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Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success

Cuong Huynh — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:13:08 +0000

JD Lasica recounted the Your Brand, Their World event at Razorfish on August 18 in San Francisco. The goal was to draw social media thought leaders and experts together to “discuss the ways in which social media is changing the relationship between customers and brands, and what it means to marketers, merchandisers, product developers, customer service organizations, R&D and senior management.”

Participants included Garrick Schmitt, GVP Experience Planning for Razorfish and an expert panel consisting of Megan O’Connor, Levi’s; Michael Brito, Intel; Marisa Gallagher, Razorfish; Sam Faillace, Shutterfly, and Jon Swartz, USA Today (moderator.) In addition, an engaging audience of social media and marketing specialists was present to share their views.

Here are some of ideas and highlights coming out of the panel and audience interaction.

An interesting tweeting strategy for business: the 80-20 rule. Michael Brito tweets 80 percent personal and 20 percent business, which is a great reference for both beginner and experienced tweeple. If you are not sure about what mix your messages should have, this is a good starting point.
Social media should not be the ultimate marketing tool but must be an important element in the marketing mix. Not all companies need a Faccebook or Twitter account. Ultimately, the key is to know what you want to achieve with social media and select the appropriate tools to meet your goals.
While return on investment (ROI) is not an easy thing to quantify from social media marketing activities, Marisa Gallagher mentioned one of the best metrics: sales. This is right on because regardless of your goals for a specific campaign (brand awareness, survey participation, opinion gathering, etc.) what really matters to all company is sales.
On Twitter followers, following and the value of realistic interaction, a great bottom line message seems to emerge. It’s this: “You can effectively interact with maybe a small finite number of people, but do not discount the benefit of having many more followers/friends. They may be lurkers and never interact with you, but they have their own networks, can like/don’t like what you say/offer, and will share their opinions about you with the world.”
Someone from the audience offered a clear, simple and easy to understand roundup of inbound vs. outbound marketing. “Outbound is the traditional form of interruption advertising (commercials on TV, a billboard interrupting your thought process), while inbound marketing is about people opting in or getting recommendations from friends.”
Here’s a little “Ah-ha!” moment on why a company decided to deploy (or not) social media: “The auto companies don’t have as much fear jumping into social media as some of the other incumbents because it’s do or die for them,” as commented by Gallagher. Sure, we all know the phrase: “Live everyday like it’s your last.” That’s how you make a difference.

There are a bunch more great takeaways from that meeting. Read more of JD Lasica’s post “Social media, brands and the way forward” over at socialmedia.biz.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Cuong Huynh — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:59:50 +0000

Pear Analytics recently did a study on how people are using and consuming Twitter. The study took 2,000 random tweets from the public timeline in English and in the U.S. over a period of 2 weeks, from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and was posted by Ryan Kelly. While I applaud the effort and think they are on the right track on providing a super-value added study to the public and marketers, I wouldn’t call this a conclusive study. Ryan mentioned that they will update it regularly so that’s a good thing.

Here are the results of the study with the categories defined by Pear Analytics:

Pointless babble 40.55%
Conversational 37.55%
Pass along value 8.70%
Self promotion 5.85%
Spam 3.75%
News 3.60%

You can read about the details of the study yourself (link at end of this post.) Some of the most surprising results are the following:

Self promotion and spam are not as prominent as many have complained about.
News represents a very small amount of activities, despite recent media buzz.

So it looks like issues that affect many people (like the Iran election and spams) that receive huge news coverage also tend to pump up public impressions about Twitter and exaggerate their real impacts. The real numbers seem to show that these are not much of a problem; you just think they’re big problems because they’re constantly in your face or they annoy you a lot. With more refinement (such as extended time of day included in the study) we may see an increase in these numbers.

I look at this study as work in progress with better updates to be expected. Here are a few issues I see that should be resolved to improve the study value in the future:

Pointless babble is not necessarily a negative thing as its name may suggest. This category needs more refinements as this big group represents many important pieces of information, both to consumers and marketers. For the consumers and individuals, it is exactly the social aspect of social networking, and people will continue to socialize the way they want to. All you can do accept it and understand it, not control or eliminate it. And this social spaces and activities are exactly where marketers need to be to understand consumer behaviors.
The time periods of 11:00 am to 5:00 pm CST is too limited to really understand Twitter users in the U.S. It’s only 6 hours of each of the time zones. At a minimum I think the study should begin at 6:00 am to midnight for each time zone. As it is, it merely tracks only the lunch to early evening hours of east coast time (noon to 6:00 pm, entirely missing 12 hours of east coast tweets,) and includes only the mid morning to mid-afternoon hours of west coast time (9:00 am to 3:00 pm, again entirely missing 12 hours of west coast tweets in the morning, late afternoon and evenings.)

See the original Pear Analytics post on “Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:38:27 +0000

Regardless of how popular or visible Twitter is currently, your corporate social marketing and new media strategy still need to maintain an effective blog. Twitter or FaceBook alone cannot solve all your marketing challenges, but a corporate blog remains a very strong and viable marketing channel. Whatever you do, you’ll need to pay special attention to 2 key elements of corporate blogging: content relevancy and trackable analytics.

Content Relevancy

Content has been king, and will always be king for your corporate blog. It’s hard to defeat great content using anything else, tricks or otherwise. If you don’t have great content, then whatever you do won’t affect your site’s popularity or traffic in any meaningful manner. In fact the goodness of your content correlates directly to how relevant you are to your prospects and customers. Are you providing the right information that your prospects are looking for, at the time they’re looking for it? Are you making available help to solve your customer’s dilemma in a timely manner? Are you providing solutions that eliminate your clients’ problems before your competition does? In short, your corporate blog is a very powerful tool, and it can help you provide relevant content that is totally under your control.

Trackable Analytics

Analytics play several different important roles. One, it can help you find out what visitors are looking for and how they are finding them. It can also show you how your company may be able to satisfy that need. Two, it can be used to help guide your content generation plan. As we discussed before, relevant content is critical, and knowing what content is relevant before you generate it is a no brainer. As a bonus, trackable analytics can also give you a roadmap with which to directly engage with your audience, at the specific time and place in the blogosphere when they congregate.

Tips to Running Effective Corporate Blog

So how do you maintain a strong corporate blog in order to engage with your customers, build your brand, while at the same time drive potential sales? Consider these following tips:

Go where the buzz is. Know where the conversations are taking place that either talk about your brand or discuss something that your brand can help solve. Get involved with genuine desire to help, to build relationship and to establish yourself as subject matter expert. No marketing spiel is needed here; just stick to the facts. That’s what people are looking for. To help with this discovering and listening task, there are social media “listening tools” available to help.
Making and maintaining contact. Once you find out where you can beneficially contribute to the conversation, interact with both those already familiar with your brand and those new to it. Think carefully before you engage to make sure you understand the conversation and meaning behind each and every conversation thread. Again your involvement in the conversation must be relevant and helpful, or at least contributes on an informational level, otherwise you’ll be looked at as someone just out for personal gains. Lastly, maintain all social networking etiquette at all times, because you need to. To read more on social networking etiquette, here are a couple of articles to help: SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools, and Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox.
Maintain a powerful corporate blog. Make it exciting. Make it attractive. All rules about good website designs still apply, including easy and clear navigation, fast loading speed, simple yet effective interface, etc. And most importantly, post fresh and relevant articles often, and invite interaction and feedback.
Stay in control and work smart. A successful corporate blog doesn’t have to cost an arm or a leg. Once you established your plan and strategy, it’s easy to post new posts, it’s cheap to use monitoring tools and follow/track the blogosphere, and it’s painless to participate in dialogue to help other people. Corporate blogging does take time, so it helps to keep it simple and institute a routine and stick with it.
Continuously develop your social networking and new media skills. Common stumbling blocks abound. They include falling behind with regular posting of fresh and relevant articles, failing to follow and keep engaged in conversation threads, running up against corporate policies that should have been created at the beginning of your corporate blogging venture, and not taking advantage of all possible effective social networking traffic channels. You may be leaving free customer traffic on the table without realizing it.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz

Cuong Huynh — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:24:22 +0000

“What Women Want.” That’s how Ford did it.

Getting bloggers involved. Prominent, well-known women bloggers. And get instant buzz in the process. It’s focus groups at work in the new social media space. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s not a new trend. Pepsi did it in their Pepsi rebranding campaign. The Air Force is doing it in their Air Force social media push. And you remember 3M’s Post-It Note Carjacks? Now Ford is doing it with refined social media skills. But really, bloggers watch out, you may be part of a bigger PR machine without realizing it.

Check out any of these Ford YouTube videos. Here are some samples of blogger reviews.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU-A6kCnbTA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDC1sBQY038

Ford describes the event in an article titled “Ford Wants to Know: What do Woman [sic] Really Want?” which included breakfast with a Ford executive, a day packed with hands-on tours, test drives and roundtable discussions, and I’m sure schwags. By the way, the event was conducted during the 5th Annual BlogHer ‘09 Conference, July 23-25, 2009. Quite timely and convenient.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always advocated that businesses need to get more into social network marketing and develop strong new media strategies. But there’s a grey area that both companies and bloggers need to be careful not to cross. In this case, to me anyway, if Ford really wants to get women’s input to help design future cars, the company probably won’t get them just from this narrow group of women demographic. But they will get a lot of free blog posts and discussions out of it, that’s for sure.

The final score: thumbs up for Ford marketing, a “huh, what were you thinking?” for the bloggers.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz

How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:29:52 +0000

You know what I’m talking about. New media. You know, social media, social marketing, blogging, and Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc, for your company? Many have found success where many others have failed. In the corporate environment, pursuing social media marketing is a full-time job.

Corporate social networking functions require individual special skills and knowledge, plus clear corporate objectives and goals. For companies that want to get with it in social media and marketing, don’t just try a few things here and there using inexperienced resources. What you need is focus and dedication. The key is to develop a clear reason why you want to be in the blogosphere, and provide dedicated resources to achieve those goal.

Here are the minimum considerations that must exist for your social media marketing to stand any chance of making a difference. Anything less will be just a waste of your time, money and human resources.

Establish a clear corporate social networking policy, the rules of engagement so to speak. It does not have to be detailed or elaborate, but it needs to have the basics in place. Remember this is still emerging technology.
Create your team from enthusiastic and knowledgeable individuals. They don’t have to be your best marketers or sales persons. In fact they should not be. The key characteristics you’re looking for include: being savvy with new technology and tools, being passionate about the company, its products and services, and above all, being honest with high ethics.
Empower and authorize team members to do what’s best for the company. If your team is knowledgeable and passionate, then they’ll do anything to ensure the best interest and protection for the company and its reputation. They are smart, and they’ll do the right things.
Always be on the look out for opportunities to go viral, especially in support of customer-generated viral media. All you need is to be there, provide support, and maybe give a little nudge. It’s social marketing after all. Do it right and you’ll attract loyal followers.

What about corporate legal? Do you need to get their blessing all the time? Probably not. Just do what’s right. Here’s what I mean. As long as you’ve made the proper communication with legal department and addressed corporate policies from the beginning, legal may just be your best friends in the company to get your social networking job done.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team

How to Write Relevant Content by Understanding Search Behaviors

Cuong Huynh — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:45:44 +0000

Content and relevant information are king. We all heard marketing experts say if you want to attract visitors, you should provide relevant content. Even Google itself says so in its Webmaster guidelines. Let’s face it. Web users, both the consumer and the business kinds, are all after a single thing when using their search engines: information. So it makes good sense to give them exactly what they want. You’ll achieve your SEO goals fasters, while retaining visitor loyalty at the same time.

Knowing what web users do is the key to attracting them to your site. You have essentially two challenges:

To be found by information seekers, and once found,
To attract and retain them.

While we can follow a number of steps to address each of these challenges separately, there are things we can do that benefit both, killing 2 birds with one stone, so to speak. Let’s look at some key behaviors of typical web visitors:

Web users are information hounds. Because of the speed and convenient of the Internet, information is always at the users’ fingertips – both good and bad information. So give lots of information, and differentiate yourself from the amateurs with great quality content.
Web users are analytical. While the fingers are clicking, the minds are on high level of awareness and working overtime. There are only two kinds of visitors that matter to you. One is the browsers who want something but not sure exactly what. The other is those on a mission to find exactly what they want at the best deal they can get. Either way, the web users are actively analyzing the content they find.
Web users are impatient and critical. Because of the available choices and the speed available to get to those choices, web users have been trained to be impatient. If they can’t find what they want, they’ll just move on to the next provider.
Web users scan content. They don’t read content. Web users know there may be better choices out there waiting for them to discover, and their impatience kicks in. Web users are fast scanners. So if your content is thousands of words long and contains just fluff in the first paragraph, or requires 3-4 paragraphs to lay out your case, then you’re losing readers fast.
Web users don’t like to be sold. Sales pitches are so old school. You and I don’t like to be sold, we like to decide for ourselves. So consider dropping the aggressive spiel.

If you stop and think about it, these are exactly our own behaviors, aren’t they? It’s pretty easy to understand and all you have to do is focus your efforts on what many call “inbound marketing” instead.

So what do we do with these behaviors? The best thing to do is addressing them head-on. Marketers have a single goal which is to sell something. But amateur marketers don’t realize that it’s very easy to fall into the selling mode trap. It takes more effort, but with much more effective results, to attract attention through a good combination of relevant information and great value proposition. The sales process will follow naturally.

Here are a few tips on writing relevant content.

Define your topic clearly and early in your content. This gets you found in relevant searches above your competitors, and lets visitors know immediately that they are in the right place with the right information, effectively answering their key question: “Am I in the right place?”
Keep your content short and to the point. If you have a lot to say on the subject, break them into sections, bulleted lists, or even series of articles. This does 2 things: a) it answers quickly the visitor’s question “is there something for me here?” and b) facilitates their tendency to scan your content.
Drop the use of teasers and fluff. I’m never a fan of teasers. They waste my time and indicate to me that the website has nothing to offer me. If you have to read through paragraphs after paragraphs of copy, and at the end still have to take additional actions with the promise of receiving the information sought, wouldn’t you feel cheated? So take the direct approach, don’t play around and make the content easy to get to.

The bottom line: consider how your visitors like to consume content and present your information to benefit their search. In the end, if your content is relevant with clear value proposition, you’ll reduce your bounce rate without resorting to sneaky tactics.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Write Relevant Content by Understanding Search Behaviors

How to Increase Twitter Followers: Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox

Cuong Huynh — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:00:39 +0000

Updated 08-18-09. We’ve read all the buzz about using Twitter, from sources in print and online, from friends to co-workers. Do a quick search on your favorite search engine and you’ll find the latest tips on how to deploy and employ Twitter for personal and business purposes. It’s not hard to find tweeting theories, tips, tools and zillions of other advices on how to tweet successfully. What’s really lacking is a practical, realistic step-by-step guide to tweet, but I believe I’ve found one that’s easy yet detailed enough that will work with almost all things you apply to. I’m still testing it but so far it’s working great for me, and based on the process I believe it will continue to help me for a long time to come.

Like many marketers, I’ve looked for solutions for tweeting but never really found anything that sounded and looked good enough to even start. And I know many others have actually tried a few with varying degree of success, but those were never long-term successes for many reasons. This process I’ll describe here works because it’s simple, realistic and doable. There are some pretty basic ideas mentioned here, plus a few more advanced concepts. Together as a package they provide one powerful tool. So here’s the process.

Social network etiquette still rules. Whatever you do, do not forget the basic rules and etiquette of social network and social marketing. After all Twitter is a blogging tool and a social networking tool that you should respect while using it. Take advantage of it like you would LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace, but do not abuse.
It’s still all about helping others find what they need. Unlike traditional marketing (some call it “outbound marketing”,) social network has never been and will never be about you and/or your company. It’s all about contributing what you can to the social network and help other people solve their problems.
You must know your target social groups and customers. Assuming you have something to offer (expertise, skills or knowledge,) you need to focus on your niche and not take the shotgun approach. By focussing on your target groups you’ll be more relevant. There are plenty of tools out there to help you find people with particular interests, but one of the best ways to target a group is to tweet from both your heart and your head, consistently (see 5. below.) Over time your group will find you. It’s inbound marketing at work.
It’s important to apply your branding to your Twitter account. This includes your username, bio, background, etc. Use your business sense to do this, but whether this is for personal or business purpose, your brand is what you present to the world about you.
Start blogging, not just about what you had for lunch, but what you’re all about, what your interests are, and what you find important and useful you can pass on to others. You should know what your brand is about, and many tools are available to help you post/blog relevant topics all day long (as your time permits.) One such tool is the Google Alerts service. Also there are tools to automate posting of your content as well.
Find your targets to follow. Just like in any other industry, it’s all about finding and associate with people with the same interests, problems, pursuits or passions as your own. In the business world, another layer would be finding people with the same interests, problems, pursuits or passions as your business, either to give help to or get help from. In time if you have something to offer they will follow you back. And this is how you build your network. Again automation tools abounds to help you find targeted people and build your follower network.
Set up automation to greet new followers when they first follow you. It’s part of the social landscape, and greetings, together with your brand, are the first impressions in the social networking sphere. Be professional and never pushy. People who greet others with a sales pitch give a poor first impression.
Know what you want. I saved this for last but it may as well be your very first step. You must know what you want to achieve with Twitter in particular, and with social network in general. Whether it’s brand awareness, click through rates, traffic counts or whatever else is important to you, only you know this. So clearly define your goals and stay on track.

I have applied the above process successfully in conjunction with a tool called the “Twitter Traffic Machine.” It is an effective tool and process combination, and I’m applying it with great results for my clients. The Twitter Traffic Machine, and a few other similar offerings currently floating around the Internet, are getting a bad rap for what they’re trying to do as the end goal and are considered spam tools by many. My view is, of course any tool in the “wrong” hand or used irresponsibly can result in undesirable consequences. For me as a marketer, it’s a tool that I’ll take advantage of in my own ethical way.

The bottom line is, if you put this tool/process combination in your marketing toolbox and use it everyday with your other tools like SEO, SEM, direct/email marketing and ad promotion and tracking apps, then you’ll benefit from it. And like other great tools of the trade, you’ll have to really use it to benefit from it.

By the way for interesting reads on the Twitter bird and the brand, read Nils Geylen’s “The Twitter Logo, Or Is It?” and Cormac Kelly’s “The Birdie brand and the Twitter bird.” As it turns out Cormac Kelly is not making his post available online any longer, but he is very generous to allow his full post content republished here. Thanks Cormac! Find out what Cormac is up to these days, head over to Birdie Web Design.

The Birdie brand and the Twitter bird

Since I launched the Birdie site a couple of weeks back, there has been loads of great feedback, which is always appreciated, but it’s been mentioned a couple of times that the Birdie icon is similar to the Twitter bird. In this post i’ll address the comparisons and give a bit more background on the brand.

About Twitter

Twitter, for those living under a rock, is a mobile micro-blogging application. Users send and receive updates via text messages, and there are a load of third-party apps to feed updates to blogs and the like. I havn’t played with it much myself (it’s a bit too pervasive for my taste, but thats just me) but it’s a bit of a phenomenon and is widely used. Twitter have a very strong brand presence as a result.

In hindsight the comparison was always going to happen. Twitter has a lot of momentum right now, especially within the blogging and web communities, so pretty much anything with a little bird reference is going to bring Twitter to mind at the moment. Obviously this wasn’t my intention!

The origins of Birdie

A bit of context on the Birdie brand will help here. I came up with the name while I was looking at domain hacks, inspired by the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and the (really nice) Irish photo sharing site pix.ie. I started going through words that end in .ie and came across Birdie. It was perfect – memorable, personable and, in combination with the domain name, it gave me a real ’smile in the mind’ as they say.

It all tumbled along from there really. I ran it past a few people and they liked it (and my girlfriend loved it), so I registered the name, and then the URL. (Which I couldn’t believe was still available.)

Visual Designs

I designed the logotype and decided on the colours based on nothing more than my current personal taste. The final element was an icon to fit the name.

It’s here the Twitter comparisons really come in I guess. I don’t think it’s all that similar, or at least it’s no more similar than any other vector bird. Nils Geylen has kindly provided a comparison which puts this better than I can. (Thanks Nils.) Thing is, the two birdies have very similar histories: They are from the same place.

The Twitter bird imagery, on the home page at least, is from iStockPhoto, and is mostly by Simon Oxley of idokungfoo. The Birdie, um, birdie, is taken from iStockPhoto illustrations by Freelance Bloke. Take a look at Twitter’s here and Birdie’s here.

So there you have it. It’s all very flattering to be compared to such a good brand, and though I resent the rip accusation a bit I know it’s not true. There is also quite a long story about how I got my particular icon, but it’s too long and dull to get into here. Anyway, you know what they say – there is no such thing as bad publicity!

Have a tweet tip? Share it with us.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

How to Increase Twitter Followers: Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox

Reason Companies Fear Social Media and Blogs: Maybe It’s Communication Itself

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:34:23 +0000

Could it be that communication itself is a hindrance to corporations in adopting social media and blogs? Sounds counterintuitive but definitely possible. Consider the following.

What are some characteristics of getting involved in social media or maintaining a corporate blog? Is it being honest with your message? Is it being involved in the conversation regularly? Is it allowing comments, feedback and critiques to come back to you whether or not you want them? Is it having to take risks that you may lose trade secrets, private information, etc.? or is it all of the above?

Yes it’s communication itself. It’s the fear of getting or receiving something back unexpectedly – good is OK but what if it’s bad? It’s the fear of the unknown that’s outside of the normal outbound marketing, which marketers have control over. It’s the fear of the unknown and the what-ifs. It’s the fear of inbound marketing.

Admittedly, getting involved in corporate social media and blogs does require attention to the details mentioned above. These are in addition to the POST Method that I blogged about last November – People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. But the reality is, if you have to take time thinking about each and every message or structuring and molding every communication piece before relating to your customers, then you may not understand your company, company culture, and value propositions as well as you should. Of course there are important and proper communication channels for corporate announcements, press releases and the like, but day-to-day relationship with your customers and prospects should be a tactical strategy in the same vein as public relations (PR). It should be constant.

So what ’s the solution? Maybe start with the following:

Understand that social media and blogs can be valuable corporate tools.
Create clear and flexible policies that foster more intimate communication with customers and prospects while minimizing risks to the company.
Empower the right individual(s) to carry out social media and blogs, working closely with every other departments within the organization.
Constantly monitor results (quantitatively and qualitatively) and be nimble to change direction as needed.

So what’s your experience? What have you found working successfully at your organization? Share with us in the comments.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Reason Companies Fear Social Media and Blogs: Maybe It’s Communication Itself

Social Media: Who in Your Organization Should Own It?

Cuong Huynh — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:42:15 +0000

How does an organization implement social media? A better question: How do you implement social media with resources at your disposal or do you go outside for help? The answer lies in who owns social media in an organization.

Ownership of social media can cross several organizational lines, at the same time it may require specialization in new sets of skills and disciplines. The line of responsibility is fuzzy at best and confusing at worst. As Jason Baer writes over at the MarketingProfs in an article called “Who Wins the Struggle for Social Media Control?” there are four combatants who may rightfully claim social media ownership. Although the article looks at the struggle between outside agencies or specialists rather than that within a company, I think the struggle is just as valid for internal departments. The 4 combatants are, in Mr. Baer’s words:

Advertising. Because social media often requires making stuff, and can impact overall brand perception, advertising should be in charge of social media. The rising importance of video within social media also favors advertising types.
Digital. Because social media is (at least for now) an online construct, the Internet marketing agencies should be in the driver’s seat. Plus, social media has major SEO implications in some cases, and most SEO is still handled by digital specialists.
Public Relations. Because social media is ultimately about conversations, and is non-linear, public relations is best equipped to manage social media efforts. Especially so given the demise of traditional journalism, the importance of blogger relations, and the blurring of the lines between customer and reporter.
Client. Because social media is ideally an extension and manifestation of the brand’s operations and culture, and requires near-constant vigilance and engagement, the client is best able to oversee social media. Comcast is a good example of this philosophy.

In closing the article, Mr. Baer advocates that public relations should be the gatekeeper for social media, but admits that PR still has a long way to go. To me this is a valid conclusion, but I would go a few steps further to clarify the issues and offer more realistic solutions that enable successful corporate social media thrusts.

Social media itself can have variations in definition depending whom you talk to. As Wikipedia defines it,

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

The key words to take away here are: sharing, discussing, communications, social, human beings, interaction, Internet and mobile-based, communities. Social media was clearly embraced by the public/consumer. Millions are already participating in “social media” activities as a way of life. All this while corporations are still trying to figure out how to get involved.

The answer is to keep it simple. From a corporation’s viewpoint, social media should really be part of marketing and PR, but the rules are really set by the consumers or the audiences. So you’ll need to get in the game, provide the resources to do so, and make sure you follow established rules of the game and not insist on pushing your own rules. If you’re talking about a specialty agency, then I think it’s still about marketing and PR, and the rules are still set by the consumers or the audiences. The only difference is what you want your agency to specialize in, in the same way that advertising agencies decide to specialize in print, radio, TV, Internet or a combination of these.

Either way, there is a final critical element to the answer of who owns social media in corporations: leadership. Corporate leaders must understand what social media is, what it’s for, why it can be a powerful tool, and how it can help. Alternatively, entrust it to and empower someone who understands it. This is important because only with informed knowledge comes informed decisions; deciding not to pursue social media because you don’t understand it is really an uninformed decision. Social media is already an important communication tool chosen by the consumers. Therefore it must be a part of corporate marketing and PR tools used to reach those consumers. There just is no other way.

There are still a few outstanding questions. Companies, by competitive nature, have been very aggressive in bringing messages to the consumers using whatever new communication tools to get an edge on the competition. And marketing and PR, by definition, are very creative groups of people. So why is social media, as a communication tool, not being looked at as another important tool for marketing and PR? Are we sleeping at the wheel, or what’s really holding us back? Is the social media concept so difficult to grasp that we’re still scared of it? Share your opinions and comments.

Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect

Cuong Huynh — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:36:51 +0000

Blogging can bring excellent and relatively quick search engine optimization (SEO) benefits to a company’s website. Catfish over at BusinessOnline has some great tips for marketers in the blogging department to help with search engine optimization (SEO). Called “3 Top Ways Blogging Enhances Your SEO Campaign“, the article touches on the 3 easy-for-executive-to-understand reasons why blogging is important for any corporation.

In a nutshell, the 3 benefits blogging can bring your business are:

Blogging creates new content opportunities. With blogging, a marketer can write marketing content relevant to any desired marketing message or campaign with very little effort, and without messing up the main corporate website. For blogging to be effective, all blog content should be keyword focused.
Blogging creates new internal link opportunities. Because of new keyword focused content being generated regularly, there are ample of opportunities for internal linking between keywords and other relevant blog posts and articles. And when you automate this process with tools such as the Cross Linker Wordpress Plugin for Wordpress (as suggested by Catfish), the benefits can be multiplied ten-fold, as older content are given new life with every new keyword linking back to them.
Blogging creates new external link opportunities. Blogging by its nature encourages communication between readers and content creators. If your content is captivating, interesting and useful to others, they will want to link back to your source article, vote for or recommend your content to others on social sites, and subscribe to your content through RSS feeds.

These are all excellent reasons for companies to get into blogging. But there is an additional good side effect from a marketer’s point of view. Blogging provides a critical, yet almost forgotten basic skill a good marketer must possess: the writing skill.

Anyone and everyone can claim to have excellent verbal and written communication skills. But let’s be honest to ourselves and our customers, how much formal marketing communications do you as a marketer actually write? And how often? The fact is we get bogged down in everyday to-do lists and deadlines that we no longer write proper marketing communications. Blogging brings good writing back to marketing communications.

And you know the saying is still true. With practice comes perfection.

So are you and your organization blogging? If not, what are some of the hindering factors? Share your experience with us.

Marketing Autopsy Blog » Blogging

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