Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy
In yet another moment of informational threading, here’s a post by Dan Kennedy about hyper productive markets. Kennedy points out that knowing your rough sales target is one thing, but knowing the most productive and yielding part of the whole bunch is worth so much more.
Thread this together with Robert Middleton’s post about a karate model for marketing. There’s a lot to it, but the key point was something he took out of another presentation he’d seen, and that was this:
1. You first have to get your clients and customers to consume what you’ve already sold them.
2. You need to offer new services in progressively more complex stages if you are going to truly serve them.
I’m working on launching a few new things at work, and they are projects that have strong social media and new marketing elements to them. In so doing, I’m thinking a lot about what these tools can do for the communities we serve, and I’m also thinking about the marketplace elements that my business will need to sustain this all. My company is in the business of helping people connect, learn, and do business together. We do this through creating content, building online and face-to-face events, and enabling a marketplace between people selling emerging technologies and people looking to understand which of these technologies will help them next.
Kennedy’s point that understanding that there’s a group of people you can sell to, but within that group lies a more productive area is useful. Middleton’s points about having some kinds of level-ups in your marketing efforts struck a chord insofar as one might consider narrowing the potential funnel for specific products and services (and thereby marketing efforts) once you move deeper into territory that applies only to a select few.
Social Media Lets You Go Wide, But YOU Have to Make it Go Deep
The tools we use to create social media: blogging, podcasting, video, social networks, etc, are great at building potential relationships, growing community, serving an audience, helping people find your business, and several other things.
BUT social media tools alone are not especially built to carve out more productive customers on their own. That still requires a strategy and surrounding marketing and products to help convert potential segments of the community into potential business customers. And remember, as I’m fond of saying: be clear about who makes up the community at large, and who makes up your marketplace, because confusing the two can be deadly.
My Takeaways, and Your Ideas
From those two articles, I have taken away the following:
- Data and understanding who makes up your community is still crucial, no matter the toolset.
- Social media tools will be useful in communicating with the community to understand their needs.
- Helping sort the early “grazers” from the committed buyers will help both sides of our community.
- Finding ways to help our audience “level up” within the community would help the whole process.
- I need to read even more outside of social media to bring it back home to how I use the tools.
Did you read the articles? What did you take from them? How are you working on this within your organization?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Jurvetson
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- Where I Learn Even More
- Starting a Social Media Strategy
- Do You Know Who Your Customers Are
- Getting To No.
- Knowing What You Don’t Like.
Social Media Strategy- The Planning Stage
As part of my Social Media 100 series, and because I believe it will have value to the space in general, I’m working through all the elements of a social media strategy. What comes first? Planning.
In coming up with the elements of a plan, I found a few surprises. One, I hadn’t considered having a “trial” phase or project as part of a strategy. Maybe there are elements that you’re not ready to roll up against your main brand. For those, you might want to trial them in a less direct way. Another surprise was that I hadn’t considered the training required for internal resources until I had a conversation with Cynthia Closkey.
What follows is simply the list of elements to consider when building a social media strategy for your organization. I’m submitting it to you for consideration, in the hopes that you’ll find it useful for your projects, and so that you can point out things I might have missed. Please note that every item below explodes out into all kinds of sub-categories and information. This is just the list view.
Social Media Strategy - Planning
- Research - the internal social media evangelist looks at what might be possible (maybe by coming hear and reading my stuff as a starting point).
- Trial or Full Plan - decide whether you want a trial phase, perhaps even not company branded (like doing an ice cream blog when you’re Target stores, without any Target branding, just to try out blogging as a culture.)
- Goals - without a clear understanding of what your goals for the program are, these steps are worthless.
- Target Audience - is this blog for customers, colleagues, coworkers, moms, who?
- End State - once this project is running, what will be better within the company?
- Resources-Internal - who gets the responsibility (fun?) of maintaining a community, creating content, being a good social media citizen?
- Resources-External - do you hire consultants, advisors, analysts to help you launch? Do you outsource the entire platform, like American Express or Fast Search?
- Integration Points with Existing Ops Structure - if this is a tiny offshoot of its own, it won’t live long. How do you tie what this person’s doing to the larger org?
- Input from Team - Once you have your plan, do you shop it around internally? If so, help them own it. Give your ideas “handles,” so people can take the ideas and make them their own.
- Reporting Structure - is the social media project’s keeper different than the creators’ boss? Where does the information gathered go? Who needs to know when something comes up?
- Training - this turns out to be an important step. How will you handle it?
- Legal (?) - the project should be blessed once at least by legal, but then do you make every step of the way a legal hurdle to jump? I lean towards no, but your culture might say differently.
Again, this is a list to stimulate thought. What does it have you thinking? Were there any surprises? Does it help you think more about your business interests in social media tools and methods? What have I missed?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Social Media Strategy - Aligning Goals and Measurements
Since starting a social media strategy series, I’ve been working diligently on understanding what goes into the process. I’m building a framework that, when completed, should prove fairly useful. Along the way, I’ll share some of what I’m learning, so that you can learn along with me, and hopefully influence the end results with your thoughts and ideas. Today, let’s talk about goals, strategies and measurements. We’ll start with a specific goal from my company, go into another basic example, and then open the conversation to you.
You Can’t Have Strategy Without First Having Goals
Strategy is essentially the diet, but the goal might be weight loss, muscle growth, cholesterol reduction, allergy aversion. See how it’s not one-size-fits all? Before you know which diet to start, you need to know the goal.
Strategy Without Measurement is Useless
Further, if you’re not measuring the effort to reach your goals ( KD Paine will be so proud of me), how can you be sure you’re getting there. Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts is vital to knowing you’re making progress. Remember that diets (strategies) often need adjusting along the way. It’s measurements that tell us this.
Sample Goals, Strategies, and Measurements
Let’s put some real information out here and talk about it. I’ll use a few that I’m working up for my own company, CrossTech Media.
- Goal: increase attendance at our live events.
- Strategy: add upcoming.org and Facebook events components, blog, invite local geek groups. Possibly purchase Facebook ads to test that, too, targeting regional. Craigslist?
- Measurements: add a “Where did you hear about us?” field to the registration form.
- Measurements: check link referral logs.
So, that’s fairly straightforward. The only thing I’m missing is some kind of estimate on how much I think these efforts might increase attendance traffic. Truth is, I’m not sure. Should I have a number in mind? I will put one down, but have no idea how close my estimate will be.
But the process is there. I’ve identified a goal: “I want more people to attend our shows.” I’ve laid out a few strategies: “put info about our show in more places.” And I have a few ideas how to measure: “in-line survey, and web links.”
In reserve, I have “blogging” and two other strategies. But I want to lead with these and see if they make a significant impact on their own.
Other Goals, Strategies, and Measurements
There are many other things a company might want to do, and other ways to approach it. Why don’t we list a few out here, and then if you have others you want to talk about, we can tackle them in the comments section.
- Goal: Increase leads for my product / service.
- Strategy : build blog traffic with appropriate links to product / service.
- Measurement : link tracking.
Simple and straightforward, right? I’d offer that the strategy should go further. Remember, “if you blog it, they will come” is not exactly true. That’s where people fall down fast. Instead, I’d add the following to the strategy area:
- Augment blog traffic by adding outposts (referral back to the blog via RSS) on Facebook, in appropriate forums, in LinkedIn, and other pertinent online venues.
- Augment blog traffic by adding useful tools for my audience that might drive more visits to download (like an ebook).
- Augment blog traffic by using social news sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, where appropriate.
By Having Three Knobs to Turn
If you look at it, splitting out goal, strategy, and measurement means that you can look a little more closely at WHY and HOW and HOW EFFECTIVE your social media efforts are. It’s quite simple, and yet powerful to put this lens on what you’re doing.
I get lots of emails asking me how to improve one’s blog traffic. My first response, almost always, is “what’s the goal with the added traffic?” People blogging casually or for entertainment purposes just want a higher number. But businesses are hoping that more traffic to the blog equals more sales, more engagement, more something-that-translates-into-more-business. In those cases, it’s not always more blog traffic that wins the game. Sometimes, it’s building more effective blog traffic, building more pertinent connectivity, building a stronger process flow to bring readers into your marketplace.
What Are Some of Your Goals?
Maybe you know the goals but haven’t thought out the strategies. Maybe you have some great strategies for achieving your goals. Perhaps you have measurements that I’m not considering yet. In any of those cases, we should talk more about it. Let’s open the comments and see what we can come up with.
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, theogeo
Five Tools I Use for Listening
As part of the social media strategy series, I thought I’d start with listening.
Social media tools are a great way to get the word out about your passions, your interests, the company’s latest products, but we tend to rush right into the “speaking” side of the toolbox without giving much thought to the “listening” part. Knowing what people are saying about you, your competitors, and your industry as a whole are just as important as blogging and making good video.
It’s interesting to note that companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to move their capabilities to understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks.
As part of our social media strategy, let’s presume that all businesses will need a way of listening to their audience, their customers, their partners, and their detractors. Let’s start with the tools, and we will talk about the strategy for dealing with what we hear in a subsequent post. By the way, the guts and tech behind most every one of these tools is RSS. Click that link to watch a quick YouTube video by Common Craft, if you want a refresher on what RSS is/does.
Five Tools I Use for Listening
- Google Reader - I use Google Reader as my home base for collecting and reading all the various sources of information I collect. It’s web-based, fast, and easy to use. It allows me to blaze through content without thinking much about it. Use Google Reader by adding various searches to it (described in the next few bullets).
- Technorati - Go to Technorati, put your company ( product, brand, personal) name into the search bar, and see what people are saying about you. Note the little orange RSS subscription button in the upper right. Copy that link location (Right click the link and say “Copy Link” or however your browser words that). Now, dump that into Google Reader as one of your listening searches. Repeat this for your competitor’s name, brand, individuals, and some industry terms (if you can make them succinct).
- Google Blogsearch - Go to Google Blogsearch and do the same thing. Sure there will be some overlap, but it’s important to capture both. The subscription to searches link is on the left hand side about 1/3 down the page.
- Summize - If you’re thinking about using social networks and social media, it’s likely that some of your customers are using Twitter. If so, go to Summize and put in your search terms there, too. Cook as many searches as you need, grabbing the RSS feeds and throwing them into Google Reader. Build a strong catalog of searches, and then remove bad or ineffective ones after you trial them out a bit.
- Link Checker - Here’s an off-the-beaten path one. Go to SEO Pro and use their free link checker. (Note: it’s a bit slow to crawl for technical reasons, so don’t get worried if it takes a while to respond to your query). This tool checks who’s linking to your URLs, what the link text is (what’s in blue on the web page that people might click to get to you), and all kinds of stats that matter to search engine optimization experts, but might not matter to you. Why? Because it’s important to know what people are saying about you with their linking efforts.
- BONUS ROUND: Crazy Egg - If you want to see how people are looking at your website when they’re NOT commenting and talking about you, try out Crazy Egg. The tool is chock full of visualization data, including heat maps, that show you how people are interacting with your website. Sometimes, people aren’t saying something on your blog posts because they’re being distracted by something else. Here’s your chance to figure that out.
The Pro Stuff
If you want something a little more advanced than hacking search tools and sucking the RSS feeds into readers (which isn’t that bad, you know), you might try tools like Radian6 (note: I just completed a 3 part webinar series with them that we’re airing soon. Go to Twebinar.com for details) or BuzzLogic or a series of other tools in the same category (they’re all listening, so I’m sure they can swarm here and give links in the comments section).
There are values to the professional products, and if you’re a larger company and can afford the not-too-very-expensive splurge, you get a lot more dashboarding and reporting with such tools. But if you’re bootstrapping, stick with me, kids.
How are You Listening?
I’m curious to know who’s doing what in the world of listening. Are you doing something formal with your organization? Have you tried any of these tools for this purpose? What else might we be missing in our tool set?
Photo credit, tanakawho
Starting a Social Media Strategy
This post begins a small series within the Social Media 100 series where we can start discussing the parts and premises of building a social media strategy. I’ll want your help with this. We can build this collaboratively, and I believe that the end results are that you’ll have some tools to build out your own social media strategies.
Consider this the warm up for the end piece, though I believe this piece has some value in helping you even begin to start your planning process. Tell me if you feel otherwise, and we can improve it together.
Begin with the End in Mind
Strategy isn’t the goal. It’s the path you plan to take to get there. So, let’s put some goals out, and then talk through how to build a strategy to reach them. Here are a few sample goals. Feel free to add some to the comments, if I don’t cover yours.
- Increase customer base.
- Generate leads.
- Drive sales.
- Build awareness.
- Make money from your content.
- Establish thought leadership.
- Educate customers.
- Customer-source part of your product development.
- Reach new channels of customers.
- Improve internal communication.
Did I miss any? Feel free to add some to the comments.
Questions Before the Strategy
Before we go too far down any one path, we should ask some questions:
- Are your customers likely to be online? Note that lots of people are online these days, but it might be that you have a product or service that isn’t as frequently purchased via the web. What’s your story?
- Are you ready to handle negativity? Platforms like blogs and videos allow for negative comments, and some company cultures aren’t ready to engage with those opinions.
- How will you incorporate this into people’s daily jobs?
- How will you measure results?
- How long are you willing to give it a try?
- What’s your willingness to experiment, take risks, and adjust your plans?
Just those answers might tell you a bit about your business, whether or not you decide to go forward with building a strategy using social media tools. Remember, it’s a lot easier to NOT listen to customers and just blast your messages out with no regard to how they’re received.
Strategy Starters
If we’re going to put a social media strategy into place, we need to align the path we’re going to take, and develop it with an understanding of how to reach our goals. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? Let’s get there. How do we know we’ve arrived? Simple, eh? Let’s start in on the “how.”
- Listening: implement at least a rudimentary listening platform. We’ll cover this in a later post.
- Communications: build a starting place to hold your conversations. And by this, I mean a blogging platform.
- Methods: determine the mix of content you intend to create, and build workflow around it.
- Community: most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.
- Neighbors: develop a plan to reach out to others in your community, comment, and share.
- Outposts: develop social network outposts where you can communicate with other communities, and also share the way back to your own platform.
- Marketplace: if your strategy involves making money, build a marketplace external to your community. Keep these separate.
- Attention: learn how to build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.
Are these all the basic regions of strategy that you might want to see covered? Am I missing any? Let’s talk about that in the comments.
What Comes Next
Once we discuss this a bit, I’ll build the next post in the series: Social Media Strategy for Businesses. I’ll build it with your input.
What do you think? What else should we work into the larger piece to make it more useful to your needs?
The Social Media 100 is a series of posts pertaining to the use of social media and social networks to build business. To make sure you receive each one, subscribe for free to my blog. Also, check out the completely different content that I produce in my free newsletter. Each is a separate piece of a larger informational product. And as always, thanks for your attention.
Photo credit, Todd Ehlers
The Target is Not the Weapon
Donald Trump. Who’d have thought I’d be in a bookstore last night and see a book by Donald Trump, and that I’d pick it up, and at random flip to a chapter with that title? The Target Is Not The Weapon. It’s a simple lesson, and yet profound in how it changes one’s focus.
In social media, the tools aren’t the same thing as reaching a goal. If you’re a marketer looking to use these tools, then make the first goal to learn how the community moves, listen to its ebbs and flows, and then make the next goal to try starting conversations. But don’t stop there. What’s the real goal? What’s your real target? Growing sales? Building leads? Engaging more people in your nonprofit cause?
I have been doing this exercise for days in different forms, but not with this language in mind. Think about this in Trump’s words. If you’re seeking to hit a target, is the goal to use a dart or an arrow or a bullet, or is it to improve your accuracy, or is it simply to hit the bullseye? The answer is C, even though A and B are part of the equation. Make sense?
I’m thinking long and hard on which social media tools do what for my own business goals, and how this will impact what I advise people to do next. Do the tools have impact? Definitely. See the Financial Aid Podcast and Wine Library TV for two small business examples. See Direct2Dell for another example. See tons more examples in between.
But the chatter, the conversation for conversation’s sake? It’s fine and I don’t begrudge people using the tools for social conversation (enhanced beyond standard email). And yet, I’m assessing which parts do the most for me. What about you?
Here’s an Amazon link to the book:
Photo credit by uuuhyeah
What Comes Next With Social Media
Once everyone understands the tools, accepts that they should be part of the conversation (or moves on from the notion), has accounts and presence where all their customers are spending time, what comes next? What should businesses and individuals DO once they’re set up?
If you were advising Ford, who by the way, is looking for someone to sign on to help with their global social media strategy, what would you suggest they do once they gave you the green light?
Memes and Why They Matter
Peter Kim tagged me in a meme called 4×4 things about me. I was going to decline (I usually do), but I thought I’d use the post as a reason to talk about memes, and what they do for the web. I’ll answer, but only after I say a few things about memes.
Memes show connection points. They show Peter that I’ll answer his request. They show that I will reach out to others, and who I reach out to, and how these things tie together.
Memes provide context. Both in the way I choose to answer, and then again in the way the answers stack together with other people’s thoughts and ideas.
Sure, they’re often kind of silly, but that’s not the point. The point is that they actually serve a function. They thread together people, the web, and how people see each other out there.
(For the record, don’t tag me in memes. I often don’t play. What’s that say about me?)
Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
1. Library page. First paid job ever.
2. Directory Assistance (411) operator.
3. Car Salesman. For one week. I chewed at it. Also kind of wrecked some gears on one of their cars. Shhh.
4. Bookstore clerk. (Did this around the holidays at an independent bookstore for years.)
Four TV shows I DVR:
None, but I watch lots of Internet TV.
1. The Clip Show
2. Something to be Desired
3. Epic Fu
4. Jeff Pulver’s TV Channel
Four places I’ve Been:
1. St John’s Newfoundland. First place I ever got off the plane and instantly wanted to live there.
2. Stockholm, Sweden. PodCamp Europe/VON Europe, and fun with Jeff Pulver.
3. Bermuda. Man, did it RAIN there!
4. San Marcos, Texas. Swell place to do a Blogtoberfest.
Four favorite foods:
1. Leftovers. I say this all the time, but it’s true.
2. Steak from Nine in Las Vegas. (Any steak, but that one rocked!)
3. Blue cheese burger, medium, with sweet potato fries.
4. Beef stew.
And now, the handoff
The point of doing memes is to keep them rolling. So here I am, tagging four people whose answers I want to hear, and people who are in some way connected to my thoughts and ideas. Here’s who I tag:
- Mitch Joel - thoughtful and wonderful and participatory.
- Travell Perkins - recently launched a new blog, and could use some visitors.
- David Armano- who celebrated his 2nd blogging anniversary.
- Len Devanna- who just relaunched a new EMC.com site.
There you go. Hop to it. : ) And thanks, Peter, for having me along.
Photo credit, Zimpenfish.
Happy Birthday Harold
Pretty hard to believe that this little guy is already two years old. It’s definitely gone a lot faster, Harold’s two years, than Violette’s. Maybe in some ways, that’s because everything was a learning curve with Violette. With Harold, we knew how to be parents (or what we consider being a parent), and instead, we can just delight in the nuances of differences that Harold brings to the story.
At the age of Two, Harold is still figuring lots of things out. Recently, like yesterday, he started using signs legitimately for the first time. His favorite is “open,” ever since we started storing lots of his toys in little plastic storage containers with tricky lids. He has a sign that he uses for “help” which looks more like the sign for “milk” mixed with “you there, peasant- do this for me.”
Things I don’t want to forget about Harold: he loves cars and trains right now, despite us not pushing him towards “boy” toys. (Violette loved Thomas the Tank Engine until she was 4, and then princesses and fairies pushed Thomas to the curb). He loves music and singing along with various songs. He eats breakfast food like it’s going to be off the menu, but doesn’t really dig most other foods without a lot of prompting.
Harold gets really excited quickly, very often is happy as a clam, and has a whole different kind of energy than his big sister.
Oh, he loves her a lot more lately, too. They’re figuring out how to interact in each other’s space a bit. Harold is getting happier with that relationship.
So that’s it. I’m happy to be a dad of two great kids. I’m thankful that Harold is who he is. They’re healthy and wonderful and remind me why I do what I do. They also remind me all that I put my parents through, and make me happy we have a good relationship. For as little as I use my blog to talk about family, you should know that my family is HOW I can do all the things I do, as well as WHY I want to keep trying.
Happy Birthday, Harold.
The Bucket Meme
Jeff Pulver has tagged me to write a “Bucket List,” as per the popular movie of the same name. Essentially, what are some things you’d want to do if you had X months to live before you kick the bucket. It’s a fun exercise to do, especially if you attempt to live your life based on what you come up with. I’m not promising a thing on what I think I can actually accomplish from this list, but if I had a few months to live, here’s what I’d do:
Travel
I suppose everyone’s bucket list would have travel. It’s just something we say when we realize how stationary our lives typically are. So, where shall I go? I’m about to die, or some such. Hmm. I say Ireland, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Tokyo (Japan), and perhaps Goa in India.
Sharks
Great Barrier Reef in Australia, or even closer by, the Red Triangle off San Francisco, are places where one could see a Great White shark, with some patience, or a skilled guide. I’d want to touch one. I’ve had a lifelong fear of sharks that is also part fascination. I think it would be fun to touch one before I went.
Reaching Out
There are people I’ve yet to meet that I’d like to at least communicate with in some form or fashion:
- William Gibson
- Serg Tankian
- Wes Anderson
- Kevin Smith
- Chuck Palahniuk
- Scott Ian
Create
I’d roll live video for the rest of my days, I think, creating some kind of record of thoughts and ideas and the things I’d summed up as part of my life until that point. Some of it would be silly, like movie reenactments. I’d want to create as much as I could before I shuffled off this mortal coil. Hell, I’d even get out my paints and things. Why stick with digital only?
So, the Purpose
The reason we’re supposed to do a bucket list is to remind us that time is finite, that we never know when it’s all going to be over, and that we should do these things. We’re supposed to look at what holds us back. We’re supposed to think beyond what limits us and consider doing some of these things.
What holds us back? I’d say that one part is money. Another part is fear. Another part is not knowing how to take first steps to accomplish these things. Katrina says another reason we don’t do all these things is that they’re very selfish. (Well, mine are). You can’t just be that selfish (unless of course you’re really going to kick the bucket).
And of course, one part is to dream.
So, I’m not doing many memes right now (deep in the heart of my Social Media 100), except that memes themselves are social media, and social networking, and wiring together of our human computers, and hey, if Jeff asks me for pretty much anything, I’d probably do it. : )
If you’re inclined to consider your own bucket list, I encourage you to think it over, post it, and send a comment to this post and/or to Jeff’s original post. It’s an interesting exercise, for sure.
Photo Credit, Moriza
