Workflow- Social Media for Marketers

Chris–As always a great post. And you’re probably tired of reading “I’m learning so much” but well, I’m learning so much. I’d love to see something in the future about integrating social media resources, in baby steps, with traditional outreach models. For example, we live and die by the press release around here. So how do we distribute those releases via traditional channels as well as use socmed tools w/o turning into “those dang government spammers”? Given the culture around here, my particular challenge is to demonstrate how socmed adds value to what we’re already doing.

Chris – as a small hotel/B&B owner…man, this post is useful!

I had heard of Yelp but was not sure of its depths. Well, they are going to have one new memeber today, for sure!

Also, as soon as my flip video camera arrives from Amazon the Culebra videos are starting…watch out youtube. :)

Great post Chris- the only thing I take issue with is the Boston setting. After complete blowout last night, this diehard Yanks fan is a little put off :)

But seriously- great ideas, agreed that analytics to show ROI would be the icing on the cake.

Thanks as always!

Chris, you should turn Yolanda into a podcast series star ;) The Office 2.0

Thanks, Chris! Hopefully this will help me as I try to bring “old school” into current world. We’re miossing a huge opportunity.

I like that Yolanda picked where she was going to focus her attention. That’s one of the biggest initial hurdles when facing social media is that there are so many directions you can get pulled into.

By focusing on what was not only relevant, but potentially beneficial to her business, she really did make good use of the social media tools available and her time with them.

Nice post Chris.

This is a great article. I really like to use social media as part of my marketing plan. When people do not see enough benefits right away they give up on social media. Social media seems to be more about the long run and not the short run.

Realistic? Sure. Comprehensive? No.

It’s realistic in that nothing here is a bad idea, and everything here can and probably should be done by anyone even considering to call him or herself a “social media marketer.” In fact, I’ve been working on putting together a couple of communication plans during the past couple of weeks that look a lot like this.

But it stops short. She’s not producing any of her own content — not blogging, not podcasting, not sharing videos, not posting photos, not hosting her own events (though she’s working toward it).

I understand that you can only do so much in one article, but it should be noted, for the sake of those who are relying this as guidance, that this is just a starting point. A *great* starting point, but just that.

Hey Chris … thank for the time.

I work in the software as a service (SaaS) business. Our customers are all non-profits. Our tools range from CRM & back-end donor management to CMS front end fund-raising, advocacy and social media tools (others things as well but no need to go into it all).

I work in the professional services piece of the pie (Director). My overall interest in social media is 2 fold: 1) Personally I find it very interesting and want to learn more 2) I want to be able to help our clients understand and use the tools to raise funds, spread their message, take action, etc …

As a side note – I have been paying close attention to @kanter lately … and every thing that went down at gnomedex – very cool to see!

Anyway … does that help?

__
http://twitter.com/franswaa

Great post. This brings up a couple of questions for me. I work in basically a start up that provides ticketing for music venues around the country. A lot of what I do on a day to day basis involves social media. The one thing I wonder about “yolanda”, as with myself, is where you draw the line between your personal and professional presence online.

Or maybe there is no distinction anymore?

It’s great to see a step-by-step for social media usage out in the “real world”. I’ve been thinking about social media and education for awhile, and maybe this is the most logical way to present it. It answers the “Why do we need it?” question that most teachers (or businesses for that matter) would ask.
Once they have a reason to invest in it, they’ll use it.

I think this situation is quite realistic and I’d love to see more businesses using this approach.

Your post depicts a realistic scenario that touches on a small tangent of possibilities that are open to marketers who use social media.

The main point of confusion for marketers is going to be accepting that results from social media as a marketing tool is going to yield results in indirect ways that may be hard to measure unless they are aware of the possibilities.

Social media as a conversation analysis tool, as depicted above, is not direct marketing but does spread a message of focus on customer satisfaction which may yield results that are not directly measurable.

Social media marketers need to understand that results are gained from increased search engine visibility, word of mouth (crowdsourcing) and branding through community building and interaction… Traditional metrics and tracking are an issue that I am sure will get better as this space continues to develop.

For now marketers have to accept that social media is mainly a branding / search engine visibility enhancer that will lead to traffic, action and sales but not directly unless you simply run ads on social networks. Traditionally the direct traffic that comes from social networks converts poorly and is rarely worth the effort unless you have built a community of supporters around your brand. In most cases the benefit for marketers is indirect as stated above.

Marketers that use social media have to take the time to learn this medium before jumping in. All to often I see marketing professionals that misuse social platforms because they don’t know what they are doing… They try to view marketing in social media through traditional Internet marketing goggles.

One thing to look at is the opportunity cost of the social networking. What traditional marketing is Yolanda not doing and what is the lost return on that marketing? That would be a useful comparison, especially when faced with skeptical bosses who think we are just surfing the Web all day.

Tidy and certainly realistic, Chris.

I especially appreciate the succinct nature of the way you describe Yolanda’s day. Some of social media marketing folks I know spend so much of their time trying too hard — and trying to pack in too much. It occasionally comes across like flailing.

There is much to be said for working smarter in the social media space — and being intentional with action items.

I like the story I can visualize, this also removes the focus on the technology iself and on the use in a setting many can relate to.

Ah, what a sense of relief to read this. I’m the Community Manager for a travel services company and have been figuring out for the past 3 1/2 years exactly what that might mean. (Don’t get me wrong… I love living in the grey areas between job-in-a-box and tech-innovation)

My days are beginning to look a lot like Yolandas, but additionally I’m responsible to design, develop and manage our own Travel blog software, write editorial for in-house blogs, deliver website production enhancements that help develop community features and also run our online CSR program (which heavily engages our community/customers.

Right now, we’re trying to write up a Customer Engagement strategy paper to help set direction for all the Social Media activities we’ve begun… they’ve often started in a random fashion, and whilst we can see the value, we’d like to think they’re contributing to some bigger, well planned business goals.

The hardest thing to figure out is measurement and what is meaningful. At the moment, I have a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers (Twitter mentions, Technorati, survey results etc). I’m just hanging in (without judgment) for a few months to see what patterns emerge.
Chris – if you ever come across a sample report for Community/Social Media marketing activities, I’d looooove to see it?!

Outstanding post–as always, great information.

If you could do another cut at this, I’d advocate for looking at what Yolanda set up first, what she added next, and so forth–how she built the program strategically. I’m not going to be able to do everything on day one.

Seeking_Balance is the one who nailed my context: I’d love to have someone who had social media as the primary focus of time.

We’re not engaged in it yet for my particular campus (one of 4 in a statewide system) because I’d have to squeeze it in around everything else that hasn’t gone away: actual print publications, news releases, marketing pieces, web content, on & on.

My own time goes heavily toward community relations activities that require extensive time in meetings & at events–aka real-time social networks. That limits my ability to do frequent checks or updates, although I confess to doing plenty of email on my phone in some of these meetings…..

I have a really small team, so we can share but there will be days when we’re all slammed and nobody posts, at least in the early days until we evolve in a way that dumps projects.

I’m in some spaces as an individual to get a feeling for how appropriate they are for us as a specialty campus (graduate/professional, heavy on research), given our communication priorities and target audiences. Plenty of the influencers I need to reach are still not even on LinkedIn, let alone being tweeted at or updating their Facebook pages.

Anyone else in higher ed reading this? What are you doing?
–barb
http://www.linkedin.com/in/barbchamberlain

Looks fantastic! Lucky boutique company being able to support a person on staff doing 100% social media work. Most companies (even at the Fortune 100 level to which I contract) are still farming it out. I’m crossing my fingers for the day when this isn’t a social media marketer, but part of the day of the traditional PR or marketing person. :)

Thanks for getting the wheels turning, as usual.

I am surprised no one mentioned Google Analytics on her website.

She would check the stats in the morning and evening before leaving and see if there is a bump of traffic coming from an sources. She would also analyze why some of her efforts seem to hit a cord and generate traffic while others do not.

She would use the tool to measure and improve her results.

@Barb – I think there are ways to slice the role among your team. To your point, it’s not easy if you’re out there doing face to face work all the time, and I think that’s very important work (humans trump machines).

I’m loving what people are saying. The ideas you come up with are far more interesting than the original post alone. Thank you!

Chris,

This is a fantastic post. I just saw your link on a new friend’s profile on facebook and decided to check it out. I am working up in Toronto at a small bouitique marketing agency and we are starting to build social communities for clients and all of the examples you have given on how to connect with different networks has really opened my eyes to all of the different options you can explore. Since I am relatively new to this, I only knew of a few ways of getting people engaged. Now it’s like I have seen the light.

Thanks Chris. I cant wait until your next post!

Aimee
http://www.walkthetalkers.com

I think this is great. It can be overwhelming to try and tackle the social networking game. Do you have any good tools so I can really understand google reader and use it myself to follow the North Texas art scene, can it be that specific?

Ben