Marketing Strategy | a thousand cuts :: adam cohen's blog

Cognitive Bias in Social Media Strategy

A common challenge in the field of marketing is the “everyone’s got an opinion” phenomenon. In other fields like finance or engineering, deeply skilled practitioners do their jobs every day with few “outsiders” questioning their tactics. In marketing, every person has an opinion on whether a tactic, campaign or initiative will resonate, no matter how deeply skilled the marketers are who developed them. Enter the challenge of cognitive bias.

Wikipedia defines cognitive bias as:

A cognitive bias is the human tendency to draw incorrect conclusions in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. Such biases are thought to be a form of “cognitive shortcut”, often based upon rules of thumb, and include errors in statistical judgment, social attribution, and memory.

Marketers don’t have to guess. There are increasingly more data sources and proven tactics to test hypotheses, which is the entire premise behind marketing segmentation (but that’s another story). When a new approach is involved – especially one that can question traditional tactics and measurements – it’s easy for people to apply the same filters on interpreting or judging how successful strategies will be. Social media, and all the technologies that enable two-way and multi-way dialogue with customers, creates that same conundrum for traditional marketers.

Companies need to look at the tools they have at their disposal and leverage them to understand the customer. Web analytics, social media monitoring, feedback, surveys, market research, segmentation, business intelligence, case studies, conventional statistics and studies…There are many inputs that companies can use to determine what makes sense to fuel social strategies that will resonate with their customers in context. The resource that should be least often used (or minimally, avoided as the sole measurement of an idea): what does someone think personally. As a marketer, are you really your own targest customer? Understanding the needs, attitudes and behaviors of customers with respect to social media is necessary to build an educated and insightful hypothesis to try out. You can even collaborate with customers to figure out what may work (imagine that). No one needs to read the tea leaves.

Photo credit: mikesell via flickr

5 Ways Social Media Impacts Consideration

Ask any marketer to draw you a picture of the sales funnel and you’ll get virtually the same picture. There are a number of proposed ways to look at the funnel applied to social media, including a post I wrote last year about the New Marketing Funnel and the new book, Flip the Funnel, from Powered/crayon’s Joseph Jaffe. What’s clear though, is that social media provides definitive means to impacting the “consideration” phase – when a customer makes the leap from awareness of a brand or product to evaluating, before committing to make a purchase. Here are five ways that social media can impact a customer who is considering a purchase.

1. Research

When deciding to make an important purchase, like a car, a cell phone or a home, few people do so without evaluating options and doing some research. You may have a friend who knows a lot about cars. You might start searching online for consumer groups. You might ask your family, neighbors, work colleagues. Social media provides means do do all of the above online, including looking at reviews from perfect strangers. It’s more relevant to look at reviews of products than to trust marketers alone. Allowing user ratings and reviews on your product site, which can be moderated for abuse, can be a very effective way to engage in user generated content without the open-ended risk associated with a platform like Facebook.

2. Validation

Is there any truth to what my neighbor said about that product or service? Or the recall rumor I just heard yesterday? Look at blogs, discuss on Facebook, search on Twitter. Consumers can use social platforms to validate or refute information easily with their social graphs or through searching. With Bing and Google indexing much of those discussions in real time, answers can be found immediately. Separately if you have a perception of a brand (positive or negative), social channels can help validate those thoughts and views.

3. Creating an Emotional Connection

An emotional connection to a product, service or brand can influence purchase behavior. Cause marketing can be an indirect way to build brand loyalty. One of my favorite recent examples is the Chase Community Giving program on Facebook. Personalized stories of real customers can also be a way to build an emotional connection.

4. Creating Touchpoints

How many brand touchpoints and impressions does it take to impact consideration? I’m not sure, but chances are that it’s more than one. An impression or interaction in social media can be measured in a lot of ways, but it takes multiple exposures to a brand to have it be front of mind when a consumer moves from awareness to consideration in the funnel. Sure, no one actually talks about themselves moving from one stage in the funnel to another. But as usage of social media grows, having a presence where consumers are will be a way to foster those impressions in a different way than traditional advertising. Marketing behemoth Proctor & Gamble is exploring Facebook more aggressively for just that reason.

5. Search

The folks at ComScore and GroupM have a great study that shows the impact of social media on branded search – just one way that shows how social media is impacting search. Discussions related to a brand in social networks, discussion boards, forums, and on brand-owned assets will impact search results when a consume starts to look for information. Brands can’t ignore the SEO implications of any content they own – Lee Odden has a great post about tools that can help optimize social content for search.

Think about the last time you moved from awareness to consideration. What influenced you? Did I miss any other way that social media could have impacted your decision process?

Photo credit: cpstorm via flickr

Return on Serendipity

According to Wikipedia, Serendipity “is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.” I’ve found that since engaging on several different social media tools like Twitter, that has happened a lot more often. How about you? “Return on serendipity” really makes no sense – how can you plan to get a return on something that happens by accident?

Last week I attended the Social Business Summit, hosted by the Dachis Group in Austin, TX just before the SXSW Interactive conference. One of the speakers was John Hagel. John is the co-chair of a Silicon Valley research center for Deloitte. One quote stood out for me, and it applies to both individuals and businesses:

You can increase the opportunity to achieve serendipity. What’s your serendipity strategy?

You can put yourself out there. Businesses can establish outposts in social channels, build and foster relationships, and have a presence where customers expect them to be. With the growth of social media tools, and their resulting impact on other digital channels, this will give you more opportunities for people to find you.

Last fall, GroupM and Comscore announced the results of a compelling study on the correlation between social media and paid search. One highlight for me hits home for the digital marketer:

The study…showed a 50 percent click-through-rate (CTR) increase in paid search when sonsumers were exposed to influenced social media and paid search. This revealed consumers exposed to social media are more likely to click on a brand’s paid search ad as compared to those exposed to the brand’s paid search alone.

To me, that’s hard evidence that building a footprint increases the likelihood of serendipity – consumers will find you, perhaps when they were not expecting to. The term “return on serendipity” may be a non sequitor, but there are signs of real, tangible return on making opportunities more likely to happen. Have other examples? I’d love to hear them.

Update: After a little discussion on Twitter I was alerted to this great post by Rachel Happe: 5 Ways to Orchestrate Serendipity. Worth the read.

Photo credit: shashachu via flickr

Chris Brogan – The Serendipity Engine (itc.conversationsnetwork.org)

Why Companies Should Leverage The Community Roundtable

Over the last couple of years I’ve been fortunate to get to know the founders of the Community Roundtable well. Jim Storer and Rachel Happe are two talented community practitioners with tons of experience. When Jim told me about his idea for TheCR (as it’s known in short), I was intrigued from day one. While there are many social media practitioners, blogs and community platform companies to leverage out there, TheCR provides at least two unique differentiators as part of its value proposition:

The Community Roundtable is a peer network of social media practioners and community managers. In essence, TheCR is using community to enhance and better people and businesses who are practicing community management every day. This isn’t social media or community 101, it’s 501. It’s a network for people who practice the discipline daily.
The Community Roundtable is pushing the envelope to advance the field. With their background in organizational design, TheCR team has built a framework of business processes to apply to various stages of community lifecycle. This isn’t (only) for selling community into an organization, it’s aimed at best practices at sustaining and growing them. TheCR is the answer to the question, “You have a community. Now what?”

As companies look at branded and non-branded, public and private, enterprise and customer-facing community platforms and decisions, TheCR provides a highly concentrated armament of resources and network of peers for support. Rosetta, my agency has been a partner from early on due to the complement to our own value proposition, and as Rachel describes it, I’m a self-professed “Cheesehead.”

So it’s not a surprise that Rosetta is pleased to be a sponsor, along with Fuzebox and Powered (another Rosetta partner), of The Community Roundtable’s first annual State of Community Management 2010 report. This 60+ page report, with an introduction from Altimeter Group‘s Jeremiah Owyang, is a tremendous resource that combines the voice of participating members representing “over 180+ years of community management experience” and what the group learned in 2009. It’s an asset to anyone exploring starting or improving their community initatives in 2010.

A Free eBook for Marketers: Learning in 2010

I virtually met Ellen Hoenig Carlson several months ago through Twitter. As I have continued to work on social media initiatives in Rosetta‘s Healthcare practice, Ellen’s blog has continually been a tremendous resource to gain insight on the subtle (and often not so subtle) intricacies of marketing in healthcare and pharma. Ellen reached out to me to be included in her ebook for Pharma marketers, entitled “The Gift of Learning for Pharma and Healthcare Marketers in 2010.” First, I’m very grateful to be able to contribute and be included. But second, my background is more traditional retail and high tech – so it’s great to read the themes from some of the top healthcare social media strategists included. Below are the other contibutors; One of my goals in 2010 is to meet as many of them as possible in person, Ellen included.

Phil Baumann, Phil Baumann online blog, CareVocate Interactive Media Solutions
Wendy Blackburn, ePharma Rx blog, Intouch Solutions
Dave deBronkart, The New Life of e-Patient Dave blog, Society for Participatory Medicine
Angela Dunn, Odom Lewis blog, Executive Search Specialists in Healthcare Marketing/Medical Education
Susannah Fox, Health Research for Pew Internet & American Life Project
Fard Johnmar, Path of the Blue Eye Project, Envision Consultancy
John Mack, Pharma Marketing blog, Editor-in-chief of Pharma Marketing News
Jonathan Richman, Dose of Digital blog, Bridge Worldwide
Marsha Shenk, Thriving Enterprise blog, The Bestwork People
Andrew Spong, STweM blog and Consultancy, UK
Steve Woodruff, Impactiviti blog and Consultancy

Themes the authors wrote about include, from Ellen’s blog summary:

1) e-Patients are at the center and critical to learning and design;

2) Authenticity isn’t a ‘nice to do’, it’s a ‘must’ (and you won’t be the one who decides whether you’ve succeeded);

3) Don’t get distracted by ‘bells and whistles’ – remember the basics and keep your brand core strong;

4) New marketing challenges require new ROI thinking…the ROI of connection, authenticity and compassion;

5) The marketing cycle of life is going through unprecedented change requiring all marketers and communications people to unlearn much – the movement from paid marketing to earned marketing requires a different mindset and skills; and

6) Effective marketing and engagement will require new kinds of leadership skills.

A lot of these themes apply to other industries – so I think it’s a great gift for all marketers. Download a copy of the ebook, share it, and drop by Ellen’s post to let her know what you think. Thanks again Ellen for including me.

Download: Best Strategic Learning Investment in 2010

The Gift of Learning for Pharma and Healthcare Marketers In 2010 (free eBook)

View more documents from Ellen Hoenig Carlson – Advance MarketWoRx.

Social Media in 2010: Getting Smarter

It’s that time of year where the pundits predict the death of brands, the trends of new media and the upcoming changes in marketing. I typically avoid these kinds of posts, but I wanted to weigh in primarily because part of my role at Rosetta next year will be to execute against the predictions. This is going to be a fun year.

My one primary thought about social media in 2010: Social Media Gets Smarter. We’re already seeing evidence of companies using social media more strategically. eMarketer‘s recent post highlights a shift in budget and a growing movement of how companies are leveraging social media in a smarter way. I see social media becoming as sophisticated as more traditional CRM and marketing tactics. I love studies like this one from comScore and GroupM that demonstrate the effect of social media on paid search results (50% increase in CTR on branded paid search for people who had exposure to a brand in social media – that is compelling alone).

The good folks over at Trendspotting have also assembled a list of quick, “Twitter-sized” tidbits on predicting changes in social media in 2010. I am thrilled to be included in their list alongside some excellent predictions from folks who have inspired me in the last few years, including Chris Brogan, David Armano, Paul Gillin, Jason Falls and David Meerman Scott. Marketing Hot Seat contributor Marc Meyer is also included.

Here are my predictions that show up in the presentation. I’d highly suggest the read – Trendspotter did a great job keeping the content in an easily digestible format.

Social media tactics become integrated tools in the relationship marketing arsenal.
Companies struggle adapting processes for customer interaction in marketing, sales, customer service & PR.
Marketing programs focus more on activating brand advocates than general customers.
Social media monitoring industry consolidates and matures, drawing closer to web analytics.

Each of these probably warrant a post on their own. I based my predictions on day to day what I am experiencing in terms of client demand in the social media space, but it’s one digital agency view. What do you think?

2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters, by TrendsSpotting

View more documents from Taly Weiss.

Photo credit: greeblie via Flickr

Marketing Hot Seat: Andrew Davis

A few months ago I had the opportunity to visit the offices of Tipping Point Labs. After some great discussions on Twitter with Andrew Davis, TPL’s Chief Strategy Officer, we agreed to meet and grab lunch to talk further. I quickly learned how smart Andrew is. TPL has a unique perspective on content marketing as a strategic platform to drive business results. I thought Andrew would be a perfect addition and unique perspective to the Marketing Hot Seat, and I was right.

You’re the CMO. You have a marketing budget of $1M. Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage. Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months. What do you do?

The Client: Mimoco

When Adam invited me to participate in The Marketing Hot Seat, I immediately started looking for the perfect ‘client’ to apply our methodology. As Adam specified I needed to find someone who was relatively unknown or early stage, but someone who had enough potential that we could move the dial significantly in twelve months or less. That’s when a friend introduced me to the perfect client: Mimoco.

The Product: Mimobots

: Mimobots- MIMOBOT by Mimoco (Via Flickr)

Mimoco’s line of designer USB thumb drives are a geek’s dream. According to the Mimoco design team they have:

“…Fused the art of contemporary characters with the functionality of personal data storage devices making its name known in both the pop-culture driven Art Toy underground and the savvy high-tech ‘tronic world.”

Mimoco has a series of licensed Mimobots that include Star Wars characters and Hello Kitty (among others) as well as a full line of custom designed ‘bots’ for purchase at their web store. They also sell their products at ‘geek boutiques’ nationwide.

The Opportunity: Geek Chic

Even reading the Wikipedia entry for the term ‘geek chic’ hits home. It’s got all the ingredients for an extremely well-focused, niche-targeted marketing campaign. Extremely successful designers, developers and entrepreneurs fit into the category of ‘geek chic’ including the likes of Zach Klein (founder of College Humor, BustedTees and Vimeo,) the Flight of the Conchords and even comedienne Sarah Silverman.

The Plan: Embrace Chic Geeks

In order for something like Mimobots to generate a million more in sales, we’re going to focus on one, extremely well-connected community: those chic geeks. We must walk like them, talk like them and, most importantly, work with them to make Mimoco relevant in their world. Part of the allure of a brand like Mimobots is that the brand must straddle the divide between mainstream (read sell-out) and exclusive (always cool,) so mass marketing is out of the question. (Just look at what Johnny Cupcakes has built by exploiting this niche.)

The plan:

Strategy – Build a strategy that focuses entirely on the Chic Geek market: the e-commerce platform, a content platform, strategic partnerships and even monthly custom designs by ‘famous chic geeks.’ We’re going to set some goals, build an influence pyramid, find the content opportunities and create an editorial calendar. ($120,000)
Build – We’re going to reinvent the Mimoco e-commerce experience to focus on the designers behind the designs; to tell better product stories and to drive deeper relationships with the geeks we’re going after. We’re going to build a new digital universe and distribute content on channels that geeks adore (channels like Vimeo and Feedly.) ($250,000)
Create – Using our editorial calendar, we’re going to create the best geek chic content on the web. We’ll profile the best of the best, partner with prominent geeks to deliver high-quality content designed to deliver on the brand’s promise. We’ll attend events, produce a weekly podcast, distribute weekly video content, shoot images and write – write a lot. ($300,000)
Measure & Refine - Our strategy will remain intact while our tactics, channels, content and platforms shift. (Gone are the days when you can launch a website and walk away.) With weekly and monthly reports to measure our effectiveness the strategy team will refine the methodology. Perhaps we’ll try exclusive offers like StuffedRobot.com or enhance the post-purchase experience with more geek chic on-device content. ($120,000)
Create More – Invariably, content opportunities, new product development concepts and smart partnerships emerge the more we dive into the strategy. Perhaps something like printing a Geek Chic magazine (yes, we believe in the power of print) that includes a Mimobot with each issue works. With that in mind, the final portion of our budget is dedicated to exploiting those opportunities. ($210,000)

The Outcome: 90 More Sales A Day (On Average)

At the end of the day, our entire strategy will be successful only if we generate about 100 more Mimobot sales everyday (At an average of $30.00/sale). Will it happen overnight with a strategy like ours? No. However, we know that a powerful, underground brand like Mimoco has too much to lose if we grow too fast. With our plan in place, this time next year they’ll be selling 1,000 more Mimobots than they are today (enough to make up for the slow-grow strategy.) Guaranteed.

Let Andrew know what you think of his approach in the comments. Thanks Andrew!

No Amount of Social Media Overcomes Bad Customer Experience

This is not a post to bash AT&T.

I know many folks who have had issues with their network, dropping calls and customer service. I’ve had quite the opposite. Sure I’ve dropped a call occasionally, but I actually switched to AT&T because they were the only service provider that had great coverage when I was traveling to a client in Ann Arbor, MI, years ago. In addition to my Blackberry, I purchased a broadband USB card that has helped me tremendously while I have been on the road. All in all I’ve been a pleased customer for nearly three years.

Where They’re Doing Some Things Well

On the social media side, AT&T has made some compelling strides over the last year plus. For years they have been working with Seth Bloom (who I have met and think very highly of) and they took the leap to put him customer facing representing the company. They have shown a good progression – starting with a Youtube channel and an engaging Facebook page, expanding to listening and customer service directly via Twitter, and making all the help more accessible via a social media landing page. This week AT&T announced a new iPhone app called “Mark That Spot” – it allows customers to indicate when they are in a location with poor 3G coverage – they are listening to customers, and it’s a good start. I’m not sure how many of AT&T’s competitors have made this much effort, frankly. For a recent issue I had, @ATTNatasha reached out to me via Twitter and has been extremely patient, helpful and proactive in working to resolve the issue. Just last week, when Natasha was out of the office, she asked @ATTJason to follow up on another request I had – he was professional, responsive and helpful.

Where The Experience Falls Short

Here’s where my personal experience with AT&T fell down. In September I took a 2-day trip to Toronto, Canada, for a conference. Before I left, I called customer service and asked for recommendations for voice, data and broadband plan changes that would help. I put measures in place for each. When I got back, I had a $6,000 bill. My average monthly bill for all services is $250.

Over the next 6 weeks, I had many calls with Natasha and other customer service reps. AT&T Billing (not Natasha) called me twice to threaten to disconnect my service while the September bill was in dispute. Natasha was able to work out several credits offline through her supervisors, and continued to keep me posted via Twitter. I really enjoyed working with her in this way – I avoided long wait times on the phone. However in the end her supervisors told her that she could credit me only so much, they believe my broadband card was legitimately connected, and still invoiced me for $1300 worth of data and roaming charges in a two day period. I have ample spreadsheets to keep track of the discussions and calculations we went through.

On my last call with Natasha, she delivered the news, and I immediately canceled my broadband service. I already have a Verizon broadband card activated. I am actively shopping for cell phone service. We agreed to disagree on the bill amount but considered the matter closed. Two weeks later AT&T suspended all service to my cell phone and only reactivated after I paid the amount due in full. I felt like I had no other option.

Here’s the point: No amount of interaction through Twitter or other social media outlets could prevent ultimately a bad customer experience and loss of a customer.

In the progression that AT&T has started in social media, a pivotal next step will be to integrate these customer relationships and interactions into their overall business process, with customer feedback being added to the product lifecycle, driving their programs and revamping their overall customer experience. I think I just lived at least a portion of what David Armano and Peter Kim are talking about when they preach “social business design.”

A disclaimer: Was user error involved? Probably – I may have left the broadband card plugged in overnight, which I have since learned is a quick way to rack up usage charges (even if not connected). I definitely did not download however many GB of data they have on record though. Was it worth AT&T to eat more of that cost to keep a long term customer? Apparently not.

Where have you had a bad customer experience? Did the company try to use social media to overcome it? Please no AT&T network bashing comments – there are plenty of other outlets for that.

Photo credit: dwfree1967 via Flickr

The Marketing Hot Seat: Rachel Happe

If you don’t know Rachel Happe yet, you are missing out. I’ve had the sincere pleasure of getting to know Rachel in the local Boston social media scene, and it was clear from my first conversation with her that she knows social media and the power of community unlike most. With a background that includes working as a research manager at IDC and a senior director of social media products at Mzinga, Rachel brings a refreshing, thought-provoking view to what challenges large enterprises are facing with Web 2.0. Before reading her point of view on the Marketing Hot Seat, I’d recommend subscribing to her blog, the Social Organization and taking time to learn more about the business she is building with friend Jim Storer. The Community Roundtable is a tremendous wealth of value-add resources for social media practioners. (My agency, Rosetta, is a big proponent and partner, and I’ve been referred to as a CR Cheesehead – read on and you’ll see Rachel lives what she preaches). I’m grateful that Rachel has offered to weigh in this week on the challenge – please let her know what you think in the comments.

You’re the CMO. You have a marketing budget of $1M. Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage. Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months. What do you do?

Adam has graciously pulled out his marketing wizard wand and given me the role of CMO at an upstart consumer products company – not a likely scenario but fun to play with none-the-less! I’m lucky because I don’t have to deal with a lot of organizational complexity, legacy systems, or legacy structures set up for a vastly different information environment than the one that exists today. And luckily, I understand a bit about what’s changed. The cost of content creation has dropped, the cost of distribution has dropped, and the cost of customer discovery has dropped – all dramatically. That means that my investment will pay off relatively quickly.

My marketing focus is split between two key constituent groups. My first important constituent group is the channel partners who actually sell my product to the end customer. The second key constituent group is the consumers themselves – driving demand from consumers will help me negotiate more and better contracts with my retail partners. My goals for the year are to execute 1 exclusive large partner deal (think Target), 5 mid-size partner deals (regional chains, Zappos.com, etc), and 50 niche retailer contracts. Our channel manager will use our website including a blog, an email newsletter, and trade shows as the primary means of outreach to this audience. All of those touch points will be richly supported with online media from our customers and secondarily supported through our Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube outreach done with our end customers.

On the consumer end, we’ll start with research and capturing user interaction with our product. We’ll give our small team of young enthusiastic media makers the gear to video tape, podcast, and take pictures as they talk to users about their reaction to the product and how they use it. We’ll use that content for regular posting to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter but we’ll also solicit content generated by the users themselves and post that. We’ll also use the research to design two online games – one individual and one team-based – that integrate with Twitter and Facebook. We will use a vendor like Bunchball that makes these games personalized, competitive, and branded. We’ll build a cheap-to-execute but unique version of our product to reward contributors for completing different tasks. Our team of media makers will also be charged with engagement – proactively and reactively interacting with people who are in our target audience and packaging the best of the resulting interactions and media for re-use. We will identify our cheeseheads and promote them.

Roughly, our marketing spend will look like this:

I’m expecting the following unit flow from each type of retailer:
Large = 60,000 units
Medium = 12,000 units
Small = 600 units
The profit from each unit is $9 and if I hit my planned goals, we’ll have $1,350,000 in profit by the end of the year. Covering my marketing costs by a bit but building a great foundation going into the following year.

What an awesome year!

…And what an awesome post, thanks again Rachel. What do you think of her approach?

Photo credit: Jim Storer via Flickr

7 Inputs to a Social Media Strategy

Building a social media strategy is not something that can be whipped together overnight. For context, any company that is looking to develop a strategy for leveraging social media should first check out the POST methodology from Forrester Research. The “People” part of the approach (followed by Objectives, Stategy and Technology) has a short description:

Don’t start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. If you’re targeting college students, use social networks. If you’re reaching out business travelers, consider ratings and reviews. Forrester has great data to help with this, but you can make some estimates on your own. Just don’t start without thinking about it.

This is smart, practical advice. Yet it doesn’t go deep enough. Here are seven inputs that need to be considered before defining objectives and developing a strategy to leverage social media tactics.

Social Media Monitoring. There are many self-service tools out there beyond Twitter search and Google blog search. Two that work well are Radian6 and SM2. No software is perfect, especially when it comes to analyzing sentiment of what customers are saying, but “hunting and pecking” using point-in-time search tools isn’t going to give you the broad array you need. These tools also can review data back in time to compare tone and conversations year over year or before and after a key event like a product launch. It takes time to sift through the chatter, but there are gems in there that constitute unfiltered customer feedback worth paying attention to.

Market research. Survey your customers and ask them what tools they use. If you are a large company, consider leveraging a segmentation that addresses the needs, wants, attitudes and behaviors of your customers. This can be a significant source of insight to drive marketing strategies – not just social marketing ones.

Forrester’s Social Technographics. Forrester has a great tool to stratify how your customers are actually using social media. Do your customers heavily index against the average for Creators or Critics? Perhaps a user-generated content idea or approach would be more suitable. While the tool doesn’t give you the answer of what to do, it does provide some data points that help justify approaches down the road. If you know some basic info about your customers, you can get useful data easily using this tool:

Competitive Analysis. What are your competitors doing? Are you behind the pack or leading by deciding to engage in social technologies to drive your business? It’s important to know where you stand – better yet to know where you want to be.

Stakeholder Interviews. Some tactics in social media will require different departments to work together – perhaps some that aren’t used to collaborating. Talk to the following groups: Marketing, Market Research, Innovation, Product Management, IT, Legal, Customer Service, PR and HR. Chances are they will all have something to say about social media and what they would hope to get from it.

Corporate Objectives. What is your company’s marketing objectives in 2010? Are you undertaking a brand refresh? Have some major product launches teed up in Q2? Any seasonal or cyclical impact to plan around? Don’t think you can develop social tactics without considering what is going on in the company.

Corporate Culture. Does your company thrive on innovation or on chopping down new initiatives? Social media tactics can be measured, effective and game-changing – yet the industry is not as mature of a marketing tactic like pay-per-click search marketing. “Making the leap” requires top down executive support and a bottoms up desire to make initiatives successful from the teams that will own the strategy going forward. (Or fail quickly and learn from it, as I’ve heard Todd Defren say – this space is still new).

Frankly, I don’t see how the rest of the POST methodology – Objectives, Strategy and Technology – can be developed without these inputs. Do you agree? What did I miss?

Photo credit: h-d-k via Flickr

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Marketing Hot Seat: Andrew Davis

The Client: Mimoco

The Product: Mimobots

The Opportunity: Geek Chic

The Plan: Embrace Chic Geeks

The Outcome: 90 More Sales A Day (On Average)

The Marketing Hot Seat: Rachel Happe

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The Client: Mimoco

The Product: Mimobots

The Opportunity: Geek Chic

The Plan: Embrace Chic Geeks

The Outcome: 90 More Sales A Day (On Average)