social media: Media

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Friday, 20 September 2013

Does Your Business Need a Full-Time Social Media Team?

By Todd Wasserman2013-09-19 14:57:07 UTC

While some small business owners need convincing that social media can help their businesses, Steve Acree doesn't have any doubts. He doesn't have any time, either.

Acree, founder and owner of Memphis, Tenn.-based Seismic Audio, says he and his staffers went whole hog on social media for two weeks in August, but soon realized that the time-consuming strategy compromised their regular workload. "I found myself late to some meetings because I was trying to write a post or find a picture to post," Acree says. "It was much more of a time commitment than I originally thought."

The fortnight of frenetic activity reaped some benefits. When we checked in with Seismic a month ago, the brand had around 70,000 fans. Now it has 73,000. The brand also picked up 150 Twitter followers, about two-thirds of which are "legit," Acree says. "We were tickled."

So far, most companies in our Social Media Makeover series have either reaped modest benefits or have seen little or no improvement. Seismic's case was a bit different — the company realized that its social media outreach was working, but also grasped the fact that it lacked manpower for the job.

Seismic didn't lack for direction, though. Mashable hooked Acree up with a social media marketing consultant Ernest Barbaric, a member of our Small Business Panel. Barbaric recommended, among other things, that the company post more often and use non-promotional content on social media outlets. In addition, Barbaric suggested that Seismic do some soul-searching in order to more effectively stake out brand positioning. Acree says Barbaric gave solid advice. "He knew his stuff and we're doing what he said," Acree says.

A look at Seismic's Facebook Page shows perhaps more promotional messages than the 10 to 1 ratio (non-promotional to promotional) that Barbaric advocates, but the content is fairly engaging and unique — like this Facebook post, which riffs on the name of electronic artist Deadmau5:

The mix of content also includes some seriousness as well as ties to Seismic products. For instance, a Sept. 11 post includes a link to a famous Budweiser Clydesdales ad that ran only once on TV in order to commemorate 9/11. On a more promotional note, this Facebook update features a DJ setup that a Seismic fan recently used:

After realizing that he needed to divert his workers (and himself) back to the company's bread and butter, Acree placed Seismic's social media presence in a holding pattern. "It just comes down to doing the work," says Barbaric. "It is a commitment, but so is sales."

Barbaric says that an in-house social media facilitator isn't the solution for every business. "I've worked with small companies that have a dedicated person and big companies that don't," he says. "It all depends on which eggs you want to put in which basket."

Acree has decided that Seismic needs a full timer. (Any readers interested in such a position — and in living in Memphis — should contact the company here.) Not everyone goes that route, however. For companies that can't bankroll another staffer, Barbaric has a word of advice: "If you have a limited amount of resources, it would be a good idea to lower the amount you do; focus on three things rather than four."

Image: iStockphoto, Blueraymac

http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=1919978

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How to Get More Media Coverage for Your Product, Service, or Cause

What could happen to your product, service, brand, or cause, if you could more media coverage—the right kind of coverage?

In this brief video, my friend Stu McLaren interviews me about how platform-builders can get more media coverage for their business or cause. This is an excerpt from this month’s Master Class at Platform University.

I have done more than 1,600 radio, television, newspaper, and podcast interviews. In the Master Class, I share what I have learned—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In this six-minute excerpt we discuss:

Why chasing television shows is largely a waste of time.The kind of media coverage that delivers much better results—at a fraction of the cost.My strategic media priorities—what I pursue first, second, and third.Why podcast interviews are particularly valuable.How you can begin building media relationships now—before you need them.

At the end of the video, Megan Hyatt Miller (yes, my daughter!) provides an overview of the content we’ll be sharing this month with our Platform University members.

In our Master Class, Stu interviews me in-depth about how to get more media, how to do interviews like a pro, and the mistakes you must avoid to succeed. (The above video is an excerpt from the class.)In our Backstage Pass, I share how I prepare for speaking engagements. I talk about everything from how I prepare my slides and notes, to the information I gather from the event sponsor.In our Member Makeover, Megan and I review the platform of one of our members. We share with him ten recommendations to take his platform to the next level.

In addition to this, I will be hosting our members-only Live Q&A Conference Call at the end of the month. This is an opportunity for our members to ask me any question they want about platform-building.

If you’re not a member, check us out. I created Platform University to help you build your platform bigger and faster than you could on your own. Don’t miss this opportunity to get the inspiration, training, and resources you need to succeed.

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The Shift To Visual Social Media [Slide]

Social media is becoming more and more visual. Check out the above infographic by Donna Moritz of Socially Sorted to see how this shift occurred and how you can leverage this trend to build your brand.

5 Steps to Determine the Perfect Social Media Strategy

For small and medium-sized businesses, the prospect of developing a comprehensive social media strategy is overwhelming. Which networks should you use? How do you keep up with conversations and engage your audience across half a dozen platforms? How often should you post updates? By following a few simple steps and creating a strategic plan, a perfect social media strategy is well within your reach.

Today, comprehensive social media strategies are implemented and some have even been around long enough for thorough evaluation. Each business model garners an appropriate social media strategy. For instance a retail business will have a commerce focus, while a non-profit organization may hone in on public support and donations. However your business decides to tackle its social media marketing efforts, there are five steps that set the foundation for a successful social marketing strategy regardless of your company’s makeup.

Before diving into the social media world, define your purpose. Is your goal to build brand awareness, provide customer service, or generate leads? Your goals will you guidance and keep you on track to completing those goals. Create concrete and measurable objectives for monitoring your progress and re-evaluating your strategy over time.

Social Media apps

Image via Flickr by Jason A. Howie

Who is your ideal customer? Create a profile of your target audience, including demographic information and other factors, such as location, profession, or interests.

Selecting the best social media platforms for your business is the step that overwhelms many business owners. With so many networks to choose from, the idea of using them all regularly is a bit intimidating. The primary social networking platforms include:

FacebookTwitterLinkedInPinterestGoogle+YouTube

The list of social networks is practically endless—in fact, some businesses use a social strategy that encompasses dozens of social sites, bookmarking sites, slide-sharing sites, and more. There’s a lot of information out there on the user demographics of the popular social networks—choose a few that closely match your target audience. Once your strategy is rolling out smoothly, expand to include second-tier and different types of networks.

Your unique selling proposition is the defining feature or set of features that sets your company apart from the competition. Your USP should be relevant to your target audience and in-line with your social media goals. Using your USP, build a list of key phrases and topics and build your social media strategy around them. This keeps you focused and sets the stage for branding.

Calendar Module and iCal data

Image via Flickr by m.gifford

Editorial calendars aren’t just for content creation. Social marketing requires great content, too, and an editorial calendar helps you define themes, identify marketing channels for the content you’re producing and reach your target audience with relevance and precision. Of course, all the marketing you’re doing requires a fast connection, so get set-up with a high-speed satellite internet plan for fewer connection hiccups.

Your editorial calendar includes information such as monthly themes, conversation-starters, and material from your content marketing strategy. Your editorial calendar acts as a guide to define what you’re discussing each week or month, where to share specific pieces of content and how much time you devote to each social platform. Use a variety of content formats, including blog posts, case studies, e-books, images, and videos.

Following these five steps results in a clearly defined and focused social media strategy. Once your plan is in place, it’s time to engage your audience, start building brand awareness and generating conversation. Social media plays a critical role in both content marketing and SEO, so continue measuring your results and refining your approach.

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Did Facebook Just Kill Social Media Management?

The death of social media management, that’s a bold statement to make, and one not to be taken out of context. For those social media practitioners among you are who actively managing a Facebook page, you may well already be aware of the changes that Facebook just rolled out to its Edgerank algorithm. It seems this update has slipped under the radar for many, which could be due to the fact that the platform it was distributed through, the relatively new Facebook For Business, may still be unfamiliar to many in the industry. Before we descend into anarchy and panic however, it’s necessary to define our key terms and figure out exactly what this new update means and what it foretells.

There are countless definitions of what social media management actually entails. I value simplicity, so I define social media management as: “The act of growing, developing and monitoring a social media platform to meet any number of business, or personal, objectives”. Simply put this can mean anything from the intern you hired to update your Facebook page, to a full team of managers, designers and developers running campaigns across multiple platforms.

At this point I think it’s fair to say that most people have an inkling of what social media management entails, what they don’t have however, is a thorough understanding of what it should entail and how to differentiate between Black Hat Social Media Management and White Hat Social Media Management. This is where things get tricky and where the new Edgerank updates are going to hit hard.

‘Black Hat’ is a term that we have begun using interchangeably to describe unethical, or ineffective, methodology in the online marketing world, it’s no longer just a term to be used by an SEO Company. There have been debates raging for years now about what effective social media actually entails, what are your vanity metrics, how do we measure and present a real ROI in terms of leads, sales, repeat purchases and so on.

Thankfully, over the past couple of years there have been some big leaps in terms of connecting the dots and plugging social into the bigger picture. I’m talking about advancements in Facebook’s own insights and measurement capability, as well as the ability to effectively plug in social referrals to Google Analytics, using Google’s URL Builder and more recently Google’s further focus on social signals and the introduction of ‘Contributed Social Conversions’ and ‘Last Interaction Social Conversions’. These last two metrics can be found under traffic sources in your social overview.

But back on point, what does ‘Black Hat Social Media Management’ actually entail?

As Facebook succinctly describes unethical social practices; black hat social media is designed to ‘game’ the system. Black hat social media entails:

The posting will consist primarily of low quality content that delivers little to no value to its audience, i.e memes, poorly constructed posts and content that does not resonate with its proposed audience.The posting will focus primarily on calls to action and ‘forcing’ an engagement from its audience, i.e “Make sure you like this picture”.There is little to no original content being produced, rather the focus is purely on syndication of others content.When content is shared, it’s shared from untrustworthy sources or communities with ‘low quality’ followings when taken into context with the sharer’s own audience.The primary objective of the posting will be to elicit ‘likes’, ‘shares’ or engagement at any cost, effectively chasing vanity metrics. This results in a poor experience for the user and a disconnect between organic page fans and the page itself.

Facebook, it seems, is effectively moving in the same direction as Google. These initial changes have been introduced to crack down on social media practitioners ‘gaming’ the system. As with Google, simply blasting a website with thousands of links is in no way a good indicator of context, or value, to the producer of a search query.

The typical example here with Facebook, is the page that is built primarily on ‘likes’ which hold no value to the page, or page owner, itself. It has become regular practice for many black hat social media practitioners to ‘share’ memes and other posts in groups, or online communities, with a large number of fans in order to generate engagement for their clients. As a result, these pages are being built on false hope and pure vanity.

For example, a local coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado, has no need of thousands of fans from Portugal, Spain, or Europe, unless they plan on exporting their coffee there in the very near future! Page size and engagement when taken secularly offer no value whatsoever, to the community or the page owner. These metrics need to be looked at with scrutiny and integrated into the bigger picture so to speak. A good place to start if you are looking to offer real measurements to a client is Nichole Kelly’s book on How To Measure Social Media.

Now that we’ve covered what’s considered black hat, let’s run through what we consider to be white hat social media management:

The underlying objective of any social media campaign is to deliver value to its audience. Value to be defined as any content that will educate, inspire, or enrich the participants Facebook experience on a particular page.Posts will not attempt to game the system, or the end user, into taking action purely to generate an increase in engagement or activity.The focus will be on creating original, unique and valuable content for the fan base.

Running a white hat campaign is simple, and these principles will be familiar to any veteran social media marketer out there.

After defining our key terms and putting the recent Edgerank developments in context, I’ll now present my take on the recent changes:

Is this timely and relevant content? The key word here is relevancy. As with Google’s continuing quest for relevancy and context, it seems Facebook is now placing a heavier emphasis on relevancy when developing its own algorithm.Is the content genuinely interesting to you, or is it trying to game News Feed Distribution? This is by far the most important development, in my opinion. This update is focused on quality of content and a heavy crackdown on vanity metrics. While it might seem great for a small business page to post a funny meme and have this shared in multiple countries and regions, it’s generating no affinity with its real fan base and thus ultimately hurting the pages ability to generate any real value to the owner.Is this content from a source you would trust? Vanity metrics might seem great to the uninitiated executive. They get to take a great progress report to their CEO, hundreds of thousands and likes and impressions, everybody wins, right? Wrong. When using the above black hat methods to generate engagement and results your pages Trust Rating is going to drop dramatically. Not only that, but any fan of substance, what I call an ‘organic fan’ (someone who is genuinely a viable prospect for you) is going to begin to disconnect with your page over time because they aren’t receiving any real value, and by now most people are aware of when they are being gamed by ‘forced engagements’ in the news feed.

You can review the full summary of the Edgerank updates here.

As with any batch of algorithmic changes, the impact will be small to begin with, then all of a sudden the social hammer will drop and thousands of black hat practitioners will be out of a job when even their black hat practices fail to generate any kind of result for their clients. Ultimately however, these changes are a good move in the right direction and should mean nothing but good things for all of the small businesses, agencies and practitioners out there who are working their butts off putting in hundreds and hundreds of hours to deliver engaging and informative social media campaigns to their audiences.

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Stop Listening When Social Media Experts Tell You ROI Isn’t Important

How can you possibly position the value of social media when you have experts telling you you’re an idiot for trying to measure ROI? Social media ROI has caused a lengthy debate amongst the social media speaker’s circuit. I was a late comer to the social media conversation as I really started getting serious about the business opportunities for social media in 2009. My interest was primarily fueled because I saw a huge potential for measurement standards and building ROI models. My interest was piqued when I had an employee tell me that you flat-out couldn’t measure social media because it was about relationship building. ROI

In my head I heard, “I challenge you to figure out how to measure social media.” So I really started to evaluate what was happening in social media and how brands were leveraging it. I started to go to industry conferences and listen to some truly brilliant people talk about the value of social and where it fit in business. However, I was really disappointed to find a huge white space when it came to measurement. At the time, the only person I saw doing real work in measurement was K.D. Paine. She became one of my greatest influences, even though we’ve only met for a few brief minutes at the Inbound Marketing Summit in 2009. Interestingly enough, we didn’t even talk about measurement. But she was so conversational and a genuinely nice person to me in that brief conversation. In most of what I’ve read from K.D. she focuses on the PR angle for social media. I felt there was a larger conversation about measurement that transcended “departmental lines.”

On the flip side, I saw a presentation from Scott Stratten which can be summarized in this post from his blog. Scott is an incredible speaker who is able to show his brilliance alongside his comedic nature. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Scott and the messages he brings to market. However, when it comes to social media ROI I feel like he is really doing a disservice for corporate marketers.

Stratten has said, “Asking the ROI of Social Media is Like Asking What the ROI of our Phone Is” in numerous presentations. In this humorous video, he pokes fun at the executive who asks the ROI question with responses like, “What’s the ROI of the 5,000 golf balls you bought with our logo” and “What’s the ROI of this board room table that you just paid $25,000 for.” He follows it up with an argument that seems logical, “I understand we have to justify what we do with our time, I just don’t think social media should be held to a higher standard than everything else.”

If you want to argue about measuring social media we have to use comparisons that make sense. The board room table is an asset for the company; its value can be depreciated over time on a tax return and it goes on the corporate balance sheet. Social media would never be on a balance sheet and I don’t think we want to start arguing that it should be. So it’s ridiculous to compare the two and think that any executive would think it is a valid argument. The golf balls may be considered a marketing expense, but let’s be honest these comparative arguments devalue the conversation about where social media truly does add value. We’re seriously going to try to push off the ROI question by comparing social media to a bunch of meaningless corporate expenses that have no relation to social media’s value? Frankly, if you try to make these types of arguments you’re likely to lose your job. Is it funny? Yes. Is it a stupid way to approach managing a conversation with an executive? Yes. Since the recession, other marketing activities have been held to pretty high measurement standards. I think executives simply want social media to be held to those same standards.

Don’t take ROI commentary that is intended to illicit a laugh as advice because what Scott says is really bad advice for marketers who want to have successful careers and eventually be in executive leadership. To date, I haven’t seen Scott change his perspective on ROI, but frankly he doesn’t really talk about it all that much.

As much as I respect a lot of the other points Scott makes in his presentations, I have to say that ROI and showing executives where social media delivers value to the bottom-line seems to be a pretty big blind spot.

My next exposure to a social media ROI conversation was in a presentation by Gary Vaynerchuk aka Gary Vee. Gary is a dynamic powerhouse on stage. He is so compelling I truly believe he could convince us all that sending piles of poop as a thank you gift to customers is brilliant. We know it’s ridiculous, but the conviction that Gary uses to deliver his message is almost hypnotic. His stage presence is truly inspirational and I hope that one day I can achieve the caliber of his presentation style.

However, when it comes to ROI he was spewing some class-A nonsense and even as recently as June 2013, he posted a video saying the same thing.

The comedy is priceless. “When everyone always says to me, what’s the ROI of Social Media? Some of you heard this from me, I always say, What’s the ROI of your Mother?” Funny, right? Hilarious! However, I think even Gary knows this comes from a place of not understanding how Corporate America works. In a TechCrunch interview just the month before, Gary discusses how he is overcoming this blind spot. “I built a small family business to a $60 million dollar business. I’m an entrepreneur. I know how to make money at a small level. This corporate America thing was a blind spot to me as a businessman. I started Vayner[Media] to learn it.”

In Corporate America, marketers can’t make arguments like “what’s the ROI of your Mom?” and win. At best, they will get laughed out of their executive’s office, at worst, they’ll get fired. This type of statement is disrespectful to the people who hold the purse strings for social media investment. In a sense, it tries to make them feel stupid for asking. I think we all know that insulting executives isn’t going to get them excited about the potential that social media holds for their company.

Ultimately, I think Gary is gaining a better understanding of Corporate America and how much the bottom-line really matters for social media investment. First, he wrote the book The Thank You Economy. By including economy in the title it eludes to some kind of financial return for all of this social media activity. In that same TechCrunch interview, he says, “99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns…have no business sense…talk about getting a Twitter follower and a Facebook follow.” He continues with “we are going to live through a devastating social media bubble…these people are hiring people that are not qualified. They have no idea how to turn it into an actual sale.” Ding…ding…ding…While I won’t argue the validity of social media experts and their business experience in this post, I believe that understanding business and how to turn social media into sales is a critical component for truly getting to social media ROI.

The timing of these two videos is really interesting since the video of Gary saying, “what’s the ROI of your mother” comes a month after the TechCrunch interview. So my guess is that ROI is an internal debate that Gary is still having with himself.

The answers for social media ROI don’t have to be this hard. We don’t have to make up ridiculous arguments to try and avoid the ROI question. Rather, we need to start talking about how to add engaging in social media as a data element in a prospect and customers record within CRM or the Enterprise Data Warehouse so we can start to do some really interesting analysis. Executives don’t always need to know what the exact ROI is going to be before they make investments, they simply want to know that there is a clear path to be able to measure it after the fact. They want to know that their marketers know what core business metric they are trying to impact and that they have a system in place for being able to get the data. Sometimes, we don’t know where the true gold for social media is until we actually start measuring it in a holistic way. Measuring social media in a way that allows us to make comparisons for what happens with the audience who engages in social media and what happens with those that don’t. What’s the level of improvement when social media is involved? The key is to be able to measure social media against a control group of non-social media users.

For customers this could be an analysis of spending, retention and customer service costs. For revenue generation this could be an analysis of conversion rates, costs for customer acquisition, sales volume and the lifetime value of a customer.

Instead of trying to argue that measuring ROI is stupid, let’s start measuring it and let the numbers speak for themselves.

What kind of questions are your executives asking about social media ROI? What kind of data are they looking for? Have you been able to show social media ROI? If you are an executive what data do you want to see from social media? Add a comment so we can have a real conversation about the questions marketers are faced with so we can get to the bottom of the ROI debate.

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The Broken Record of Social Media Advice

Later this week I have the pleasure of speaking at an event in Minnesota called the Social Media Rockstar Event. The one-day conference brings a dynamite lineup of speakers and experts to Southern Minnesota and will put me in front of a number of people who have not heard me speak before.

There is both a good and a bad to this type of event. It’s may seem bad because I’ve been asked to talk about social media strategy to start the day, then end the day with a big takeaway. I’ve given these two talks over and over for the past couple of years. Sure, I change up a little here and there and revise case studies and the like. But if you saw me talk on these topics last summer, the talks on Thursday won’t be holistically different.

Get your ticket! But for me it is also good. Not in the sense that I don’t have to prepare much – I still stress over little details, update pieces of the talks and, where appropriate, write new jokes. But it’s good in the sense that this audience hasn’t been given the advice yet.

Many in the social marketing space sound like broken records these days. Would we all like to move on to other topics? Certainly. But we don’t because we see, day-in and day-out, that the advice we’ve been giving either hasn’t been heard or isn’t being used. When you still have major brands doing dumb things with crisis communications, when you still have small businesses paying scam services for Facebook followers, when you still have companies applying a set-it and forget-it policy to blogs and Twitter accounts and the like, you have to keep teaching and preaching.

Jay Baer is probably one of the most informative and dynamic speakers in the social marketing space today. I saw his first-ever presentation of Youtiliy … before it became a book … in the spring of 2012. I saw one of his first presentations of Youtility just days after the new book debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list for self-help and advice books. There were a few new hooks and polishes to it, but for the most part, it was the same talk.

Yet, I still learned from it. And so did the audiences – both of them.

Broken record syndrome is incredibly annoying if you’re a proactive learner, tearing through talk after talk, conference after conference and book after book looking to get smarter and better at what you do. But it’s critical for overall good of the market since not everyone is listening the first time around.

Every time I speak, the majority of the room hasn’t heard my talk, doesn’t know the case studies and probably hasn’t looked at social marketing from the perspective I’m advocating. So they get to hear the tried, tested and true. Which, in a way, is even better than the audiences from a year ago. The talks have been vetted. The information confirmed. Feedback has been had.

All that said, as a speaker and an audience member, I’d like to impart a bit of friendly advice for you all: Always hold your speaker, blogger or author accountable. Ask the questions you expected to have answered. Comment and push them to provide more and better. Write them and ask why they left a certain part of the topic out of the book or didn’t answer something you were looking for.

Your ability to push us to provide more will make your experience better and improve all of us as well.

If you’re within a respectable drive of the Jackpot Junction Casino and Hotel in Morton, Minn., I’ll see you Thursday. If you’re not – Jump in the comments. What are people not telling you these days that you need to know?

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