March 3rd, 2010 by Justin —
Considering the reluctance some companies have to adopting any form of social media, you’d think we’d celebrate any company who “dives in headfirst” and “learns as they go.”
Wrong.
As much as we love the idea of a client being willing to think on their feet and adapt on the fly, there are a number of steps we’d advise any company to invest in before they ever post a blog or send a tweet.
And you might be even more surprised to learn that most of these steps don’t involve a computer; they involve understanding goals, language and intentions.
8 Questions to Ask Before You “Dive Into” Social Media
1. What’s the end goal? Do you want to increase sales? Improve public opinion? Raise awareness? Gauge customer sentiment? Too many companies create social media outposts and then ask, “now what?” Unless everyone involved in planning and executing your social media campaign is working toward the same goal(s), you’ll never be able to direct your efforts effectively.
2. How will success be measured? Are you focusing primarily on sales data? Traffic? Click-throughs? Positive press? Consumer mentions? As with step #1, if you’re not all looking at the same metrics, you won’t all be able to agree on what’s working — or why.
3. Who needs approval? Will every blog post you write and every tweet you send require approval from multiple layers of management? In the event of an emergency, is there a streamlined version of that chain of command that first responders can utilize to circumvent a red tape quagmire?
4. What’s the official voice of our brand? Some companies thrive on being personal. Others demand professionalism and objectivity in all forms. Anyone who’s acting as “the voice of the company” needs to understand the range of that voice, in order to avoid statements and phrasing that feel “out of character” for the brand.
5. How often will data be collected? If you don’t know how your efforts are being perceived and acted upon by the recipients of your messaging, you won’t know what’s working and what needs to be tweaked. But if all you do is analyze data, you’ll slip into the strategy trap. Agreeing on an acceptable frequency for data analysis helps keep everyone sane and focused.
6. How often will we reconsider our process? Some of your ideas will work better than others. Sometimes you’ll have lucky breaks; other times, you’ll be outshined by someone else’s better story. Taking the “long view” in analyzing your goals and data will allow you to base your future adjustments on better-contextualized results, rather than your own knee-jerk reactions.
7. How elastic is the budget? Social media is an ever-changing field. What works today may not work tomorrow, and the tools you’ve invested in may become outclassed or obsolete. Likewise, areas in which you’re minimally invested may turn out to bear more fruit than you initially expected. How much elasticity and discretion will your team have to adapt your plan on the move, or are the decisions you’re making now expected to last until your next budget analysis?
8. Where do we start? You can’t wake up tomorrow with a fully-functional presence on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, WordPress and Delicious. Every channel you’re investing in takes time to establish, grow and curate. Which tools are the most important for achieving your immediate goals, and in which order do you need to get them up to speed? Because if you spread yourself too thin, nothing works.
Got all that? Great; now you can start making plans.
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February 3rd, 2010 by Justin —
Do you hear that panicked murmur rumbling up from the masses? It’s worse than fear — it’s failure! It’s catastrophe! It’s the absolute Armageddon of social media business strategy!
According to Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey, no one trusts anyone!
(Which is ironic, considering Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents was a bestseller during the same year this survey was conducted. But I digress…)
Here’s what happened:
Last year, 47 percent of respondents to the survey claimed to trust information from their peers (aka “people like me”), fueling the tendencies of social media gurus to target peers (and especially “influencers”) as a way to gain visibility for the brands they represent. This year? Only 27 percent made that same claim.
So much for social media, right?
Wrong.
According to Edelman, trust in TV is down 20 points as well. Radio and newspapers also dropped. Across the U.S., faith in media as a whole is in the basement. Media and insurance were tied as the two least-trusted industries in America.
(Ironically, of the sources mentioned above, newspapers actually ranked highest in terms of respondents’ trust, at a scant 32 percent. Surely that’ll make hundreds of downsized reporters feel better this winter…)
So… so much for media itself, right?
Still wrong.
Keep in mind that we’ve just survived one of the most tempestuous political years in American history, one in which our ruling parties have become ever more ideologically opposed. Town halls and tea parties have proven that we’re increasingly incapable of having rational debates about even the most basic elements of our social fabric. No wonder trust in “people like me” is down — trust in everyone, across all facets of the system, is down. The only people we seem comfortable trusting anymore are ourselves.
And that explains why a book like Trust Agents can find an audience: because people are desperate to connect. People want to trust each other, and they want to be able to trust the media that feeds them their information. They’re just skeptical of everyone’s motives and transparencies, including that of their peers, whom (we’ve all finally realized) have access to the same unreliable media as everyone else.
Instead of seeing this report as a death blow to the legitimacy of the media empires, those same empires should be taking this study as an opportunity to refocus on what their audience actually wants: clear, unbiased, reliable information.
As for the social media campaigns of the world, congratulations: now you don’t have to worry about “going viral” or targeting those pesky influencers anymore. Now you just have to appeal to every human being, one at a time, and treat them like valuable individuals. Now you have to earn their trust.
And in that case, maybe there’s a silver lining to all this skepticism after all.
September 23rd, 2009 by Justin —
When marketing analyst Olivier Blanchard insists that businesses must track metrics in order to prove that social media is creating revenue, he’s right. Now he has a handy slideshow to explain why this is so important — and how you can do it, too.
Apart from the financial benefits of such metrics, you can also gather related data, like:
- Which sales spikes match which traffic spikes — and what caused them?
- Which word-of-mouth trends are more likely to prompt actual sales?
- Whose voice(s) in your social media team is the most effective?
- When is the best time to launch new messaging or offer new deals?
- Where (and how) are people choosing to engage your calls to action?
- How (or even if) negative word-of-mouth directly impacts sales
Whether your criteria for success is fiscal (as most companies would prefer) or simply a heightened brand awareness (which, Blanchard argues, is only a premature piece of that larger fiscal puzzle), you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. Otherwise, all the time and money you’re spending on Twitter, Facebook, social networking and iPhone applications is just guesswork — and guesswork has a hard time getting past the Accounting department.
