Lessons from a launch: Scoring success in social media

• December 10, 2010

By Alexandra Reid

Delaney Turner, Worldwide Social Media Marketing Manager for IBM Business Analytics, presented his lessons from the launch of IBM Cognos 10 at Zone5ive yesterday afternoon. Turner, also a primary contributor to Performance Perspectives Blog, admited he was a skeptic of social media and that he initially didn’t even see the point. However, he stood yesterday as a devout convert to the business value of social media as he discussed the success of the Cognos 10 launch. Here are Turner’s five core elements for social media success for business.

1. Find a problem that you can solve and measure the results

Turner said that, before adopting social media, the number of unique monthly visitors to IBM’s website were going down and that its newsletter was seeing diminishing click-through rates. To solve this problem, Turner built and delivered a social media model that would drive traffic to IMB’s content. He used a model similar to the marketing funnel as a starting point to increase top-line traffic to the site through social media awareness building. The goal was to turn views from social media sites into business deals as people clicked-through to offers and completed an offer form.

Twitter proved to be the perfect platform to share these offers with prospects, giving Turner the ability to instantly track click-throughs. According to Turner, Twitter can:

• Act as the connection point between various web properties;
• Bring new people into the conversation;
• Provide insights into what clients are thinking;
• Keep visitors on your site(s); and
• Increase the chances of visitors filling out forms.

2. Build a model that includes measurement

Turner’s biggest challenge was to generate a significant amount of buzz before the launch of Cognos 10 while also working within legal parameters that forbade him sharing certain content. While social media would allow him to reach the most people with a limited amount of information, measurement was needed to understand and steer the campaign’s impact. His plan was cross-functional, incorporating blogs, Twitter and a website. Essentially, Turner steered traffic by creating great content for the Cognos 10 blog, sharing the content on Twitter and linking both channels back to the Cognos 10 website.

According to Turner, a social media model should be:

• Guided by strategic and operational goals;
• Driven by an engaged and committed team;
• Fed by the best content;
• Enabled by the right technology; and
• Measured, scalable and relatable.

3. Find your audience and be findable

It is clear that social media is changing people’s purchasing decisions and the way businesses operate. According to a report from Forrester, 91 percent of tech buyers use social media and 69 percent use it for business purposes. Turner said that finding and engaging your audience is a combination of using easy tools and good old-fashioned legwork. You’ve got to put in the time to find out where your audience is and watch what people are saying before you engage them. You’ve then got to set up your sites where your audience is and use what you’ve learned about your audience to engage them.

Some tools that Turner suggests that can help you learn about your audience and engage them include:

• Twapper Keeper: Twitter archiving
• Many Eyes: Creates social media word clouds
• TweetReach: Shows how far Tweets go

4. Create killer content

According to a study conducted by Hubspot, Junta42 and King Fish Media, 85 percent of people surveyed said original content is critical to social media success. Therefore it is imperative that you create a content strategy for your business. Turner said it is a good idea to keep a close eye on the editorial calendars from the publications that your customers read and where you publish advertisements. Find trends and see where you can match blog posts to the publications’ stories.

5. Don’t underestimate quick wins

Every win counts in social media, even the small ones, said Turner. In social media, people want to interact with people and are delighted when a business representative hears them and responds to them in a timely manner. If someone is having an issue with a product or service, a quick and helpful response can be the key to maintaining longtime customer loyalty and contentment.

Turner said that starting out in social media is a lot like walking into a cocktail party; everyone seems to be friends already and you have to exert some effort and mingle to get accepted. However, once you start having conversations with the other guests, you begin to form your own community. Unlike a cocktail party, however, most companies need about two years of social media commitment before they really figure it out. Take your time, listen and learn before you leap, and have a solid strategy for content creation, management and measurement in place. These are the keys to your social media success.