Social & the Marketing Mix

Hang in there, folks. We’ve got TWO more sessions to go before SES NY 2010 goes into the record books.  I can already feel the carpal tunnel in my hands and wrists screaming at me. Hopefully, they’ll shut up long enough for me to finish this thing up.  I aint no quitter.

Okay up on stage we have Adam Sherk, Veronica Fielding, Beth Harte, and Jeff Jones.  Let’s go.

Up first is Beth Harte.

She’s an integrated marketer. When she hears that companies don’t put the consumer first, she agrees. There are three phases:

• Product-oriented companies: If you build it, they will come. You go to the store and buy what they have.
• Sales-oriented companies: We make a product and we will push it, push it, push it.
• Market-oriented companies: What do you want? We’ll make sure we build it.

In any marketing, you need to know thy audience. You shouldn’t build anything unless you know people want it.

The 4 Ps vs The 4 Cs

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion

vs

1. Customer
2. Cost
3. Convenience
4. Communication

Really, they’re the same thing.  They need to mesh and coincide with one another.

What is Integrated Marketing? It’s not that everything is pretty and matches. It’s that every point in your company needs to have one objective – to satisfy your prospects’ wants and needs.

Why Integrate? People interact with brands. If they recognize the brand, that’s what they’re interacting with. With social media, they interact with PEOPLE that represent brands.  When everything is cohesive, every interaction is easy and intuitive. You make it easy for people to fulfill their need or want. The problem with integration is silos. We have different departments with different budgets, agendas, levels of risk aversion, etc. You need to understand that your customers don’t care about ANY of that. They just want what they want.  Your customers are, essentially, five years old.

5 Steps to an Integrated Process

1. Identify Customers and Prospects: What have customers done in the past and what will they do in the future? Social media lets you put a name to a face.
2. Estimating the Value of Customers: If we’re going after an audience, we have to know how much money they’re worth. If that audience isn’t worth how much you’ve invested in a product, then you’ve just made a big mistake.
3. Planning Communication Messages & Incentives:  What channels will you use?
4. Estimating Return on Customer Investment: It’s just another channel, it’s not the whole thing. It’s about branding. How much is your brand worth? What’s the equity?
5. Evaluation & Future Planning: Was your plan successful or do it fail?

Geico Integration: They show their videos on their Web site. They have videos on Facebook. They’re using mobile marketing. They have the gecko on every bit of it.

Pampers Integration:  They have a disconnect in what they do. There are too many steps to get to their FB page and there’s a different experience on each.

Next up is Veronica Fielding.

Buyers expect brands to engage. 85 percent of people surveyed said they expect brands to engage with them in social media.  They use a 5 phase approach.

1. Brand Protection
2. Listen & Research
3. Strategy
4. Implementation
5. Active Management

Determine Where You Want To Go & Why

What objectives do you want to achieve?

• increase sales
• better job applicants
• better branding
• streamlined media relations
• all of the above?

Sales should not be your initial objective in social media. Repeatedly people say they DON’T want to be marketed TO. Use this channel to influence rather than drive sales.

Brand Protection: If you are authorized, you will want to claim your brand names on at least 15 of the most popular social media sites [Oh hai, Knowem]. This will help you lay the groundwork for future activities.  If you are NOT authorized, get buy in. Even if you’re not going to move forward, at least do this.

Establish protocols for claiming names:

• Who can claim them?
• What names will be claimed?
• Keep registration information consistent, document it all – Decisions about avatars/personas/ghostwriters.
• Keep protocols consistent but unique to avoid someone “guessing” and hacking your account.

How often do you need to post “something” to keep the account live? Change your password every 6 months. Keep current with site policy changes.

Look & Listen: Start researching the external environment. Where are your clients, prospects, competitors, partners, employees, etc.  What are they saying about your brand Who does the media turn to for info? What are your competitors doing? Do prospective customers behave differently than current customers?

Go to Key Social Media Sites

• On Twitter search for variations of your competitors names
• Check hashtags
• Search your company and brand name on LinkedIn
• Check channels on YouTube and do keyword research

Tools

• Google Alerts
• Social Mention
• Addictomatic
• Twilert

After you did your research, ask what you learned. Does this change your plans?

Overarching Plan: What’s your game plan? This is where you start to map your strategies. Restate and clearly define your objectives and agree on how success will be measure. Resist the urge to start talking – keep listening. Focus on 1-3 social media outposts at the beginning. Use the ones that make the most sense for your brand and tackle them in that fashion.

Questions to Consider

• What are your company’s policies about content? Who owns it?
• Are social media sites blocked by IT?
• What is your Internet policy? Are employees allowed to talk as individuals during company hours?
• Will you converse as a team or a persona? What will be the tone if one persona is representing you?

You want the groundwork laid. Don’t underestimate the resources that will be required to keep the conversation going.  Having stale posts is worse than having none at all.

Plan now: What happens when someone goes on vacation? What if someone gets fired or quits? What happens when there’s negative press? How will you respond/not respond?

Get buy in for all departments/personnel affected. Be clear about the risks and reward.

Build Your Outposts

Set up 1-3 outposts, configuring them according to your formal plan.  Facebook – Use pages not groups. What kind of photos? Who can post?  Twitter – what’s your background design?   What will be your posting schedule? Linking – how will you engage

Soft launch it among business friends to get input before rolling it out big time.

Go Live

Start talking, quietly at first. Continue to listen, respond promptly. Learn by doing and from mistakes. Remember, it’s all transparent – get used to it. Succeed because you knew what you were doing to measure as success. If you can tag it, you can measure it.

Jeff Jones is up next.

Effective Measurement

Specific

Measurable
Actionable
Realistic
Timed

Web presence is much more than your Web site now. There are countless external threads from blogs to aggregators to social media. The ultimate goal in most cases is to drive qualified traffic back to your site and increase links.

Reach & Awareness – what are your ratios of followers/fans/following? Are you on lists/bookmarks Are people subscribing to your profiles, feeds, emails?

Authority and Discussion Volume: Are you included in discussions around target topics? Are you being referenced/retweeted and shared? Are you being linked to?

Off-Site Social Measurement & Tools

• Twitter
• Retweetist
• Tweetmeme
• Hootsuite
• Twitalyzer
• Facebook Fan Pages
• LinkedIn Business Page
• Google Analytics
• Topic Tracking
• Short URLs

On-Site Social Measurement

• Mentions and shares/RTs that led to visitors
• Unique visitors by social referral vs. returning
• Page views, bounces & time spent her visitor by social referreral

Referrals and Links

• Backlinks vs Actual Referrals from social stream
• Ration of mentions to referral
• link shorteners and parameters for tracking

5 Common Social Measurement Mistakes

• Not providing landing pages for social
• Not tracking your links
• Focusing on Follower #s
• Not putting dollar values on KPIs
• Not owning your Web presence.

Things to put $ values on – what is the value of a mention? what is the cost per conversion? cost per lead? what’s the value of a visit? Compare that to the cost to setup.

Adam Sherk is gonna help us finish this up.

There are lots of different ways to reach out to users. It’s causing users to redefine what news is and how they want to consume it. As a publisher you have to find out what they want and react to it.

Diversify Your Approach: Twitter’s going well for The New York Times right now.  They have separate feeds to sections, events, specific journalists, etc. They have lots of different touch points. You want to diversity. Make it less editorial when you can.  It’s breaking news with personality.  Customize the style of messaging to help build referrals.   The NYT creates lists curate, not just to promote. It’s about the information, not the source. They have curated lists for all sorts of different topics. It’s good for real-time visibility.

He thinks Fox News is getting more likes/dislikes than any other news organization on Facebook. They have a very rabid follower base. Video is getting the least clicks for the NYT FB page. They think people just don’t want to take the time to watch the video.

Facebook gives you a good opportunity to correlate what’s happening on your site with what’s happening on Facebook.  There are lots of great ways to connect FB back with your site. They want to collaborate with the users themselves. They’re looking for ways to have meaningful conversation.

Create direct connections. He likes Facebook Connect.  Life Magazine installed it in January and Life has become a really good social media case study. [Heh, take that out of context and it’s funny.] 18 percent of their traffic now comes from social.

Real-Time Search:  They’re really looking at RTS. If you’re a news organization, you can get quite a few impressions on the page. RTS is moving fast, but that’s where trusted brands can stand out and get a lot of traffic. They time their tweets with the news cycles.

Google Social Search: This is a tough nut to crack.