One of the top questions that I receive about Social Media Marketing, is “which platforms/websites should I use to build my company’s business?”  The answer that I give is always the same:  “It depends.”  You see, there is no one-size fits all answer or approach to social media marketing.  Successful campaigns are developed by understanding this critical lesson, and creating a tailored strategy that takes into consideration the following factors:

1. Your current brand position online
2. Current social media tactics being used
3. Your company’s goals
4. Your goals for this campaign (i.e. sales increase, brand recognition, reputation management)
5. Your target audience & their online behaviors

Once you have a thorough understanding of your current standing in the interactive realm, and the key factors listed above, you can begin to develop your social media campaign.

Branding Strategies: Identifying the “Best” Brand Evangelists

Yesterday I wrote about a case study for CashForGold, and their mistake of not developing sincere brand evangelists in today’s market.  In this post, I want to talk to you about brand evangelism and how to determine which customers will make the best brand evangelists for your products/services.

What is a Brand Evangelist?

Brand evangelists are a very special group of people.  They are your most loyal customers, and will go out of their way to spread the word about your brand. Mack Collier explains, “In many ways, brand evangelists are a company’s marketing partner. But brand evangelists are also members of communities, and as such their ability to reach fellow customers is often greater than a company’s. Whereas many companies use traditional marketing tactics to send a one-way promotional message to customers, brand evangelists can communicate with customers in their space. This is a very powerful difference: It shifts the communication from being one-way to creating an actual dialogue; and whereas many people simply do not trust advertising, a recommendation from a fellow customer is credible.”

Who are Your Brand Evangelists?

With the boom in social media over the past few years, everyone is talking to everyone else about everything, so how do you choose the right people as brand evangelists? The answer is that you don’t necessarily “choose” your brand evangelists, they choose you!  You can, however, select potential evangelists according to each individual’s interests, preferences and values, and then provide them with the information they need to promote your brand.

When looking to single out your top brand evangelists, I like to use the model created by Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent, Inc.  His brand evangelism selection model revolves around the following three simple guidelines:

1. “Category Appreciation: Does the individual care about your product or service– or could the person learn to value what you offer? Would it make sense for that consumer to discuss your product with others?
2. Curiosity Quotient: Word-of-mouth success is not based on how many people with whom a consumer talks, but rather whether the product complements the person’s lifestyle. This is a huge distinction that many marketers overlook. Don’t evaluate your campaign participants based on how positive they will be, choose them instead because of their personal interest in the item.
3. Channel Usage: As media continues to fragment, the need to integrate the broadest spectrum of “customer evangelism” media — blogs, personal videos, at-home events, et cetera — becomes critical. A high impact word-of-mouth program encourages individuals to share their opinions in the places that are appropriate and natural for them.”

Once you have identified your top evangelists, you can then begin communicating with them, and sending them the information they need to promote your brand.  Now I do not recommend sending them your brand’s media or marketing packet, but instead engage with them on their level.  Find out what they like about your product/service, why they recommend you to their friends, offer them the chance to try out your new products/services at no charge (you know they are going to talk about it once you give it to them, so enjoy the marketing!)

If you only remember one thing from this article, remember that it is the relationship you develop with these evangelists that will grow your brand.  Consumers are much more likely to purchase a product/service when it has been recommended by someone they like and trust.  Why shouldn’t it be your brand they are recommending?

“The only way I know of to turn a customer into an evangelist is to consistently deliver unique value that exceeds their expectations.” – Pat McGraw

Campaign Strategy: SEO & Social Media – Part 1 – Strategy Development

Any website that is aimed towards sales or eCommerce should have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy built in to the development process.  Search engine optimization aims to get more visitors to a website by helping it get higher rankings in the search engines. This simply means that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the first page of a search done through the search engine.

Getting Started

Before jumping headfirst into SEO, you must first define the goals of your campaign, by asking yourself the following questions:

• Why am I considering SEO over other traffic driving techniques?
• Does my company need direct sales, traffic, branding or some combination of these?
• Who are the influencers I am trying to reach with a message?
• Is my organization/brand subject to potentially negative material that needs to be controlled/mitigated?
• Do I have products/services you sell, either directly over the web or through leads established online?

Once those questions are answered, you can begin to develop your search strategy, and intertwine it with your other online initiatives (i.e. social media, email marketing, ppc, etc).

The Value of SEO

There are many different types of SEO strategies, and choosing the right one for your business if critical.  For this post, I want to review some of the key value behind SEO, in order to prepare you for my next post on intergrating your SEO & Social Media campaign.  The following are exerpts from SEOmoz co-founder, Randfish, as he explains the real value behind SEO:

Value # 1: Traffic Generation

“Optimizing a site for search engines and creating keyword targeted content produces direct traffic from the engines, which typically expands into content sharing, direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find, use and enjoy the work you’ve produced. There are thousands of sites on the web that leverage this traffic to serve advertising, directly monetizing the traffic sent from the engines. From banner ads to contextual services like Google’s AdWords to affiliate programs and beyond, web advertising has become a massive ($25B+ according to eMarketer) industry.”

Value # 2: E-Commerce Sales

“One of the most direct monetization and intent-bases for SEO is driving relevant traffic to an e-commerce shop to boost sales. Search traffic is among the best quality available on the web, primarily because a search user has expressed a specific goal through their query, and when this matches a product or brand carried by the web store, conversion rates are often extremely high. Forrester research estimated the e-commerce market to top $235 billion in 2009 (though the recent economic downturn may affect that number somewhat). With so many dollars flowing over the web, it’s little surprise that e-commerce focused SEO is among the most competitive and popular applications of the practice.”

Value # 3: Mindshare/Branding

“A less popular but equally powerful application of SEO is to use it for branding purposes. Bloggers, social media websites, content producers, news outlets and dozens of other web publishing archetypes have found tremendous value in appearing atop search results and using the resulting exposure to bolster their brand recognition and authority. The process is fairly simple – much like traditional advertising’s goals of ad repetition to enter a buyer’s consideration set (see Three Laws of Branding for more), so too do online marketers observe that a website’s pages consistently at the top of search rankings around a particular subject has a positive impact on traffic, consideration and perceived authority.”

Value 4:  Lead Acquisition & Direct Marketing

“Although less direct than an e-commerce sale, lead acquisition via the web is an equally valuable and important system for building customers and revenue. Millions of search queries have commercial intents that can’t be (or currently aren’t) fulfilled directly online. These can include searches for services like legal consulting, contract construction, commercial loan requests, alternative energy providers, virtually any service or product people source via the web.”

Value 5:  Reputation Management

“Those who’ve dealt with negative or non-existent web information about themselves or their businesses frequently desire to populate the search results with positive links and mentions. SEO enables this process through content creation and promotion via link building. While reputation management is among the most challenging of SEO tasks (primarily because you’re optimizing many results for a query rather than one), it’s in high demand and has a large number of practitioners.”

A few weeks ago, amateur sociologist Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com wrote a negative/funny article about the questionable business practices of Cash4Gold, a company that offers money for gold jewelry and coins you send them. I suggest you read his article, “Cash4Gold Will Offer One-Third of the Actual Value for your Gold.”

Soon after being written, Rob’s article was picked up by Boing Boing and the Consumerist, and his article shot to the top of Google for searches on Cash4Gold. About a week after that, Rob got the following email from Joe Larato, President of Tandem Interactive, representing CashFor Gold:

“I work on the Cash4Gold site. We are trying to clean up their first page of results in Google. Your article: http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/goldkit/cheat.shtml is ranking very well for term “Cash4Gold”. The site looks like you may do well from Adsense.Is there a financial arrangement we can come to that will offset your Adsense income and make it worth your while to take down or at least “de-optimize” it for that phrase? I would be happy to speak more about this on the phone…

Thanks,
Joe Laratro
President
Tandem Interactive – Trendy Online Marketing Solutions
Hollywood, FL 33020″

Rob did not respond to the email, and a few weeks later he was contacted again when ignored him, and in a couple of weeks Mr. Larato sent him a follow up email:

“Rob,I work with Cash4Gold on their reputation management. Your article is ranking #3 on their brand term. They would really like to make it worth your while to take it down or make it more positive. They did something similar by joining (OTHER CONSUMER AFFAIRS WEBSITE)’s advocacy program. Is it worth a few thousand to take it down? If not, maybe a donation to your favorite charity is more to your liking?

Feel free to call me anytime to discuss further.

Thanks,
Joe Laratro
President
Tandem Interactive – Trendy Online Marketing Solutions
Hollywood, FL 33020″

In the end, Rob refused to take the “few thousand” and his story is still at the top of Google.The real value here, is learning from the mistakes of Tandem Interactive & CashForGold, and understanding that the best way to combat negative press is to exhibit superior service and quality, and to develop your own set of brand evangelists that will speak positively on your own behalf.  (After reading Rob’s article on CashForGold’s business policies, I am not sure that they will be developing brand evangelists any time soon!)

For additional information, read:

Rob Cockerham writes article critical of Cash4Gold, gets offered cash to kill story

Branding Strategies: New Skittles Marketing: Successful Branding Strategy?

The internet marketing industry has been full  of chatter about Skittles’ new internet marketing campaign.  Skittles tried an interesting new approach to online marketing and social media when they launched their new company website, on a wikipedia portal, featuring a live Twitter feed alongside Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube content. BusinessWeek continues, “Instead of the usual corporate propaganda, the home page and “chatter” section became the brand’s Twitter page, the video media and images pages became the brand’s YouTube page and Flickr stream, respectively. Meanwhile, the “friends” section morphed into a Skittles Facebook fan page. According to Andy Hobsbawm, European chairman of online ad firm agency.com , which came up with the idea, the site received so many hits the first day it brought down Twitter.”

Sounds innovative, right?  It may have been, and I applaud Skittles for their creativity, but the brand has had to battle some tough issues since the site’s launch on March 2nd.  The biggest issue that Skittles has been facing is having users bombard the site with inane and often profane “tweets.”  When the site launched, the Twitter feed was at first prominently displayed as the home page, now, due to the abuse, the twiter feed is now harder to find—just a small link in the corner of the screen.

In my opinion, I appreciate that Skittles really stepped outside of the box to market themselves online, but I find myself asking, where is the REAL value?  I am a woman in my late twenties, what is the value to me (obviously aside from sparking conversation in my industry).  I find the “connection” value dangerously low for the Skittles team, and wonder about the ROI calculated at the beginning of the campaign, after all, how many people are going to run out to the store and buy skittles, because they are a FB Skittles Fan?

I would also like to hear from Mars (owner of Skittles brand) on their goals behind the campaign.  Maybe it was simply a publicity stunt to get people talking about their brand.  It worked, didn’t it?

Online & social media marketers seem to be torn as to the success of  Skittle’s new online strategy.  I gathered some opinions below, and I look forward to you adding yours to a comment!

“Agency.com got a bunch of marketing and social media wonks (yours truly included) to talk about Skittles. If that was the goal of the work, mission accomplished. But if the goal was to genuinely connect Skittles more closely to their community, stunts don’t cut it.”  – Bart Vickers from VML

“I’ve heard nothing about Skittles and Twits outside of my reading of marketing and advertising publications. Nothing on the news. Nothing in the paper. Nobody I know talking about it (and I teach at a city college infested with young people). The only people this appears to have affected at all are those already connected to advertising, social media, or rampant Skittles fans. That means its major effect has been on people in the industry, people who obsessively browse Twitter for something to follow, and people who already consume Twitters. A good ad campaign would have produced far greater effects. Yes, it would have been more expensive, but it would have actually accomplished something.” – Holman Tibbett from Ad Nauseam

“I think people are missing the point here. The Twitter feed was a short-term stunt — designed to get us all talking. And now they’ve made the switch to Facebook at the perfect time — while we were all still paying attention. If they had waited more than another day, this buzz would have been over. Instead, they get an entire second news cycle out of this. And that translates to new “friends” on their Facebook page, which is monetizeable in a very real way.” – Zach Goodwin from ZBGoodwin

“With everything that is going on in our world- you would think that Skittles and their agency would be more sensitive to what PEOPLE REALLY CARE ABOUT…(sorry, it’s NOT Skittles)….I realize they have a product to market, but if current examples in the world don’t make it obvious that you need to exert a LOT of sensitivity in your marketing messages (offer SOLUTIONS, not HYPE), I’m not sure what you need to know to wake up and be MORE IN TOUCH with your audience. They got trashed on Twitter because Twitters are about REAL, organic, testimonials and truth in real time. Spending the time, and $$$ with an agency that didn’t understand nor grasp that from the get go, shows that someone at the top of this, should have done more homework, or solicited better advice about using Twitter. Every agency in the world wants to jump on the bandwagon and utilize Social Media. If you don’t understand how to properly “engage” consumers using Web 2.0 technology, you need to be careful, for it’ll blow up it you face.” – Greg Lee from IMAGINE NATION

“The closest thing I can equate this to is the increases in search for Rihanna and Chris Brown being a good thing.  Ask yourself, who are the people who eat the most skittles? 18 and up?  I think people are being praised for poor execution, this could have been done in a much much better way.  And I am pretty sure the FB fan increase is mostly a viral thing on facebook, i didn’t fan the skittles page on the website, i saw it as the network of social peeps started becoming Fans as i am sure most did, so the dumb luck of the Facebook after effects are the good part of this you are right.. then again so is the example of what NOT to do in social media or to Rihanna if you are Chris Brown.” – steve plunkett from M/C/C

“I’ve said this umpteen times by now, but I think the real value is less about the execution and more about the philosophy that drove it. If it means anything at all, it’s that this campaign is a recognition of the importance of the role social media plays in brand-building. The game has changed. It’s not 1999 anymore.” – Paul Chaney from Bizzuka Inc.