Social media channels have become the modern day podium for consumers to express their thoughts with others, and oftentimes these thoughts can directly relate to your business. Through a well-planned social strategy, delving into these conversations is where your company can better understand the customer and learn the strengths and weaknesses of what your company does, whether it pertains to your services, products, promotions or even to your own employees or key competitors. Finding these social insights through your customer’s voice is where you can truly improve your business. The question is – how to use social media to go about finding these types of insights? Here are three basic steps to consider when gathering social media intelligence:
1. MONITOR CONVERSATIONS
Firstly, gathering social media intelligence requires listening to what your customers are saying. Think beyond Facebook and Twitter, and consider popular forums, blogs and even location-based network sites, like Foursquare and Yelp. Also, consider monitoring conversations that relate to your key competitors, as these conversations can be leveraged to see how your company compares to them.
2. ANALYZE CONVERSATIONS & SENTIMENT
Analysis is the next step for how to use social media to gain business intelligence. Obtain these conversations, and evaluate what consumers are discussing. Some questions you may ask yourself: Are there any key topics being discussed? Are they complaining or praising the quality or price of a product? Do they applaud any specific employees for their superior customer service? Do they purchase your product due to a current promotion? How are they responding to your sponsorships? Do they prefer a competitor’s product over yours?
3. ACT ON SOCIAL INSIGHTS
This is the fun part of your social strategy. This step is where you are able to turn your trends into insights and your insights into actions. For example, if you are a retail clothing company and your customers were constantly criticizing the fit of a particular product, it could be worth exploring a new fit to better accommodate them. Or perhaps a few customers stated how helpful your employees were at a particular retail store location; consider rewarding them for their quality customer service.
Regardless of the actual insight that is garnered, social media intelligence can truly help your company make more definitive and data-driven business decisions based off the voice of the consumers you serve. You just have to know how to use social media to your advantage.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Nov 12th, 2011. 
Social media marketing is distinctively different from traditional marketing. Unlike billboards, print ads and infomercials, social media marketing is anchored in engagement, dialogue, and exchange. It provides an endless landscape for businesses and consumers to connect, in a very personal way. In order to navigate this new marketing environment, marketers must develop a keen understanding of how to craft and establish a professional social media presence.
Think you’re ready to get started?
Wait! Before you make your first Facebook post or send out the first company tweet, take the time to develop a plan of execution. This guide will show you how to create a solid foundation for integrating social media into your overall marketing strategy.
6 Essential Steps to Social Media Success
1. Determine Your Primary Goals and Objectives
This may seem like an obvious step, but assessing the motive behind your social media launch is the best way to understand why you’re doing it in the first place. Get to the core of it all, by asking the important questions: Are you seeking greater sales conversions? …increased traffic to your website? …or greater brand awareness? Each of these questions uncovers a unique set of behaviors necessary to achieve your goal.
2. Identify Which Platforms Are Right For You
First, be clear on your target market. Breaking down the demographic makeup of your potential customer base, will allow you to identify the appropriate channels for your social media campaign. How? Well for example, if your primary focus is business-to-consumer interactions, you may focus more on integrating Facebook and Twitter into your strategy. However, if you service other businesses, LinkedIn will likely be your primary tool of choice.
3. Ensure Brand Awareness
Don’t overlook the power of branding. Before you launch, create a strong brand-presence strategy.
Optimize your logo for online use – some profiles require certain image specifications. Seek help with this if you have difficulty with design or visual concepts.
Create a customized Twitter background – include contact information and your website URL.
For newsletters, embed your social media profile links into the template and be sure that the design of the newsletter compliments your website and over-all social media branding.
Create a dynamic Facebook landing page – that encourages interaction and sharing.
Secure Your Online Real Estate - There may be social media platforms or communities that you don’t currently plan to use, secure your professional/company name anyway. Here’s an example of why this is so important. Recently, Netflix relaunched its DVD mailing service under the name: Quickster. In the process, they failed to secure the Twitter handle @Qwikster. If they had done a bit of research (prior to their major announcement), they would have discovered that the name was already taken. The negative press they received for this faux pas could have easily been avoided. Don’t let this happen to you! Do your due diligence, before you launch.
4. Develop a Social Media Process Plan
This document will serve as your standard operating procedure for social media engagement; helping to eliminate the burden of micro-managing. Sounds important? Well, it is. So much so, that we’ve dedicated this entire section to helping you to create a solid (and useful) plan.
Be flexible. This guide will evolve over time, but initially it should include the following:
Procedure – An outline of the appropriate steps that will be taken for identifying, engaging, responding, and servicing customers or prospects. For example: how will your team uniformly handle a prospect inquiry or customer complaint.
Delegation – When selecting which member of your social media team will be the essential online voice for your company, you need to consider each candidate(s): personality, writing style, and product/service knowledge; by doing so you have the ability to establish a cohesive and consistent social media presence that clearly represents your brand.
Training – Educating everyone involved is essential to success. Because social media integration is much more detailed than sending out scheduled tweets, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of the platforms being used, and how to use them effectively to achieve the desired result.
Routine – Establishing response protocol and time-blocking for strategic online engagement is extremely important. Social media users are accustomed to quick – often instantaneous – communication; without routine monitoring of social media platforms, customers may become disgruntled or dissatisfied.
5. Understand SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Whatever you do, don’t launch your social media campaign without obtaining at least a basic understanding of SEO. Knowing how to increase your chances of being found on the internet is essential for increased online traffic and target market conversion!
6. Create a Social Media Policy
Though it may be cumbersome, drafting a detailed set of social media guidelines for your business is something that you don’t want to put off. You will want this document to be easy to understand (so that there is little room for misinterpretation). It should clearly define do’s and don’ts that represent acceptable – work related – social media behaviors. For example:
Are employees allowed to post to their personal social media accounts during work hours? Who is responsible for monitoring the communications of the social media team? Or, if an employee encounters an unhappy customer, is there a protocol for offline follow-up?
Hindsight is 20/20. So, it’s best to be ahead of the curve while you are still strategizing your social media plan. A well written policy will minimize unsavory and unprofessional employee conduct online.
Look Before You Launch!
Taking the time to develop a strategic and progressive plan of execution, will not only increase your potential for success, it will also establish the guidelines necessary to maintain focus and consistency. The truth is that branding your business, service, or profession takes time and creative effort. On the other hand, attempting to grow brand awareness with social media also requires personality, likeability and a knack for easy conversation.
Understanding the many facets of social media is no easy feat. Don’t schedule your lift-off without a plan and a solid strategy for long-term success. The right fuel, a clear sky, and a capable team in mission control, will always make for the best chance to take it to the moon; take it to the stars….to take this whole thing to Mars.
Do you have additional tips for social media marketing planning? Have you launched a successful social media campaign? Share your tips and thoughts with us in the comment section!
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Nov 11th, 2011.
Within the customer engagement field, “social media” has become a sort of catchphrase for the latest, shiniest voice of customer program technology. Every day seems to bring the publication of a slew of press releases announcing the latest social media customer engagement gadget. These tools promise to integrate tweets, Facebook posts, comments, and every other bit of social media data with a company’s customer feedback program.
In the ideal company everything would be integrated to perfection. Unfortunately, business leaders work in a real world where everything must be prioritized. We recently wrote an article explaining the importance of designing a customer experience strategy that aligns with the overall business strategy. The same rules apply for social media. To effectively use social media it must be considered as a part of the big picture. The following are a few considerations for leaders evaluating how social media fits into their Voice of the Customer program and into the grand overarching strategy of their business.
1. News travels fast on social media. This might be the biggest understatement of the year, but it is important to note this up front. Social media tools are like magnets for anyone interested in the customer experience because it has changed the way that many of us receive news and interact with companies. Pew Internet Research has found that, on average, each American has 634 ties in their overall network.
News travels fast when people are instantly connected via their ever-present Smartphones, iPads, and other internet-faring gadgets. With Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn just a few clicks away at any time, customers understand that they have the power to quickly share their experience with others. Certain extremely Internet-savvy consumers (the “Technorati”) are exceptionally skilled at quickly spreading (usually negative) feedback. These social media kings and queens know how to amp up the volume and expand their reach. Furthermore, the press is extremely tuned into social media. This provides another level of amplification for whatever is trending online. Because of this, having a social media presence is valuable regardless of industry.
2. Social media may not accurately represent your core customer base. Twitter and Facebook are excellent outlets for “squeaky wheels”—the loudest, angriest, or most popular consumers. It is easy for company leaders to become distracted by these kinds of social media users, which are not to be confused with your best customers. (Indeed, depending on your industry, your best customers may not even have a Twitter or Facebook account). Moreover, social media collectors often provide too much information for company leaders to use effectively.
As customer experience guru Bruce Tempkin explained in a recent blog post, a common customer experience management mistake is to assume that more data is always better. Another is to completely focus on one measurement while neglecting to see the big picture. Tempkin calls this mistake “Falling in love with a metric.” If your firm falls in love with social media trends, it is likely to follow tweets and Facebook posts without really understanding the entire customer experience picture.
3. Know your size and industry. While huge business-to-consumer companies can see benefits from tracking global brand trends in social media outlets, social media trackers are less useful for smaller business-to-business firms, simply because niche B2B firms are less likely to be discussed on social media platforms. (From a market research perspective, social media cannot provide a large enough respondent pool to provide accurate surveying results.)
If your goal is to systematically improve the customer experience and boost customer engagement, it is best to continue asking for customer feedback, rather than focusing on social media aggregation. While a review of recent social media comments on your brand may provide a sort of temporary scatter chart, an effective Voice of Customer program will provide a much clearer line graph, showing the overall trend for loyal, engaged customers.
We’re huge fans of feedback and have been collecting it from customers and employees alike for over a decade. We also use social media to connect with people, share ideas, and listen in on what our industry is talking about (Say, “hi” @peoplemetrics). While social media is important, fun, and interesting – it will never replace consistent feedback, systematic follow-up, and a solid business strategy.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 26th, 2011.
Businesses that combine email marketing with social media marketing are more successful with their integrated marketing campaigns than those who use email alone.
That was the conclusion gleaned from a study conducted by email marketing provider Constant Contact and absolutely came as no surprise to me because I am huge believer in the fact that an integrated marketing strategy is vital to success and anytime I hear the word “integrated” or “integration” in the context of marketing and advertising, it catches my eye and gets my undivided attention. Unfortunately it would appear, at least from recent surveys and findings that the majority of marketers and marketing type folks are not practicing integration – be it integration of offline and online tactics or any other form integration.
The title of two of my most recent posts say it all…
Marketers Still Not Integrating Their Marketing Strategy & CMO’s To Increase Spending On Social Media But Integration Still Lacking.
However, there is hope… hope that marketers will realize the need for integration across all channels and all departments and eliminate those silos that threaten their very existence. Yes, that was melodramatic but I meant it to be as
I believe the lack of integration is that serious. And there is hope that marketers, – B2B Marketers, B2C Marketers, CMO’s will see results of surveys such as this one and realize that integration is key.
And from the looks of the findings integrating email marketing with social media marketing can prove to be very beneficial…
Constant Contact examined results data from small businesses and nonprofits that have combined their email marketing with social media marketing to those using only email marketing. Key findings include: 
- Faster list growth: From June 2010 through August 2011, those using both social media and email marketing saw 14.43 percent list growth, while those using only email marketing saw 8.96 percent list growth.
- Larger average list size: Those using both tactics have email lists that are 53 percent larger on average than their email-only counterparts.
- Higher click-through rates: The average click-through rate for those using both email and social media marketing was 59.3 basis points higher than for those using email only.
Now, I realize this study dealt with “small” businesses but… I am confident that larger companies would see similar results. I also agree with Rick Jensen, chief sales and marketing officer for Constant Contact who, when asked whether to use email marketing or social media marketing said “… it’s not either/or; it’s both. Use email to communicate with your current customers and social media to reach new customers.”
I’m sure, however, that Mr. Jensen is also a proponent of renting mailing lists of prospects and not just using email marketing for existing customers but he is right in so much as your current customers are, one would assume, accustomed to receiving emails from you, hence the assumed higher click rate, whereas prospects may not be as receptive to email. They may, however, be more apt to engage via social media, which lends itself to a more personal experience, especially during that all-important first-impression part of any relationship.
What do you think? Do you use email marketing? Do you use it alone or with social media marketing? What has your experience been with email marketing and/or social media marketing?
Source: Constant Contact, Google Images, The Star Group, Use Email Marketing And Social Media As Part Of An Integrated Marketing Strategy
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Sep 23rd, 2011.
As digital marketers, it’s easy to get caught up in doing something because it’s the next big thing sweeping the industry. But because we’re digital marketers and everything we do is data-driven, it’s important to take a step back and re-examine our tactics from time to time. Every marketing effort must be tracked and analyzed, allowing us to use the data to pinpoint trends and improve upon effective tactics while doing away with those less successful.
Your social strategy is no different. For example, are you using hashtags within your tweets? If so, are you using them just because everyone else is using them or someone somewhere down the road told you that you should? Or are you actually using them because you carefully tracked your own Twitter messaging, analyzed your findings, and now have a full artillery of data to back up your methods? Didn’t think so.
Luckily, someone out there did. By tracking nearly 450 tweeted messages for three separate Twitter handles over the period of one month, Levelwing was able to compare the click-through rates of tweets with hashtags against those without. Hashtags used throughout the month varied, but always included trigger words the target audience would use to find the products offered by each company behind the accounts.
What they found was consistent across all three accounts – overall, it seemed that when compared to non-hashtagged messages, hashtags resulted in higher engagement and transfer rates:
Account #1: 5% higher click-through success rate using hashtags
Account #2: 11% higher click-through success rate using hashtags
Account #3: 11% higher click-through success rate using hashtags
Need help getting started? Here are a few basic tips on how to use hashtags as part of your social strategy:
1. Before including the hashtag, look it up to be sure it’s actually being used elsewhere on Twitter. If no one else is using it, it’s probably not a great term. One way to do this is through hashtags.org.
2. While researching the term, look at how it’s being used across Twitter, not just how often. What might sound like a great keyword to you may actually be used more frequently in a completely different context, sometimes a very negative context. Hardly something you want to place your brand next to.
3. Consumers want to categorize you. Make it easier for them to understand what you do by using hashtags that are relevant to your industry, company and product/service offering.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Aug 31st, 2011.
