Most businesses know that Social Media Marketing (SMM) would be to their great advantage, but many need guidance as to how exactly to implement a SMM strategy. Social media agencies can help; each have a set of guidelines and will cater to your particular business’ needs. There are a few simple rules everyone should remember when engaging in social media on any level.

Know Your Audience

Who you are marketing to will play a huge role in how you market to them. Know who your business is likely to cater to, and find out how they are already using social media. Then…

Join the Conversation

Participation in online communities should be genuine. Never try to promote yourself or your business before building relationships. Your communication to potential customers should help them solve problems, not just have your brand pushed on them.

Think Outside the Box

Simply joining the most popular social networks (Facebook, for one) will not guarantee you genuine engagement with consumers or other businesses. Consider all the internet has to offer; don’t just sign up for a Facebook account and think you have this social media thing under control. Again, an online marketing or social media agency may be able to help you explore all your options.

Earn Your Reputation

Be helpful and relevant, and you will earn a good reputation. Join the community only to lurk or shamelessly self-promote, and you will earn for yourself a bad reputation. Choose wisely; the community is there for the benefit of everyone involved and trying to manipulate feedback will only make your company look bad.

Find Success

This last step is described in Matt Ambrose’s recent article. Ambrose believes that any feedback received, “even criticism, can be harnessed to improve product design and find out which areas your services are lacking.” This will result in a better product from your team, which in turn will “receive better reviews” and “be easier to sell.” This will lead to customers advocating for your brand.

How do you implement these guidelines? How can you better use them in the future for greater success in SMM?

“The volume of Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions is much higher than the volume of Business-to-Customer (B2C) transactions. The primary reason for this is that in a typical supply chain there will be many B2B transactions involving raw materials, and only one B2C transaction, specifically sale of the finished product to the end customer.”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business-to-business)

Because of this higher volume of transactions, businesses really should be marketing to each other through social media. However, many businesses do not see the need to do so, or do not understand the power of social media in B2B interaction. Perhaps they still see social media as hype or as too new a medium, but it is in fact one of the most influential ways to market online. According to Laura Lake, “people are tired of ‘marketing speak,’” and social media B2B interactions “allow companies to relate to one another and bypass the fluff.”

To be successful with B2B marketing, Jeffrey L. Cohen suggests first having “a social media strategy with a content strategy, integrated with the marketing plan.” It is also important not to isolate the social media agency or consultant who is working the plan; this could cause delays and slow down your marketing. Instead of relying solely on social media for marketing purposes, “continue to invest in traditional communications, but always include links to social sites to build those communities,” says Cohen. And remember, these things take time. Avoid “drastic, knee-jerk changes,” and give your strategy time to take hold.

What successes or failures have you had within B2B social media engagement?

It may seem strange to think of your customers as consultants, but in this age of social networking and social media marketing, it is imperative to do so. Kelly K. Spors at The Wall Street Journal says small businesses especially can benefit from involving customers in “decisions on everything from what to sell, how products look and work, how much they cost, and even how the company operates.” Spors sites two major advantages to this customer-centric advisement: “They’re cheaper” for one thing, and “the end result is likely to appeal to customers because they were involved in creating it.”

I can’t help but think of the 1988 film, Big. When Tom Hanks’ character walks into the toy store and starts playing the big piano with the store’s CEO, he unwittingly reveals his passion for that particular toy, thus landing himself a job marketing new toys for the company. This is a prime example of a consumer becoming a developer. The honesty of the interaction is exactly what every business needs to succeed in creating products that people will actually like and use.

media.createdigitalmedia.net

How to involve customers using social media? Spors suggests informal surveys—asking questions on Twitter or Facebook, or starting discussions on forums or blogs. Another example: “Local Motors Inc. of Wareham, Mass., a small-scale auto maker started last year, lets anyone upload design ideas onto its Web site.” Additionally, online marketing agencies exist for the purpose of helping businesses interact with consumers in similar ways.

What might be some drawbacks to increased consumer involvement?

At SociaLNK, the goal is to promote your business. How can Social Media Marketing (SMM) accomplish this? Our focus is threefold: (1) Listen To and Understand Customers, (2) Engage and Interact With Customers, and (3) Monitor and Analyse What Customers Are Saying About Your Business.

Listen and Understand
At your business, it is imperative that your product be good quality and relevant to the customer. Ideally, your customer service will be excellent as well. By providing customers with not only a useful product but also an attentive ear should something come up, you earn that customer’s loyalty.

Cartoon originally appeared on CustomersAreAlways.com

Engage and Interact

To promote your business, network. These days that means online interaction using social media. Create accounts on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Flickr—making certain these accounts are maintained regularly and are relevant to your product. Create a business blog to inform your customers of the news surrounding your business and genre.

Monitor and Analyse

Along with broadcasting your business’s latest endeavors, use social networks to encourage feedback from customers through surveys or simply by starting conversations. This enables you to, once again, listen to and understand what your customers need. And the cycle begins again.

SociaLNK

Additionally, it may be helpful to familiarize yourself with other businesses in your genre. How are they using SMM to promote themselves? How can you relate that to your own business model?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is all about creating discussion among and engagement with current and potential customers. People are already talking about the companies that influence them, the brands they love, and the products they just can’t live without. So what is the advantage of SMM? Becoming a part of the conversation enables your business to understand the needs of customers more promptly and enthusiastically.

SociaLNK’s methodology for SMM begins with understanding customer needs. To do this:

• Understand the networks
  (Who are they, where are they, and when are they talking)

• Benchmark
  (Social intensity: Quantity of social actions)

• Determine what is being discussed

However, along with listening to customers’ needs, an organization also needs to listen internally. As a corporation, what are your employees saying about you? In other words, what is being said about your company by your company? Employees are also customers, remember, and should be treated accordingly. Also, because so many employees interact using social media on a personal level, they will be either your most valued asset or your worst enemy. Integrity in employee management increases the likelihood that your good online reputation as a business remains intact. As author Melissa Galt points out, “You have a responsibility to maintain awareness of what is being said particularly by those who work for you and correct any misstatements that they make.”

Razorfish argue that connected consumers are now the mainstream

So what is the best way to anticipate how people are going to change in the way they use technology? Razorfish think they may have found a way to do this. Rather than surveying the entire population they have taken a sample of highly connected users. They argue that by studying these early adopters of social media we can get a deeper understanding of where we are going and what works in this new more highly interactive, real time, connected world. Their main conclusion is that nowadays “the experience is the message”.

97% of these consumers had searched for a brand on line, 70% had read a corporate blog, 67% had watched a commerical on YouTube, 65% had played a branded browser based game and 73% had posted a product review on a website like Amazon.
40% had actually friended a brand on Facebook and 26% followed a brand on twitter. These customers were definitely being pulled.

However interestingly 44% of those who friend a brand on twitter said it was to get exclusive deals. Similar statistics were shown for Facebook. Dell of course have already shown that this works in cash returns. I can imagine many brands will look at this with interest. Pizza Hut and Papa Johns have had similar experiences when offering free stuff via an iphone app and facebook respectively.

The report also gave some insight into how change is taking place in how information is dispersed. They found that these consumers are increasingly getting their news from social networking sites from Facebook and Twitter. I guess the great thing about news from these sources is that it is very much customized to your interests. I have certainly learnt about several fairly big stories via facebook especially breaking news.

Razorfish conclude that in terms of brands we are more actively engaged with brands than ever before and the companies that are getting it right are the ones that are focusing on the “experience” that customers are having with their brand. 97% of these consumers reported that digital experience has influenced whether or not they went on to make a purchase.

So can these results generalize to the general population? Well Razorfish suggest that what is incredible about digital technology is that people are picking it up very quickly. The speed and scale with which digital fluency grows is very transforming. They believe these connected consumers do represent the mainstream. Personally I find this a pretty big jump to make. There is no way that the majority are behaving the same way as these more highly connected users. However this does not mean that in a year or two this will not change. They are certainly right that the technology is getting entrenched in society quickly and the next generation of young adults will be even more involved with it.

We would love to hear what you think. Leave a message or contact us.

Social Media is certainly becoming a buzz word in many companies. But how can we measure return on investment (ROI)? It certainly isn’t simple. There are many ways being touted to track social media but there is no obvious “perfect” solution. It isn’t like a simple email campaign where you can measure the number of emails sent out, the number opened and the conversions that resulted. Most of what happens in social media is securely hidden from view by a login. The outcomes are often much more fuzzy things like developing “brand awareness” etc. The things that appropriate for your company will be specific to your current situation.

So what can we measure? To start measuring Social Media ROI you need to define your own set of metrics relevent to your particular context. What do you value as a measure? Could you measure the number of retweets a blog post get? Number of views of a video? Number of comments? Would it be relevant to define a metric based on comment length? By setting up a system you can start measuring your outcomes to establish what is working for you.

It is important to realise that simply having a large number of followers/friend/subscribers does not actually mean anything in terms of engagement. You need to look a whole lot deeper than this to understand what is really going on. The things you measure should aim to identify the people that are actually hearing what you say and are actively engaged in building community themselves.

So where are the conversations relevant to your brand happening on the internet? This is where you need to be. These niche areas often have fewer people but they are often highly focused and engagement levels are high. The best way to find such relevant conversation is to use social media monitoring software.

Your company can make a real difference to the level of engagement in their brand by the way they behave on social networks. If you simply use the network as a way to advertise then you are loosing a lot of the value of social media. Social means participating in social channel, by sharing opinion and giving people a reason to interact with you. A company that engages with personality and a level of giving will have a much higher level of engagement from others.

At a higher level you also need to set up a social media strategy with clear objectives. This helps not only justify your activity in the long term but also helps you work out what your logical next steps should be.. SociaLNK can help you develop metrics and strategies to help you understand your own Social Media ROI.

Every Industry has Influencers. These are the people that are actively involved in the conversations about that Industry and broad scale changes in it. Most brands also have Influencers. These are the people who champion your brand out in the world. They have a different sphere of influence. The key to understanding influence is understanding the context in which a person influences.

Finding out who the Influencers are in your specific context would seem to me a logical step for most companies. Identifying Influencers is not simply identifying the people that talk about your products but requires careful analysis. A company like SociaLNK can provide such services.

Once you know who your Influencers are you can engage them. Engaging with Influencers is not a short term campaign, you should see this as developing a long term mutually beneficial relationship. This is a change from marketing “at “ consumers to marketing “with” people.

Engagement can be done in a number of ways – you could invite an Influencer for a behind the scenes visit to your company. Alternatively Influencers love to meet each other you could invite them to a joint event such a meeting, conference or an online webcast. By doing this you are building the conversation around your brand. Of course people who are interested in your brand are the perfect people to provide feedback about current issues or speculate about future directions.

If an Influencer is passionate about your product then the act of providing feedback and being listened to will only increase this passion. Understanding the inside story also tends to make people more empathetic. The odds are if you work with your Influencers they will go on to promote you more.

Word of mouth truly accelerates when people are passionately engaged, when they are true believers in the product/brand they are promoting. Finding and engaging Influencers has to be a sensible move for any company.

SociaLNK is based in Oxford, a centre for intellectual debate. We often have the opportunity to be involved in some great talks and discussions. Last month the Oxford Social Media Convention was focused around the impact of social media on the more traditional forms of media. A key talk was that by Richard Sambrook who is director of the BBC Global News Division.

Just as in many other spheres of life he argued that social media is transforming the role of journalism. The media is no longer acting as gatekeeper rather they are involved in sharing the news in a public space. He thinks that the impact of social media is a little over-hyped at the moment but does believe it will make lasting changes to the news.

One of things that he can see evolving is a new objectivity. Although journalism has always been based on trust, in this new media world it is “transparency that delivers trust”. In other words the emergence of news is now seen as almost as important as delivering the news itself. In a sense he is arguing that viewers are becoming much more sophisticated in their news consumption and so the relationship between the news presenters and the public becomes more equal. They no longer need to hide behind a veneer of perfectly presented news stories.

Despite this he does not see the role of the citizen journalist replacing the need for journalism. Journalism is much more than just information. It requires discipline, analysis, research, explanation and context.

Another speaker John Kelly of the Washington Post discussed how the advent of social media was affecting the newspaper industry. He argued that the print media were starting to use social media tools, such as discussion forums, to their advantage to increase the engagement of their readers. Apparently 8% of the Daily Telegraph web traffic now comes from social media.

He brought up the subject of crowdsourcing as a possible source of value for journalism in the future. This is a fascinating topic. Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Jeff Howe in an article (2006) in Wired magazine. He argued that one could apply the open-source principles beyond software. Instead of outsourcing a task to one person you outsource it to a crowd and bring the distributed intelligence of many people to bear.

Of course the famous example of using crowdsourcig in print media was during the MP Expense scandal when the Guardian created a simple site that allowed members of the public to help analyse the 700,000 expense claim documents. Over 20,0000 people participated in finding erroneous data. This incredible free resource enabled the guardian to rapidly carry out much more detailed analysis than they could have afforded any other way.

It seems that the connectedness and transparency that the internet affords is having impacts on every type of organisation. Experimentation seems to be the name of the game at the moment. It is going to be fascinating ride!