The Pressure of Increasing Likes and Followers

I am sure you have heard this question before – “What is the value of a like or follower?” At the same time, some of the same people ask, “Why don’t we have more followers or likes?”

Here is the crux of the issue … on one hand your management believes that you need to be active and successful in social media marketing. Everyone is doing it, so it must be important. On the other hand, your management does not understand (and maybe you do not as well) what successful social marketing looks like and how it might be measured.

Well over three years ago, I answered that for you. Having knowledge of the points within the referenced article is key while managing social marketing and reporting metrics to your management. I highly recommend you review the article and become well versed with the approach.

But the point of this article is to take it one step further (assuming you understand “What Social Media Marketing Success Looks Like“). There comes a time when your management will ask you, “Why don’t we have more followers or likes?” In the back of your mind, you must understand that this metric by its self is meaningless. I always say, I could get any brand one-million likes … we’ll just give an iPad away to anyone that likes us. OK – so I am being a bit dramatic. The point is that it’s important to get followers and likes, BUT it is even more important how you communicate to them and keep them engaged with your brand.

Remember, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social platforms are NOT your community. The social platforms own the users, not you, and Facebook and others change their policy just about every month. Your objective is to drive users to your site; your community; a place where you control everything. At the same time you want your audience to be comfortable getting your brand communication, inspiration, and engagement where they prefer. They may just get brand content on Instagram for instance because that is THEIR digital preference and behavior. It is a delicate balance to strike.

You might clearly understand how to drive success with social media and that it is not just about followers and likes. But you must also be prepared with the reality that you will be questioned on your brand’s follower and like numbers. Everyone who has ever had some degree of social media responsibility in a company has experienced this.

So here is the reality. (I hope executive management is reading this as well as social marketing directors, managers, strategist, etc.) When the brand is feeling growth pressure, someone will evidentially ask, “Why don’t we have more followers?” I have been asked this question in every position (fulltime and consulting) I have held. It would be nice if you could explain to management everything that was included in the referenced article, “Know What Social Media Marketing Success Looks Like”, but this is not the time. At that point, you must have tactical plans to increase followers and keep management happy. It is important to drive results that concern management. But you cannot stop there. You must have a strategy and plan in place to move new followers to the digital assets you own – your community and your site.

In summary here are the three important takeaways:

1) Educate your company management on what successful social marketing looks like before they ask. Produce weekly reports that highlight performance metrics even if they do not ask for them.
2) Be prepared to have a tactical plan when you need to increase users (including paid social media).
3) When you do grow followers and likes, have a strategy and plan that keeps them engaged with your brand and motivates them to share with others.

Social marketing positions come with much pressure. You can alleviate much of the pressure if you are a) proactive, b) responsive, and c) strategic in building relationships far beyond simple likes and following.

Make It Happen.
Social Steve

Here is the ROI for Social Marketing

Social marketing ROI; not social media ROI. I hope everyone realizes that “Social Media is Not Social Marketing and Why It Matters.” Additionally, we are talking about social marketing. Not social sales. A successful marketing outcome is lead generation, which is one step short of sales. The successful outcome of sales is a sale. (Pretty profound – huh?)

It is also worth noting that it is very difficult to attribute a specific sale to a social interaction. First of all, many peer-to-peer conversations cannot be monitored. If a verbal exchange happens where one participant recommends a product/service to another and the recipient responds with a purchase, attribution is near impossible. Similarly, most conversations on individuals’ social channels are private. If someone asks their friends for a recommendation on Facebook, and people reply, the individual’s privacy settings most often eliminates the ability to track such exchanges.

So the ROI of social marketing is not sales. It is audience adoption, development, and relationship building to yield awareness, consideration, enthusiasm, loyalty, and advocacy for a brand. And take note that I said brand. Not product/service. The brand is an extension beyond the product or service. It is the personality, stories beyond and overall customer experience that go beyond the specific product/service.

So what exactly does audience adoption, development, and relationship building mean such that it can be measured to evaluate ROI. Let’s start theoretically and then we will move to empirical.

Audience adoption and development means that you are taking the appropriate steps to make target segments (not the entire universe) aware of your offering. You do this by engaging in places the target segments frequent. You aim to go beyond getting their attention and actually get them attracted to your brand. Continuous audience development means that you remain an active participant in the digital channels they frequent so they start to build affinity for your brand. Relationship building continues when your target segment members literarily opt in to be part of your audience by their action. They sign up to receive emails, follow you, like you, and subscribe to your blog/site via RSS. Once they have become a member of your audience you have an opportunity to really enhance their user experience and develop an emotional bond. And the most successful outcome of the relationship for a brand is not a sale. It is having that individual refer and market your product for you. Yes they will buy the product along the way, but if they can influence people to try your product, ultimately you will yield grander sales.

So that is the theoretical side. But as one post-it read on the door of an executive at an agency where I worked, “there is no time for theoretical,” I’ll give you the empirical ROI. That is what matters for all types of executives.

Over two years ago, I wrote an article “Know What Successful Social Media Looks Like.” But like I said in the beginning of this article, social marketing is not social media. So that article requires an update. (And thus this article. 🙂 ) In the original article, I made a point that social was poor to be used as a direct sales tool. But I said social was excellent for teeing up sales as a function of the other stages of a sales/marketing funnel – awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. I talked about a Social Brand Index I formulated which was a complex measurement with different coefficients for various parameters highlighting increased awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. Below is a chart showing some of the parameters I used.

But here’s the thing. Yes, successful social marketing increases the Social Brand Index month over month. But the real ROI of social marketing comes from your specific goals and objectives.

First understand what social marketing CAN do – the theory behind it. The value related to audience adoption and development, and relationship building. Understand how those facets relate to your company’s KPIs (key performance indicators). Determine what you want to accomplish, your goals and objectives. Back to marketing and lead generation … Do you need to increase awareness and consideration? Understand your company’s drivers. For example, many companies look at the cost of customer acquisition versus retaining customers. Others look at lifetime value of a customer. Loyalty is key in both these areas. And then of course there is the paramount value of social marketing – advocacy. Advocacy is the ability to unleash objective individuals to market your product/service to their friends, family, and colleagues. Is your company looking to accomplish this?

Social can do all these things, but you may be focused on some specific objectives. Determine this in the beginning of your social marketing effort. Then collect the data and show trending empirical results. Review some of the parameters I provided in the chart above and tweak for your own scenario. This is YOUR ROI. When you make a friend, what is the value of that friend? Different people would answer this question in many different ways. It is analogous with social marketing and companies. Everyone knows there is value in audience adoption and development. Everyone knows there is value in building relationships. But the ROI (the value) of these activities may be different for companies based upon the companies’ KPIs. It is also worth mentioning that different social marketing executions will yield various results on increasing awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy.

In summation, the ROI of social marketing IS audience adoption and development as well as relationship building. Social marketing does have an ROI and can be measured. Based upon specific goals and objectives, various companies can measure social marketing ROI differently. But social marketing ROI can be measured if your strategy addresses what you look to accomplish and how the social marketing strategy contributes to your organization’s KPIs.

Make It Happen,
Social Steve

All You Should Know About Social Marketing to Be Successful

I have been blogging now for five years on the topic of social media and social marketing. I have shared a great deal of information with regards to social best practices, case examples, integration, and organizational implementations. There is a wealth of information contained here within The SocialSteve Blog. But wouldn’t it be nice if it could all be pulled together in one article? (Really – that is impossible.) But I will attempt to give you a “Cliff Notes” version of what you need to know about social marketing that I have covered in my blog.

So lets get cracking and I will refer you to some key highlights from The SocialSteve Blog …

The first thing to realize is that brands need to use social media to enhance their brand image as covered in the article “Brands in the Age of Social Media.” Some brands were initially apprehensive to get involved in social media because they believed that they lost control of their brand position. Certainly, objective audience postings are more believable than subjective brand communication, but administration of good traditional marketing practices and utilization of social marketing highly increases company-driven brand influence.

Social media has put brand reputation in the hands of the democracy of users. Thus, brands must build strong relationships with users. And the way to do this from the start is to have complete empathy for the target audience. Yes “empathy” is “The Most Important Word for Marketing.” And once you have empathy for your target audience, “Connections and Relationships are No Different for Social Media” than in “regular” social situations.

So far, I have mentioned some of the general mentalities required for successful marketing, but generalities are not enough. You must understand the “Three Social Marketing Fundamentals.” The first fundamental starts with a strong and inseparable link between content and social marketing. A content strategy and social marketing strategy must be determined in unison. The brand definition is the center point of marketing strategy and content must reinforce what the brand is about without directly referring to the product. The social marketing strategy must then address how the content is to be proliferated such that readers/viewers/contributors share the content and some even become advocates. Throughout my blogging career (really not a career but a platform to share), I have given much coverage to content. It is imperative – crappy content, crappy social marketing; stellar content by the perception of the target audience, damn good chance of winning social marketing. Consider reading through some selected content article highlights:

• Content Marketing – A Must for Marketing Communications
• 4 Ingredients to a Winning Content Strategy
• 7 Tips for Blogging – Maybe Your Most Important Social Media Activity for Business
• The Power of UGC (User Generate Content) for Social Marketing
• Evolving Social Media Marketing – From Content Marketing to Contextual Content Marketing
• If a Picture is Worth 1000 Words, What is the Value of a 6-Second Video #Vine

The next social marketing fundamental is far too often missed. Social marketing is not about building the social field of dreams and having people show up. Social marketing starts by going to relevant conversations where they exist as opposed to expecting a crowd to show up on your Facebook page or simply following your Twitter feed. You need to go beyond your own social assets and go where the existing conversation exists and start to engage there. Early on, I coined the social media A-Path. The A-Path allows social marketers to traverse their target audience through a sequential path increasing commitment to brand at each stage. The A-Path starts by getting brand Attention, followed by Attraction, then Affinity, Audience, and Advocacy. The early part of this path is accomplished on social channels other than the ones the brand owns and manages. As you progress your audience through the A-Path you slowly wean users to brand-owned social channels. This method is described in “Executable Game Plan for Winning Ultimate Customers with Social Media.” When using this approach, marketers need to understand “When to Ask for a “Call-to-Action’ in Social Media.” Following this approach provides an understanding of how “Social Media Highlights the Important Difference Between Marketing and Sales.” You will also see the relationship of “Social Media Conversion and the Social Media Marketing Funnel.” And one other note on this holistic approach to social marketing … Do not jump to a conclusion that your Facebook “likers” are your audience. Understand “Where ‘Audience’ Fits in Social Media.” It is likely different than you assume.

And now the last imperative social marketing fundamental is to “Know What Successful Social Media Looks Like.” Specifically, I am talking about social media marketing measurement. The referenced article outlines that awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy should be measured. Not sales. Parameters to be measured in the four categories are covered in the article. When it comes to measurement and “Social Media ROI – Don’t Be So Short Sighted – Think Longer Term.”

So you have the fundamentals down, right? Now, where do you start? “Before You Start with Social Media” you need to apply marketing basics. The referenced article explains the need to understand the brand and its position, defining a communication or campaign objective, as well as defining a communication plan. A presentation deck is provided to take you through the steps. The deck was later updated in a more recent post, “University Social Marketing Presentation.” And when you put together your social strategy, you must pay attention to “Marketing Demographics and the Ramifications of Social Media.” Consider psycho-demographics as well as standard demographics. Psycho-demographics identify various segments of the target audience’s state of mind. When you identify the various states of mind, you can then deliver contextually relevant content.

Now that you have the fundamentals and a game plan, you cannot stop there. Far too many companies make errors with regards to organizational issues for social marketing. Here are some very important issues …

• CEO understanding and support
• Social Media in Your Company – Guidance for Where It Fits In
• When Looking for Your Company’s Social Media Marketing Leader, Consider ….
• Why the “Social Media Person” Needs to Be More than Just the Social Media Person
• 3 Helpful Tips when Hiring for Social Media

Social media gives the target audience a strong voice. Brands can no longer put out statements and advertisements and expect the audience to simply accept what they are saying. Brands need to listen to their audience, engage and build relationships. Brands have an opportunity to build an emotional bond with their audience. Emotional branding will yield loyalty, word of mouth marketing and overall, long-term brand preference and sustainability. Social marketing is a must in today’s consumer driven world.

You now have the definition of how to drive social marketing success. Let me know what else you need or do not understand.

Make It Happen,
SocialSteve

Not All Numbers Matter in Social Marketing

All marketing efforts need to be justified with empirical results. And at the same time, way too many social marketers look at the wrong numbers or wrong combination of numbers. Let’s get it right on the table … Social marketing success is not defined by how many likes (friends) a brand has on Facebook or the number of followers on Twitter. Far too many executives are hell-bent on measuring success by likes and followers.

Likes and followers are very important, but looking at them in isolation is meaningless and dangerous. First, lets consider the objectives of social marketing:

1) To get in front of your target audience and establish interest, value, trust, interactivity, and a growing relationship.
2) Generate brand preference.
3) Provoke referrals and word of mouth marketing.

So getting likes and followers is only the start to meeting the objectives listed above. Lets discuss Facebook likes first. I can get any brand one million followers, no problem. We’ll just give an iPad away to anyone that likes the brand. Sounds a bit silly, but there are a number of brands that do some sort of a sweepstakes or ad campaign to get people to like their brand and think the social marketing is over. Getting likes is an important start, but not everyone that likes your brand will see your posts. And if they do not see your posts, what is the purpose of having that like? Facebook uses a complex algorithm to determine what posts are seen. To simplify the complexity, lets just say that if a person is engaged and interactive with a brand on Facebook, it is most likely that brand’s post will appear on the person’s newsfeed. Thus, the most important combination of metrics to look at on Facebook is likes and “talking about this” (found just to the right of likes on a brand Facebook page).

I often tells brands I work with that they should track the percentage of talk about this relative to their likes to get a good Facebook metric. Remember, once you acquire many likes, you need to keep them engaged by posting compelling content that inspires people to like the individual posts, comment, and engage. If you score numerous brand likes, then work to increase the percentage of talking about this relative to your likes.

Now lets talk about Twitter a bit. How many Tweeters do you follow? I follow over four thousand. It is not possible for me to actually capture and see the tweets of that many and I am sure the scenario is close to the same for you. So getting followed is step one for a brand. The second step of success is to motivate your followers to put you on one of their twitter lists. Typically users maintain twitter lists as a short cut to capture valued information on a segmented topic. The best strategic way to get on a list is, once again, to continually provide posts of interest – entertaining, informative.

(Notes on twitter lists – it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what list your twitter account is on. The only way I have found is to go to ‘http://twitter.com/twitter-handle/lists/membership’, but this will only give you a page worth of the list you are on. If you are on more lists than can be covered on one page worth, Twitter does not allow you to scroll and see the additional ones. A complete list was available using TweetDeck, but now that that app has been eliminated, I have found no replacement. I welcome input from others that have seen a solution.)

There are some that have emphasized looking at qualitative social results instead of quantitative results. Both are important. For example, I might be content with only having one thousand Twitter followers if those followers were every CEO and CMO at fortune five hundred companies. As a brand, you want quality likes and followers … those that will engage with you and advocate for your brand. But a good part of the onus is on your social marketing to create quality likes and followers.

In the end, let’s make sure we agree on one thing … You must generate measurable results with your social marketing efforts. But make sure you are measuring results against objectives – not just simple like and followers. There are a number of important parameters you can track to align to overall business objectives. If you want more information on this, see “Know What Social Media Success Looks Like.”

Make it Happen,
Social Steve

2013 – The Year Social Media Will Be Measured Correctly

In 2012, just about every marketer got on board recognizing the need for social marketing. More and more brands included social implementations to their marketing programs. And now, there is no shortage of “experts” making their predictions of social trends for 2013. (Okay, I added some context here as well. 🙂 )

But this post is not a prediction. Social media metrics is a MUST for 2013. And I am putting my skin in the game. In the words of the great Peter Drucker, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Before I share my efforts defining meaningful social metrics, let’s first review “What Successful Social Media Looks Like.” As I mentioned in that article, social marketing is not a strong channel to promote sales. But social is very strong at increasing Awareness, Consideration, Loyalty, and Advocacy. All of these attributes “tee up” sales. Thus we should measure social as a function of awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy … at least as a start.

At Ryan Partnership, a full service marketing agency where I head up the social practice, I have defined the Social BrandAction Index. The Social BrandAction Index is a proprietary algorithm that weights different input parameters in each category of awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy.

When I calculate the Social BrandAction Index for clients I come up with a number, say 237. The first question is “what does 237 represent? Is that good?” The number starts with a baseline and is meaningless at first look. The index needs to be looked at as a trend. You need at least four months of data to see how this number is trending. Trending is what is important. It tells how social programs are increasing (or decreasing) awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy.

Certainly, the Social BrandAction Index provides meaningful information. But it must evolve, as social continues to evolve. For example, pins from Pinterest need to be added. At this time, Pinterest does not provide analytics that can be captured other than counting manually. Another case in point is sentiment analysis … it needs to improve significantly and it is part of the social metrics.

So yes. We have a start of meaningful metrics. But I will be the first to admit that they need to mature. So in 2013, I will continue to work on social media metrics modeling that provides the most accurate and telling conclusions of brand social marketing implementations. As I quoted Drucker in the beginning, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” If you have some thoughts with regards to how we take social metrics forward, let me know. Maybe we can collaborate to improve what I have defined thus far.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Know What Successful Social Media Looks Like

I am really astounded at much of the conversation that the Facebook IPO has ignited. It appears that most people are equating Facebook and their valuation to a barometer for all of social media marketing success. This is ludicrous. Facebook’s valuation is simply speculation on Facebook’s revenue and profitability. Facebook’s revenue (at least so far) has been a measure of their ad revenue. Let’s be clear … Facebook ad revenue is simply a “digital display” offering. Display, although an important element of a holistic digital marketing plan, is not social media. So in the face of all the Facebook misconceptions, I want to set the record straight on social media success … you need to understand what it looks like before you can make sure you have a strategy to get it!

As I have defined in the past, social media is the combination of social + media or seeking or enjoying the companionship of others by the means of digital communication. I am a marketing executive and thus I look at social media from a marketing perspective. (Yes, there are other uses of social media beyond marketing.) As a marketer, we look to change consumer behavior and drive transactions. That is what successful marketers do.

Thus, as a social media strategist and marketing executive, I look at social media as one piece on an integrated marketing plan to change behavior and drive transactions. So it is those actual social media activities we need to concentrate on to change behaviors and drive transactions.

In the past, I have used the social media marketing funnel to describe the progression of changing behaviors and driving transactions. While the funnel shows a “typical” progression of the customer journey, the emergence of the digital world has turned typical to atypical. The funnel shows a linear sequence, even with its cyclic nature where advocacy re-feeds awareness. My experience examining customer behavior for the brands I work with reveals some slight variations. Yes, the funnel states are still there, and individual consumers can traverse the funnel states in a linear fashion, but we see more and more variations away from a linear movement as shown in the diagram below.

As we examine the new construct of social media relationships to change behavior and drive transactions, notice “conversion” is not part of the social media activities. Awareness, Consideration, and Loyalty states “tee up” a conversion. Social media is not a strong channel to promote a sale. (Yes, there are some examples where companies have done this successfully, but 95% of the time, social media should not be for direct conversion.) Think of forming a social media strategy to increases Awareness, Consideration, Loyalty, and Advocacy. Social media provokes these behaviors and these behavior changes drive transactions.

Awareness promotes consideration. Awareness can also drive a transaction. Consideration yields conversions and has a higher probability of doing so than simple awareness. After a purchase is made (conversion), social media activities can help to generate loyalty. Loyalty can result in repeat purchases as pictorially shown with a double arrow in the diagram above. Loyal customers can become advocates as well. You should think about post-sale follow up content and engagement to move your customers to a loyalty and advocacy state. And once you produce advocates you have a most powerful outcome. Advocates inspire awareness, consideration and loyalty. They work as the most trusted source of marketing your brand.

So when I say “Know What Successful Social Media Looks Like,” it means that you have a strategy and plan that consciously addresses how you are going to use social media to measurably increase awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. Not only do you need the plan, but you must measure results of your plan. Only in the rarest of rare situations does a social media plan hit perfection out of the gates. You modify your social tactics based on empirical results.

And how would you measure social media results? I have defined something I call the Social Media Brand Index. This index is a complicated algorithm that has four sub-index variables that are measure – Awareness, Consideration, Loyalty, and Advocacy. Here are the inputs to the Social Brand Index.

Even if you have not derived a social media index equation, you should measure these parameters in the groupings as above and have a sense of your social media performance.

So hopefully now you have an idea what successful social media looks like. It is an ongoing effort that changes behavior and drives transactions. It is a continuous program that produces measurable results in awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. All of these elements contribute to the ultimate goal of conversion. But they not only contribute to conversion, they work to continue the relationship with the customers and strengthen brand reputation, loyalty, commitment and on going word of mouth marketing. Concentrate on your brand’s appropriate social activities that increase measured awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Lessons Learned in Social Media

There is no shortage of trending lists, reviews, and top 10 lists looking back at 2011. I know many are cynical and think they have seen enough of them, but frankly I like them. They give me an opportunity to learn some things I missed. The problem is that anyone can produce these lists and get them out in the public … the “power” of social media. Yes, there is some good stuff out there, and there is some garbage.

When I look back on 2011 and think about the social media takeaways from my perspective, it is simple … just look at what I have written about. OK – I spared you the pain of going through all of them and did it myself. Funny enough, I pulled the best of the best together and grouped them together and what happened? You get the summary of important social media themes and learnings for 2011. Here is what you may have missed:

Understanding Social Media

The Simple Explanation of Social Media provides an easy to understand explanation of what social media is, what success might look like, and important considerations.

Integrating Owned Media, Earned Media, and Paid Media explains how the three different types of media should be planned to produce synergy and great results. (This was my most popular and top rated article)

Content

Content is the core of social media. Content must be awesome … would you ever share something that was just okay?

4 Ingredients to a Winning Content Strategy calls it like it is.

There actually is something more important than content. Find out what it is in Content is Super Important !!! (But Not King).

Social Media in Your Company

Social Media at Your Company – Policies prepares you and your company to leverage the power of your employees while putting some best practice rules and regulations in place.

It is easy to be impressed by someone that appears to know much about social media, but are they going to produce results for you? Before you get underwhelming results see 3 Helpful Tips when Hiring for Social Media.

Why Most CEOs and Top Execs Don’t Get Social Media explains some key issues from the C-Level Suite perspective.

Planning and Understanding Your Audience

Why is “empathy” The Most Important Word for Marketing. You better understand your audience through and through. How else are you going to appeal to them?

7 Things You Need to do to Turn Social Media Successful Results provides some common sense that is often forgotten when social media planning takes place.

Marketing Demographics and the Ramifications of Social Media:
Introduction to Psycho-Demographics explains marketing beyond traditional demographics.

Ever wonder Where is the WOW in Social Media? Take a look at what might be missing in your social media approach.

ROI and Measurement

Social Media ROI – Don’t Be So Short Sighted – Think Longer Term is probably the biggest mistake people make when it comes to social media. Get a reality dose here.

The Social Media ROI Conundrum is a solid examination at the challenge of forming a defined social media ROI and what to do about it.

Social Media Models

Measuring the Stages of the Cyclic Social Media Marketing Funnel takes a look at the traditional marketing model and how social media is applied complete with metrics.

Digital PR and Outreach for Important Social Media Conversations goes beyond your Facebook and Twitter implementation and explains an equal, if not more important aspect of social media strategy and implementation.

Unifying Loyalty, Rewards, and Social Media is an explanation of yet another integration point for your existing marketing and social media activities.

Social Media Model that Defines the End of the World as We Know It brings it all together and provides the balanced formula and approach for the winning social media program.

Wrap-Up
So we actually covered a ton this year and made some great advancements in social media. Social media is no longer that thing people are thinking about doing. It is part of just about every company’s, every brand’s plans. 2012 will show greater success and more defined best practices. And I plan to be there with you every stride of the way. I am looking forward to providing greater help and guidance and connecting with more of you. Thanks for being an extremely important part of my little social world. Let’s make an effort to engage more in 2012 and help each other out.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

The Social Media ROI Conundrum

As the year closes out, everyone (including me) will be looking back on the year and looking ahead to 2012 and stating their trends and predictions of social media. There is absolutely no doubt that the most common topic will be social media ROI.

So let’s get the reality on the table. Social media does provide a great value to organizations that take a well thought strategic approach and integrate it with other business and marketing programs. Measuring social media return on investment is very difficult to perform because of the inability to hardcode or hardwire social activities to a purchase. But there is no doubt socialization of a brand leads to increased sales. You want some data to back this up?

Bain and Company declared that “Customers who engage with companies over social media are more loyal and they spend up to 40 percent more with those companies than other customers” in their study “Putting Social Media to Work.” Just yesterday I listened to an interview with Wendy Clark, senior vice president of integrated marketing communications and capabilities at Coca-Cola Inc. where she stated that an independent group verified that Coca-Cola fans on Facebook (36 million +) were twice as likely to consume coke and 10 times more likely to purchase. Are these not results you want to see for your company?

When used correctly, social media is powerful because it sparks earned media and/or user movements. The earned media and user actions are stronger than other brand marketing activities because it is a voice coming from a “trusted agent.” Well planned social media endeavors are apt to cause word-of-mouth. It is the equivalent of asking a friend a good place to grab some dinner. Is that not a lead that yields a sale? But how do you track that scenario … pretty difficult.

Getting people interested, engaged, and loyal to brands are some of the great outcomes of social media. Word of mouth, another byproduct of social media, is the most powerful lead generation source. All of these things lead to sales. To use a hockey analogy, if sales is the goal, social media is the assist. The NHL does score players 1 point for goals and 1 point for assists when calculating individual scoring statistics. And yes, awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy are all assists of sales and can all be measured.

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, here are some examples of how you can measure each of the assists to sales within a social media paradigm:

Awareness – look at digital assets you do not own (blogs, portals, other tweeter accounts, etc.) and count the number of mentions of your brand and URL mentions of your site. Use a social media monitoring tool.

Consideration – look onsite and measure the number of visits and pageviews to your site. Use Google Analytics.

Loyalty – derive an equation that includes number or fans, followers, comments, interacts, subscriptions, and return visits to your site. Use Facebook, Twitter, and community analytics as well as Google Analytics to measure return visitors.

Advocacy – look on and off of your digital assets and measure referrals, mentions, positive sentiment, retweets, and reblogs. Use social media monitoring tools, and site analytics tools.

The approach I take with clients is to first baseline measurements for the four categories. Then continue to look at the measurements either week-to-week or month-to-month. Do not worry about an individual period of slippage. You are likely to see a zigzag line over time, but normalize that line. Positive results are somewhere around a 10% increase month-over-month on the normalized curve. Put all line metrics on the same chart. Do you see relationships between the lines? Are you converting those that are aware to consideration? Those considering to loyalty? Those loyal to advocate? There is likely some degree of drop off from stage to stage, but is the percentage of drop off getting better over time? Also add in a sales measurement and see if you can determine a correlation between your social media measurements and sales. I often suggest that there is a “gestation” period between social media awareness and consideration to sales. There is a definite lag of these parameters. Do this type of measurement over a rolling 12 month period. Learn to modify your social programs based on measured results. If you implement this correctly and have a strategic approach to social media, execute with the right tactics, and modify your social program based on measured results, you will have a winning social media program that can be quantitatively justified.

Back to ROI … the technical definition of ROI is (sales – investment) / (investment). It is that sales component in the equation that makes it difficult to measure social media ROI. This is for two reasons: 1) social is not a channel for direct sales. While some use it successfully for sales, overall it is not the best use of social. 2) It is extremely difficult to tag a sale with a social media tracker.

As we roll into 2012 and social media is finally well accepted as a very strong brand marketing initiative, you must show measured value for your efforts. I am certain that somewhere along the line someone is going to (rightfully so) ask you for social media ROI. You now have the background to answer this question. It is now up to you to put a measurement tracking and reporting procedure into your social media program. Ready to deliver measurable results?

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

The Simple Explanation of Social Media

Still a bit confused about social media? I understand. I see it day in and day out with clients I serve. While so many want to make it complicated, it really is nowhere close to rocket science. Heck, it is not even as hard to follow as my daughter’s sixth grade science. It’s just that those that try to explain it either really do not get it themselves or they want to make it so complicated to justify that they are social media experts.

So my answer to this ubiquitous question has been stop selling and provide some simple education first. Since my blog has been a place to share information, let me share a presentation with you that I give to many clients. The name of the presentation is called “The Social Lounge.” It is called The Social Lounge because it is meant to be a casual experience where you relax and enjoy a straightforward explanation of social media, success, and implementation.

Here it is …

The Social Lounge – MediaWhiz

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The presentation is a high level look at social media. There is mention of the A-Path (which is social media execution) and parameters to measure success of social media. If you want to drill into these topics one level deeper, see one of my previous articles, “Social Media Model that Defines the End of the World as We Know It.” What else can I help you with?

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Content, Follower Numbers, and Hurrying to Launch – Think It Through

How do I decide on a topic to talk about in social media for my weekly blog? More often that not, I am inspired by something that happens during the week and then I write about it on the weekend … and this is especially true this week.

Social media has really opened me up to a broad group of people near and far, but we are drawn to each other by common interests. Really now – how cool is that. I have had the pleasure of meeting up with people, face to face, and were it not for social media, our paths would have never crossed. One such person is Karine Halpern (goes by the tweeter handle @KHenthuZiasm) who lives in France. We’ve tweeted a bit and met in NYC while she was visiting.

Anyway, I could go on about previous conversations and our meeting (definitely interesting – maybe for another time), but let’s get to the topic at hand. And here is the question:

“Do you start your social media strategy, plan, and execution building great content or building a wide following?”

Have a look at our tweeter conversation here …

And here you have the crux of the problem …

That is the question – “What comes first – the chicken or the egg. What comes first – a portfolio of great content or people to consume you content.”

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just snap your finger and have both just like that? Yes, this is the challenge all face. Follow the conversation a bit more …

“Hurry to launch.”

Now here is a topic that used to get me. I was a product manager for a number of years and formed a methodical process to delivering quality releases of product. To top it off, the engineers would have a really hard time letting their baby go. But I now have a very strong appreciation why “hurry to launch” is the right approach. You want to get your content or product out there and start building an appreciation from early adopters. If you engage properly, they will help you shape your product/service to excellence – far better than you could ever do staying closed up in your isolated company surroundings. A topic covered by Seth Godin in his book, “Poke the Box.”

Yes, launch it. But let’s get back to content and number for a second. The magic of social media (when it works well and correctly) starts with having awesome content. Content that is entertaining and/or truly valuable. It MUST be content that is worthy of being passed around because it is so compelling.

The second part is driving people to share the content (shared media) and create their own version (earned media). This is achieved by having something of value to share (content) and then you need to really, really, really do true engagement and socializing. The crowd is not just going to come to you. (Happens very rarely.) You have to get out there and connect. The approach I have always recommended is the LCR Mentality. Listen. Conversations. Relationships.

So you really need to work great content and building a following simultaneously. It is not a matter of one or the other. You have to create great content and cultivate a following – both. Get active producing content. Get active engaging with people. And then hurry to launch.

And there you have it. Karine gave me a great idea …

Great ideas usually come from collaboration.

Make It Happen!
Social Steve

Footnote – I have connected with Karine as she was initially interested in my approach and writings on social media. Since then, I continue to learn so much from her – mainly on the topic of “transmedia.” Transmedia involves a creative community and happens when STORYTELLING and EXPERIENCE come together in a creation or production or designed for multiple devices, formats or platforms. Transmedia is NOT marketing. It is about STORY and it is used by marketers. This is the aspect that interests me, a marketer. I believe that brands need to humanize their public face and one of the best ways to do this is to look at marketing as storytelling. When we dumb it down to that level, it is not dumb at all – but rather more humanistic and far less corporate. And that is what people really want from a brand. A compelling story behind the brand with people and personality rather than corporate-speak. Karine has given me numerous resources on transmedia. Leaders in this area include Henry Jenkins and Jeff Gomez. If interested in learning more, Google them, “transmedia,” and/or contact Karine at her blog or on twitter as listed above.