Monthly Archives: January 2012

5 dangers of not having a social media presence

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Many businesses realise the benefits of social technologies but many are still watching from side of stage, waiting for the right time to make their entrance.

Perhaps they are fearful of getting it wrong or simply don’t think they need a social web presence.

As with all marketing initiatives, there’s no point adopting a social media presence just for the sake of it, but there are dangers in holding back online:

1. You’re missing the opportunity to extend your Customer Service

Customer service IS social. In spite of all the jargon and bluster it is simply a conversation between a company and its customers.

If you’re not socially active, you are missing the opportunity to lead that conversation. Don’t put your company at risk by not being there if someone has a complaint – or recommendation.

You can stop bad comments in their tracks and amplify good comments – but only if you’re listening. Someone, somewhere is discussing your brand, don’t be afraid – get involved and participate.

2. You are losing out on sales and leads

The stats around consumers researching their purchase decision online are significant.

The sales cycle now has an additional step – we call it the “validate my decision” step, where a prospective customer reaches out to listen to what others are saying about their chosen purchase.

It’s why all the major online retail outlets now feature review sections. If you play no part in curating the conversation about your brand within social media then you are losing out on sales.

3. You’re not just missing out on young consumers!

Social media might be relatively young, but it’s a common mistake to assume that only the young are using it.

There are 800 million users of Facebook, predicted to be one billion at some point in 2012. Over 200 million of those are over the age of 35+

Social media is here to stay and it’s for everyone, being used across all age profiles.

http://www.kenburbary.com/2011/03/facebook-demographics-revisited-2011-statistics-2/Ken Burbary

4. You’re not in charge of your reputation

Because of the speed of online conversation, if you miss the opportunity to react if someone is complaining, the sound of your silence is deafening.

An effective social media strategy or reputation management strategy helps manage problems before they flare up.

5. You’re ignoring your customers’ great ideas

One of the greatest merits of Social Media is that you can now gather feedback by listening to your online audience. It’s like one huge, open focus group, if you’re willing to take advantage that is.

In addition a strong social media presence can strengthen you’re overall marketing, allowing you to track customer lifecycles and provide insight into customer profiles. Many companies are using techniques to find advocates and foster loyalty and build long-term relationships.

Become a social media success story

Social media on it’s own is not the big picture. It should form part of your entire marketing and customer service strategy. Nor does your entrance to social media need to be “big”. Many of the success stories are from organisations that had a clear strategy, aligned to business objectives and supported by an individual or a core team.

 

 

FT.com continues to generate revenue from online content – case study

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While many publishers are still struggling to create a model to generate revenue from content online, The FT are continuing to increase profits through digital subscriptions for content.

“At the FT Group, the changes we have made to the business model and mix mean we are well placed to grow even in tough markets for print circulation and advertising,” says a news release from The Financial Times. “We expect digital subscriptions, now the engine of the FT Group’s growth, to continue to build steadily.”

FT Online Product Management Director Mary Beth Christie commented at the conference Paywall Strategies 2011: “Like the best systems, ours is simple. It gives users freedom of choice to consume media between the paper, the tablet and mobile. We allow our users complete freedom to read our content as they wish.”

This approach has culminated in more than 230,000 paying subscriptions for the FT/FT.com and 3.7 million registered online users.

Christie says the “majority are individual subscribers, not corporate”. She also added that “The goldmine is not paying for content, the goldmine is building greater reader engagement over time.”

Key features of the business/marketing model

  • Registered users can sign up and get 8 articles for free a month, though payment is required for further access.
  • Mobile platforms are a growing demographic — about 22 percent of all traffic to FT.com is from a mobile device and account for about 15 percent of new subscriptions.
  • The home page with the lastest headlines if open to view without registration generating search results.
  •  A wide range of content including blogs and podcasts is freely available without registration, generating search results and allowing journalists to engage in social media.
  • Current deal ‘Try the Financial Times for 4 weeks for just £1. Then continue your subscription from just £5.19 a week

Get more people talking about your brand on Facebook

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The Häagen-Dazs Facebook pageIf you’ve got a Facebook page for your business, you need to know who your brand advocates are.

Why? Because unless you do, you’ll find it hard to grow your community, increase engagement with your brand or successfully convert Facebook engagement into increased sales.

Knowing and analysing your advocates in Facebook allows you to:

1. Generate increased word-of-mouth about your brand and campaigns

Understand what makes your advocates tick and you’ll understand how to get them talking about you, your brand and your campaigns more often. Do this and you’ll increase the positive ‘word of mouth’ about your brand and campaigns.

2. Generate an increase in conversions/entries to campaigns

Who entered your last promotion/competition or campaign? Was there a pattern in the types of people that engaged with certain campaigns? Profile your advocates, tailor your upcoming marketing activity to ensure further campaigns are exponentially more successful, generating increased conversions and entries.

3. Build a sustainable community for the long-term requiring less input from your brand team

Know your advocates and deliver content of value to them. This way, you’ll create a self-sustaining community who will engage not just with your brand, but with each other through your brand. The result? A sustainable community requiring less input from your brand team.

4. Invoke advocates to help manage reputation and customer service

A sustained community of advocates means you have more brand ambassadors socially interacting online on your behalf. This extends your reach in terms of managing your reputation who can also help to manage your reputation, in turn supporting your team in delivering excellent customer service.

5. Gather insight from your biggest fans

Your biggest fans talk about you and your brand. What they think, feel, like and dislike matters to you. Take the time to get to know them and what makes them tick and feed this back in to your R&D efforts and marketing strategy. Your fans are vital to your business, so don’t waste this resource at your fingertips.

6. Create an advocate management programme

There’s no point understanding your fans and advocates without a programme to manage them. Document and plan the management and growth of your advocates and your brand will truly grow and succeed on the social web.

“I don’t have time to write a blog” – the dawn of the content engineer

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People are increasingly recognising the need to use social media to promote their company, but when faced with the prospect of writing a daily blog or tweeting on a regular basis, lack of time is a quickly cited as a barrier to even getting started. This is particularly the case if the person is not already part of the marketing or communications teams.

Citing lack of time clearly links to the perceived value of regularly conducting such activity. People generally find time for things they think will benefit them.

The results from blogging aren’t immediate

The big problem is that the results from blogging or tweeting aren’t usually immediate – social media is about using content to build relationships and this can take time. On a day to day basis it’s often not clear which blog or twitter topic is the one that will make the most difference. You can blog for weeks and not seem to make an impact.

But as companies point out, if they are going to invest in this space they need a clear idea that they will get a return.

It comes back to the old adage in marketing – ‘only 50% of marketing works, the question is which 50%?’ This applies just as much to social media marketing.

Some look to consultancies to direct them to what is guaranteed to work, but this is rarely possible as the audience for every business or brand is different even in the same sector. The real-time nature of the web makes it notoriously difficult to predict behaviour.

Businesses who have made the step into social media marketing are increasingly using monitoring and analytics tools to ‘listen’ to their audience and get some kind of indication of the impact of their work.

Who is best placed in an organisation to engage in social media?

Linking this to your social media activity is relatively straight forward when there just one or two of you in a business. It’s easy to keep track of the blog, twitter, Facebook etc.

Problems arise when you’re a big corporate with different products, divisions etc. It becomes impossible. The big question is who within the organisation is best placed to listen and manage / engage in social media in order to generate maximum awareness, engagement and ultimately sales?

This is leading to a new kind of marketer who works across the business:

The content engineeer

Pelin Thorogood blogged about the idea of the content engineer. In Pelin’s words this “is a marketer who engineers and optimises the many forms of content required to engage customer 2.0, based on the data presented by the many analysis tools. eg:

  • Social-media monitoring and analysis give them the pulse on buyer sentiments on brands, products, and ad campaigns.
  • Web analytics tell them which content is engaging which type of visitor from which source.
  • Search engine optimisation tools present them with the right keywords to include on the web site to improve page rank (and thus findability) with search engines.

Leveraging all the social and behavioral intelligence available to them, content engineers develop and apply the right content, at the right time, to engage the right audience in the most effective manner possible.”

This is great thinking as it is clear the value in social media is generated through content.

But it starts to put a framework around how you can optimise this content to get the best results for your business and who should do this.

It shows how your time spent in social media marketing can be used most effectively, so you can start to see the value in what you do.