To help marketers develop strategies for using social media we posted a presentation as news release. The outline works through the intersection of marketing and social media as a series of discussion points.
To make it interesting, it is completely designed as 50 tweets. All 50 points made in less than 140 characters, in case you want to forward them on.
The lines between various aspects of journalism continue to blur and create new categories.
Social media meets the press release. First, no longer are press releases written for the press; they’re written for everyone - clients, consumers, and investors. A good release strategy helps with search. Second, the Internet is consumed differently than print. We do not read, we scan. A 2 page release in 5 paragraphs just doesn’t work any more. Third, words are only one way of communicating. Places to check out for the social media newsroom include.
I have often heard the phrase, “Your brand is not what you say it is, but what they say it is.” And one of the great thing about social media and technology is the ability to get in and look at the conversation about your brand and see “what they say it is”.
Do you wonder what people what people are saying about your brand? Here are a few tools to give you a glimpse into what people are saying. These two tools will help get an idea about the answers to two very important questions
Social Mention
Social mention is great for helping you to see if your brand is being mentioned in the blogosphere. Go to www.socialmention.com and type in your brand name and see if and what people are saying. They provide a social rank box to the right to help you understand how frequently your brand is being mentioned. I like to use this box to compare one brand to a competitor or to a related keyword. The left side of the page will give you a small idea of some of the things that people are saying.
Twitter Search
Another way to see what people are saying is to use the Twitter search. Twitter is like a bunch of giant chat rooms and can give you a good idea of what people in general are talking about. Go to search.twitter.com and type in your brand’s name. See what comes up. You will be able to see the conversations that are happening that involve your brand and what people are saying. I think one of the coolest things about this is that you can see what people are saying in real time as its said.
For example, the Superbowl is this weekend. If I were running and ad in the Superbowl, I might watch the search feature as the ad aired to see what people said as they saw the commercial. People will Tweet about the ad they are watching as they watch it and you can get genuine response from your audience.
This is a breif glimpse into the mountains of data that can be gathered from social media. As we go through this data we will come to know our audience better. Once we understand our audiennce better and understand what people are saying about our brands, we can design better strategies and campaigns to connect with our consumers and meet their needs.
This morning, our office gathered around the bank of TV’s to watch the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, President Barack Obama. And as millions of Americans watched, the President’s team was hard at work, implementing the White House’s new social media strategy.
At 12:01pm as the President gave his Inaugural Address to the nation, www.whitehouse.gov switched from the old administration to the new and added a few features, one of which was the new White House Blog. Along with the website, another item to transition from the old administration to the new was the White House’s Twitter account @thewhitehouse.
With accounts on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, President Obama was the first Presidential Candidate to effectively use social media in his campaign. He will likely also be recognized as the first President to actively use these platforms during his administration. He recognizes the value of using these channels to communicate with the public(his audience) as he serves as President of this Nation.
Captain C.B. Sully Sullenberger
Yesterday January 15th 2009, a US Airways jetliner with 150 passengers and 5 crew members plunged into the icy Hudson River. Due to the heroic actions of Capt. C.B. Sully Sullenberger and crew, all 150 passengers and crew are safe.
What does this have to do with Social Media? When something happens in the real world it also happens in the so called “virtual world” of the internet and social media. Today, less than a day after the crash, Capt. C.B. Sully Sullenberger has over 34,000 fans on Facebook. Scratch that, its up over 36,000 just in the time that I am writing this post. In fact now I am watching it grow real time, with about 100 joining with every refresh. This also doesn’t take into account the Flickr images posted, Tweets from Twitter and blog posts about it over the next few days.
The offline world and online world are in fact so connected that one affects the other and vice versa. They are no longer seperated by the closed off walls of “virtual worlds”. Social media and new technology have just made it easier for people to communicate about what is going on in their lives, and have made it easier to talk about the real world in real time.
UPDATE: Two days after this post there are now over 385,000 fans. I also just learned that the first pictures of this event were posted Twitter by a person on the Ferry that helped rescue the people from the plane. This means that, before a news crew or anyone else could get word out about the plane, it was likely first reported over social media via twitter, by a person who watched it happen.
1. Social Media Insurance — while good things might happen, bad things definitely do happen. I’m thinking of it like ADT or other security alert system – “we’ll monitor your world so you can do your day job.” Scalable because it is defensive, systematic, and requires strong processes.
2. Briefing Book - answer the question ‘what do I need to know?’ about social media in my category. Given the singular focus on a category or segment, this becomes a potential syndicated service (like an ACNielsen) where multiple divisions or business units benefit from a shared perspective - a beautiful thing.
3. Conversion - use existing profiles as part of the recruitment or conversion as opposed to lead gen process. In education markets, when I think about this as a sales problem, then anything that can make an outbound contact more personal and relevant is useful. This requires an ongoing data feed and training on the use of the information.
4. Participation - there are five ways a marketer and SPARK a conversation:
Stimulate - provide interesting things for people to talk about; product plans, exclusive stuff
Participate - join as one of equals; usually an act of desire and best done by the client.
Amplify - provide the platform, tools, and connections for an existing conversation to spread
Repair - correct facts, offer the other side of the story (part of the insurance above)
Kindle - nurture a group of people in the first instance and let them grow
5. Data - still the wild west here with all the unstructured stuff and the fact that we only collect what we can. “I can’t get intent, but I can get the search term - thus I’ll infer intent”. As an industry we don’t have the answer yet, but several possibilities could emerge. The idea of interests is obviously of ‘interest’ but difficult for two reasons - low penetration (can’t get them all; and not everybody does it) and lack of categorization into useful or bite size chunks. There’s no dimensional model yet for this stuff - just a bunch of words. I’d treat it like tags and search clouds.
6. Advertising model - we need to rethink the intersection of message, medium, and immediacy. Direct response doesn’t work in this space. Is social media really a PR play in disguise? Is it really the next iteration of telephones and email as a communication platform - advertising doesn’t work there; but other models do. The key question is what aspects of marketing are best supported by social media?
7. Marketing Mix Models and Lead Scoring - given #5 there opportunities to look at both the high-level impact as well as the effect on a given individual. Marketing, pr and advertising are so intertwined these days that maybe we need to step back and take a fresh look at the problem of return on investment.
Announcing a week ago that it had reached 150 Million active users worldwide, if Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth largest country in the world just ahead of Nigeria, Japan and Russia. This is a 50% growth in four months from the 100 Million active users it had in August of 2008.
People are becoming active in social networks in increasing numbers. According to some research we did, 40% of Generation Y has a Social Network profile. And its not just Gen Y. People of all ages are active in social networks. My uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends and my mom are all on Facebook. Even my grandma has a Facebook account and is active on it.
We are past the point of debating if people are using social networks and if brands should have a presence on them. We are at the point where we need to be asking ourselves, “What are we doing about it?”
Some brands may choose to do nothing. Its what Apple has done. But that has been a conscious decision that they have made knowing full well that Apple customers would stand up for them in this space. While Apple may not be active in the space, I am sure they are monitoring what is being said.
Every day people are talking about brands. What are they saying? What are brands doing about it? Its time for brands to take a look at the social network and social media space and decide what is the right strategy for their brand.
