Social Media Strategies (does your company have one?).
Posted by jonpape | Filed under Internet Marketing, Social Marketing
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Social media planning and strategies are a lot more complex and entangled than any other advertising channel available to marketers. It seems like for every example of a strategy that works, there are 10 strategies that fail. It seems that companies are stuck using one off tactics on social media networks and have no integrated strategy to boost interest through overlapping and consistent campaigns.
- Originally (about 2 years ago), as a SEM strategist, most of the literature available recommended using social media outlets as an extension of directories and social bookmarking sites. Marketers would submit URLs to increase the number of in-bound links and the quality score/visibility of target URLs in search engines.
- As a programmer and RSS proponent, social media outlets were seen as a way to aggregate and spread content in an automated fashion using a variety of social marketing tools. Additionally, it is not uncommon to see individuals using social marketing outlets as a way to network inanimate objects, appliances, and applications to receive continuous updates.
Now, if marketers really want to use social media the way social media developers envisioned the medium being used, marketers must be much more strategic and plan campaigns to be much more comprehensive than one off campaigns. Your company isn’t creating print pieces. A Facebook campaign simply cannot be cobbled together to cover a two month period focusing on back to school. Social media is a companies voice that must be sustainable and consistent. It is cliche to say social media is a conversation with customers. More accurately, if a business as an authentic, consistent voice it is more likely that the customer will continue to listen.
Above is a very basic social media strategy. The illustration lacks a lot of glitz and glamor but it includes something most social media planning lacks, an overall strategy.
What is your company trying to tell the consumers? Social networks are just the vehicles of this message. Will consumers find your companies message interesting or entertaining? Is your social media strategy limited to profile pages with no friends or sweepstakes and prizes? Does your company ask for user videos but has no submissions? Then your company (and your agency) many have a problem.
If the social media strategy for your organization is similar to the diagram below, there is a planning problem.
What is your company trying to tell consumers about yourself? If the message is that you have “free shipping from now till Christmas” or that “this is your chance to win $10,000 by entering our contest now” then expect to fail.
Focus on your companies passions and plan a strategy that lasts for more then six months and your company may have a chance. If customers find your social “voice” interesting or entertaining, than you may have a win.
Otherwise, you can build something as awesome and creative as the Whopper Sacrifice but marketing that genius doesn’t happen every day.
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Twitter has Made Dell $1 Million
Posted by jonpape | Filed under Internet Marketing, Social Marketing
- Image via CrunchBase
A recent article on Sphinn.com called Twitter has Made Dell $1 Million in revenue caught my attention.
When you take into account Dell’s total revenue, the contribution from twittering is negligible. The development costs and management probably has a high return on investment even though the model isn’t scalable. Consumers have to choose to follow Dell. Dell can not interrupt consumers.
Mashable has an interesting article on Brands on Twitter. The article boils down to the two strategies that enables a business on Twitter to resonate with users:
- 1) Is the conversation on Twitter one-sided? A business should respond to users.
- 2) Does the brand have a “personality” (I believe some marketers call this positioning).
The Mashable article has a nice quote that sums up my position:
“I think that authentic and transparent personal Twitter accounts – being yourself in an uncontrived way – may indirectly and intimately influence organizational brands, because of the level of trust involved in sharing information with someone over the course of time.”
David Wallace agrees with pairing a personality with a brand on Twitter and offers some additional suggestions for social marketing on Twitter in his article, Can Twitter be Useful for Business?
I think the most important thing to remember for a business is that Twitter is an investment in time (maybe more then you anticipate) and to be successful, you are going to have to commit to a long term strategy to reap the benefits.
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Tags: Marketing, Mashable, Social network, Twitter
P&G Social Advertising on Facebook
Posted by jonpape | Filed under Internet Marketing, Social Marketing
- Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
The New York Times has a really interesting article, Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites, on Proctor & Gambles social advertising attempts via Facebook.
Five great take-aways:
- Seth Goldstein, wrote that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”
- Businesses still have to rely on either contests or expensive content to attract visitors.
- Just 3% of internet users would forward advertising information to a friend.
- Contests that feature user submissions historically has a low response rate.
- Seth Goldstein describes a self-perpetuating cycle in social networks: “Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”
There are two approaches that seem to work on social networks:
- Advertisers can be more intrusive, but the outcome will not be positive.
- Advertisers can create genuinely entertaining commercials, but spend ungodly sums to do so.
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Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Seth Goldstein, Social network
