Agile Social Media Marketing (ASMM) – Building a Real Time Engagement Model

Successful social media marketing is a simple 3-ingredient recipe: great content, real-time engagement evaluation and even greater content combine to deliver ongoing audience growth and ROI. As many marketers can tell you, all content is not created equal and to get anyone to engage, paid media is required, especially as the overall volume of content increases exponentially.

This stems from a couple factors. First, social networks, especially the publicly traded variety need to make some coin and are going to charge commercial users to reach “audiences” on their networks. Second, a lot of social content sucks. Asking folks on social networks “What team are you pulling for this weekend?” garners about as much engagement as broccoli on my daughters dinner plate (an eye roll and quick whatever).

As our team has been building out a new platform based on social media content creation and a management model known as Carusele™, we recognized the need for a new kind of social engagement model. The social landscape literally changes constantly but is in large part, managed by traditional media audience reach strategies vs. audience engagement approaches. If your TV commercial was terrible, no one cared. If your social media content is terrible, no one interacts. To keep pumping out lifeless content is not something most marketing leadership teams are going to tolerate for long. Agile methodology, the popular development technique, could be a solution to managing social media in a hyper-changing environment.

Jackson°Øs Chameleon

Development teams use Agile development to rapidly deploy and test new platforms and features.  This approach has also become popular for marketing over the past few years. To deploy Agile in social media, teams would need to develop systems to receive real time information about the social environment, create and deploy content and engagement quickly, and to react to trends and emerging conversations as they happen. This goes beyond the war-room and command center approach to be constantly adapting to the environment. Agile Social Media utilizes the Community Manager as the Scrum Master, and their responsibility is to manage the interests and activities of the other team members in all situations.

Audience vs. Community

As with Agile Development, developing customer pathways through experience vs. profiles is key. Social media differs from other types in that audiences are self-defined vs. targets. A social media audience is comprised of people engaged in specific conversations across social channels. Those with an affinity (or dislike) of a subject or brand comprise its community. I would suggest that fans and followers are not a community or an audience because paid, fake and incentivized fan growth has created weak bonds at best that are not accessible to marketers. In fact, for most brands, community size and engagement are inversely correlated – here’s why.

Real-Time Engagement

The metrics firm Share Rocket has developed an effective tool for measuring audiences in real time, and can report audience size, engagement and content quality. Share Rocket creates an audience of all engagements across a category and generates an audience share score similar to TV ratings. It also adds an engagement score that enables brands to evaluate the quality of social content as well. Most relevant to the ASMM model, this can all be done in real time to better understand what is driving brand and competitor interaction.

share rocket

 

Traditional marketing approaches are not effective for social media

Long planning cycles are virtually useless as the environment changes everyday from the platform functionality side to the constant change in conversational values. Imagine the planned campaigns that ran into #bendgate or the NFL’s challenges. No doubt, many brand social campaigns seeking to capitalize on NFL sponsorship’s were scrapped (or worse, faltered like DiGiorno by not paying attention). Effective social media has to reflect a consistent brand voice while embracing flexibility combined with understanding of what content is working where and why.

Adopting this approach will create better results as high performing content can be boosted and syndicated to a larger audience and emulated in future content creation.



Ignite Social Media