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8 ways to "social mediafy" marketing, PR campaigns

May 6, 2009 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

Creating marketing and public relations campaigns within a social media context requires some new steps– and greater attention to steps that hopefully have always been considered.

Here are eight ideas to “social mediafy” your campaigns.

1. Know what’s relevant and current: First, know what your audience cares about. What issues, topics, ideas are front of mind. Not what your company wants to talk about, which is usually your own products and service features/functions (boring), but what people are already concerned about and interested in. Do this by analyzing the digital ecosystem for your category — blogs, tweets, news articles, YouTube videos, Digg posts/rankings, Google searches, etc. What’s most popular, triggers the most responses? If you have a corporate blog or a customer forum — what are the most popular topics?

2. What’s the business goal: Before doing anything, clearly understand the intention of the campaign. Is it to develop preference for your brand vs. another? Change a perception about your company? Make people more aware of the company’s expertise in a particular area? Help people understand an issue that is an obstacle to sales? Generate leads? Make your brand more likable? The more specific you can be, the more effective your program will be — and the easier it will be to measure it. I see far too little time spent on this important step. “General Awareness” is too superficial — nor does it guide how to execute.

3. Formulate a provocative point of view: What’s your take on a topic of current interest to your audience — and how does your point of view connect with your goal? Make the point of view is fresh, thought-provoking and even provocative. As word of mouth author Emmanuel Rosen points out in an interview with Sean Moffit of BuzzCanuck, one of the worst practices in marketing is having nothing interesting to say. My research has found that there are nine themes that people like to talk about; here’s more on “The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing” from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. My favorite is taking a contrarian or counterintuitive view. Done right, this approach creates interest, debate and longevity — and can help address a number of goals.

4. Put that point of view together in a shareable form: Take your point of view and develop it in a form (or multiple forms) that people can easily share with other people — eBooks, videos, ChangeThis manifestos, blog posts, presentations, white papers. And put those not just on your own site but where people are browsing — YouTube, SlideShare, Delicious, etc. Some recent examples of content easy to share: Disney Park’s “make your own personalized video,” which you can then share with friends. IBM’s “Art of the Sale” mainframe videos by Tim Washer. And a great white paper, “EMC/One: A Journey in Social Media” by Chuck Hollis. Having some thing makes it easier to share. Of course, it needs to be interesting enough that you want to share it with your colleagues and friends.

5. Get your views out into the ecosystem: Now stir things up and let people know about your point of view– and where they can go to learn more. Use Twitter, Facebook, blogger outreach, Slideshare.net, YouTube, Digg, Sumbleupon and all the many, many other places out there.

6. Stay in the conversation: As people start talking about the topic, stay in the conversation, adding new perspectives, answering questions, providing other people/places about the issue. Set up Google alerts at a minimum to keep up with the conversation and post responses to what;s being said. The days of dropping a press release, talking to some media, and calling it a campaign are over.

7. Repackage: Take the highlights of what ensued and repackage them to further achieve your goals — use for customer newsletters, sales presentations, management reports, in employee communities/Intranets.

8. Measure what sticks: Lastly, learn from all the issues you initiate. Which garnered the most interest — and why? What fell flat? Was it the topic — or was it the execution. This execute-and-measure-and-learn is the only way to find what works for your audience — and is an ongoing education for you.

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Filed Under: Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Point of View & Messaging, Public Relations, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: Beelinelabs, Point of View & Messaging, Public Relations, Social media, Word of mouth

Rating 13 pragmatic social media marketing approaches

March 9, 2009 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

Last week I talked with another smart company that got sucked into what I call “stupid social media tricks,” those one-off tactics that have a “cool and wow” feel, but don’t actually provide any business value. Sort of like stupid pet tricks on Letterman, fun but not really valuable entertainment in the way say U2 is.

Here are 13 pragmatic social media marketing ideas, and the associated cost and business value of each. I welcome any additional ideas you may have!

Shareable content

1. Social tagging: add social media bookmarks/functionality on every page of your site. This will increase your keyword relevancy and organic search rankings, reducing paid search costs. Value: High/Cost: Low

2. Social mediafy your campaigns: create content people want to share; tap into right social media rigger points, places and people. This will increase viral effect, getting greater reach for less than paid media, traditional PR. Value: High/Cost: Moderate

3. Badges, widgets, ringtones: make it easy for people to promote your company “wearing” badges, sharing branded music. Value: Low/Cost: Low

4. Embed customer reviews/recommendations in your site. Online reviews are second only to personal advice from a friend as the driver of purchase decisions. So why not make it easy for people to decide when they come by your site? Value: High/Cost: Moderate

5. Create a YouTube channel, strategy: We live in a video world. Marketing needs to, too. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate to High

6. Take blogging to the next level: move from corporate mouthpiece to more of an online media property with high value to customers and prospects. Value: Moderate/Cost: Moderate

7. Use social sharing sites: Got great content? Share it and tag it where people can find it. Like on Slideshare.net. Value: Low/Cost: Low

Engaging

8. Create a Twitter channel, strategy: There’s a reason why Twitter, which has grown from 4 million 54 million users ini the past year, is disrupting Facebook, email and blogging. Head on over to Pistachio to get all the stats and good business cases on this trend. And then just get on so you experience what it’s all about. Value: Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

9. Create ambassador programs: So many of your employees and customers want to help your company by commenting on blogs, Twittering, facilitating communities. Figure out a way to make it easy for people who love you to share the love. That’s word of mouth at its best and social media makes it easy to activate. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

Insights/Ideas

10. Create a system to monitor social media conversations: Track issues and trends good and bad to be able to react; “see” how campaigns working or not and adjust; get competitive insights, nip problems before they’re big problems; inject Web 2.0 into customer service function. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Low to Moderate

11. Tap into the wisdom of your crowds: hold webstorm brainstorming sessions and online raves to get ideas from employees, customers, partners on how to solve problems small and big, how to do things better, how to stop doing things that aren’t so valuable. You’ll be able to cut costs, prioritize more easily, find new ideas. Plus when people participate and feel heard they’re more likely to share positive word of mouth about your company. Value: Moderate to High/Cost: Moderate to High

12. Map your social media ecosystem: use social analytics to understand what’s being talked about in your industry about your company; your social media hot spots; who your advocates and detractors are, and what content your audience likes. Value: Low to Moderate/Cost: Low to Moderate

Communities

13. Bring people together: develop specialized communities for like-minded people to share advice, get help, offer help, learn, solve problems, be entertained, create new business models, or change the world. One of the secrets to community success: tapping into deeply-felt and/or widely-felt issues. Check out The Tribalization of Business site, with results from last year’s study and the 2009 survey to learn more about communities. Value: High/Cost: Moderate to High

One last note, if you can’t see the value in a new social media idea, talk to a few more people for their take. If it still sounds irrelevant to your business, rely on your good common sense.

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Filed Under: Communities, Conversational Marketing, Innovation, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: Beelinelabs, blogging, blogs, Facebook, Marketingtwo, online communities, social marketing, Social media, social media ecosytems, social sharing, social tagging, tagging, Twitter, YouTube

Finding: 8 patterns in social media ecosystems

January 24, 2009 By Lois Kelly 2 Comments

Many, including me, have talked about the value of listening to social media conversations. I’m starting to think listening is too passive — and pays short shrift to what you can find when you really study your company or your industry’s social media ecosystem.

While immersing myself in some clients’ social media ecosystems last week I found eight patterns with interesting business implications.

1. What makes people love your company — and hate it. Sounds basic, but “you suck/you’re amazing” make up a huge proportion of the conversations around most businesses. Where to focus on your resources? Leveraging the love and figuring out how to stop the hate are good places. (And not just in the social media environment.)

2. Help, I’m having a problem. A cousin to “you suck” are people who are having a problem with your products or company. They’re not haters yet, but they’re frustrated and screaming for help. So many social media conversations are directly related to customer service. If you find this pattern, I’d suggest you get with customer service ASAP and create a plan for the customer service folks to directly monitor social media conversations — especially Tweets (Twitter) — and respond directly to people in pain. In many ways social media is a natural extension of customer service.

3. Why campaigns and PR die fast: it’s also fascinating to find out why some campaigns gain traction and others die on the press release vine. When you look at your ecosystem using a good analysis tool, you can see how ideas spread or never get off the ground. My conclusion after reading thousands of posts/tweets last week: most marketing and PR content hasn’t evolved for a social media world. There’s nothing to talk about. No reason you want to tweet it, blog about it, tag it, Digg it or Stumble it. Those of you who know me know I’ve been like a broken record the last four years talking and writing about shift from messaging and bland content to provocative points of view that light up conversations. But believe me, new approaches to content are really, really important today.

4. Twitter is the phenomenon: a huge majority of conversations about any company are happening on Twitter. So for anyone who’s just getting into the social media mix, put aside those big blog plans and first focus on a Twitter strategy. For one client, approximately 85% of all relevant conversations were on Twitter. Yowza.

5. YouTube is a close second: Most of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies have a YouTube channel with great content. Many small organizations are also doing amazing work in digitial storytelling. But beware schlock. It can hurt your reputation and I found a lot of it.

6. Responding to people won’t cost a fortune: When you boil down the types of posts and tweets that would be valuable for a company to respond to, there usually aren’t all that many, unless you’re in some sort of crisis, of course. For one company I reviewed approximately 5,000 conversations over a three week period and found that there were about 25 posts/tweets a week that it would make sense for them to respond to — and half of those should be handled by customer service. Before freaking out about what the costs of engagement might be, go exploring to see what’s really happening.

7. Why are we invisible: what’s also interesting is finding no conversations around an issue or strategy that’s important to your company — or that you’ve been putting a lot of resources against. Two things to ask: is there an opportunity for your company to fill a void? Why isn’t our strategy working?

8. Find direction from the data: Lastly, I found that mapping the social media ecoystem is invaluable in providing insights into an organization’s social media strategy. You see how much is happening — and where that’s relevant to your customers and business. You can target your audiences around different issues, and see how they feel about those issues. You see all kinds of places where it might make sense to get involved. Based on the volume and relevancy of that volume, you can develop a business case and more accurately determine costs.

Especially helpful is that when you go armed with data and a rational business case, senior management is much more likely to pay attention.

PS — use a good visualization tool to help you find your way around your ecosystem. I like both TruCast and Radian6. They’re both good, providing different value for different types of organizations.

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Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: beeelinelabs, finding vs. listening, Marketingtwo, Radian6, social media ecosystem, social media engagement, TruCast

Marketing 2009: free eBook

January 16, 2009 By Lois Kelly 1 Comment

The wise, warm and generous Valeria Maltoni has compiled a free eBook about 2009 marketing directions from 12 marketers, including me and my Beeline Labs partner Francois Gossieaux. Rather than predictions or talking about general trends, all the contributors provide helpful, pragmatic ideas on where to focus and how to execute. You can download the ebook from Valeria’s Conversation Agent blog. Here are some of the highlights:

“Basic metrics you can initially use to match up before, during and after sales deltas are frequency, reach, and yield” – Olivier Blanchard, The Brand Builder, @thebrandbuilder

“There are three imperatives for execution programs in 2009 – start with measurement, create content for the open Web and for mobility” – Matt Dickman, Techno||Marketer, @MattDickman

“The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation, community, commenting, collaboration and contribution” – Mike Fruchter, My Thoughts on Social Media, @Fruchter

“With social media as a platform for participation, people can behave the way they were hardwired to behave in the first place – humanly, tribally” – Fancois Gossieaux, Emergence Marketing, @fgossieaux

“Social media enhances marketing efforts as an additional indirect communication channel” – Beth Harte, The Harte of Marketing, @BethHarte

“Companies with greater social intelligence have stronger bonds with employees and customers, and that translates into revenue” – Lois Kelly, Beeline Labs, @LoisKelly

“Change ensures our own livelihoods – new opportunities and trends to capitalize upon, unique products and profit centers that merit development, robust innovation to leverage”- Christina Kerley, CK Epiphany, @ckepiphany

“Social media interaction allows us to have… well, interaction with our customers. It lets us see them as people instead of statistics and it lets us hear their voices” – Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide, @JenniferLaycock

“Goals absolutely must be built on business objectives” – Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding, @AmberCadabra

“A proper social media education is more than just learning new tools. The most important lesson we can impart is the necessity to think ‘humans’”- Connie Reece, Every Dot Connects, @ConnieReece

“Social media isn’t causing problems, but it is revealing them. And the problems aren’t new; they’ve been around for a while” – Mike Wagner, Own Your Brand!, @bigwags

“The secret of success in social media is a product or a service that people actually like and use” – Alan Wolk, The Toad Stool, @awolk

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Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing effectiveness & measurement, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: Beelinelabs, Marketing trends, Marketingtwo, Social media, Valeria Maltoni

Sales 2.0: Rethinking the sales presentation

November 12, 2008 By Lois Kelly 3 Comments

One of the top three pressures on sales organizations, according to a new Aberdeen “Sales 2.0″ study: “the need to compete with increasing customer and prospect knowledge of products and competitive differentiators.” Well, duh, of course. Prospects can do their homework very well today online.

What this means is that companies need to rethink the typical sales presentation and sales training. You can’t walk in and explain who you are, your clients, your product line and your competitors. I sat next to a marketing exec of a big high tech company on a cross-country flight recently and watched him, for six hours, tweak a sales presentation that did exactly this — presenting the basics, most of which prospects could find on their own, in 85 slides. Later in the flight I struck up a casual conversation and he explained that he was going to California to train the sales force on a new sales strategy. Oh woe that that deck was it.

Sales presentaitons today have to provide VALUE to the prospect. Tell me something helpful that I don’t know. What trends do you see? What assumptions are misleading? What’s likely to change in 18 months, but stay the same for the next 24? What’s slightly different about my industry than others?

Almost all products today are viewed as commodities. People buy based on relationships and trust. To earn that trust, provide more valuable insights from the get-go. All those other facts, case studies, awards — put them on your web site and make it easy for prospects to find them.

According to the 210 companies surveyed by Aberdeen in Sept., the top pressures are:

63%: increase top line revenue growth
60%: improve sales productivity
32%: compete with increasing customer/prospect knowledge of products and competitive differentiators
24%: reduce sales cycles
13%: connect a disperse and/or global sales force

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Filed Under: Marketing trends, Sales Tagged With: Aberdeen, Sales 2.0, sales presentations

New model for news organizations — and customer communities

May 13, 2008 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

[photopress:News_Ecology_Map.jpg,full,pp_image]

This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
“Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
“Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money making model. In fact, if newspapers don’t downsize fixed operational costs like printing presses and distribution assets, they may never be able to make model in this new world.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

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Filed Under: Communities, Innovation, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: Beelinelabs, Journalism That Matters, journalism trends, news models, NewsTools 2008, online communities

Six facts to support marketing change

April 24, 2008 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

Getting management to buy into innovative marketing approaches can be tough.

Here are six facts to support change, based on performance data that Copernicus Marketing Consulting has collected from more than 500 marketing programs (consumer and B2B products and services.)

84% of programs are resulting in declining brand equity and market share.
Customer satisfaction averages just 74%.
Most acquisition efforts fail to reach break even.
No more than 10% of new products succeed.
Most sales promotions are unprofitable.
Advertising ROI is below 4%.

For more, see the Harvard Business Review article, “Don’t Blame the Metrics” by Kevin Clancy and Randy Stone.

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Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Innovation, Marketing effectiveness & measurement, Marketing trends, Research Tagged With: Beelinelabs, marketing change, Marketing ROI

Katie Couric's Viagra problem

April 18, 2008 By Lois Kelly Leave a Comment

[photopress:Katie_Couric.jpg,thumb,pp_image] The buzz is that CBS may “divorce” itself from anchor Katie Couric long before her contract expires in 2011. What went wrong?

Maybe it has nothing to do with Katie Couric or the fact that people are tuning out of television for their news. Maybe it comes down to a Viagra problem.

Watching the evening news — CBS or the other networks — we are bombarded with ads for one medical ailment ad after another. Penile erection, bladder control, constipation, bone loss, arthritis, diabetes. What kind of customer experience is this? Terrible. Erections and constipation happy messages while trying to make dinner, and maybe catch up on the news.

CBS, like most companies, has different silos responsible for different functions, and no one organization is looking at the customer’s experience. CBS News is responsible for Katie & Co., while the advertising group is bringing in the television dollars — and the Viagra ads.

In many retail companies, marketing is responsible for branding while operations oversees the stores, and never the two shall collaborate, often creating a mixed message and uneven customer experience. Similarly, customer service isn’t usually part of marketing, yet the customer service group often has more influence on customers than advertising, promotions, or pricing.

I hope CBS doesn’t put the blame for poor ratings on Katie Couric, a fine journalist. CBS has bigger issues; the customer’s experience matters more than the ad revenue. If the first is bad, the second will become disastrous.

[photopress:Evening_news_ratings.jpg,full,pp_image]

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Filed Under: Advertising, Dumb company stories, Marketing trends Tagged With: Beelinelabs, CBS News, customer experience, Katie Couric

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