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Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

Time To Evolve How We Target Social Media?

10.09.07

How many times have you read something like this in a digital communications plan?

“One in three of our target audience is using Facebook. So, we recommend creating a Facebook page for this program.”

As social networks become more and more prevalent, we’re at the point now that almost every client brief appears to point, on its surface, to one of a few key networks. As a result, we’re seeing more and more programs based on “insights” like:

Only eight per cent of Canadians in the target demographic are inactive in social media (according to Forrester)
There are more Facebook accounts for Canadians aged 25-34 (according to Facebook’s ad creation tool) than there are Canadians in that age group
We need to reach our target market in the place they inhabit.
Therefore, we should create a Facebook page.

Right there, without any knowledge of the company, the product or the objectives and only minimal knowledge of the target audience, you’ve made a pretty standard case for a Facebook page. Trouble is, these insights are no longer particularly insightful. At this stage of the game, they’re akin to “2.6 million Canadians read the Globe and Mail. Therefore, we should do a traditional media campaign.”

This only leads to a plethora of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and the like – some of which are well targeted, but many of which are not. Let’s face it, most B2C clients are going to target people somewhere in the 18-55 age group. Using just a demographic rationale, you could propose similar social media campaigns for all of them.

I think it’s time to move beyond sheer demographics when we’re planning social media campaigns, and towards more sophisticated analysis. What about:

What are the company’s business and communications objectives?
What behaviour are you trying to motivate?
What are the norms within the different social networks? Do they fit with what you’re trying to achieve?
Would you be better served via mass reach, existing niche communities or your own hosted site?
Do the company’s culture and existing policies lend themselves to social media engagement?
What existing properties do we have that we could leverage?

Let’s move away from generic demographic analysis and towards more sophisticated, critical analysis. For sure, some people are already doing this, but I think we can work to raise the bar.

What do you think?

Posted in: social media, strategy

Tags: audience, social media, strategy

36Comments

Are You Creating Social Media Scorched Earth?

10.08.30

“In too many cases, the “best practices” espoused by digital agencies are less about “serving the community” and more about driving a rush of new fans, without much thought re: how to keep those fans engaged on a LONG-TERM basis.” — Todd Defren

As corporate spending on social media-based communication continues to rise, I’m beginning to worry that many brands are inadvertently adopting a ‘scorched earth’ approach to their online activities.

What do I mean by scorched earth?

When an army advances using a scorched earth approach, it destroys everything behind it as it advances. So, while it gains territory, little remains of the territory it captures. Similarly, many companies are at risk of this when they focus purely on customer acquisition while neglecting engaging their existing fans.

One-shot social media accounts and short-term campaigns-focused approaches may eventually build a fan-base, but unless that is paired with activities aimed at engaging those fans, you’ll lose them. Worse, you’ll not only lose them at the time but you’ll also have to work that much harder to win those people back next time.

This is understandable to an extent, especially in a campaign-focused setup – retention plans aren’t as “glamorous” as new customer-acquisitions. As a result, it’s tempting for marketers to focus their dollars on the latter. You’ve seen this approach – the Twitter account that’s shut down after a month; the big-bang launch that’s forgotten by the next week; the multiple campaign-focused Facebook pages that the company launches and shuts down every year.

Agencies (and savvy corporate communicators) need to resist the urge to take this approach. It can be particularly difficult for agencies, where the client brief may not extend to long-term engagement, but good agencies should give clients the advice they need to hear whether they expect that advice or not. Make sure you dedicate sufficient resources to retaining your fans.

So, next time you’re creating a social media plan, stop and think: are you creating social media scorched earth, or are you engaging for the long term?

Have you seen this pattern, in your organization or with clients?

(Image: Steve Lacy)

Posted in: social media, strategy

Tags: engagement, social media, strategy

38Comments

Four Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Campaign Sucks

10.05.25

Listen; engage; develop.

That’s the three-step approach we recommend companies take when it comes to approaching social media marketing activities for their organization. While you’ll hear nuances in terminology and small differences in approach, you’ll see thought leaders in our industry take a similar approach. Brian Solis, for example, talks about “listening, observing and learning” as the bedrock steps in organizational use of social media in his book “Engage” (which I’m currently reading).

You know what you don’t see anyone recommending? Build, promote, abandon.

However, we’re still seeing social media marketing campaigns built with this implicit process. A few tell-tale signs when we encounter them:

A short-term focus, often manifested in a desire for “disposable properties” and a reluctance to sustain any kind of presence after the end of the campaign.
The desire for campaign-based tactics with no existing presence of any kind.
A one-way broadcasting focus, aiming to blast messages out to the target audience.

Granted, a campaign-based approach can work with specific influencer outreach, but it’s far more effective if the team doing it is able to reach out to those people consistently over a long period of time and hence is able to build a relationship with those people. In general though, the problems with this approach, and the reasons that you don’t hear anyone advocating for it, are four-fold:

1. It takes time or money to attract an audience

Social media tools don’t just let you flip a switch and reach thousands or millions of people. TV, radio and print advertising lets you do that; Facebook, Twitter and blogs don’t.

Social media lets you identify, create and tap into communities of like-minded people. However, this doesn’t happen organically overnight. So, any campaign that starts from scratch and aims for quick results needs to be supported by other forms of media in order to drive people to the social properties in the hope that people engage. This is often counter to the organizational goal of a campaign: driving to a single conversion point, requires resources to be diverted from the primary goal and in doing so reduces the ROI of the campaign.

2. You build an audience, only to throw it away at the end

As I just mentioned, it takes either time or money to build an audience through social media tools. By scrapping the properties you’ve developed at the end of the campaign, you’re throwing all of that investment down the drain. That’s like building an email list then deleting it as soon as you’re done building it.

A much better approach would be to drive people to a long-term property which you can adapt and tailor for short-term purposes, for example a long-term Facebook page or a corporate blog. That way you can foster and continue to engage your community over the long-term, with the benefit of increased loyalty, further conversions and improved perceptions of your brand. What’s more, next time you have an announcement or campaign, you’ll have a pre-established group of people there who have opted-in to receive your updates.

3. Social media is earned media, not paid media

Much of the problem stems from the mindset of the people who often drive the social media bus in corporations. If you think back to our social media marketing ecosystem and Forrester’s breakdown of media types, marketers are often most used to paid media – immediately scaleable and controllable.

Social media isn’t primarily paid media – it’s owned and earned media. Often these lines may blur – you may do interesting things with your owned properties (which are long-term relationship builders) while earning attention in other forms of media with your approach there.

Trying to fit a paid media approach to earned and owned media is akin to trying to saw a plank of wood with a hammer. You’re doing it wrong.

4. It’s one-way, not two-way

These campaign-based approaches still take the old one-way approach to engaging online – do something funny or interesting in the hope that it will “go viral” and reach thousands of people. There’s some value in doing that, but there’s so much more potential to social media that companies really only scratch the surface if they take a purely campaign-based approach to social media.

For example, where’s the potential for business process redesign, product enhancements or customer service improvements in a siloed promotional campaign? There’s very little – which means you’re missing the bigger picture. You can use these tools as one-shot promotional tactics, but you’re missing the forest for the trees if you do so.

Do you agree?

Simply put, campaign-based social media without the basic foundation of an ongoing presence to support it is, more often than not, doomed to fail.

What do you think?

Posted in: marketing, social media, strategy

Tags: marketing, social media, strategy

110Comments

Forrester Outlines Seven Things Your Organization Must Do Because Of Social Media

10.05.12

Forrester analyst Augie Ray posted a list of seven things he recommends organizations do to avoid the recent problems of Nestle and United Airlines. The list makes for interesting reading:

You must be proactive: Nestle knew the palm oil/deforestation issue could blow up, but did nothing about it until it did
You must improve customer support: Poor customer service now has the potential to do widespread damage to your brand. As Ray puts it, “Marketers must view their customer service organizations as a key component in brand-building efforts”
You must listen: It’s becoming more and more important for organizations to monitor online discussions to avoid escalating issues. There’s no risk – if you’re not listening to online conversations about your brand, you’re neglecting your brand
You must participate: You don’t lose control when you participate in online conversations; you gain the opportunity to be heard. What’s more, it’s easier to address an issue on a central property than in a fragmented environment, which you may have to do if you don’t have a place to engage
You must respond: As Ray writes, “how can you ignore damaging accusations that accumulate within your own Facebook group? You can’t; inaction breeds frustration, annoyance and distrust”
You must move faster: Responding to an issue in days risks the accusation of moving slowly. Expectations have shifted, and people expect organizations to respond quickly
You must realize every employee is a marketer: Your employees can affect your brand messages just as much as broadcast messages in traditional media

I encourage you to head on over and check out the post in full.

How does your organization shape up? Are you encouraging your clients to move in this direction?

Posted in: social media

Tags: social media, strategy

48Comments

Evolving the Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.03.08

In January this year I put forward my thoughts on the social media marketing ecosystem in which we operate in 2010. It looked like this:

While this relatively complex model is great to help shape the thinking of organizations wrestling with a plethora of products, it’s also a little complex for organizations without those massive resources. These organizations, which comprise the majority of the market, just don’t have the staff, resources or time to deal with such a complex set of properties.

So, I went back to the drawing board – not to re-think the model, but to boil it down to one simple enough for the majority of people to digest. The result: a simplified model of the social media marketing ecosystem:

All of the complex dynamics within the original system are still accounted for within this simplified diagram, but the framework as a whole is much easier to digest.

In addition to earned, paid and owned media (summarized as “company website” and properties on other sites), this model has an additional sphere on top of Sean Corcoran’s framework, on top of which the original ecosystem model was developed – social networks. This raises the question – should Corcoran’s model have an additional row? What might it look like? (thanks to Joe Thornley for prompting this line of thinking)

It’s a tough call. For one thing, the “social media” row might look a lot like the other rows in many ways; borrowing aspects from owned and earned media in particular. For another, any definition of the role of social media is surely going to be controversial.

I’m a glutton for punishment though, so I put together a starting point – Corcoran’s model, revised with a new row for social media.:

Does social media deserve its own row here, or does its rapid evolution over the past few years simply mean it is intertwined among the other media types in today’s communications environment?

What do you think?

Posted in: communications, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

Tags: communications, ecosystem, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

37Comments

Strategies In The 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.01.19

A few days ago I blogged my thoughts on the shape of the social media marketing ecosystem as we enter 2010. The key aspects of the system from my perspective were:

The lines have truly blurred. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between different forms of communications, especially when considering the online space.
Successful communications programs need to integrate owned, earned and paid media to achieve their goals.
Two-way communication is increasing. Wherever you look, previously one-way information flows are becoming two-way. Mainstream media feed off social media while also driving it. Advertising drives attention but also content strategies.

The line between public relations, advertising or social media is artificial – the overlap between the disciplines is becoming greater and greater. While I doubt the disciplines will ever completely merge, the ‘Venn diagram’ of communications disciplines is moving closer to being a single circle at a rapid pace.

When we talk about integration and lines blurring, it’s easy to head down the thought path that you need to excel at everything. I’d argue it’s not that simple.

Public relations agencies (for example) don’t need to shift to pitch pure-play advertising accounts. However, agencies of all disciplines do need to hire or train people who can think media-agnostically when developing communications strategies. I’d argue they also need to be able to execute the integrated tactics that sit in the grey areas between disciplines. PR firms won’t suddenly start producing TV ads, but they may start to roll online advertising campaigns into their service portfolio.

As always, it comes back to:

What are the objectives?
Who are the key audiences?
What are the key considerations?
How do we best reach those audiences to accomplish the objectives, and how do we measure against that?

Is this new thinking? No. Is the urgency for a shift to integration increasing? Yes. It’s a long road to travel to build those skills-sets, but the need is pressing.

Instead of differentiating by marketing vertical, we may need to approach our strategy from a different perspective – whether we’re marketing our clients or our own agencies. To fail to do so raises the risk of fragmented, ineffective communications and sub-par results.

The question is, what form do those strategies take?

This is a re-post of my first post for the Marketing Profs Daily Fix, where I will now be writing occasionally. To check out the original and, down the road, my other posts there, check out mpdailyfix.com.

Posted in: marketing, pr, public relations, social media, strategy

Tags: ecosystem, marketing, social media, strategy

23Comments

The 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem

10.01.04

Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran recently posted an insightful breakdown of some of the differences between owned media, paid media and earned media. Given the ongoing convergence I’m seeing between different communications disciplines which I’m seeing on a daily basis, this got me thinking.

The thought process ultimately led me to sketch out my take on the social media marketing ecosystem in which corporations operate – shown below.

This is my take on the ecosystem within which the new wave of hybrid marketing agencies like ours need to operate as we enter 2010.

(Update: yes, I know there are no ads on Flickr. It’s illustrative.)

This is pretty complex, so I’ve broken it down into different system elements below. Note though, that the different elements work best when we succeed in breaking out of communications silos and integrating our communications strategies.

A few notes up-front

As complex as this image is, it’s still a drastic over-simplification. There are many more linkages than are displayed; I’ve simplified to the graphic is still readable.
The importance of each social network will vary depending on the organizational context – target markets; objectives, etc.
The ecosystem is constantly changing. A few months down the line, the big four social networks may have changed.
There are many, many other social networks, forums and other sites not directly shown here. They’re grouped into “Other” but may in fact play a significant role in your activities, depending on your company.
This ecosystem is externally-focused. A similar system doubtless exists for corporations’ internal communications.
MSM stands for “mainstream media.”
Each of the different elements can both act as a focal point and/or support other tactics, depending on how they are used within an integrated strategy.
The following sections each filter certain elements from the overall ecosystem above, to provide a simpler view of the owned, paid and earned elements of the system.

Corporate Social Media Ecosystem (Owned Media)

Key elements of the ideal corporate social media ecosystem:

Hub and spoke: Adopts a ‘hub and spoke’ system centred around a corporate social media hub, whose form will depend on the organization.
Tiered hub and spoke: Each social network may have its own hub and spoke system, if necessary. For example, you may have a primary corporate page on Facebook supported by several applications and product-specific pages.
Integrated: The hub is as integrated into the corporate website as possible.
Fewer Microsites: Todd Defren and Maggie Fox both make compelling cases for companies to stop and think before investing in microsites. I agree. They may have their place in this ecosystem, but shifting to a social network or building on top of your flexible social media hub may make more sense.
Mobile is ubiquitous: I considered including mobile as a separate component in the ecosystem, but decided against it. The web is becoming device-agnostic. Companies need to consider mobile content and applications as part of every aspect of their corporate web presence.
Inter-linking: The social media hub links to all external corporate social media properties and profiles.
SEO-powered: Search engine optimization (driven, in part, by social media activities) helps to drive traffic to the corporate website, social media hub and external social media properties and profiles. This goes for both the corporate site and separate properties. SEO could fall into any of these buckets, but for the sake of simplicity I’ve included it in this part of the breakdown.
Two-way flow: The information flow around social media elements is (depending on the organizational context, of course) two way.

Corporate Mainstream Media Ecosystem (Earned Media)

Key elements of the mainstream media portion of the ecosystem:

On and offline: Mainstream media exist both online and offline (many are both). Either way, they can drive significant traffic within the social media marketing ecosystem.
Two-way: Ideally, the information flow with mainstream media is two-way in two ways:
- Earned media drives quality traffic to your properties; your properties can generate stories within the mainstream media (both positive and negative)
- One of your goals should be a constructive dialogue with mainstream media which enables you to achieve your goals while making the journalists’ lives easier.
Multi-destination: Earned media coverage will primarily drive traffic to your corporate site in the short term. However, earned media coverage can raise broader awareness, thus driving traffic to your external properties and social media profiles (especially over time within a sustained media relations program).

Corporate Advertising Ecosystem (Paid Media)

Features of the corporate advertising ecosystem:

Social and non-social: Advertising takes place both within social media sites, but also within other online properties (search engines are a prominent example, as is CPM/CPC advertising on mainstream sites).
Interwoven: While paid online media stands alone within the social media marketing ecosystem (represented here by “SEM,” it is also interwoven throughout many other elements.
Multi-destination: Much of your advertising may drive traffic to your corporate website. However, advertising can also support your social media efforts by raising awareness and driving people to your social media profiles and properties.
Multi-faceted: “Ads” within many social networks can mean many things. Facebook, for example, your advertising activities might extend beyond regular Facebook ads and into “appvertisements.”

Make sense?

Together these different elements combine to form the more complex (yet still simplified) ecosystem displayed at the top of this post.

This is clearly far from complete. I’m curious as to your thoughts – let me know what you think in the comments and let’s refine this together.

Posted in: communications, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

Tags: communications, ecosystem, marketing, pr, public relations, social media, social networks, strategy

319Comments

Six Ways To Silo-Bust Your Communications

09.12.21

We’re into “2010 prediction season, and there are plenty of social media buzzwords being thrown around.” “Real-time,” “location-based,” “convergence” and “augmented reality” are a few that stand out for me.

No silos

I’m going to throw a new one into the mix; one that has been my mantra for a while, and which (I think) should frame your communications strategies for 2010 – if it doesn’t already:

Integration.

Silos suck

If I’ve learned anything from the social media work we’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of this year, it’s that siloed communications strategies rarely work. What good is a Twitter account if no-one knows it’s there? What good are user-generated videos if no-one can share them? If a news release falls in the forest, does anyone hear?

As communicators, we know that message repetition is key to message retention. When it comes to social media – a long-term, relationship-based channel – you have a great opportunity to reach people repeatedly with whatever messages you’re sharing. That goes whether you’re trying to offer a new customer service channel, develop long-term loyalty, gain product feedback, promote new services or whatever your goal is.

Your life as a communicator becomes a lot easier when the public-facing elements of your organization – the public relations, marketing, advertising, IT (where IT handles the website), customer service and (perhaps) social media functions – are pointing in the same direction.

Reality kicks in

It makes intuitive sense, right? Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Almost daily, you can see important campaigns launched without support from other functions and all sorts of similar fragmentation of strategies and tactics which undermine the success of the sizable investment made in them.

It’s not always as easy as it sounds to break out of communications silos. Regardless of the size of your organization (or the nature of the agency relationship) there are likely politics and turf involved. Organizational silos layer on top of the communication silos. In an agency, it can be particularly hard to coordinate with other agencies who, frankly, may wish they were executing some of the work you’re doing. Still, you can be the player that takes the high road and makes the first move to reach out. If you don’t try, you’ll never know.

Here are six simple things you can do to begin to integrate your communications and bust out of your silos:

Where possible, invite people from other communications functions to be in the room when planning your year’s activities. At a minimum, ensure the different functions’ plans are shared.
Plan to coordinate your activities with those of other functions. If there’s a big ad push in Q1, for example, consider whether other functions should push hard then, too. If not, consider how you’ll try to compensate for the lower advertising activity at other times in the year.
Ensure you integrate your messaging with other functions. If there’s an ad campaign focused on a new product feature, it makes sense to use other channels too, rather than focusing on something else, right? Remember – repetition begets retention, and retention leads to results.
Schedule regular update meetings with your colleagues in other departments. If you’re on the agency side, try to meet or talk regularly with other agencies working with your clients. You’ll probably need client buy-in (or even pressure) to make this happen, but it’s worth it.
Next time you launch a contest, product feature or web property, consider well ahead of time whether it could be featured in email blasts, direct mail pieces, advertising creative, news release, speeches etc. Lobby the appropriate people to update your company’s website with links to all of your web properties, and ensure your websites and social media properties link back.
Do what you can to integrate measurement with other functions. If you’re driving traffic to your website, don’t measure click-throughs; measure conversions. If you’re trying to drive foot traffic to stores, see if you can measure that. Don’t limit your measurement to the first level of proxies on the way to your goal.

These are just six simple ways to begin to break out of silos in your communications. There are plenty more out there – what would you add to the list?

Posted in: communications, strategy

Tags: communications, marketings, planning, public relations, strategy

20Comments

Mainstream Media Still Matters

09.10.02

It’s easy to jump on the “mainstream media is dead” bandwagon. Journalists are jumping ship, outlets are fragmenting and readership is, in many cases, down. What’s more, it’s what a lot of the “cool kids” are saying so it must be right… right?

But here’s the thing – your local newspaper still probably has higher readership than your corporate blog… and as for tier one outlets, well, you’re probably not even close to their audience size.

Their audience is still bigger than yours

Mitch Joel recently wrote about the conundrum facing newspapers – more and more people say they will go elsewhere if their favourite news site suddenly introduced fees. Beneath the surface though, there’s a useful point for PR folks. As Todd Defren wrote in a separate post yesterday, “Though the news media still struggles to figure out how to make $$$ from journalism, the audience is present and accounted for.”

You catch that? The audience is present. It’s not as targeted as niche communities, but the reach is there (the reach/niche debate is one for another day).

Long term/short term

Social media is at its best long-term. I believe that; you probably do too. Yes, you might get lucky and get immediate attention but let’s face it, that’s not so likely.

As Dave Jones noted on a recent Inside PR podcast, agencies are fond of telling companies not to worry about social media results now; that in a few years they will – without necessarily having any evidence to back that up. See how your CFO or client reacts when you tell him he needs to wait for a couple of years to see the result from the budget he carved out from other marketing programs to give you.

How will you reach people?

You may have the best social media program possible, but if that’s all you have, how will people find out about it? Devoid of an audience, you run the risk of standing alone in a forest and shouting at the trees.

Depending on your company, you may already have an established visitor base for your corporate website. If so, the weight is off slightly but you’re still not off the hook. Search engine optimization is obviously key, but vaulting up to page one of important search terms isn’t usually a short-term endeavour.

Where does that leave us? With the established audiences of mainstream media – whether you’re buying placement through ads or earning it through media relations.

The definition of mainstream media has broadened (we can now count sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, Daily Kos, HuffPo etc as mainstream) but the old channels still matter.

What do you think?

Posted in: communications, social media, strategy

Tags: communications, pr, public relations, social media, strategy

57Comments

Your Social Media Presence Needs Substance, Not Just Style

09.09.30

“Twitter” isn’t a communications strategy. It isn’t even a social media strategy. As a company, having a Twitter account doesn’t even set you apart from the pack any more.

As social media’s golden-child-of-the-moment heads into the trough of disillusionment, we’re going to see more and more people vocalizing the same thing; Jennifer Leggio said it succinctly today: “I don’t care if your company is on Twitter.”

I’ve argued this for a while, but I’ll argue it again – Twitter (or Facebook, or FriendFeed, or blogging) isn’t a silver bullet for your company.

Plan properly

Instead of wondering how best to use Twitter, try wondering:

“What are we trying to do?”
“Who are we trying to reach?”
“How do we best reach those people to achieve those things?”

Sometimes, the answer to those questions won’t include Twitter. Remember – Twitter is just one tool in your social media toolkit, and social media is just one set of tools in your communications toolkit. There are lots of other options.

Have a purpose

Just having a Twitter presence isn’t enough to make you interesting, either. Thousands of companies do nowadays. It doesn’t set you apart. You need substance to your presence, rather than just style.

Look at the companies we often look to as models of how to approach Twitter successfully – each of them uses the tool to accentuate their USP or to add something new to their communications (over-simplifying here to make a point):

Zappos uses it to shine a spotlight on their great customer service
Molson and Ford solve the problem of being large, potentially faceless brands by putting people and personalities out there
Dell uses Twitter to address a perception of poor customer service, while also putting a face on the company (along with sales generation)

These brands aren’t just there because they should be (in fact, they were on Twitter before it was the golden child) – each of them uses it for a purpose.