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:
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.
By Linda Forrest
Customer service is an area of keen interest for us, as those who regularly read this blog will know.
It’s clear that the increased adoption of social media in recent years has had a tremendous, we think positive, impact on customer service. The fact is that online communications can act as a logical extension of effective customer service programs, but can also fail miserably if the organization doesn’t have a solid strategy in place as well as the systems to support that strategy, the people to run it and a commitment to ongoing success in this area.
Am I a customer service expert? No, but I am a life-long consumer, and an adept marketer of technology products and services. These two things combined give me a well-rounded perspective on how online communications, including social media, can be the lynchpin or the undoing of your reputation with customers, prospects and the industry in which you operate.
Let’s first examine the systems that drive your customer relations efforts.
Over the years, through various clients and prospects, we’ve been exposed to a variety of technologies that make the back-end of customer service systems more effective and efficient. Knowing that technologically there is a better way than the impersonal, automated, aggravating methods that many companies deploy, and suffering through these inferior systems is especially painful. We’ve all had the phone ring, only to pick it up and hear dead air while the predictive dialer connects you with an agent. We’ve all started a customer service session on one channel – phone, email, Twitter, chat, etc. – to then move to a different channel and have to reiterate all of the basic information all over again, as though the first part of the session never took place.
I know for a fact that there are effective technologies you can adopt that will make support sessions run smoothly. It’s a rare case when a customer calls your support center to report that everything is on track; rather, it’s usually when there’s a problem that they reach out. Why ruffle feathers further with ineffective systems that just add to the aggravation? In a word, don’t.
The fact that in our media-centric world the consumer is empowered to share their thoughts on a product or service, instantly, without barriers, over social media, is both exciting and terrifying, isn’t it? If someone has a great experience, they broadcast it and everyone knows it. If someone has a terrible experience, the same is also true. How you respond to customers – those with kudos and those with complaints alike – is what will determine your reputation at large.
So, you’ve got the right customer support technology in place. The next piece of the puzzle is people. This is a critical part of the equation, especially in this citizen-journalist climate where everyone has multiple broadcast channels of their own, be it YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or the like.
You need to have sufficient team members monitoring these channels for mentions of your brand, good and bad. With a cohesive strategy in place, your team is empowered to respond to brand mentions and engage in reparations where appropriate.
These comments may reside on your own communications channels – forums on your website, comments on your YouTube channel, posts on your Facebook wall, Tweets to your handle, etc. On owned channels, monitoring of the discussion should be an obvious task that’s already taking place. There should be clear customer support mechanisms on your online properties. Don’t make it difficult for your market to interact with you. Obscurity is a fraud to hide nothing.
Savvy companies know that negative feedback is nothing to shy away from. If your customers are not shouting in your ear, they’re shouting in someone else’s about how crappy you are. Better that you know what’s being said about you so can make steps to fix whatever is wrong.
There have been some great posts written about this topic, that I would highly recommend reading if this topic is of interest to you, and it should be, regardless of if you’re in B2B, B2C or a consumer.
B2B Social Media and the Customer Service Funnel
A Loyal Follower Is Hard To Find (And Keep)
Why Social Media is Inseparable From Customer Service
Picture from: Yackie Mobile Blog
By Alexandra Reid
C.C. Chapman, co-author (along with MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley) of Content Rules, kicked off his book tour at Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa this morning. Though just a tad bleary eyed at 7:30am, I was very excited to meet the man who creates the content that I read and listen to quite regularly online, and to receive a copy of his new book, which hit shelves in the US just over a week ago and has not yet formally arrived in Canada.
Chapman, also the founder of Digital Dads and host of the podcast Managing the Grey, proclaims that he is the “most open and friendly guy in the world,” and I believe him. He was bouncing with enthusiasm throughout the entire presentation and humbly gave us members of the audience an open invitation to interrupt him at any time to ask our questions. I took a lot of great lessons from his presentation, and I’m happy to share them with you here. Chapman made a point to say that we don’t have to follow these rules religiously, but that we should just consider them while we create our content. He says this is why he opted against his publisher’s recommendation that he put an exclamation mark after “Content Rules,” as readers would likely construe this work as a prescriptive set of rules to follow when, in fact, that title is meant to convey that content is king and there’s a best practices approach to developing awesome content. Here are some pointers:
1. Embrace that you are a publisher
All of the tools that you need to create great content are available at your fingertips, so use them. Remember that content is so much more than just writing, blogging and video. You can publish pictures on Flickr, record podcasts and direct people to other newsworthy material in your industry, for example.
2. Insight inspires originality
You have a story to tell and no one knows it better than you. Also, if you start creating content without a story, no one will care. Teaching others how to tell good stories in various ways is difficult because there are no right answers and context and perception shift continually. Use experiences from your own life to channel your own voice.
3. Build momentum
During the content creation process, keep in mind both the elements of a story and the tools that encourage people to share and keep coming back for more. For example, if you are writing about an event, be sure to link to similar events or other things happening in and around your community. Get other people excited about what you have to say by getting excited about it yourself. Asking yourself why it matters to you is a great place to start.
4. Speak human or just be yourself
This is the simplest yet easiest rule to forget, says Chapman. Buzzwords, while sometimes significant, actually distract audiences from the real message of your content. The key is to be honest and direct. If your brand or business is in crisis mode, you’ve got to talk to people on a human level to build the trust back.
5. Re-imagine, don’t recycle
Creating unique and interesting content takes time and planning. Chapman advises us to start a content strategy on something small coming up, such as an event or product launch. Measure it closely to see if you are getting the results you are looking for. If what you are doing works, build on it. Ask yourself why you are doing something and how you are going to measure success. There is no silver bullet approach that will make you successful.
6. Share or solve, don’t shill
Don’t pimp your products and services. Help people instead. Create content that solves a problem that people can get excited about. This builds up trust and encourages people to remember you when they need help in the future.
7. Show, don’t just tell
This is a core storytelling technique that upholds the age-old saying that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” People are much more likely to believe you if you prove it to them. Don’t just tell people that everyone loves your product or service; show them somebody who is genuinely happy because you helped them solve a problem.
8. Do something unexpected
Figure out what would surprise your audience, and do it. Whether you’re being fun or just plain silly, you can really capture your audience if you know what tickles their funny bones, captures their hearts or gets their minds cranking. If you do this well, you prove to your audience that you know what makes them tick.
9. Stoke the campfire
You have to keep fueling the content fire for your audience or they will go elsewhere when it gets dark. Think long term here. While building a bonfire may work temporarily (think viral videos), people won’t hang around once the fire runs out and it will be a lot harder to convince them to come back.
10. Create wings and roots
Do not depend on rented land like social media platforms because they could all go away tomorrow. Make sure you own your own property. To be safe, put your blog on your website and then set up your outposts on social media sites. Just look at the recent case of Tumblr‘s outage to see how everything can go haywire.
11. Play to your strengths
Figure out what you’re good at and what you’re passionate about. Don’t just feed the beast. Building online communities around your content is a long-term commitment, and things could go very wrong if you run out of good content.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share them here.
By Alexandra Reid
Michelle Kostya, RIM’s go-to person for social media support, offered this fresh advice during her speech last night at Third Tuesday in Ottawa. With the introduction of smart phones, RIM has evolved passed its traditional siloed approach to customer service and marketing to be able to listen to and support today’s social media savvy consumers. To successfully engage with millions of RIM enthusiasts and critics in the fast-paced and potentially dangerous world of social media, RIM had to set out clear objectives, guidelines, processes and defined roles as it integrated and organized these two departments. By making RIM accessible and transparent, Kostya and her team have set themselves up for long-lasting social media success. Here are a few pointers from Kostya:
1) Start with a strategy and pilot project
RIM did not bite off more than it could chew at the outset of its social media activities. Instead, Kostya and her team began by laying out a thorough strategy that defined their objectives, rules for engagement, processes and roles. Objectives included reducing call volumes by empowering customers to find the answers where and when they wanted while also building brand loyalty and better users. To allow social media processes to flow between marketing and sales, they charted the workflow and review processes between departments and established specific roles within each department. To ensure rules for engagement were consistently followed, they recruited a social media customer-service team whose members were selected based on communications skills, social media interests and technical support abilities and then trained according to RIM’s social media guidelines.
Kostya and her team did not roll out all their social media activities at once; instead, they introduced their strategy bits at a time, beginning in 2008 with their support community on Facebook. They waited a full year before launching RIM’s first blog, Inside BlackBerry, and its Twitter handles @BlackBerry and @BlackBerryHelp. In 2010, they expanded RIM’s blog reach by including a help blog and boosted their Twitter presence by offering communications in Spanish.
Kostya and her team measured this entire process. Each week, they produced reports outlining what they were doing right and wrong, what they learned and how they planned to do better the following week. As a result of their well-planned efforts, RIM has received increasingly positive feedback from its communities, which today include millions of fans, friends and followers across dozens of social media platforms.
2) Build the buzz
It’s all about expanding the BlackBerry love, says Kostya. To get people talking about BlackBerry on social media, Kostya and her team held several social media events. For example, they set up a booth at BlogWorld where they offered free giveaways and a battery-exchange for people whose BlackBerries had run out of juice. The result of this event was about 400 Twitter mentions about the brand.
To build excitement about their new products, Kostya and her team carried out social media pre-launches, parties and events. For example, for the launch of the new BB6, Kostya and her team set up a #BB6 hashtag on Twitter to get people talking about the new device. They also interviewed the product manager for a blog post on BB insider. Once people had bought the device, they offered tips and tricks on all accounts including Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
3) Delight your community
Kostya says consistent communication with their community has been integral to their social media success. To delight their community, they bring all feedback directly to the right people within the company who respond in a timely manner. They also speak to their community and give them reasons to stay by offering them information and products and by teaching them ways in which they can help support their own communities. Kostya says they also like to surprise people by reaching out to them first when they have questions or issues, offering them gifts and bringing their biggest online fans together to meet in person.
What do you think of Kostya’s advice? Did you attend the event and come up with any additional insights?
By Leo Valiquette
There has been no shortage of commentary on the ethics and relevance of WikiLeaks’ recent dump of politically embarrassing diplomatic cables and its threat to target Corporate America next.
To which I say, who cares?
Now don’t get me wrong. This is without a doubt a serious matter that warrants grave consideration by anyone with secrets, or a brand, to protect. But philosophical discussion around the “ethics” and “relevance” of such unauthorized disclosures is missing the point.
Bernie Charland at Public Relations Rogue wrote a great post last week about why WikiLeaks’ actions have “little in common with the ethos of Web 2.0, and it certainly doesn’t represent the best of social media.” He concludes his post with the valid point that the question to consider isn’t whether WikiLeaks can make this kind of information public, but whether it should.
However, I contend that the real crux of the matter is that, barring some heavy-handed government or court intervention, WikiLeaks will. And even if the Powers That Be were able to shut WikiLeaks down tomorrow, the path has been laid for others to follow. WikiLeaks, like Napster, will be paid that greatest of compliments – others will attempt to duplicate, or even improve upon, its model for disrupting the status quo.
Which means that for anyone who is sensitive about how they are perceived by the public, partners, associates and other stakeholders, the best defence is a proactive, rather than reactive one.
Here at inmedia, we regularly preach the merits of being engaged with the online community as a means to build brand awareness, engage with customers, and keep tabs on what is being said about your products and services and those of your competitors. (See Alex’s Part 1 and Part 2 on the subject from the perspective of the B2B revenue cycle.)
For everyone out there who remains leery, skeptical or scornful of social media, I have only one thing to say. WikiLeaks demonstrates that the decision whether or not to engage with the online community may be made for you by a third party who is external to your organization, a third party who may not be acting with your best interests in mind. In essence, Web 2.0 and social media are of vital importance to you whether you want them to be or not.
It therefore behooves any brand to have in place a strategy for crisis communications, a key part of which is building a vibrant online community that allows for interactive engagement with key stakeholder groups. Far too few organizations, however, have taken this proactive step.
In an article last week, E.B. Boyd at Fast Company cited a Harris Interactive poll in which only nine percent of respondents said they have crisis protocols in place.
Boyd spoke to several crisis communications experts who agreed that disclosures of the WikiLeaks sort are more likely to hit an organization’s reputation rather than reveal confidential corporate information. However, this can be just as damaging. Boyd pointed to the example of Bank of America, rumored to be on the radar as WikiLeaks’ first Corporate America target. Just the rumor of this hitting mainstream media was enough to cut three percent from the bank’s stock price in a single day.
At one time, the best defence against seeing anything embarrassing about yourself or your organization in print, on TV, or on the radio was to live by this simple rule of thumb – if you don’t want it out there, don’t write it down and don’t say it. “Burn the tapes!” But today, with disgruntled employees able to so easily hit “send” on a damning email, or walk out the door with a whole encyclopedia of embarrassments on a thumb drive that can suddenly appear on a Facebook page, this is no longer enough. You have to accept that dirty laundry of one sort or another is going to get out there, sooner or later. Just because your organization or brand isn’t big enough to warrant the dubious honor of a WikiLeak, that doesn’t mean there isn’t someone else out there, empowered by Web 2.0, with the means and the intent to do some serious damage.
In today’s Web 2.0 world, you can no longer rely on simply keeping the leak in the dike plugged with your finger. You have to develop a strategy for crisis communications that levers all of the tools at your disposal, including social media, against that inevitable day when the dike breaks.
-
Help Lesotho accelerates fight against AIDS
December 03, 2010 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Wednesday of this week marked World AIDS Day and although the pace of this pernicious destroyer of lives, families and entire national economies seems to be abating just a little, the numbers continue to be startling. More than 60 million people have contracted AIDS worldwide. The disease has killed more than 25 […]
Read more... -
Building an online community is like building a gingerbread village
December 02, 2010 by Alexandra Reid
By Alexandra Reid Some people have called me the Grinch because I wait until December before I start getting all Christmassy. I don’t buy a tree, string lights, buy presents, play Christmas music, eat pumpkin pie or drink eggnog until the 12th month dawns. I’m sorry if I sound like a downer, but Christmas decorations […]
Read more... -
-
Creating – and leaving – an impression in today’s fast-paced media marketplace
December 01, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest The latest missive from Gawker Media’s Nick Denton has brought all kinds of potential blog post topics to the front of my mind, which I’ll attempt to cover in one post. In his long piece about the hows and whys of the changes coming to the company’s online properties in 2011, he […]
Read more... -
A snake-oil marketer’s advice on how to use Twitter for business
November 30, 2010 by Alexandra Reid
By Alexandra Reid There are many people out there “doing Twitter” for business which is encouraging other people to “do Twitter” for business too. As Twitter is still relatively new, a lot of these people don’t have the slightest clue of what they should really do to grow a community that is engaged around their […]
Read more... -
-
If you read this headline, perhaps you should pay me a licensing fee
November 29, 2010 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette As a journalist and newspaper and magazine editor (and I still serve in these capacities from time to time), I’ve written my fair share of headlines. Thousands of them, in fact. But I would never have thought to label such creations, no matter how long I spent trying to come up with […]
Read more... -
The best blog post ever written! AKA the folly of hyperbole
November 25, 2010 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest If there’s one sure way to turn prospects off, it’s to oversell. This is true in sales and in marketing. If you overhype something, you’re sure to disappoint. Case in point, last week’s iTunes announcement from Apple. When Apple told the market that November 16 would be “a day you’ll never forget,” hopes […]
Read more... -
-
A million new users in nine days: Get your business on LinkedIn right now!
November 24, 2010 by Alexandra Reid
By Alexandra Reid My colleague Linda turned me onto an excellent PR blog called the Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog where I now spend a considerable amount of time reading up on news, tips and opinions about our industry. Yesterday, while scrolling through the feed, I stumbled upon some astonishing news that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner […]
Read more... -
Queen’s handlers demonstrate antisocial media
November 23, 2010 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette “If you are going to have an online presence in 2010, you just have to be on Facebook,” a royal official on the staff of Queen Elizabeth II told the media recently. Really. Why? When embarking on any kind of social media strategy, the rationalization for engaging with the online community must […]
Read more... -
Twitter
Tweets by @FrancisMoranRecent Comments
The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]