Audience Research & Strategy

Do You Have a Plan for Measuring Your Social Media Marketing?

Written May 22nd, 2012 by


What is a marketing success?  What is a marketing failure?

When it comes to social media  and integrated marketing, unless you have a plan to measure what your are doing how will you know?  There’s a lot to be said about knowing where your audience is, understanding how they talk about you, planning your social media strategy, getting something to go “viral”, accepting the negative with the positive, throwing up social media tactics like spaghetti against the wall.  It’s subjects we’ve talked about here at Da Li Social Integrated Marketing, but unless you have a plan to measure what you are attempting to do, you’ll never know if what you are doing is worth the investment you are putting into it.

While there’s a lot of numbers counting, and those numbers can be very subjective, you still need to have a social media or integrated marketing measurement plan.  For example, counting the number of Twitter followers you have, isn’t really a great measure if you want to measure the quality of your reach. However if you are just starting up a Twitter account, monitoring and counting how many followers you are attaining on a daily or weekly basis can be decent way of gauging how you are progressing in the beginning.  Once you reach a certain threshold, counting the number of followers can be and overwhelming task to keep up with and weed out the spammers.  It’s the same for counting the number of fans you have, or friends on other social networking sites.  It can be a good “check” but it can’t be the be all end all to your measurement plan.

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Social Media Marketing is an Investment, Not a “Free” Marketing Channel

Written May 14th, 2012 by


Free Marketing Tools Are Great! Who Doesn’t Love “Free”?

Social Media is a free marketing tool, isn’t it? In the very basic sense of examining it, yes “social media” can be seen as a free marketing tool because there’s very little to no outlay of monetary funds.  Participating in social media, if you are a community member, 9 times out of 10, is at no cost to you from the perspective of joining and engaging.  The only time these social media communities charge a fee is if you are upgrading to some sort of premium or pro account.  Think about Flickr in this case, if you don’t want to be limited on your daily uploads or want the analytics, you have to upgrade to the professional account.

From the community participant’s end, this is wonderful!  I get to share and connect with people who have the same interests as me without having to pay a fee, who doesn’t like that concept?  That’s why social media communities have been around long before the term “social media” had ever been coined.

Companies stepping into the idea of marketing in these social media communities with the mistaken idea that marketing within social media communities is “free” are a lot of times sadly mistaken at the end of their campaign’s run.  They find it’s failed, or rather they are under the impression that their marketing attempt failed and they also find there’s a lot more involved than they ever realized.  At the end of the day it isn’t free.  There’s a whole lot of investment that needs to go on in both resources and technology.

It really makes me curious why companies think they can just put up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page and think “this is going to work” immediately.  A “Field of Dreams” Social Media is not, unfortunately if you build it, most likely they won’t come.  Companies spend millions developing new logos, planning public relations (PR) Events, doing keyword research for SEO and PPC, why should the concepts around social media marketing be any different?  The “free” barrier to entry is a huge misnomer and misleads a lot of marketing departments down the wrong path.

So what should a company plan to invest in when looking at a social media strategy?  Well that really depends a lot on what the company hopes to establish in the medium.  Is it increased buzz or brand lift?  How about increased sales or traffic to the site?  Could you want people to sign up for your email list, blog RSS or coupon distribution?  Become part of your own community?  Different goals require different strategies in social media, and they all require different levels and types of resource investment.

Here’s a quick list to keep in mind of what you’ll be investing in when you decide that social media is the next medium your company should become actively involved in.

  • Investing in Understanding:   “Where Are We Now” in the Whole Social Media Sphere

    Do people even know who you are?  Is there any buzz about you?  Do they know the products you sell or the services you offer?

  • Invest in Finding Your Audience

    Where are the conversations happening?  Who’s doing the talking about you?

  • Invest in the Approach

    How do I interact with the social media communities that are talking about me, my industry, products or services?  How do I add value to their lives and not just be another “noise channel”

  • Goals & Measurement Need Investment

    Free tools verses Paid Tools?  Free buzz monitoring tools give you limited data, can your strategy work with that limited data, or do you need more robust information?  What about your analytics, are the free tools going to give you enough information to connect the dots of traffic to buzz & engagement to conversions?  Have you even taken the time to plan what goals will make you successful?

  • Employees are as Social Media Investment in their own right

    You pay your employees a salary or an hourly wage to preform tasks for you.  If one of their tasks has to do with social media, that’s definitely an investment that isn’t free by any means.  However, it isn’t just their time engaging you should be planning for, it’s their time researching, setting goals, training, developing and ultimately fortifying relationships with your audience that you really need to plan for investing in.

 

With investment in research, strategy and measurement companies can see return, or at least if there isn’t a return they can figure out why.  The investment of time and resources from the onset is likely the biggest factor of whether a company is going to succeed or fail.  Don’t you want the money and time you’ve invested to grow your social media strategy into a success rather than just having spaghetti being thrown at the wall?

Scrabble Letters Photo Credit:  Flickr User WonderWebby

Tree & Coins Photo Credit:  Flickr User Pfala

Are You Flexible Enough To Do Social Media Marketing?

Written May 11th, 2012 by

Next to taxes and death, change is the only thing in this world that is certain.  As the tides of the internet push and pull and the whims of social media community members ebb and flow, so does the popularity, web site traffic, interest and buzz around tools, applications and sites in social media.  Even with all your research, six months down the line, the social media marketing tactic that you identified as part of your strategy could be in serious decline and not performing.

On the other hand, the marketing tactic could be even more of a success than you imagined.  The question then comes to any company – “Are You Flexible Enough in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy to Change & Adapt to Those Conditions?”

Can You Plan to Be Nimble and Integrate Your Marketing Strategies?

Can You Change Your Strategies?Some companies have internal politics that make it nearly impossible to be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changes that happen in social media.  There are budget constraints, signatures that need to be obtained or a bunch of other hoops that a social media marketing team must go through in order to change parts of their strategies on the fly.  This is where mid-sized to small-sized businesses have an advantage to super big corporations, a lot of times it’s a quick phone call or email to get that change done, not a check list of permissions that need to be obtained.

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Every Business is Different Especially When Dealing with Social Media Marketing

Written May 9th, 2012 by

A Flock of Sheep (Are You Just a Social Media Sheep?)Just because the media is hyping how the biggest companies or well known celebrities are using the latest, greatest social media site, doesn’t mean that every business should be doing the same. If your competition has a blog that doesn’t mean that you need to have a blog. There’s a lot of  hype around so many different types of social media marketing tactics, from Twitter to Friend Feed, it’s tough not to automatically fall into the trap of the “ooooh, we need that too!”

Unfortunately for a lot of companies, even the most conservative ones, that lure is too strong and they slap up a Facebook page or a Twitter account without thinking about forming a strategy around it.

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Buzz Monitoring Tools Can’t Tell You Everything

Written April 20th, 2012 by


Buzz Monitoring Tools Help You Integrate Your Online Marketing Strategies

Are You Using Social Media Monitoring Tools?

There are a lot of tools out there on the market that can help marketers understand what’s going on in the world around them, particularly online.  Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing  are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.

However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by. Read the rest of this entry »

Are You Afraid of Loosing Control in Social Media?

Written April 18th, 2012 by


Fear. Fear of Negativity. Fear of Social Media.

Don't Let Fear Paralyze Social Media Efforts

Don't Let Fear Paralyze Social Media Efforts

Almost every company has it when they take one look at what’s going on in social media. The question is whether you embrace it or run from it.

Fear of the unknown, of what “could” happen stops a lot of companies right in their tracks. It also has them making a lot of crazy decisions when it comes to their own internal social media policies.

There’s two pieces to fear in social media that can really hold a company back from being successful with their online marketing strategies. The first piece is being afraid of what your employees are doing online. This fear causes companies to restrict access to the internet. At Search Engine Strategies in New York in March 2010, keynote speaker David Meerman Scott said that 25% of companies restrict their employees access to the internet. Instead of looking at it as an asset, these companies are fearful of what “could” happen.

The second piece is fear of what people are saying in these social media communities, fear of them getting the message wrong or saying something bad. They site this as their reason for not getting involved with social media, or taking an approach of “telling” their customers online things, instead of listening and engaging. They are fearful of how customers are engaging with their products because they want it to be all about those carefully crafted and fine tuned messages they put out.

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Small Business & Integrated Marketing Tips

Written April 11th, 2012 by

* This is a partial reprint of Li’s ClickZ column on Integrated Marketing

Helping Small Business with Integrated Marketing

Helping Small Business with Integrated Marketing

Small business owners are probably some of the hardest-working people I know. Constantly pressed for time, juggling and balancing priorities, trying to figure out which strategies to implement to get them closer to success – it’s hard to find time to breathe. Add that in with the hundred other day-to-day responsibilities, figuring out how to implement all of the online marketing strategies out there can be quite overwhelming. That’s why we’re launching this series that’s dedicated to the small business to help you understand how to begin and implement different online marketing channels in the most time- and resource-efficient ways.

Rather than start off with a particular channel of online marketing and discussing how to integrate it into what you have already implemented, I feel it’s best to start everyone at the beginning. Launching into a marketing channel just because your competition is doing it or you read an article about it on CNN, doesn’t mean that it’s the best path for you. So how does a company get to know what’s best for them? Audience Research.

Yes, it might slow you down in launching your strategy, but at the end of the day you’re going to be very glad that you invested the time to understand how to carefully and successfully implement your marketing strategies in the channels where you are going to get the “most bang for your buck.” There are several ways you can go about your research, and as a small business you won’t need all the bells and whistles that the enterprise-level tools offer. You just need the time and effort to understand the research to use it to your advantage.

Inexpensive but Great Listening Tools

Google Alerts. Google Alerts, if used and fine-tuned around the terms that matter most to your business, can be a great source of understanding multiple channels at once, not just social media. Google Alerts can give you an idea of what’s up-and-coming in the search results, pay per click, as well as social media. The caveat here is to fine-tune your search queries, and make sure you include negatives with your searches so that you get the most relevant results.

Twitter Search. You may or may not find that Twitter is the channel for you to be active in. For some businesses, the audience you seek just isn’t in Twitter. However, Twitter is still a great place to figure out the “pulse” of a topic whether it’s trending or one that’s evergreen. A lot of time utilizing Twitter can lead you to other more powerful and relevant social communities that you might not have been aware of.

Trackur. When you combine Google Alerts and Twitter Search with social media “listening tools” such as Trackur, you can truly get a great understanding of where you should be focusing your efforts. Trackur is great because it’s very easy to understand and utilize in a time-efficient manner for any small business owner who’s pressed for time. Looking at the results daily for about 15 minutes can help you keep an eye on changing trends and where the most relevant conversations are taking place and ensure your strategies are still in line with where the action is happening.

…. Read more of this article at ClickZ

Making the Connection: How Duracell Misses the Mark with Daughtry Facebok Campaign

Written December 7th, 2011 by

Making a ConnectionIn marketing it’s all about making connections.  Products and services to messages, facts to value propositions, companies to potential customers these connections are all vital to having you marketing strategies succeed .  Marketers generally assume that the messages they devise will be easily understood by customers and that they will be able to make the connection of why what we are presenting to them should matter to them.  That assumption, without data to back it up, can sometimes be the death of any a marketing plan, no matter how easy you assume that the leap is to make the connection, especially if egos are involved.

Failure to make the connection can also happen when not all of the parties involved are on the same page.  This happens a lot when marketing departments are ‘siloing’ their efforts.  In other words, the PR (pubic relations) department has no clue what the online marketing department is doing and vice versa and they are running separate campaigns in similar venues and the messages are confusing between each channel.  In these situations not only is it confusing for the customer, its damn near impossible for them to make a leap in these messages to make the connections, let alone trust that the company itself understands its own messaging.
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Buzz Monitoring Tools in the Wrong Hands

Written November 30th, 2011 by

Dangerous in the Wrong HandsI was both appalled an intrigued this week about the story that took off like wildfire in the press where a high school senior dared to tweet her negative opinion about a government official, in this case, the governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback.  The article on CNN, “The girl who dared to tweet about Gov. Brownback” actually caused me to pause and consider how buzz monitoring tools in the wrong hands can cause disastrous situations.

In this case, the wrong hands is a spin happy PR team trying to save a political figure’s reputation.  When a PR team uses a buzz monitoring tool to seek out negative comments and fires all cannons on the commentor without regard to free speech and understanding the power of social communities, it’s definitely in the wrong hands.  It’s also why you cannot just take this tools an apply them without a strategy, you should have a clear cut policy to respond to negative comments spelled out and not allow anyone, not even your PR team, to go rogue.
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