using social media for business purposes, this strategic approach may provide the foundation needed.
Book Review: Social Media Marketing
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010With Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media
As she notes in her introduction, Li’s book is organized around four main themes:
Research: start by using search and social media monitoring tools to discover where your customers and prospects are congregating. Don’t automatically assume they use the most popular social networks. This saves time, effort and money in the long run, but it’s a step too many companies skip over.
Strategy: it isn’t just the tools you’ll be using, but also establishing goals for what you’d like to achieve in social media, and allocating time and resources to do the job.
Involvement: understand that everyone in your company has a stake in social media success and most of your employees are probably already members of at least one social network. Explain your goals and establish clear guidelines for any mention of the company on social media sites. This presents misunderstandings (at the least) and enlists your people beyond just the marketing and PR groups.
Measurement: as Li notes, “Measurement comes in many different forms, from website traffic to the number of retweets your content is getting.” Though measuring direct ROI is challenging, a successful social media program should increase engagement with customers and prospects, provide direct website traffic and increase branded search traffic. Choose metrics that make the most sense for the tactics you’re employing, and monitor results to determine which activities to increase and where a change of course may be needed.
Li really “gets” social media from the social, search and business perspectives, and this shows throughout the book. I wore out a highlighter on this one, but here are a sampling of representative quotes:
“The difficult part of finding success in social media is dedicating the resources and time to your social media strategy. This hard work behind the scenes makes the ‘overnight’ successes seem so easy.”
“Participating in social media isn’t just about creating a page, making a blog post, posing a question, or tweeting. You can’t just ‘leave your mark’ and expect success…Members of social media communities are no longer swayed by a coupon for 10% off or an invitation to try a new product. Instead, they want to connect. That is why social media marketing is not a quick process—it takes time to nurture relationships into conversations and create those solid, trusted connections…these real conversations lead to real relationships,and those trusted relationships lead to referrals and sales. These real conversations also produce some of your most loyal fans and greatest evangelists.”
“Diving into social media without a strategy in place is the best way to set your company’s efforts up for failure.”
And those are just from the first chapter. Li addresses social media at all levels, from grand strategy to nitty gritty tactics. She provides an excellent taxonomy of the social media landscape, categorizing the different types of social media tools into:
- • Social News Sites (Digg, Reddit, Kirtsy, etc.)
- • Social Networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.)
- • Social Bookmarking (Delicious, Diigo, Bmaccess; the distinction from social news sites is s bit blurry)
- • Social Sharing (YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, etc.)
- • Social Events (e.g., Eventful, Meetup, Upcoming, etc.)
- • Blogs
- • Microblogging (Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca; Li helpfully notes that “the power of microblogging for a business can be huge, if you add personality into your Twitter stream and not just allow it to be automated.” Amen!)
- • Wikis (Wikipedia, hundreds of specific topic-focused wikis)
- • Forums and Message Boards (the oldest and second-most commonly used forms of social media)
In chapter 3, Li notes importantly that “with social media, there’s no direct click to purchase.” Too many companies focus only on measuring the traffic back to their own site driven by social media, rather than focusing on and valuing the engagement on social media sites themselves. Sure, social media can in some cases drive lead generation and even direct sales (so can PR), but that isn’t its strength or its primary purpose. Confusion over these measurements has fueled the social media ROI debate. Her detailed descriptions of what can be measured on each type of social media site alone is worth the price of the book (at least).
And there’s so much more. Chapter 6 details the importance of social media conversation. Chapter seven provides an excellent outline for a corporate social media policy. Chapter seventeen notes the importance of providing not just a policy, but social media training for all employees so that the understand the policy, the power, and the potential dangers of social media. Chapter 19 addresses the “personal branding” issue that many companies struggle with in social media. Chapters 36-39 present a great outline of web presence optimization, though Li doesn’t use that term.
It’s difficult to find anything to quibble with in this outstanding book, and what quibbles there are, are minor ones. Li comes down a bit hard on PR agencies; true, most of them are ham-handed when it comes to social media, mass-blasting out press releases to bloggers (Li offers an excellent guide to conducting blogger outreach the right way in chapter 11) and generally treating social media like a broadcast channel. But the best ones take the time to understand their clients’ businesses, help craft social media policies and plans, and can even productively engage on their clients’ behalf. In chapter 14, she drops the phrase “social media campaign,” though this may have been an inadvertent slip; she demonstrates throughout the book a clear understanding of words that shouldn’t be used with social media.
Finally, as wonderful as the book is, its a tad long. For example, she devotes six pages to why companies shouldn’t rely on interns for their social media strategy or execution. Her advice is spot-on, but shes beats this fallacy beyond death. She states that “link baiting isn’t social media marketing”—which is true, though it doesn’t mean that link baiting is an unethical or ineffective tactic. In chapter 37, she almost seems to defend the insidious nofollow tag, which has outlived whatever useful life it once had and should be banished. Particularly in social media, let the community decide what content has value and what is spam.
Minor quibbles aside, Social Media Marketing
Other reviews of Social Media Marketing
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.
