Business & Marketing Strategy for the Israeli and Global High Tech Markets
Listen to Louis CK on social media strategy. He hates Twitter. Just because it’s the cool shiny tool doesn’t mean you should be running to it when your basic business strategy is lacking.
Stop going after the shiny things.
Start going after the value (which probably includes social media).
Maybe Louis CK should be doing your social media strategy:
Sometimes, people new to social media don’t understand the difference between Facebook and Twitter. This is a relatively simple thing, but the consequences of misuse can have serious implications for your brand.
Too many people treat Facebook like Twitter — frequent status updates, posting multiple times a day. The consequences not only mean that, because they don’t understand Twitter, they are missing out on conversation, website traffic, and outreach to potential new leads, but it also means that they might be upsetting and annoying their existing Facebook fan base. This will result in losing fans, potential customers, and even potentially cause negative word-of-mouth. This is one of the basic reasons why it’s important to have professional community management and an open organizational structure that takes advantage of the Groundswell.
Here are one person’s comments/summary. We concur:
-Waning interest in the brand
-Complaints about the information offered on fan pages w
-Posting too often or posting uninteresting informationBrands need to focus on content strategy and community management if they want to see healthy, active and engaged communities!!
Today’s edition of the New York Times has a great article explaining how Twitter can help small businesses with their marketing. It also emphasizes how this service, with millions of members, is mainstream and requires community management.
Many businesses are struggling to make sense of Twitter, but even if it strikes you as an enigma or hype, consider this: many of your customers are already there.
The article points out several important best-practices:
One sign of a company that engages with followers is a page filled with @ symbols (Twitter shorthand for a reply to a specific person). “You absolutely have to remember you are part of a community and you have to offer value to that community,” Ms. Erwin said. “It’s not about you. If all you do is talk about yourself, your audience will be instantly bored.”
Chrysta Wilson owns the small Los Angeles bakery Kiss My Bundt. She likes to experiment with new recipes and use Twitter for customer feedback. “It absolutely is like a focus group, except the beauty of it is I don’t have to go and find people who are interested or knowledgeable about baking,” Ms. Wilson said. “My universe is already there — my Twitter followers and Facebook fans.”
When Ms. Wilson wanted to try a new maple bacon bundt, she posted about it, put up photos and invited followers to stop by for free samples. Their feedback helped her perfect the recipe, which is now a favorite. She has more than 1,900 followers. “It’s great for getting input — they become your sounding board,” she said. “It’s a way to break out of the business owner’s bubble and get an outsider’s perspective.”
He posts about interesting articles, blog links and anything that strikes him as surprising. “The key thing is being interesting,” he said. Mr. Berry said he believed that his Twitter stream generated 10 to 20 percent of the traffic that came to his company Web site. If he can pique interest and establish himself as a trusted authority, he said, customers are more likely to buy his products and services.
“If you’re just selling, it doesn’t work,” Mr. Berry said. “If somebody starts selling, I stop following them.”
Mari Smith, a social media speaker and trainer who lives by the rule “always be marketing” and has amassed more than 68,000 followers, agreed. Ms. Smith will not post a traditional “push” marketing message that explicitly advertises an event like a webinar. Instead, she might post something that arouses people’s curiosity and include a link.
For Ms. Smith, Twitter is a way to maintain a personal touch — and scale it up. “Whether I’m chitchatting, retweeting, @replying, talking about my personal life, my products or services, it’s all marketing,” she said. “People buy people before they buy products or service. They’re buying into you.”
The payoff: Ms. Smith said half her business came through Twitter.
No one likes annoying car salesmen. Don’t be one on Twitter
“It’s not so much about the number of followers,” said Emily Doan, La Boulange chief of operations and principal Twitterer. “It’s about making that connection and relationship to people. It’s keeping our company fresh in their minds each day.”
I first blogged the latest edition of Socionomic’s now ubiquitous video about how the media landscape has changed to digital and its social implications back in December. Now, six months later, the world has changed again and Socionomics has come out with a new video called Social Media Revolution 2 (though not the second edition of their video, which has been around for over a year – an eternity in the age of the iPad).
A few facts, from Socionomics:
How is your company reacting?
I frequently say that digital media and digital marketing is not about the tool. It’s not about Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. It’s about the fact that communication — and how people get their information — are changing.
People don’t get their information from the daily newspaper, get their local paper — if you’re lucky and live in a big city you get the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times or Chicago Tribune — or go out to the local store and purchase a newspaper and read whatever’s in their paper. Rarely pay attention to who the journalist is that wrote the piece. Or are lucky to read papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal with an amazing array of editorial writers.
In today’s digital age, people don’t look for news. News comes at them and to them — at an amazing, rapid rate. Millions of people are getting their news from links on Twitter – whether retweets or posts from their friends or network, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with 4.8 million followers, corporate accounts, or news sites like CNN with over 3 million followers. Twitter is a news source.
People find out about what’s happening in the because they see a link posted on Facebook or Twitter. A recent study by some Korean researchers argued that Twitter is less like a social network and more like a news source; Twitter is the new CNN.
This was also discussed at Israel’s Com.Vention, the country’s largest annual Internet convention. At one of the sessions, with Robert Scoble, and several high tech executives, about digital content creation, it was mentioned by one of the speakers that today, because we get our information at us — and not dependent on any media outlet — journalists are dependent on their own personal brand. Instead of getting our news from a print newspaper, we read journalist’s — people who have credibility and write quality, regardless of what degree they have or what outlets they write — blogs – whose links we found on Twitter or were shared on Facebook.
I apologize that the sound is not very good, as I took this video from my cell phone. Start at 2:00 in particular, where it talks about how journalism and content consumption and creation is changing, and especially at 3:00 where the speaker talks about the “Brand of Me.”
As mentioned in the previous blog post about inbound marketing, one of the core tasks of inbound marketing is content creation.
The central component of inbound marketing is content creation. This could mean anything from writing a blog post, having posts and conversation on Twitter or another microblogging service, interacting on groups and pages on Facebook, or creating and administering a page on Facebook. Perhaps it’s creating a video cast or podcast. Content creation can be further narrowed down into two more categories:
Another important concern is data analysis. Sure, you have written copy for your website and have metadata. Yes, your Facebook page has a beautiful landing tab with conversion form. The design work is done. But is it doing its job? Are you doing A/B testing to test the effectiveness of your landing page? Are you using your analytics tools to track conversions? Are there new searches and keywords to consider optimizing for? A few hours a week need to be devoted to analyzing and constantly tweaking your content. Perhaps your website still says © 2005 – or worse. Have you updated this?
One of the core content hubs is a blog. A recent post by HubSpot on the fast evolution of SEO makes essential point both about the SEO and lead-generation benefits of blogging and on the time commitment that content creation takes.
What is the most important thing an SMB can do to improve organic traffic?
A Blog. Period.
Write content, have others write content and make it engaging and relevant, then the links will come. I Can’t even begin to tell you the potential here, if you are willing to engage for a few hours a week.
What’s the point? Content creation takes TIME!
The amount of time required in content creation is often underestimated. Yet, inbound marketing practioners say that the amount of time (remember, this is a general rule – it could take less or more time depending on your specific task) is at least two hours daily.
Chris Brogan writes (“How much time should I spend on social media?”) that “2 hours a day is a minimum for MOST efforts.” Matt Dickman of Fleishman-Hillard agrees (“The two hour minimum“) with Chris Brogan. He set the “two hour minimum per day” rule.
Two hours a day? Just to go update Facebook and go on Twitter and do all this unimportant social media stuff is TWO HOURS A DAY? Really? What do you do with the two hours? Chris Brogan and Matt Dickman divide it up differently but the core is: listen, listen some more, interact, engage!
This is how Chris Brogan divides up his time:
- 1/4 for Listening – Start your day by listening and finding what the world is saying about you, your competitor, your marketplace, etc. Need help with listening? See grow bigger ears. In this space, I also count reading (reading other people’s blogs and other online materials).
- 1/2 for Commenting/Communicating – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on the various channels where they reach you. If that’s Twitter, email, or wherever you hang out, fine. In the commenting timeframe, I also include sharing. Be sure to tweet links to great articles, use StumbleUpon, Delicious, Facebook share, and all the other various tools that help people find the good stuff. In Google reader, a simple SHIFT-S gives an article a whole lot of new potential fans. In here, I might also add the act of linking in and connecting with people on various networks.
- 1/4 for Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication. This might include blogging, making video or audio, creating email newsletters, and anything else you’re building to contribute something to the space. It might be posting those event photos in Flickr and on Facebook. Whatever it is, creating content of some kind should take up 1/4 of your social media efforts, as this is the way you get found. Search engines thrive on new content. Humans seek out new material. The more you can be helpful, the better your opportunities.
Dickard divides his time up similarly.
Listen – Check your feed reader, check your Google alerts, monitor Tweetdeck, do a Twitter search (unless you’ve added them into your reader), check Technorati (you never know), look at your commenting service (co.Comment/Backtype/etc.) to see who has replied to you. This isn’t a one-time thing, set a schedule through the day and check back for 5 minutes.
Engage – Monitor those conversations through the day and reply as close to realtime as you can. Overnight delays are common and (I think) accepted in most cases. During the workday, however, you can make more impact by replying within 2-4 hours. If you have a blog, write a post or at least brainstorm new ideas based on what you’re seeing.
Discover – Another part of the day should spawn from the listening and engagement phases. You should constantly look for new blogs, people on Twitter to follow, new relevant posts to comment on, etc.
How long do you spend on your inbound marketing tasks? How do you divide them up?
As mentioned in a previous post that social media fans are more likely to buy, there’s also another question. Why do people fan brands on Facebook or follow them on Twitter?
According to eMarketer:
The top reason to friend a brand on Facebook was to receive discounts, followed by simply being a customer of the company and a desire to show others that they support the brand. On Twitter, discounts, up-to-the-minute information and exclusive content were the main draws; only 2% of respondents followed brands on Twitter to show their support.
The findings are largely in line with previous research about what social followers want, but the results changed when Chadwick Martin Bailey asked respondents about why they had first decided to follow brands, and allowed them to choose as many reasons as they liked.
Among Facebook fans, the top reasons were being a customer (49%) and to show support (42%), with discounts and promotions coming in third (40%). Another 34% simply said it was fun and entertaining to become a fan. On Twitter, being a customer won out (51%), with discounts (44%) and fun (42%) rounding out the top three.
Brands are still a bit slow on the social media bandwagon. Some are still wondering why they should join it. A new report from eMarketer gives a good answer. People who follow brands on social media are more likely to buy. According to Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate social friends and followers are more likely to purchase from brands that they are fans of.
More than one-half of Facebook fans said that they are more likely to make a purchase with brands that they are fans of. 67% of Twitter followers reported the same.
60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly eight in 10.
As I mentioned on an earlier post about the demographics of social media use, baby boomers are the fastest growing group on social networks.
But, what does that mean for marketers? Does it mean that they just need to set up a Twitter or Facebook page and they’ve done their job? Alternatively, will a LinkedIn page do?
The answer: it depends.
As in any sort of marketing, demographics and the purpose of communication matter. Twitter is not Facebook. LinkedIn is not MySpace. It’s not even ASmallWorld (and no, I don’t mean the Disney song).
As eMarketer points out, different age groups use different social media networks. Younger people – not yet in the professional world or just entering their first career – tend not to be power users of LinkedIn. The 40-year old middle manager? You bet (hopefully!) that they are doing business networking and lead generation via LinkedIn.High school students don’t need Twitter to connect with their peers. But Gen Y and X do.
There’s no one size fits all strategy in life. Certainly not in social media marketing either.
Social Media doesn’t just sell technology (although Dell claims that they’ve made over $1 million in sales due to their Twitter presence), or shoes (although Zappos has also been raking in the big bucks), but it also saves lives and does good.
Whether it’s a religious organization, charity fundraising campaign, or trade group, or promoting democracy, social media does good.
If you’ve been paying attention, social media has been recently saving lives in Haiti and promoting democracy in China and Iran. Ben Parr of Mashable has a new story posted on CNN about the social web.
According to Parr, “In all three cases — China, Haiti and Iran — social media has had an impact, especially as the course of events evolved. Real-time communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook have spread the word about what’s happening within these nations, long before the mainstream media prints the story. These tools have also created a level awareness we’ve never seen before.”
As of this writing, over $11 million has been raised – just via text messaging – for earthquake relief in Haiti. Google is highlighting ways to help – texting, online payment, or even Google Voice.
Twitter and Facebook are also being used to help raise funds for disaster relief.
Twitter is helping to promote individual country’s roles in the Haitian relief effort. The Israeli Defence Forces spokespersons office created a Twitter account at @IDFatHaiti to showcase that country’s role in helping Haiti..
How are you using social media for social good?