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<h1 class="title">Introduction to social media marketing strategy</h1>
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<p>By E. Mahony – spotlightideas.co.uk</p>
<p><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">The importance of social media and social media strategy</span><span style="color: #3366ff;"><br/>
</span></strong><span style="color: #000000;">Let’s start off with some stats first.<br/>
</span><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>- Internet-usage stats.<br/>
</strong>North America: 73.9 %. Europe. 50.1 % <span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Source</span></a></span>.<br/>
So a lot of people using the internet! A lot of people exposed, potentially, to social media.<br/>
<strong>- Number of people using Facebook:</strong><br/>
300 million active users. <span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=136782277130"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Source</span></a></span>.<br/>
A lot ..<br/>
<strong>The various goals social media tools/technologies can achieve.</strong><br/>
Twitter, for example, can be used for: creating brand awareness, consolidating brand loyalty, networking, driving traffic to blog, research, getting ideas, and much more.<br/>
<strong>Social media success with brands</strong><br/>
Consider these success stories: Zappos – Twitter (<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zappos_twitter.php"><span style="color: #ff6600;">article</span></a></span>); Burger King – Facebook (<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/whopper-sacrifice/"><span style="color: #ff6600;">article</span></a></span>); IBM – blogs (<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/"><span style="color: #ff6600;">IBM blogs</span></a></span>); Starbucks – consumer-generated marketing (<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideaHome"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Starbuck’s page</span></a></span>); Dell – multi social-media platforms (<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://en.community.dell.com/"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Dell page</span></a></span>).<br/>
<strong>Social media success with small and medium-sized businesses</strong><br/>
Brands are enjoying success with social media. Since it’s often so much easier for smaller businesses to implement social media strategies and benefit from social media in general (it’s relatively cheap and uncomplicated to set up) so there are many that are benefitting, significantly, from social media.<br/>
<strong>The end of old marketing</strong><br/>
Social media coincided with (and helped in) the decline of old marketing. What is old marketing? It’s about, for example, interrupting instead of asking for permission for attention (in a general branding sense). It’s about talking at, instead of talking with.<br/>
New marketing is about really knowing who your audience are. It’s about creating and marketing products/services/content that are relevant and interesting/useful to your audience. It’s about opening up, being transparent and authentic to your audience. And more. Social media is relevant, in a fundamental way, to all these points.<br/>
<strong>Social media back-fire</strong><br/>
Unless you have a proper strategy, social media can back-fire. For example, you might think it’s a good idea to appear to have a blog, even though your efforts are half-hearted. A potential customer could visit your blog and come to the conclusion that if your blog is half-hearted, then perhaps your other business efforts are half-hearted as well.<br/>
<strong>Social media bandwagon</strong><br/>
There is so much talk on the net about ‘social media’ that it’s easy to join the bandwagon without really thinking about social media properly. It’s very easy to spend time ‘doing’ social media without any return. In order to avoid wasting time and effort, here are some very general questions to think about first:</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #3366ff;"><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Important questions to ask</span></strong><br/>
</span><span style="color: #000000;">- What are you trying to achieve, exactly, using social media?<br/>
- How does each thing you do in social media help you in achieving your business/brand goals?<br/>
- Can social media develop your business/brand in ways you hadn’t thought about before?</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">What is social media marketing?</span></strong><br/>
<span style="color: #000000;">In a nutshell: it’s about using various online tools/platforms to listen to, and communicate with, customers and people in general in a way that can (relative to traditional media communication channels) be cheap and uncomplicated to implement. Social media can involve a myriad of marketing/business goals:</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #3366ff;"><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Social Media Goals</span></strong><br/>
</span><span style="color: #000000;">A crucial part of your social media strategy is knowing what you want to use social media for:<br/>
- <strong>Brand awareness</strong>. Can help create brand awareness / find new customers. Creating brand-awareness in an indirect, social way.<br/>
- <strong>Brand Loyalty</strong>. Can help to create brand loyalty. Building a community, or ‘tribe’ (to borrow from Seth Godin).<br/>
- <strong>Research</strong>. Can be used for quantitative and qualitative research (about products, customers, marketplace, competition, and so on) as well as for general zeitgeist.<br/>
- <strong>Networking</strong>. For useful industry contacts, as well as for contacts in general.<br/>
- <strong>Income</strong>. You can make an income directly from social media i.e. with AdSense and affiliate-marketing programs on blog sites, for example.<br/>
- <strong>Customer service</strong>. Social media can be an extra useful tool for customer service. You can find out, very quickly, what people think about your brand and why. And respond, quickly, to any complaints.<br/>
- <strong>Collaboration</strong>. People from different departments /companies/industries can work more easily together via social media. Helping to integrate workers and their approach to work.<br/>
- <strong>Communications</strong>. Improves general communications within companies, and between companies and customers.<br/>
- <strong>Ideas</strong>. Using social media to find out ideas in general for your online content and for your business in general.<br/>
- <strong>PR</strong>. Using online PR to promote products, services and brands, as well as for crisis management, and more.<br/>
- <strong>Publicity</strong>. Tying social media in with general publicity campaigns.<br/>
- <strong>Leadership</strong>. Communicate ideas through social media as an industry leader / influencer.<br/>
- <strong>Education</strong>. Using social media to educate customers about your products and services, as well as for education, in general, to employers and business partners.<br/>
- <strong>Career</strong>. Using social media to find jobs and to enhance your career by having a social media presence in general.<br/>
-<strong> Leads</strong>. Creating customer interest for lead generation.<br/>
<span style="color: #ffffff;">.</span><br/>
</span><strong style="color: #3366ff;"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Selecting the right social-media tools/platforms<br/>
</span></strong><span style="color: #000000;">Here are some popular, social-media tools/platforms: blogs, microblogging (Twitter), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace), Social network aggregation (FriendFeed), social bookmarking (Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Delicious), social news (Digg), photo-sharing (Flickr, Photobucket), video sharing (YouTube), wikis (knowledge management), opinion sites (Yelp), upstream (on-going broadcast of someone’s life), audio and music sharing, product reviews, game sharing, information aggregators, and more.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"> In order to help you choose the right platforms, here are some links (<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="/ "><span style="color: #ff6600;">blogging</span></a></span>, <span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://www.spotlightideas.co.uk/?p=1088"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Twitter</span></a></span>, <span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://www.spotlightideas.co.uk/?p=1144"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Facebook & more</span></a></span>) to some useful and interesting blog articles on this subject. And some links to social media case studies:<span style="color: #ff6600;"> <a href="http://www.spotlightideas.co.uk/?p=2670"><span style="color: #ff6600;">UK</span></a></span>,<span style="color: #ff6600;"><a href="http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/09/ive-been-thinki.html"><span style="color: #ff6600;">USA</span></a></span>.<br/>
Another way of choosing the right tools/platforms is to use social media .. (i.e. Twitter, forums, blogs – just listening as well as asking others about their experiences on social media).</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong><span style="color: #3366ff;"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Conversations / listening / Portal/content</span><br/>
</span></strong>Here are three important, general, social-media activities/approaches to think about when implementing a social media strategy.<br/>
<strong>- Conversations.</strong> ‘Conversations’ is chiefly about getting to meet and getting to know new customers as well as building up loyalty with existing customers. It can involve direct, two-way dialogue i.e. on Twitter. But it could be more, indirect, i.e. leaving a comment on a blog post. And even more indirect than that, for example, a product review.<br/>
<strong>- Listening.</strong> Listening is chiefly about absorbing information (quantitative research, qualitative research, but, in particular, just looking around to see what people are saying in general, and so on) and ideas and using these, in an important way, to improve your product/service/brand/online content.<br/>
- <strong>Portal / content.</strong>‘Portal’ is chiefly about building a place (could be a blog, facebook page, interactive website, and more) on the net where you can<br/>
1. present yourself / brand<br/>
2. create content (interesting and useful articles, videos, apps, and so on) around what you do.<br/>
It’s about personalizing your social media strategy and giving your customers something concrete to focus on. But it’s, also, about clothing your social media strategy with useful and interesting content, that will help attract new customers, as well as increase the loyalty of existing ones.<br/>
Your portal could, also, be connected to related content on other parts of the web (either created by you, or by others, for example, in your organization).</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="color: #3366ff;"><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Social media attributes/skills</span></strong><br/>
</span>In order to carry out your social media strategy, you will need to focus on three types of attibutes/skills (there are others, depending on what your marketing background is, but these are typical to social media, that everyone in social media should have some idea of).<br/>
<span style="color: #ff6600;"><strong><span style="color: #000000;">Technical</span></strong></span>. You don’t need to be a technical whizz. But knowing about, and understanding the nitty-gritty of how social media tools/platforms work, as well as best practices, are important.<br/>
<strong>Human</strong>. ‘Conversations’ is very much about being human.<br/>
<strong>Creative</strong>. There is a strong element of objectivity in social media (figuring out your objectives, functionality of tools, measurement, and so on), but, certainly social media is, also, about getting a feel for things – but ‘getting a feel for things’ after much research and trying things out. ‘Creative’ about connecting the activities you do on different tools/platforms so that they are part of one overall social media approach. ‘Creativ’e about how you put-together your content and how it is integrated with your social media goals in general. Creative about how your social media activities tie in with your marketing activities in general. </span></p>
<p><strong><span style="color: #3366ff;"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Mashups</span><br/>
</span></strong><span style="color: #000000;">You need to think about how different social media platforms/tools can work together to aid you in your social media strategy overall. And, also, how your social media efforts are integrated with your overall marketing strategy. An holistic approach is required.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Consumer generated media</span><span style="color: #3366ff;"><br/>
</span></strong><span style="color: #000000;">Consumer generated media or ‘user generated content’ is about getting consumers to provide content on your site (could be articles, blog posts, blog comments, news updates, forum exchanges, news updates, reviews, video, audio, and so on). Need to think about the positives and negatives.<br/>
<strong>Positives.</strong> Consumer generated media can attract traffic to your website as well as keeping people longer on your site. It can represent the views of a cross-section of people. Build up customer loyalty / the tribe and so on. Lead to word-of-mouth recommendations, and more. And it’s free.<br/>
<strong>Negatives</strong>. Some might see it as amateurish to have the content of all-and-sundry on your site. How much time and effort did they put into the content? How qualified are they to provide such content? And so on.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #3366ff;"><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Consumer generated marketing</span></strong><br/>
</span><span style="color: #000000;">Consumer generated marketing is about getting customers to participate in product and brand development, as well as to develop advertising campaigns, and so on.<br/>
<strong>Positives.</strong> It’s like qualitative research. You are basing your product and brand on what consumers think.<br/>
<strong>Negatives.</strong> Do the views of consumers fit in with the long-term goals of your business, for example. And more.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Plan for time</span></strong><br/>
<span style="color: #000000;">How much time can you devote to social media? How long are you prepared to work on a particular aspect of social media?</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #3366ff;"><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Being prepared for criticism</span></strong><br/>
</span><span style="color: #000000;">Opening up to audiences makes you vulnerable to criticism. You need to be ready for people who do criticise you. You need to find out where such criticisms are being made. And you need to know how to deal with such criticism as effectively as possible.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #3366ff;"><strong><span style="color: #ff6600;">Social media measurement</span></strong><br/>
</span><span style="color: #000000;">How well is your social media efforts going? You can listen to find out what people are saying about you. You can listen on social network sites / carry out searches for brand names, urls, and so on, via various search tools. You can, also, use a more technical approach with, for example, Google Analytics (and many other tools), to find out stats about your social media content, in general.</span></p>
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