Can you make money managing social media?

Our advertising agency have asked us many times before if we would want them to manage our social media stuff for us.

Of course I would think that everybody should do their own social media because of the "authencity" value. But I am also a realist. If people want to out-source their social media and there is a buck to made, it will actually happen somewhere. I also believe that there is some value to a consultant or agency helping people along for the some period of time.

I am not going to name brands but I have seen some big brands with some amazing and sophisticated social media marketing programs. These companies are beggining to make correlations between "share of voice" and true marketshare, using listening platforms to track micro-trends and taking location-based marketing to a whole new level.

Of course these companies have the resources to hire the biggest agencies and best minds in the world to help them navigate social media labyrinths and determine a strategy.

For medium-sized companies. I guess unless you are an elite brand, most companies are desperately confused about what to do about social media. But most of these companies at least have the vision and budget to hire an agency to get them started on social media marketing.

For small businesses - I really believe that social media can provide an advantage to most small businesses, but that doesn't mean it actually does unless they are working on it! Now why isn't it happening?:

• They are overwhelmed by the concept and dont know where to start
• They started Facebook page and nobody "liked" them so they quit
• They understand the concept but don't have the time or resources to do anything consistent and meaningful
• Their marketing budget is tied up on traditional marketing and they don't have anything left for something new
• When you bring it up, they stare you down and tell you they dont need Facebook or Twitter.

The new category of social media gurus are trying to teach best practices and perhaps do some hands-on social media management. My take is the most of these efforts eventually fail because you are communicating for somebody else, which is probably not sustainable, and the labour cost to actually do this stuff is so high and the results so undefinable in the short term that businesses lose interest.

I am also coming across more small agnecies offering social media packages - e.g. one facebook update, tweet a day and one blog a week. I am not quite a fan of this approach because it intstitutionalises lazy marketing. But it is happening. A lot. 

I think the only viable long-term solution for most small businesses is to get some coaching and learn step by step plan to eventually create a culture, an organisation and an actionable strategy appropriate for the company resources and budget. This seems to be the approach that will work best. 

Social Media ROI: Myths, Truths, Measurement

Since we are embarking into the social media scene at work, I have been researching on how we measure social media. Question: Is the way you calculate social media ROI the right method? And are you meeting your business objectives and goals? If you answered YES to these questions, YAY!!!

But even that, are you 100% sure you are doing it the right way?

Like my boss, many are still skeptical about marketing via social media and some claim its not really measurable as it's difficult to get the benchmarks and without the metrics it seems diffiult to claim that a strategy really worked. I feel that way, but it might be because I don't have all the numbers to plug in yet.

But for online marketers like me, its a high priority because they:

• need to improve effectiveness
• need to improve integration with other marketing
• feel pressure to report quantified outcomes

But before we discuss the best way to measure our social media marketing, we need to set business metrics which are basically goals and KPIs of our marketing strategies. If its just because "our agency advised us to do it" or "our competitor is doing it too" then, please think about the reasons more deeply.

Examples of some typical social media business goals:

• Gather competitive intelligence
• Engage with customers and prospects online
• Maximise reach of content and messaging in social channels
• Support existing sales and marketing campaigns
• Support recruiting and retention efforts
• Build a customer community to provide support and advocacy

Now to get to ROI, these metrics have to be turned into business benefits -a combination of tracked data and outcome  data, which are not directly connected to social media. e.g. total sales, number of test drive requests, registrations, etc.

I think its quite important to consistently measure ROI of a lot of things..as long as it concerns the growth of our company, in the end we want to knoe whether our investment will pay off or not. Of course its true to listen more to the customers and start engaging with them (by talking with them but first listening  to them). I think this is an investment as well..

Social Media Marketing: We need to measure it! (or do we not?)

Social Media Marketing has received centre stage in today's marketer's planning plateau. E.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. 

Marketers are curious about this "new" channel to market especially given that many studies depict a sense of postivisim in it. However, the reality is social marketing is something of a black box, marketers inject programs into the black box and cross their fingers at the output.

Perhaps the standard quantitative notions of approach to analysing data (bounce rate, CTR, regression, path analysis, etc) may be cast aside for qualitative methods? Afterall social being social requires the need for verbal and face checks, no? or perhaps we should just get companies to state their objectives and we just track certain metrics. Do we really need to measure it? I think that is the question. Or should we just let social media play its role and just cross our fingers and hopefully the spread of its positive will correlate positively with profitability and hope that we can control the spread if its negative.

Well what are your thoughts? There are many different ways to see how many people see what you create, but is there a way to get a true sense of how well your Social Media Marketing is doing? For all the measurement metrics and stat softwares out there the only number we should be looking at when determining the success of our Social Media campaigns is the same thing we look at any campaign. Its the only thing we judge each of our social media campaigns on.

I came up with pros and cons of some of the top measurment methods:

1. Number of followers and Likes -Does it really mean anything? Obviously its great to have an audience, but usually 35% of followers are competitiors, people you know in the industry, etc who are really not there interested in your product/services. So who are you really helping? Bottom line, an audience is great and any form of media is valuable. Its also far less expensive than an ad in the newspaper or TV .
2. Engagement. Some will say that the number of follwers are useless if you don't have a high engagement score. I guess the real problem is that the majority of Social Media users don't really interact to brands on those sites. They sit and watch.  
3. Revenue - Let's be honest. Companies/Brands get into Social Media to get new clients, increase revenue and not really into making new friends. Social Media marketing is just a piece to the great Marketing pie and cannot sustain a business on its own. Like all of us know, u require awareness to purchase and hopefully turn that purchaser into an evangelist for your brand.  

By looking at the question re. "measuring" if by measuring it means counting friends and followers it really doesn't add much so to me that sort of measurement can be skipped.
 

Brand Reputation and Search Engine – Correlated?

I was reading Advertising Age this afternoon and read an article titled "Search Shifts Means Visibility Must be Earned, Not Paid". Does this infer that brand reputation and search engine optimisation are correlated? If so, this has many ramifications.

I believe marketers should devote more attention to SEO rather than SEM, as the title in Advertising Age suggets. Consumers look to the internet for information and education to help them make a more informed decision. 

In the fase paced interconnected world that we live in today, consumers are going to talk about your company regardless if you have entered the online space. So even your offline campaigns, customer service, product quality with be talked about online. And of course these conversations can make or break your brand reputation.

As part of SEM, one of the variable of getting higher rankings, content needs to be refreshed and of course rich in information can be a very powerful variable in pushing up brand name in Search Engines.

Consumers want to know more about the company/brand and read about reviews and feedbacks from current customers. But hey isn't that a way social marketing? People are searching, people are also perhaps in engaging in long-tail searches on your company and brand. So having good or bad press on search engines may be a deal winner or breaker for you - depends on how it swings.

Somehow this is no longer PUSH marketing but PULL marketing at play. Not new I might say, in the past we have always trusted our friends more than advertisements anyway.

So concluding, I personally feel that brand reputation and search engine are correlated - be it good or bad reputation. Search marketing now is not just about generating leads, it is also a strategy in itself that goes beyong selling a product.

What are your thoughts?

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here are just some of the Social Media Marketing Monitoring tools that I use. Some are retty good and some not but nevertheess still works. 

• Google Alerts
• TweetBeep
• Watchthatpage
• Trendrr
• Trackur.com
• Google Trends
• Blogpulse

Please feel free to add to the list for those I’ve missed out. Thanks!

Authentic Marketing in Social Media – Paying People to Seed Comments – Trust

In media such as prints, TV ads, consumers will understand and recognise that these are all paid advertisement and they are perfectly fine with that. After all, this fact is known from the outset.

However what if this is not known from the outside? A trend that I see, from conversations with friends, clients and agencies is the notion of seeding conversations in Social Media. For example, firms employ (and pay of course) individuals to post comments on blogs, forums and such as to create a favourable image for the product and hope that it will generate more traffic and of course generate leads.

Is this right? I don’t know – Well for me, I hate to read comments that are not genuine especially if I found out later that this was a paid post or comment – some one who is employed by the company in question. I would lose credibility in the site or for that matter the product – trust is built in incremental steps but once lost, it falls exponentially – isn’t trust (and candidness) the bedrock of social media? Trust is one of the antecedents (drivers) of Word of Mouth (WOM).

From a marketer’s stand point, sure WOM is something they wish to achieve i.e. a result, by seeding comments, would one lose that trust if found out?

But I can understand from the agencies’s point of view is that it generates discussion in the comments section. Afterall social media is interaction and its success stems from conversations.

What are your views, I’m keen to hear them out.

Social Media humanizes your brand?

I think so! But do you think firms are more concerned about "negative comments"?

You bet! Of course that really depends on how the interaction is conversed online. Social media gives business the opportunity never befper to access consumers honest and candid feedback

You bet! of course that depends on how you interaction and converse online. Social media gives firms the opportunity never before to access consumer’s candid feedback and of course business are given the opportunity to respond and relate back to the consumers.

The "problem" I see though is that a significant number of companies still treat social media as a channel for sales. Firms should think beyong that and use social media as a means to better interact with their customers and garner feedback.

Though I have heard is that firms seem to be only concern about one major point - what if someone gave us a really bad feedback? Can we delete bad comments?, etc, etc. Fixating on negativity.

If you think about it, businesses should really be asking how they are going to engage with their consumer? Social Media did not invent critisicm. Businesses have always dealth with complaints via phone calls, email, face to face. So how different is this?