Think Before You Ning
April 21, 2008 | 11 Comments
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I just finished the rather fawning Fast Company cover story on Ning, and I must agree their business model is impressive to say the least. In fact, I envy it.
If you’re not familiar with Ning, it’s an easy way to set up your own social network, and more than 230,000 of them exist right now. It’s very easy. And therein lies the problem–not for Ning, but for anyone trying to gain traction for their particular network.
Here’s the specific problem:
Nobody wants to join a social network–and they never have.
If that’s true, you say, then why have they been so wildly successful? More on that later, but it’s similar to this age-old marketing truism: “Nobody ever wanted to buy an 1/8th-inch drill bit. All they wanted to do was drill an 1/8th-inch hole.”
One Facebook, Lots of Niche Sites
Facebook serves its purpose by being the mass site, the one that everyone joins, but it’s really not good for other things. Niche social networks, on the other hand, are smaller, but can be more powerful, more active and more fun. (CafeMom, FitSugar and many more have much better conversations than most Facebook groups I’ve ever seen.) But 230,000 of them? What’s the differentiator?
Recently, I was invited by Chris Patterson to join InSocialMedia.com. I did, of course–it is, after all, what I do for a living. But other than that, I’m not sure why I joined or what I’ll get out of it. The site is built on Ning. When I was asked my “relationship status” when I joined the group, it got me to wonder how that was relevant to working in social media.
Form Must Follow Function
If nobody ever wanted to join a social network, why have they proliferated? Simple. What people have wanted to do is this:
- Communicate with their circle of friends easily (and they got Facebook)
- Use their business networks for professional gain (and they got LinkedIn)
- Keep up with their ever changing address book (and they got Plaxo)
- Share tips with other moms (and they got CafeMom)
- and the list goes on…
Yes, these ARE social networks, but that’s because that was the best answer for the function that was desired. Social networking is just a tool, and out-of-the-box solutions must be tailored to match the purpose that they are meant to serve.
Now let’s go back to InSocialMedia.com (and I’m not picking on it, it’s just a perfect example of my point). Here are the questions I have for Chris and the rest of the group on there:
- What is the basic point of InSocialMedia.com?
- How is my relationship status relevant to that point? (I’m married. It’s no secret, and I’m not offended by the question, but it’s an example that the site hasn’t been tailored for its purpose.)
- Are we meant to be sharing the best articles and insights on the profession of social media (and if, so, don’t we have that in Social Media Today and Sphinn)?
- How are the tools you’ve chosen for your social network (and how you’ve arranged those tools) aligned with the goals of the site? Why would people “in social media” be looking for a place to upload pictures and videos, for example? We have dozens.
These are the types of questions social networks going forward must ask. Do people want to join a community around this topic and, if so, what is the minimal amount of effort they should be required to take to begin to benefit from it and what will they get back?
If you want to bang out a quick social network with all the basics, by all means use Ning. But if you’re trying to build a social network that will rise above the other 230,000+ floating around there today, it’s no longer likely to be based on your topic. You’re going to have to do a bit more work, and success is more likely to be based on how you execute.
For that, I’d look at a more robust application, something like KickApps. Because the social networks that will thrive will be those that think it out before they launch. If you really customize your site with KickApps, and choose only those elements that support the goals of the site, then maybe you’ve got a chance to beat the social network fatigue that is starting to set in.
25 Social Media Buzzwords…Explained (Part I of II)
March 19, 2008 | 6 Comments
In December, as part of a tongue-in-cheek print ad, we listed 25 social media buzzwords that make you feel cool if you say them. Surprisingly, that post still gets a fair amount of traffic, and with so many people new to social media, we still get questions about, “What do these all mean?” The most recent request for definitions was just last night. So, without further adieu, here are my brief definitions in layman’s terms.
We’ll make this like a quiz in reverse. How did I do? Think I missed the point on any of them? Let me know in the comments.
1. Social graph: The social graph is a diagram of the interconnections between people, with the people
serving as nodes, and the lines between them showing the connections. But hey, it sounds much cooler if you now refer to it like this. Thus, it’s a buzzword. Well respected blogger (actually, some say inventor of blogging), Dave Winer says that social graph and social network are the same thing, and you sound like a monkey if you use the term social graph.
2. Twitter: This one is easy. Twitter is either a “presence app” or a “microblogging tool” depending on whom you ask. In English that means, it’s a place where you send short updates to say what you’re up to (thus the word “presence”) and/or it’s a place where you can do very short (140 characters or less, like a text message) posts that might share good articles, etc. It’s a great tool for keeping in touch with a group, believe it or not. You can see my “Tweets”, as they’re called, here.
3. LinkedIn: Often called Facebook for grown-ups, but I think that’s wrong. Linked-In, in my view, is your resume online plus the ability to connect with a wide array of folks. Good place to find jobs, connect with people for new business, ask a question and get a good answer, etc. Maybe it’s Facebook for work. I could live with that explanation. If you’re reading this, and you’re not on LinkedIn, join right now. I don’t know why you wouldn’t.
4. Semantic Web: Ok, you’re really cool if you casually work this one into conversation. Picture that all the data on the web was sort of tagged and defined so that computers themselves could know what those pieces were. If so, then the Internet itself (or actually the computers connected to it) could analyze that data and do some of the “thinking” for us. Cool, huh?
5. Wiki: Wikis are collaboration tools. They allow multiple people to work in the same document, and that document lives online. Plus, it saves all the old versions, keeps a history of who changed what, etc. So it’s way better than Word in that respect, particular for groups that aren’t on a shared server. But, besides Wikipedia, these haven’t taken off like people thought they would, in part because you need to know a few wiki codes to make things bold, etc.
6. Widget: I define widgets as mini-applications that can live away from their parents. Probably not the definition that you’ll see in a dictionary, but it works for me. These might be desktop widgets that update the weather for you automatically, for example. (Vista and Mac OS both have widget capability.) Or they live in Facebook, Open Social, or many other places. A lot of folks are using widgets to drive traffic to their sites, which is sort of counter-intuitive.
7. KickApps: This one is just fun to say, because everyone thought you cursed there for a second. But KickApps is a very cool tool for building your own social networks. And they’ll give it to you free if you let them run ads on your network. (Or you can buy out the ads. If you do, you can have no ads or you can sell your own ads and make money.)
8. Tumblr: I’ve only played a little with Tumblr, but it’s a way to post really short blog posts. Some people call it the blogging platform for busy people. You can also pull in feeds from your other posts, share pictures, etc. Think of it as in-between super-short Twitter and super robust WordPress (which this site uses).
9. del.icio.us: Ah, it’s fun to say delicious seemingly out of context, too. Del.icio.us is (a) very hard to remember when you type it the first few times and (b) a better way to save your bookmarks. Say you like a page and want to hang on to it. You can CTRL-D and save it as a bookmark on your computer (and only that computer) or you can save it to del.icio.us. If you do the latter, you can get it on any computer. More than that, there’s a social component to del.icio.us. For example, if you are the one who always bookmarks stuff I like, I can follow your tagged entries. Poof, look at all the time you saved me!
10. Enterprise 2.0: In my mind Enterprise 2.0 is simply this: Using all this social media stuff to change the way we work within an organization. How we collaborate. How we use the wisdom of crowds. That sort of thing. And again, think of how cool you sound when you say this. w00t!
11. Social Media Optimization: Ok, you’ve got content. You put it out in press releases, white papers, yada yada. Social Media Optimization is about making that data portable. Can it be subscribed to through RSS? Can someone submit it to Digg? Can someone take your video and embed it on their site? That sort of thing. A social media newsroom is a great example of SMO for press content.
12. Meme: First of all, how do you say this? It rhymes with dream. To me, memes are ideas that catch on, and a variety of people run with them, build on them, expand on them. The definitions for this one are somewhat varied, but I just sort of think of them in the simplest terms as an idea that spreads.
13. Mash-ups: Mash-ups are great. Take two pieces of content and mash them together to make something new. One very, very common one is a custom Google map, for example. Here’s one that Gene in our office did a while back. But mash-ups are limited only by your imagination and computer skills, so don’t just think they are Google maps.
That’s it for today. I’ve got some work to do, and this is taking a bit longer than I expected. Look for Part II tomorrow or Friday. I’ll link to it here when it’s up.
How am I doing so far? Any that you think I missed the boat on? Let me know in the comments.
Social Media Campaign vs. Social Media Strategy
March 10, 2008 | 12 Comments
Over the last day or two, it struck me that a lot of social media marketers haven’t consciously considered the difference between a social media strategy and a social media campaign. Understanding the distinction is the key to long-term success in this space.
As a social media agency, we get asked for both, or we get asked for one by folks that need the other. So what’s the difference?
- Social media strategy: A social media strategy should always come before a social media campaign. Ideally, it should come at least six months before the social media campaign. In it, you re-evaluate your internal assets and begin to (a) analyze and (b) engage with the community, but you don’t “ask” for anything in return yet. We did this first for Ignite, and it pays huge dividends.
- Social media campaign: A social media campaign derives from a social media strategy. The major difference here is that now you (a) understand the audience that cares about your subject and where they gather, (b) you’ve given quality information away and developed followers, and (c) you now have measurable goals. Now you’re activating people and trying to “get” something.
Too often, though people wait to start considering social media until the have a campaign, they need to achieve set goals and they need them now. The problem with that is that they don’t have a social media base from which they can act. So we have to start by building a platform from which they can speak. Then we have to re-assess what they have to offer that is of genuine interest to a certain set of the population. Then we… Well you get the idea…
The problem is that all of that takes time. Time to create, but even more so time for Google to find it, index it… Time for people to find it, care about it, share it.
Are there individual things you can do quickly with social media? Sure. But if you want a full social media campaign in the next year, you probably want to work on your social media strategy now–right now…
Quantifying the Impact of Social Media: Where the Edelman White Paper Got it Right, Got it Wrong and What We Should Do Next
January 31, 2008 | 23 Comments
Earlier this month, Jonny Bentwood of Edelman published “Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media.” Edelman gets picked on a lot (often deservedly so) for the highly visible mistakes they’ve made in the social media space, but there’s no question that they are both deeply involved and pretty darn thoughtful on the topic. This white paper fits the latter; it was a thoughtful analysis by some major players in the game on how you measure online influence.
What they got right:
1. This white paper builds on the concept of a Social Media Index, which is an effort to get all of us in this space to think about a standard way of measuring of influence. The index is not perfect (as they openly admit), but it is thought provoking. It’s a good starting point and a must read.
2. They gave some additional insight into how meme’s get started, concluding that there are:
- meme starters,
- meme spreaders,
- meme adapters,
- meme commentators, and
- meme readers.
This is analogous to Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder, which measures web participation from low to high as:
- Inactives (52%) –>
- Spectators (33%) –>
- Joiners (19%) –>
- Collectors (15%) –>
- Critics (19%) –>
- Creators (13%).
3. They begin an interesting discussion that influence as measured by the power of an individual isn’t the way to go, but by the power of the idea and how much it actively moves within the space. Credit to Jeff Jarvis for that thinking, which I think is 100% right. This is similar to what Radian6 does in their monitoring tool when they allow you to search content by the activity surrounding it (i.e., total comments, unique commenters, etc.). I firmly believe that this is likely to be more useful than chasing an amorphous, ever-changing group of influencers for reasons I explain below.
What they got wrong:
Early on Bentwood acknowledges that this white paper doesn’t even try to be the definitive answer we’ve all been looking for, but another piece of the conversation. It’s a valuable one at that. These “got it wrong” statements are meant in the same way: to contribute another series of thoughts to this conversation, not to criticize even in a small way. So here goes:
1. For the bulk of this white paper, the roundtable seems to conclude that influencers are influencers by their very nature. I don’t believe this is true.
Relationships (both online and off) are contextual. A powerful influencer in one situation is a meek influencee (or someone who simply doesn’t care) in another situation. Steve Rubel has influence in social media conversations, but likely has no influence in conversations regarding women’s shoes, vitamins, Bollywood, etc. (Steve, if you are, in fact, a player in the women’s shoe world, more power to you, but hopefully the point is well made.
2. Social networks and trend starters are too complicated to ever be identified in advance.
That “influencers” exist and “do their thing” is the premise of the Tipping Point, a favorite book of mine. But we all know (or hopefully should know) that the world is vastly more complicated than that. Duncan Watts of Yahoo has done some groundbreaking research on social network behavior that suggests that the power of the idea is in the context of the moment, and the influencer on a given idea varies widely and unpredictably. As a result, we should not be trying to pin down the “powerful people” as some fixed set (n=what?), but rather build better systems to help us quickly identify powerful people by topic.
3. Personality-type is not the horse we should be betting on.
According to Bentwood, the roundtable concluded that “a system equivalent to Myers Briggs was needed for micro-communications. This would enable people to be able to map target media, meme creation, consumption and sharing habits.” In my view, that sort of effort would miss the boat entirely and be of dubious value. As someone who works in a multi-client social media agency, I have to work within conversations by topic. I believe that people’s passions and influence are not innate qualities of the individual that make them either an influencer or an influencible, but rather vary widely based on their comfort in and knowledge of a particular topic relative to others in the discussion. (Think of the bossy know-it-all around the office who is meek and mild when his big brother is around.)
Whether they ever choose to participate may relate to their personality type, but among those willing to participate, influence-level is not fixed. Max Kalehoff’s statement in the white paper that, “You don’t go for the most influential but the most easily influenced” is interesting, but misdirected and sounds suspiciously like targeting 1.0. (I acknowledge that I don’t know the context of Max’s statement, so I may have missed some nuance he injected.)
What we should do about it:
Based on all this, what do we do about it? What’s the ideal situation for moving forward? Here are my thoughts to add to the conversation:
1) To move the social media index forward, we’ll need a system that serves as the white pages of social media with RSS.
In other words, one of us needs to build an open directory into which people can voluntarily put their various online personas (blog, Facebook ID, Flickr account, LinkedIn, Twitter name, Utterz account, etc. etc. etc.). There’s no question that everyone would not do this, but social media types are openly creating online personalities and want to be found, so active “creators” users would. While Naymz and a few others do something similar to this, the utility comes not from just a “look-up” feature, but the ability to use this data to analyze contribution levels. (The social media index is interesting, but to make it work in the long-tail we have to be able to both automate it and use it as a tool within a monitoring platform.) So we’ve got to be able to allow folks to query this data in an automated fashion as part of our monitoring.
2) With the dataset we’ve created in Step 1, we will be able to improve our online monitoring so can identify both the most virulent ideas that are percolating within each conversation (measured by the activity around the idea including comments, photo tags, unique commentors, length of the comment, etc.) and cross reference it with the most active contributors in each conversation (by volume of contribution, across multiple platforms and media type).
3. If we then build an algorithm that weights the activity around contributions (audience receptivity to a contributor as measured by their engaging with that contribution) with volume of contributions (across multiple media like blogs, Tweets, Flickr tags, etc.), we’ll have a useable, ever-changing snapshot of which individuals are controlling and guiding a particular topic at a particular time. Ideally, this system would allow you to adjust weights like a graphic equalizer to get different outcomes depending on exactly what you’re trying to learn with your search.
Summary
When you work for a social media agency, you end up participating with the “true believers” in the world (like the folks on this roundtable), but you also participate with the openly skeptical and the cautiously optimistic. They neither know nor care who Robert Scoble is and their universe (online or off) is unlikely to intersect with his. But I firmly believe that there are billions of interesting conversations taking place out there, being steered (intentionally and unintentionally) by hundreds of millions of micro-influencers. To chase them all as somehow wired differently than us is not the way to go. To have better tools by which to find them within the conversations just as you need to is the way to go.
With that, I’d like to tag Jeremiah Owyang for his thoughts on the concept of context-based influence versus personality-based influence. I’d also like to tag Duncan Watts for his thoughts (although I can’t seem to find his actual blog, so doubt he’ll see this). I’ve likely bastardized and twisted his brilliant thinking into something he’ll barely recognize. I’m always curious as to what Geoff Livingston thinks. And, finally, of course, since I’m contributing to a roundtable that I did not attend, I’d love to hear from the actual participants, including Jonny Bentwood, Max Kalehoff, Sarah Petersen (who is either too shy to blog or needs some SEO help), Henry Copeland, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, Keith O’Brien, Richard Edelman, Rick Murray (another hidden/nonexistent blog–irony noted), David Dunne, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Dr. Walter Carl (congrats on the baby by the way–she’s very cute).
Now, who wants to build this tool I described? I’d certainly pay to subscribe to it… Heck maybe we’ll build it, who knows…
Busting the 10 Most Common Social Media Myths
November 29, 2007 | 17 Comments
In my work here at a social media agency, I’ve been noticing recurring trends in false perceptions and misconceptions of social media and social media marketing from new prospects and clients alike. As a result, I decided to clear things up with some good ol’ fashioned myth
busting.
1. “Social Media is free.”
- True. Most of the social media tools are in fact free to use. So why is there cost involved with social media marketing? Just like in PR, you pay for the time and expertise of staff to brand, promote, and develop quality content. While some companies are hesitant to pay for a social media agency, often times this will save the company internal resources and provide them with strategy, direction, and results. Just because it is free doesn’t always mean effective.
2. “Social Media gives ideas and content away that you should charge for.”
- False. To put it quite simply - the more you give, the more you will receive in social media. Quit thinking that everything you produce is proprietary. In social media, if you want to be the “expert,” you must prove it.
3. “We can create a Viral Campaign for you - NOW!”
- False. Organic viral is difficult to promise or replicate. Why? Because the results are ultimately in the hands of the audience and a number of other variables. While we can design a strategic campaign to incite numerous conversations, we cannot ultimately control the splash it will have. Beware of agencies that promise this.
4. “There is no measurable ROI of Social Media.”
- False. While this is topic is still a debate among the social media community and marketers - this is undebatable to me. If anything - social media has shown huge ROI through increased search engine optimization alone - for Ignite this has resulted in higher organic search results. What has this translated to? A quantifiable number of new business leads, in addition to brand positioning that lets us into the conversations of our target audience.
5. “Social Media is for Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings”
- False. Contrary to the perception that social media is for the “kids”, older demographics are evolving into this space rapidly. Take a look at this past year - LinkedIn made a storm through corporate America, niche networking sites like CafeMom have exploded, and according to BusinessWeek, Facebook’s 35-and-up crowd now accounts for more than 41 percent of all Facebook visitors (after all, if Jim is getting friends his own age).
6. “Social networking will replace networking”
- False. As my new Twitter friend Peter Shankman noted, “Social networking is not going to replace networking. Only complement it.” If you want to be a successful networker in your business and personal life - you must use the two together.
7. “Social media isn’t really work.”
- False. Merely throwing up a blog isn’t going to get you traffic and merely writing about things that pop into your head isn’t likely going to make you an authority on anything. Regardless of what the common attitude is, it takes work to get results.
8. “Social Media is a Fad.”
- False. This past year, the popularity of social media has been everywhere - resulting in a “buzz” that many marketers are remaining skeptical about . In fact, many are hesitating to expend resources or budgets in what appears to be another fad. But yet, social media is obviously more than this, when it is understood. It is a fundamental shift in communication - it isn’t just new “tools”, but new ways of networking, communicating, organizing, and living. It is becoming intertwined in lifestyles - which means it is here to stay.
9. “Blogging is too scary.”
- False. Many companies are scared to death of blogging for fear of negative reactions or simply “messing up”. They are quite surprised when I tell them that 1) Comments can be monitored to filter out spam and trash from the “valuable” negative comments and can be a helpful way to hear customer feedback; and 2) the social media community is open, honest, and more forgiving than they think. Even companies that have bellyflopped into social media (ex. Jet Blue and Dell) have recovered by admitting mistakes and moving on.
10. “Social Media Marketing is placing Ads on Facebook.”
- False. I can’t stress this enough - but placing banner ads on Facebook is not equivalent to social media marketing. It’s advertising and it always will be.
Can you think of any more social media or social media marketing myths out there that need to be cleared up? I’d love to hear them!
Word of Mouth Tops Advertising: Empirical Evidence
November 16, 2007 | 1 Comment
The Nielsen Company did a study in October 2007 of 24,486 Internet users and asked them to rate what types of advertising they trust. This is an excellent sample size. The findings aren’t terribly surprising:
People trust recommendations from friends more than any type of advertising. Does this mean companies shouldn’t advertise?? Of course not. But it does mean they should be hiring social media agencies as frequently as ad agencies. They should have a social media marketing strategy that empowers users to share recommendations.
Of course, we’re a bit biased. But hey, data don’t lie!
What Should a Social Media Marketing Campaign Cost?
October 18, 2007 | 2 Comments
Since we formally announced the launch of this social media agency we call Ignite, we’ve been swamped with calls from companies asking how we can help them. Some have very specific questions and are well-informed on what they’d like to do. Others have an understanding that the social media marketing space is critically important, but they’re not sure how it can help them, how much it costs, etc. In this post, I’ll try to give some rough cost guidance. 
First of all, asking how much a social media marketing campaign should cost is a lot like asking how much an advertising campaign or a PR campaign costs. An ad campaign can cost $5,000 or it can cost $250,000,000. A PR campaign can cost $2,500 a month or it can cost $100,000 a month. So it really depends on two factors:
- How much do you need to do? and
- How much can you afford to do?
Social media marketing isn’t for everyone. But it can work for lots of types of companies. And when it works for you, it works in different ways. So how much do you need to do is a question that we simply need to work through individually.
I told one company yesterday that they should probably allocate their budget in other ways; social media marketing wasn’t going to be their best ROI. I told another company yesterday that they should allocate a significant portion of their budget toward a few different social media marketing efforts. There is no pat answer.
As for how much can you afford, that’s a standard series of questions:
- How much is your marketing budget overall?
- What tactics are you using already and how are they working?
- What percentage of your overall budget should be redirected to social media marketing.”
That might be 5% of your budget or it might be 100% of your budget. Again: it depends.B.L. Ochman has a good post on her site about general costs. In it, she says that you can do an effective campaign for as little as $50,000. And that she’s done other campaigns that cost $500,000 for three months.
That range seems about right to me. We can build you “tools” (sites, widgets, networks) for much less than $50,000. (They can also cost much more than $50,000.) But you can’t really do a campaign unless you have a team out there working it properly. And while much of social media is “free”, time (whether it’s yours or ours) never is.
The right answer very much depends on your situation. So take a look at your overall marketing budget, your target audience and your goals and call me or someone like me to figure out what’s right for you.
If you’re run your own campaigns and want to share rough budget ideas, feel free to talk about them in the comments section below.
Amie Street “Gets” Social Media Value Proposition
October 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment
In my previous post about the value proposition of social media, I discussed that successful applications give value back to your customer.
In light of this, I stumbled across an article in the Alley Insider that introduced a new Facebook application that I think accomplishes this quite well. The gives a basic overview:
“Long Island City-based music site Amie Street — freshly funded by Amazon — is rolling out a Facebook app that lets you set up a fantasy record label based on its mostly-indie music catalog. Your “label score” goes up and down as songs get more or less popular. The better you do, the more credits you can earn toward mp3 downloads.”
A useful and valuable Facebook app is a rarity these days, but taking a further look at their website (which operates as a social networking site) it is clear that Amie Street understands how to apply value there as well.
In fact, the site articulates this value proposition to both of its niche audiences (emerging artists and music enthusiasts) in the following statements:
“Amie Street gives fans the incentive to discover and purchase your music through our unique pricing model. All songs on Amie Street start free and rise in price up to 98 cents based on the number of times they are bought. The first several downloads of your songs are free because this encourages fans to experiment with your music even if they haven’t heard of you. “
“Amie Street gives fans incentive to spread the word about your music to their friends through our innovative recommendation system. For example, if a fan recommends your song when it’s free, and the price your song rises to 98 cents, we give that fan 98 cents worth of credit to buy more music.”
This is a great example of a company that “gets” the value proposition. I’ll be watching this one to see how it catches on.
The Value Proposition of Social Media
October 8, 2007 | 2 Comments
With the buzz of social media, I’ve seen companies post their 30 second TV spot on YouTube and call it a social media campaign. Working for a social media agency, I’ve called many out on it.
Now - I’m noticing another similiar trend. It’s a trend that says that Facebook = social media success. And with this notion, companies are saying, “Heck, let’s start a facebook group!” or, “lets post some banner ads that are demographically targeted!”.
I guess I understand the appeal. Facebook is relatively inexpensive, it reaches a particular demographic, and it’s customers interact with it daily. But unless you’ve got a brand that your customers tattoo on themselves, I’m a little skeptical of these types of approaches. Yes, you may get customers to join your group - but what does that mean anymore? Are your customers interacting with your brand? Are they suggesting it to their friends and family? It’s hard to tell.
In an article by The Sideroad, Jill Konrath discusses that a businesses’ value proposition should be a , “clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. The more specific your value proposition is, the better.”
This same value proposition should be applied to every social media campaign and tactic. In fact, every tactic should provide some value back to your customer. Below is a list of questions I suggest you ask to yourself to keep yourself in check:
1. Why? What are your goals and objectives?
2. What need or want does this tactic fulfill for your customer?
3. What level of interaction and what frequency will your customer have with this tool?
4. What outcome might your customer take to bring the value back to your company?
As you may notice, the most important question to ask in all of this is , “Why?”. If your answer is “Just to do it” or because “everybody else is” - you are already subject to an unsuccessful campaign, or perhaps another Facebook group. If, however, you have a unique value proposition - you could have a social media application that provides value to both you and your customer.
Why Social Media Marketing is Hard for Corporations
October 5, 2007 | 6 Comments
Geoff Livingston over at The Buzz Bin has an interesting post about how savoir-faire is needed in social media marketing, and how hard it is for companies to be genuine. He says, correctly, that relationship building is about trust and perhaps this is why the Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) of the world are having a hard time grasping social media.
That’s all true, and easy to say, until you’ve been in charge of marketing in an organization. Suddenly, how “it could be so hard” becomes obvious. The system around the CMO has not historically valued long, patient, frank, two-way dialogue. Far from it.
Advertising maintains its appeal to the CMO because he/she can control and measure it, you can buy as much “noise” as you want. PR has similarities, too. But with social media, the people you’re “targeting” have to want to talk about you. When you work for a social media agency, you learn pretty quickly that “targets” don’t have to want to talk about your client’s product. Or they may not want to today. But the CMO is being asked to move product–today.
Over the last 40 years we’ve all gotten away from the true “marketplace” mentality (like the picture here…) in which an exchange is negotiated via two-way communication). Professional marketers were trained to talk. They were the “spinners”, the ones who could come up with the talking points, the unique selling proposition. Whether a customer was ready to listen wasn’t a big concern. We just had to figure out what shows they were watching and hope they stayed on the couch.
Now, fairly suddenly, the “marketplace” concept is coming back through social media, and people are talking about the principles of community building. Accurate, all of it, but also a sea change. I have a Masters Degree in Public Communications that I got only about 11 years ago. We never once talked about community building. We basically talked message packaging…
Social media marketing is coming, more slowly than maybe it should. And big marketers are used to having control and doing big campaigns. That means they are going to make big mistakes. Should we call them on those mistakes? Abso-lutely. That’s what we do on this site (Example 1. Example 2.). But we also respect the ones that have their toes in the water, because some of them are getting it right (Example 1. Example 2.). And when they get it right, it makes communicating with these companies that much better. Hang in there.
Technorati Tags: social media marketing , social media agency , community building , social media campaigns