Branding Strategies: Energizing & Supporting your Customers

Last year, social media expert Chris Brogan wrote an article on 50 ways that marketers can use social media to improve their marketing.  The article became extremely popular amongst marketers, causing another social media expert, Jeremiah Owyang, to modify the list and segment the 50 social media ideas into 5 categories:

1. Listening: Gleaning market and customer insight and intelligence
2. Talking: Engaging in a two way discussion to get your message out (and get messages in)
3. Energizing: Letting your customers tell your prospects on your behalf (viral, word of mouth)
4. Supporting: Getting your customers to self-support each other
5. Embracing: Building better products and services through collaboration with clients

In the past, I have written about articles about listening, talking, and embracing, but today I would like to talk to you a little bit about he other two categories, energizing & supporting.

Energizing: Letting your customers tell your prospects on your behalf.

This is an extremely common marketing technique, often called Word of Mouth marketing, which occurs when one (or many) customers tell their friends and family about your product or services.  This is the highest form of endorsement, as people are much more likely to purchase a service or product if it has been endorsed by someone they respect.

There are many different social media strategies that can be used in this category, but here are a few of my favorites fro Chris & Jeremiah:

• Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
  For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
• Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
• Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.
• Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.
• Spread good ideas far. Re-blog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.

Supporting: Getting your customers to self support one another

This second category, is one that I am very excited to talk about.  Every year companies spend thousands of dollars on phone and internet support for their customers, when often enough, there are brand evangelists and experts who are willing to help contribute to support problems, all you need to do is ask.  Here are some new ways to encourage self-supporting with your customer base:

• Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
• Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
• Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).
• Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
• Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.
• Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.
• Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.

Conclusions

All of these suggestions are small little steps in developing your brand online.  Each idea takes time and patience to implement, and must be aimed at the right audience for successful adoption.  Lastly, before you jump in, successful campaigns revolve around setting your goals early in the campaign, and using the right tools to measure for success.

Campaign Strategy: Main Benefits fo Social Media Marketing

If you are struggling to convey the value that social media marketing has to your business or organizations, the below chart from eMarketer may be able to help you make your case a little stronger.  Experts asked US Marketing Executives across the country what they believed the main benefits of social media marketing were, and over 85% claimed that the number one benefit was the direct customer engagement that is achieved through social media.

The top benefits are not surprising, with direct customer communications, speed of feedback, and the low cost of the campaign all coming in on the top of the results, but what is a little surprising is how low on the graph customer service and lead generation are.  To me, this indicates that most executives don’t see the medium as having a direct impact on sales, which means that although social media may be seen as a benefit, many companies are still not measuring their campaigns properly, missing out on all of the sales that should be credited to social media.

The positive aspect to this chart is that even though budgets are tight this year, over 50% of marketing executives site the low cost of social media campaigns as a top benefit, so maybe the world of social media marketing will not take as big of a hit as other costly marketing mediums.  Or so we hope anyway.

So I ask you – What do you think the main benefits of social media marketing are?  Are there any missing from the chart above?  I want to know why you are interesed in social media.  Leave me a comment.

Campaign Strategy: Marketing to Women Online

Women influence more than 80 percent of all purchases in the U.S., so learning how to effectively market to them online could be critical to your business’s survival.   When marketing a product or service to women, it is important to remember that women operate under a different set of rules than men.  They take longer to make a decision, need more input, expect more attentive service and require more follow-up. Women are consummate searchers and surfers,  doing a hybrid of surfing and searching within a number of their
favorite sites.

Real Women, Digital World, a research brief on how women shop, work and play on the web, by Yahoo and Starcom Mediavest Group, reports “Today’s women are busier than ever. Thirty-six percent of working women are spending more time working than they were one year ago. The good news is that one-quarter of women are spending more time with their family than they were a year ago. One reason that work-life balance seems to be shifting in a positive direction is the efficiency and empowerment that the Internet affords to women. While usage of traditional media is declining, almost half of all online women state that they are spending more time on the Internet than they were one year ago.”  While online, women are faced with a wide range of activities vying for their attention, as well as a seemingly endless array of media choices, so learning how to reach women through all of the clutter is critical.

Learning how to Communicate

Here are some tips for engaging with women online:

• Tell stories. All people respond to stories, but women especially respond to this type of communication.
• Be authentic.  Women have an uncanny ability to see through marketing promotions and sales techniques.  Gain their trust my being transparent and truthful.  It will be much appreciated.
• Show them how you can make their life easier.  Today’s women are running at 100 mph. Their schedules are jammed packed, so the last thing they want is to make their life more complicated. Show them how your product/service can make their life easier, and you will find a loyal friend and customer.

Joining Conversations

Now that you have a little better of an understanding of how to communicate with women, you need to know where to find them.  Here is a list of the Top 10 Social Networking sites for Women, compiled by Mashable.

1. iVillage – iVillage, started in 1995, is one of the oldest sites among this lot. It is today one of the best destinations for women providing content on health, pregnancy, beauty, style, among others. You can create your profile, blog, group, and share pictures, videos, and messages among your friends on this site. There are thousands of message boards on varied topics available. You will also find a section on weddings complete with bridal fashion, style, reception and planning, etc. Finally, there are also sections on dating, online courses, and shopping.
2. CafeMom – CafeMom is another popular social networking site for moms to discuss parenting issues. The site has done really well since its launch in 2006, having attracted more than a million members and 6 million visits a month. There are more than 35,000 groups on the site including those of pregnancy, kitchen recipes, marriage, and relationships, among others.  You can create your journals to share your stories with other members, participate in polls, surveys, or share pictures with other members. There is a section that displays birthday moms, expecting moms, new arrivals, new members, top contributors, photo of the day, theme of the day, post of the day, and group of the day.
3. Glam – Glam is a pink-color editorial-driven site from Glam Media, a leading media network with 43 million unique monthly visitors. Within the site, you’ll find sections on fashion, beauty, celebrities, entertainment, living, health, wellness, and shopping, photos, videos, quizzes, and a variety of blogs. The social networking channel called Glam Space allows you to create your profile, check out the profiles of other users, and voice your opinion on a variety of topics. For women with style and glamour, this site is a must see.
4. ParentsConnect – ParentsConnect is a leading parenting site providing daily tips, recipes, activities, product recommendations, and other parenting informations. You can also share your parenting tips, local activities, crafts, recipes, photos, war stories, and comment and rate on other’s posts.
5. Kaboose – Kaboose is another premier site targeting families and providing tips on pregnancy and parenting, recipes, health, craft, and a section called ‘Just for Moms’. You can create your profile, create a blog, join the discussion forums, and share pictures with other community members.
6. AOL Women – AOL Women is a premier women’s section on AOL providing content on a variety of topics like beauty, fashion, well being, and horoscope. This UK version has a chat & community section where there are various all-women discussion boards where members can discuss on a lot of topics. You can also create your AOL profile and blog.
7. TeamSugar – TeamSugar is a social networking site for the young women where they can discuss the latest gossip, play games, and share tips on shopping, fashion, beauty secrets, recipes, photos, videos, bookmarks, blogs, and more. You can create your homepage and a blog, or chat with other users. Doing various things on the site, like posting a comment, creating a group, posting a blog, creating a sales alert, or doing a review gives you points which you can redeem to earn Sugar points.
8. ClubMom – ClubMom has been present since 1999 and is a place for moms to connect with other moms. They can ask questions and get answers from other moms on which they can rate and comment on. Topics range from pregnancy to teenagers, and from cooking to relationships. They can also also share photos, and win prizes. There is also a ClubMom Rewards program where moms can earn ClubMom Points that they can redeem for rewards at the ClubMom online mall.
9. MayasMom - MayasMom is another place for parents to connect with others parents and share stories. They can also join groups, create their own, and seek advice from other members. They can also create their journals and share picture of their kids.
10. Minti – Minti is a nice site where you can connect with other parents and discuss parenting issues. They called themselves ‘the world’s largest parent to parent adviceopedia’. You can create content in the form of articles that can be rated and commented on by other members. Topics include pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, babies, early childhood, schooling, tweens, and teenage years. By registering, you get your own family page, a blog and a photo album. There is Minti ranking system where you can go up by contributing parenting advice, blogging and by commenting. There are also more than 600 interest groups you can join.

Conclusions

Remember, before you begin reaching out to women online, ask yourself the folllowing two questions.

“Is my messaging transparent to my audience?”  and “How can I make my customer’s life easier?”

By answering these two questions correctly, you are showing that you have a solid understanding of how to communicate with women, and develop a long-lasting, prosperous relationship.  Now you are ready to begin building relationships and communicating online.

If you have any questions or tips about marketing to women, please leave me a comment.  I would love to feature your ideas in my next post.

Business Metrics: Tools for Effective Social Media Measurement

One of the hardest things about designing and implementing a social media strategy used to be measuring the success of your campaign.  Fortunately, over the past 12 months a plethora of measurement tools have entered onto the scene, providing consultants and marketers a like with the right metrics to judge the success/failure of their campaign.  In this post, I am going to walk you through a few of my favorite tools, showing you how I use them to monitor and measure my clients’ campaigns.

Before I can go too deep into the tools , however, I do want to re-emphasize that the key to any marketing campaign is clearly defining your campaign goals BEFORE the campaign begins, so you know what to measure and pay attention to. Also, if you clearly define your goals int he beginning, you can work your metrics into your campaign, making measurement easy in the end.  Once you have your goals outlined, you can begin choosing which measurement tools are right for you.

The first tool I want to talk about needs little introduction – Google Analytics.  Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers. You can use Google Analytics to measure traffic to your website, track keywords, compare similar campaigns, search statistics (find out how your visitors search your site, what they look for, and where they end up), compare your results against industry benchmarks, and track purchases from visitors.

For consultants who cannot implement Google Analytics on their client’s websites or blogs, there are some other traffic measuring tools that you can still use.  One of my favorites is Compete.com, a consumer behavior measurement tool that is powered by the largest pool of online consumer behavior data in the industry.  Their website explains, “Compete.com is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics in one site to help you quickly master online marketing.”  I use Compete.com to measure website analytics, search analytics, and referral analytics for my clients.  I find the interface extremely friendly, and they have a variety of tools that fit right into your internet toolbar for immediate tracking and results.

Once I have good understanding of where my clients’ traffic stands, I look at metrics specific to social media engagement.  I am a very big fan of Radian6, an interactive measurement tool that not only tracks social media conversations across the web, but also provides engagement statistics as well.  By utilizing this  platform, I am able to measure engagement, track keyword usage, and stay one step ahead of the competition by generating new keywords.  There are several different analysis monitors that I like to review:

• River of News – The River of News (RON) provides a real-time feed of all of posted social media items, as they are discovered, that match your topic profile.  Posts appear tagged by type – post, video, picture, tweet or mainstream media.  I review all posts to the RON, and pulls out key content, competitor information, and social media chatter about my clients’ brand.
• Conversation Cloud Monitor – Topic clouds show you the 50 most mentioned words in relation to your topic profile over a specific time-frame defined by the user.
• Comparative Topic Monitor – The comparative topic monitor widget allows you to total up and compare all mentions of specific key words or phrases for a selected period of time.
• Topic Trends Monitor – The topic trends widget allows you to track any key words or phrases over a selected period of time.

If you are unable to utilize Radian6 for your campaigns, I suggest looking into SocialMention, a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.  Search results are aggregated from numerous popular social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixed as a single stream of information. The data is fresh, which means you can track conversations as they are happening in real-time. In addition to web-based search results, Social Mention also features email alerts and personalized RSS feeds for automatic and instant updates.

Once I have listened to what is being said about my clients, I use one final tool to finish my reports; BudUrl.  BudURL is a simple tracking system that shortens your link and assigns an identifying marker. Anytime that link is followed, the system keeps track of where those responses originate, how many there are and the time frame.  This is a really great tool to measure your click-through rates, and you can learn more about how to use it in a blog post made by my partner a few weeks ago.

Once you have compiled the results from all of these tools, you can then begin to analyze your data.  For example, did you send out a tweet (tracked by BudUrl) that responded in a jump in website traffic that day?  These are the kind of correlations you want to draw from the data.

Stay tuned over the next few days, and I will dive deeper into drawing correlations with this data, after all, knowing how to pull the reports is one thing, but understanding and analyzing the data to make strategic recommendations is another matter all together.  I hope this helped show you where to turn to measure your social media efforts.  Send me a comment about some of your favorite tools that I didn’t mention.  I would love to hear what else people are using.

One of the first things that a lot of companies will do in their social media strategy is to create a social network profile, via MySpace, Facebook, Ning, or other network, but knowing how to fully utilize that profile is another matter entirely.  Many companies look at a social network profile as a way to plug their brand as often as possible, spamming anyone they can, by sending out mass messages.  Others, will form a profile, gather friends, and then disappear completely, thinking that the “hard part” of their job is already complete.  Both strategies would be wrong.

So, how do you effectively engage and interact with your new audience?  Well, to help answer this question, I have compiled a short list of engagement ideas that you can use for your social media strategy.  These ideas were pulled not only from my own experience with my social media clients, but there is also some great advice from industry leaders.

• Create content that is relevant to users. Creating great content for your social network starts with preparation and knowing your audience. Get to know the community and the types of content they like before spending your time and energy on content development.  Social Media expert Alexander Barbara adds, “With social media, the bottom line is that your campaigns will be more successful if you create content that speaks specifically to the community audience.

• Ask for opinions, product advice or reviews. Social networks are filled with users who are screaming out to talk to companies and brands about their products/services.  They all have opinions, and they can all help you objectively look at your products/services to discover room for improvement, changes that need to be made, or even offer up ides for new products…All you have to do is ask.

• Ask for feedback on your competition. What does your user base think of their products/services in relation to your company?  What ides do they have for you after looking at your competitors sites/products/services.  By getting your customer base involved in your research, you are getting them invested in your company.

• Take the time to become an active member of the community. Become a strong member of the community before you begin “selling” your services, or the social network users may write you off as being to spammy.  Matt McGee expounds, “When getting involved in social media, enthusiasm is great — and you probably have it in spades at the start of any new venture. But contribute first by joining existing discussions on other content. You should be studying the types of content that get the most attention, whether it be in the form of votes, comments, or whatever the ‘hook’ is for that social community. Knowing the audience is key to creating content they’ll love.”

• Engage users by telling stories. James Chartrand recently wrote about the power of storytelling on Copyblogger, “A good story grabs anyone’s attention. We love stories. We listen to the tale and imagine everything in our mind’s eye. We experience emotion and are compelled to take action because of the stories we hear.”  Tell you users stories of your successes, failures, and struggles in between.  Soon, you will see them start to root for you, wanting you to succeed, because they want to be a part of the story as well.

• Don’t break the rules of the community. You must develop a keen understanding for the written and unwritten rules of the communities you join, and their tolerance for sales promotions, or you may be asked to leave.  Social networks are developing an increasingly short fuse for companies who are overly sales-y or spam-y.  Abide by the rule or you may be asked to leave.

• Practice consistancy with your profiles. Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com writes, “All of your online profiles should share the same information. Make sure to use the same user names. If possible, use the same profile pictures (if applicable), logos and contact info.”

• Build a strong army of followers. Mike Fruchter explains, “Choose your friends wisely.  This is the army you will need for the battle you are about to embark on. While you have the option to friend people back, it’s all about your objectives using social media. If you want a mass audience, then friend everyone who friends you back, but if you have no intention of ever having any level or engagement, then you are just fooling yourself, and all your doing is list building. You need to be receptive with friends who are trying to engage you positively. It’s impossible to interact with hundreds or even thousands of friends, but the ones who reach out to you, by commenting on your blog posts, sharing your content, tweeting your content and so forth, you can not neglect.”

In conclusion, if you are expecting results from your social media strategy, you must be willing to put in a substantial ammount of effort following the guidelines above.  If you have any suggestions or advice on effectively communicating with users online, please leave me a comment, I would love to include it in my next post.