Social Media Executive Primer Part 8

Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Don’t: Allow anyone and everyone within your organization to do whatever they want on social media sites.
Do: Develop a social media policy that outlines for your employees what they can communicate about in the online world. It’s your job as CXO to push for a social media policy and to educate your employees on it. They need to understand how they can communicate about their employer in the online world. You can’t expect your Legal Team or anyone else to understand the negative ramifications that can occur from not having this policy. But you, as CXO, understand how powerful social media can be and how one employee tweeting about issues your organization is experiencing can have some serious repercussions with your clients, potential clients, investors, partners, and other employees. It’s important to develop a clear social media policy, establish a format to educate your employees on it, and enforce some form of punishment when it is violated.

Don’t: Hire a young marketer that’s savvy on social sites without requiring they have experience in online marketing.
Do: Utilize your online marketer(s) to manage your social media marketing. They may not be social media marketing experts but they can quickly educate themselves and work with you to create your social media marketing plan. If they do not have the bandwidth, hire an online marketer with experience in social media marketing. If you don’t have the budget for a new hire, look at other employees in your organization that might have the social media marketing experience. The key is assigning one person to head your social media marketing efforts so the efforts coincide and maintain brand consistency. You don’t need 3 “Company X” accounts on Twitter or Facebook as it will just confuse and deter people. Already hired a young marketer that’s just not doing the job? It might be worth it to keep them on board and train them but if you lack confidence that they’ll get it, let them go.

Don’t: Tweet every day about your company only with no personal mix or opinions. And just let anyone follow you.
Do: Tweet at least once a week about both business and personal topics. And follow your followers. Mesh both business and personal topics in your tweets which should be done once a week, at the minimum but beware of over-tweeting/spam-tweeting! People will stop reading your tweets and your brand can quickly lose credibility. Also, follow as many people as you can, don’t just let people follow you. It shows your business is interested in what others have to say (you listen) and that you are not just a voice trying to be heard.

Don’t: Allow your target audience to hunt for you in vain in the social world.
Do: Make it easy for your target audience to find you in the social world. Let your clients, prospects, partners, and employees know that you play in the social media world. Promote your social sites on your website(s), employee signatures, and email footers. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and others even provide logos for you to use in your marketing materials and of course they do – it’s free advertising for them. Tap into their brand strength to help promote yours!

Don’t: Send your team to get you on every social media site possible.
Do: Focus on the social sites where your target audience is most likely to be found. You should have an organized plan for your social media marketing and it’s ok to start small. The key is managing your presence well on the sites you choose to be on and monitoring what’s being said about you elsewhere. This will help you determine what sites make the most sense and better evaluate where you should focus.

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 7

Measuring Success

Metrics from Social Media are a hot topic these days. Even the ability to actually measure true ROI is under debate. New Social Media metrics acronyms such as ROE (Return on Engagement), RORE (Return on Ripple Effect) and others muddy the metric waters even more.

Still new tools are launching every day to help make the impact of Social Media more quantifiable. Traditional clipping services are now offering daily insight into who is saying what about you. Social Media ROI calculators abound. But you have to ask yourself – so what? What it comes down to is what specific metrics do I need to make decisions?

To answer this, you’ll need to articulate your overall objectives. Are you looking to increase your website traffic? Are you looking to add qualified leads to your funnel? Are you interested in expanding the reach of your overall brand? Are you looking to increase your blog subscriptions? The list goes on and on.

Social Media Analytics

Website Traffic
Social Media that drives traffic to your website is a good (and easy) place to start. While you may already incorporate web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Woopra or Omniture, some don’t always measure the effects of social media effectively out of the box. But 3rd party extension are now being developed that help bridge the gap.

If you use Eloqua, they recentlfy released 'sub sites' which allow website vistor tracking specifically from social media sites. There is a new application developed for use with Omniture (Now part of Adobe) that tracks page-level statistics on a variety of social media platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn. Greasemonkey offers an extension that adds a social media information layer to Google Analytics, providing information on Diggs, stumbles, delicious bookmarks and others. Do a search for “Blog Metrics” and you’ll see a host of other available apps.

As with any website traffic metric, showing the volume of traffic to your site is one thing, but you are probably more interested in conversions. How many filled out and submitted a form? If you use a marketing automation tool such as Eloqua, you can easily track conversions of any form, including the source of the submitter. If you have Eloqua integrated with your CRM you can track full closed-loop ROI reporting, including opportunities, closed-won specifically generated from your blogs, etc. Eloqua has also just released a new social media viral tool that allows prospects to easily repurpose and share your content on their own social networks. Integrated reporting helps track which social media sites are driving traffic to your website.

Even if you don’t currently deploy any website analytics, there are some stand-alone apps that will help. Here are some you might consider:

SocialToo is a tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats on Twitter and Facebook. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows.

Xinureturns: Offers a dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media. Run a report and you will receive stats on Technorati, Google Pagerank, Diggs. It also includes backlinks to your website.

PostRank offers detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place.

Bit.ly: If you use a URL shortener, it’s a good idea make sure it has analytics information as well. Bity.ly is one such app. It will track information including the number of clicks, traffic sources, even the time clicks occur.

Blog Traffic
Another fairly easy metric you can incorporate is the “stickiness” of your blog. You can track subscriber growth, reader comments vs. views, etc. As mentioned above there are a number of tools that act like web analytics tools but are specifically designed for your blogs, posts, etc. It’s a good way to judge the success of your social media efforts on their own.

Track as Campaigns
You can segment your efforts into campaigns and track them that way, providing a campaign ID in the query string for any subsequent form submission.

Additional Social Media Metrics Resources:
http://www.radian6.com/
http://www.techrigy.com/

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 6

How to Start

Once you’ve defined both your overall strategy, your purpose and your voice, it’s time to get tactical.

Target Your Conversations
Finding a place for your conversations requires that you first locate where those you want to communicate with currently are. Start by searching the top 10 Social Media networks outlined in the first post in this series and look for likely audiences. If you are B2B, LinkedIn is a great place to start for example. Get a lay of the land within each community you are considering. Notice the segments, the conversations, where your competitors are and where they are not.

Define Your Voice
Decide which conversational voice you will adopt (See Define Your Voice). Once you’ve decided on which ‘personality’ best represents your company, this makes it easier to find the person who will actually be writing the Social Media content. Try and match the content provider’s personality with your chosen voice.

Start Slow
Nobody jumps on the Social Media freeway going 120 MPH immediately. It takes time to get up to that speed. Use the ramp up period to refine your message, learn what gets read, what triggers other conversations. You may in fact have no choice but to start slow. Few new bloggers are recognized as overnight visionaries.

Stay Consistent
You may find that 3-6 months into it you are still not seeing the kinds of results you were expecting. Be patient and whatever you do, stay the course. Watch your subscription rates as they slowly rise. You’ll typically see a lift each time you post. But watch the unsubscribe rates as well, particularly after posts. If they spike, review your content and make sure it is still relevant to your audience.

Remember That Most Readers Are Laying on the Sand. You may go months without a single comment to your incredibly well articulated posts. Just remember most readers will never post a comment. Instead make sure you post comments regularly on other blogs. Use your voice to respond to everything. Get heard, get noticed via comments. It will help drive traffic back to your posts. Readers will start to recognize you.

Acknowledge the Quick Wins
Someone read your post about an upcoming webinar and sent it to a colleague, which resulted in 2 new registrations. Make sure you document these quick wins and announce them to the team. These quick wins, as small as they may be, continue the momentum and lets everyone know their efforts are paying off – even if it’s one registration at a time.

Recognize that we are all Pioneers
Marketing’s embrace of Social Media is still in its infancy, despite all the hoopla. Things will change, new communities will be born or reshaped or go extinct. Just when you’ve got it all figured out, the rules will change (think SEO). Be agile, be patient, embrace change and commit to staying the course.
 
Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 5

Audience Relationships

As with all marketing, the focus of Social Media is to build (and even repair) relationships. The key to driving a successful relationship is relevance. If your content isn’t of much interest to a reader, it is doubtful you will ever be able to build a relationship with that person.

Remember your goal is to create raving fans. And not only that, but to create raving fans that actually rave about you. With 97% of social media readers laying on the sand and only 3% actually in the water, you begin to see the kind of numbers game you’ll have to play to get others to rave about you.

And in order to do that, you have to communicate about something that your target audience is completely passionate about. The good news is that Social Media encompasses an enormous number of very detailed segments that you can tap into. The more specific the segment the better your chances at building a lasting, raving fan relationship.

It will obviously require more dedicated resources to create the many different segmented conversations you’ll likely identify. Batch and Blast has no place in social media, or anywhere else for that matter. Choose niches that convert, then go after everyone else. It is better to go after a group of 20 swimmers than 20,000 sunbathers.

If you currently use marketing automation tools, another way to build the relationship is to get your readers into your database so you can add them to your nurturing/scoring programs. Don’t think social media replaces email. In fact, a recent Nielsen Company analysis found that the heaviest social media users actually use email more, perhaps because of the steady stream of messages that social networks dump into participants’ inboxes.

Whichever voice you choose, know that the conversation will have to be passionate, dedicated, consistent and even intimate if you want real results. Just remember, your conversations are always about what you can do for your reader, it’s never about what they can do for you.

Your conversations are real-time examples of your brand. Build raving fans and let them disseminate your brand for you.
 
Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 4

Define Your Voice

Once you’ve established your purpose, the next step is to define your voice.

Below are the most effective types of voices to use. Begin by taking a subjective look at your company’s persona. How do you currently communicate to your customers. Are you light and endearing? Corporate and slightly pretentious? Steadfast and reliable? Choose the personality that best fits your company culture.

Whichever voice you choose, stick with it; don’t change voices mid-stream. Don’t change what makes you – you. This will only confuse your readers. Consistency is key, no matter which voice you adopt.

Reactionary
Nothing drives traffic like a good rant. One look at reality TV and you see those with the loudest voices tend to have the highest ratings. But if you use this method, don’t just scream about the problem. Be prepared to provide a solution. This method taps into common frustrations your target market is likely having with other solutions, or the challenges with a lack of any solution. The communication sequence is usually (1) connect with the problem (2) acknowledge the pain (3) provide empathy (4) reiterate what will happen if nothing is done (5) offer your solution.

Exclusivity
Find something that few people are offering solutions for. Or offer unique solutions to common problems.
Take an inventory of your IP and see where you can share those things that make you unique. This method works best if you are offering something truly scarce. Specific niches where you’ve created a custom solution for example. Play up the fact that your content is extremely valuable, that it is not something shared to many or made public. Make your audience feel like they’ve hit the jackpot with your content.

Thought Leadership
Much of today’s social media revolves around thought leadership. It’s the best type of conversation to have with anyone just beginning their buyer journey. This combined with Exclusivity provides a powerful positioning statement. While some people balk at the idea of divulging their inner most secrets, today’s best webinars provide a good roadmap of how to provide thought leadership that encourages follow up dialog. The main goal is to prove your credibility. The more segmented you can make your communications the better. Your content must appear at the right time to the right person with the right message. General Thought Leadership will only get you so far and usually won’t get your name on a short list. Include both strategic and tactical communications in your thought leadership mix.

Reliability
Seth Godin delivers a blog every single day, 7 days a week, rain or shine. Whether you choose to add content once a day, once a week or once a month, once you commit to a schedule, stick to it. Don’t deviate, don’t change the pattern. Consistency is key. Frequency is usually driven by bandwidth. If your contributors have the time to contribute MEANINGFUL dialog each day, great. Deliver whatever you can realistically consistently manage. Don’t make the mistake of delivering daily just to deliver daily. Your content must always be meaningful, useful and worth the time and effort of your readers.
 
Agreement
Politicians are masters at getting agreement. Identifying and acknowledging a problem lends itself to getting buy-in and agreement with your particular solution. The more relevant you can articulate the exact problem, the more agreement you are likely to get. This ties into a Reactionary voice very well. By virtue of you acknowledging the frustration of the problem you are discussing, agreement comes much more naturally. But don’t try and gain agreement on the obvious. Prove that you really have gone through the same specific ordeals your readers have.


Share the Love
Making friends is often a good way to engage in Social Media. Be prepared to do something for someone ‘just because’. Be genuine and never feign your intentions. Expect nothing in return. This might be a good method of communicating to current customers. Whether up selling, cross-selling or working towards subscription renewals, this type of communication is all about serving others. Almost philanthropic. The end result – creating not just a loyal customer but raving fans.
 
Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 3

Define Your Purpose

There are various purposes for social media marketing. Some marketers want to spark a movement while others simply want to use it to support other marketing efforts. It is important to decide what your purpose is in the social media world. Knowing your purpose will help align your strategies.

1. Be a Watch Dog. You can listen to what is being said about your business via social media marketing and use it as a way to police your brand. You might read a negative Tweet about your Customer Service Department and warn them so they can take the appropriate action to resolve the issue. Comcast has excelled at this.

2. Create a Conversation. One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing is it allows you to create a dialog with your customers, partners, prospects, colleagues, etc. The dialog is what builds the relationship and can allow you to benefit from it. The more conversations you have with your customers and prospects, the better you get to know them and their needs – and the better they get to know you and your business. And it can improve your relationship with them if done correctly because they will feel as though you are listening which is vital in any relationship. Use the dialog to do market research, respond quickly when issues arise, build your brand, and more!

3. Ignite a Movement. Some marketers use social media marketing to spark a movement meaning do something profound online that’s highly recognized and that others follow. For instance, Comcast staring using Twitter in 2008 by creating a “ComcastCares” account to target complaints about their services. It then responded to those complaints and worked toward a resolution for each and doing so, improved its customer service. Comcast has been recognized as one of the best companies at utilizing Twitter for B to C interactions. If you have something like this in mind, plan carefully because you may very well lose control once the movement is sparked.

4. Support Other Marketing Efforts. One of the most common purposes for engaging in social media marketing is to use it to support your other marketing efforts. Social media marketing is just another avenue to reach your target, create conversations, build and monitor your brand. If you have an event you want to promote, you can use traditional marketing avenues to promote it such as email, direct mail, banner ads, your website but you can also use social media marketing. It is one of thee cheapest marketing avenues if not thee cheapest. Most social media sites do not charge any fees so why not use them to promote your event? Just keep in mind the target audience for your event and be sure you don’t invite all your Facebook fans if you really only are targeting a small subset of them.

5. Innovate. Some marketers are finding ways to use social media to position themselves as thought leaders and innovators. Social media is, in itself, state-of-the-art marketing and a modern way of communicating so if you can use it to position your leaders and products as innovate, you gain double-time. Not only will your customers and prospects learn about your leaders and products but they will via a means they prefer and that’s most convenient for them such as on their Facebook or Twitter homepage or RSS feed. If you don’t reach out to them via social media, you can bet your competitors are!

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Steve Kellogg

-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant

Social Media Executive Primer Part 2

Define Your Strategy

The first step in social media marketing planning is to define your social strategy. Here are four components of a well thought out plan:

1. Who are You Talking To?
It is vital to identify the audience you plan to target through your social media marketing efforts and to research where they are most likely to be found - Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? LinkedIn? If you do not know, send out a simple survey to better understand where your target is doing their online socializing. Of course, you’ll want to offer something of value in return for the completed survey but it can help substantially with planning your social media marketing strategy. You’ll know where your target audience can be found in the social world and save a great deal of time and effort from trying to reach them on sites they do not visit.

2. Set Your Goals
Set goals for your social media marketing efforts and measure your performance routinely –ideally monthly. If your goals are not being achieved and efforts are not paying off, it may be time to re-evaluate what you are doing and how you are doing it. Magic is not likely to happen overnight. It’s important to be realistic as to what you can expect from your social media marketing.

3. Create Action Items
To get the plan in motion, you need to create and document action items with owners and deadlines for each. Otherwise, you’re plan may never come to life as well as it could. And track these action items so you’re efforts are organized. One action item should be to create a calendar of marketing events (if you don’t have one already) to optimize your online outreach and keep all your marketing efforts aligned.

4. Implement Your Bag of Tricks
You don’t have to scramble to hire a social media marketing expert or purchase social media marketing management software. Use your in-house tools, tactics, and technologies to get you started. If you have an online marketer, tap into this resource to manage your efforts. If you already have marketing campaigns underway with content and strong call-to-actions, use social media marketing to promote these other marketing tactics.

If you have a website analytics tool, use that to monitor social media sites referring traffic to your site and potential spikes in visitor traffic caused from your social media marketing efforts. Social media marketing is an extension of your current marketing efforts so utilize what you already have in place.

Part 1-Social Media: An Executive Primer
Part 2-Define Your Strategy
Part 3-Define Your Purpose
Part 4-Define Your Voice
Part 5-Audience Relationships
Part 6-How to Start
Part 7-Measuring Success
Part 8-Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

Updated 5-8-12
Visit my brand new website and learn more about Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Steve Kellogg
-Demand Generation/Marketing Automation Consultant, Astadia
-Eloqua Certified Marketing Best Practices Consultant