Category / Social Media

by adam

Social Media Is Not Right For Your Business If…

hearnoevil

…you don’t like to listen to your customers.

…your company mantra is “It’s All About the Revenue” and not “It’s All About the Customer (the Revenue Will Follow).”

…your product is known to annoy or frustrate customers, but you don’t really think their gripes are legitimate.

…you don’t like to listen to your employees, and getting employees to change their thinking is impossible.

…you outsource 100% of your marketing, sales and customer service functions.

…you think that you have control over conversations about your brand and products.

…you think that Facebook is a good channel to leverage just because it’s mentioned often in USAToday.

…you think your company should be on Twitter because celebrities are doing it.

…you like to spend a lot of money for slow market research projects that are a single point in time.

…you think it’s a myth how social media can impact the enterprise.

…you could care less about being marginalized by your customers.

…you think SEO is voodoo and has no benefit or correlation to social media. On Cofe Winchester webpage you will get different blogs related to SEO.

…you think your customers are too stupid to come up with real product ideas.

…you don’t think it matters what your competitors are doing.

…you think the content on your website isn’t going to drive sales.

…you don’t believe there are proven applications of social media.

What did I miss?

Photo credit: stuckincustoms via flickr

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by adam

The Intersection of Social Media and CRM

prioritiesAt first glance, it seems obvious.  Customer Relationship Management and leveraging social media to connect and build relationships with customers are related concepts in marketing and business.  The attached slideshare is a great way to simply tie the concepts together.  I especially like the concept of customer Moments of Truth – where they have meaningful interactions with companies.  This presentation also does a good job at bringing together various digital concepts in marketing – paid search for acquisition up through leveraging social media channels for support and education.

My favorite slide that popped out at me is 27 – showing conversation mining for actionable insight.  Quite simply, that’s the single best reason for a brand to leverage monitoring in social media in the first place.  Spotted via Amnesiablog.com.

Telstra – CRM / Social deck

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by adam

5 Twitter Tips You May Not Know

twitterbirdAs Twitter turns the corner on the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and heads full speed ahead into the “Trough of Disillusionment,” I thought I’d share 5 tips that have continued to make Twitter a meaningful, useful tool.  Some of these you may know, some may be new.  This is aside from new features coming like Twitter Lists and the ability to report spammers directly from the web version.  If you know of others I’d love to hear them.

  1. Authorize your API connections. It seems like every other week a new Twitter scam pops up sending DMs on behalf of many unsuspecting users.  Of course you can change your password to protect yourself, but many apps require an authorization for your account.  Be sure to check http://twitter.com/account/connections to make sure everything there is legitimate.
  2. Twitter provides their own widgets. There are apps galore out there, but did you know Twitter has developed their own series of widgets for you to use on websites, blogs and elsewhere? Check out http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets to find widgets to show search results, your recent tweets, or your favorite tweets.  Here’s a quick sample of a search widget, showing scrolling chatter ahead of the 2nd TWTRCON conference coming up on October 22 in DC (want to attend? I have a 20% discount code: TWTRAC – I think the agenda is shaping up to beat the first one in SF earlier this year…) [Reading via feed? Please click through to the post to see the widget.]
  3. twittersearchUse RSS to track mentions. I use Google Reader to keep up with many blogs, but sometimes I miss a reply on Twitter if I haven’t logged in for awhile.  If you want to make sure you never miss a mention, create a simple Twitter search on your Twitter name and grab the RSS feed in the top right corner.  I’ll go through that list on occasion to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but a business could import that feed into a more robust tool for reporting and assigning responses.
  4. Get more use out of your Favorites.  I’ve always thought the “Favorites” function was under-utilized.  I tend tto use favorites most often to mark links to go back to read later, especially while I am on the road and using my Blackberry – sometimes taking the time to click through to links doesn’t help.  Once again Google Reader to the rescue.  Your Twitter Favorites are actually available via RSS as well, even though there is no RSS link on the page.  Here is the syntax:  “http://twitter.com/favorites/{twitter name}.rss” – now I can use them like a bookmarking service, feed them to a widget elsewhere and save them even for sharing with others via Google Reader’s sharing functions.  It’s almost a backdoor way to “retweet.”  Here is my feed, which I use very similarly to how I decide what to bookmark in Delicious:  http://twitter.com/favorites/adamcohen.rss
  5. There’s an app for that. Everyone has their favorite Twitter applications – the proliferation of 3rd party apps is profound.  My personal crutch is Tweetdeck, which has allowed me to create groups in order to more closely follow friends, industry experts and mentions of clients (more casually than a social media monitoring tool).  Rather than go deep on more apps, in the last few weeks one of my favorite microblogging experts, Laura Fitton, has launched One Forty at  http://oneforty.com – it’s the online equivalent of Apple’s App store but much broader – there are mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry and other devices, desktop apps, Twitter analytic services and more.  Integrated to your Twitter profile, oneforty.com allows you to rate and suggest services.  This site will clearly help sort through what the best and worst 3rd party apps are out there.  Laura is a featured speaker at TWTRCON too.

What other Twitter tips do you have to share?  I’ve been using Twitter for more than two years but continue to learn ways to make it an effective tool and build connections. Were these tips old news to you?  (Did you know that Disqus, the comment system which I recently installed here, allows you to authenticate via your Twitter account?  Sweet.)

Photo credit: cotinis via Flickr

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by adam

Google Sidewiki and Implications for Pharma Brands

Download Rosetta's Sidewiki POVGoogle Sidewiki is a perplexing new product from our friends in Mountain View, CA.  Sidewiki requires a toolbar download but enables anyone to comment along side any website.  Here are three key posts that have been helpful to understand it – and I’d highly recommend reading them.

As people try to sort out what this all means, Rosetta’s Search & Media group teamed up with our Healthcare practice to create a quick point of view and some recommended actions.  You can download the PDF here:

Google Sidewiki and Implications for Pharma Brands: Rosetta’s POV

What would you do? This has applications outside of pharma – would this be helpful to your organization?  We hope to keep the document up to date with more information, but in an industry that is highly regulated it’s important to act quickly.

UPDATE: Rosetta’s Chris Boggs also published some thoughts today on Search Engine Watch, providing more discussion about the implications of Sidewiki for SEO.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’m grateful to AdAge for publishing my first post there – Big Pharma and Google Sidewiki: A Sink or Swim Situation? – Please let me know what you think.  Thanks to Rosetta partner Jason Whitney and Search manager Ian Orekondy for helping with the content.

UPDATE: I’ve heard some feedback about issues downloading the PDF from Rosetta.com – so I am attaching the document here for posterity.  Please reach out to me with any concerns.

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by adam

News Flash: Big Brands Can Be Social Too

Companies and brands of all sizes can leverage social technologies to interact one on one with customers. Every interaction is a chance to foster community, build advocacy and change opinions. Many Web2.0 and technology companies are of course eating their own dog food doing this, but can a big, dinosaur, established, brand adapt? The folks at Proctor and Gamble are showing it’s possible – in this case with a brand that’s been around since 1946. Here’s an example of how a large, established consumer brand can be just as nimble as startups and smaller companies.

Awhile ago, I shared my thanks to the inventor of the Tide To Go Pen, who created a product that happened to save me from a serious coffee stain right before a client meeting. I even managed to include a misspelling to make it seem authentic (ok, it was really authentic, I made the typo).

tidetweetI started to receive several replies from other enthusiasts for the product. If you look at the Twitter stream of “Tide pen” mentions people are talking about this product. It’s a useful, customer-centric, problem solving product. But I didn’t think I would garner an individual response from the Tide team at P&G.

Have you met Deb Schultz? I first met Deb at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Dallas last year. She is a talented consultant and social media practioner who recently joined a talented crew at Altimeter Group. Case in point, her recent presentation at the Web2.0 expo entitled, “It’s the People, Stupid” about designing social experiences. Deb has been working with P&G for some time, and contacted me to say thanks for my tweet, and encouraged me to go to getsatisfaction.com to share my praise there. I did.

Too often as consumers we pipe up when we have a bad experience with a product or service, I thought I may as well share some praise.  Via DM, the Tide team also asked for my address.  A week or so later I received a small package from the Tide team, including a sample of the new Tide to Go Mini pen, with a note that read:

tidetogo“Dear Adam,
Thanks for complimenting Tide to Go. We appreciate it! Here is a small thank you gift from the Tide Brand.
– The Tide Team”

Want to talk about designing a social experience? The Tide team gets it – every one of these interactions has the potential to build advocacy, good will and influence more customers than just me. I for one felt compelled to tell a few people about my experience via Twitter at the time and this blog post later one. When was the last time you had that kind of interaction with a big brand?

Kudos to the Tide Team, P&G and Deb – I look forward to seeing more from them. And until there are 100% spillproof cups I’ll keep the Tide to Go pen as a staple in my laptop bag.  Have you had a similar positive experience with a big brand?  Please share your experiences in the comments.

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by adam

The Basics of Social Media ROI

registerToday I sat on a panel at the IBM Websphere Commerce Leadership Summit, with panelists Brant Barton, co-founder of Bazaarvoice, Duke Marr, VP of Product Management at 1-800-Flowers.com, and Stan Payson, VP of Interactive Media at David’s Bridal, moderated by Forrester‘s Sean Corcoran.  The panel was called Answering the Burning Question of Social Commerce ROI. I enjoyed the discussion, especially with the varied perspectives of the participants.  There were lots of lessons learned shared – in particular Duke and Stan had terrific insight at different ends of the social media maturity perspective.  Stan’s company is just getting started, building a strategy, while Duke’s team has a foothold in just about every social and new technology (especially mobile) tactic out there working hard to be first.  1800Flowers.com was the first to do commerce on Facebook, for example.

Some key thoughts about ROI shared on the panel:

  • Measurement and ROI are not the same. Use measurements to calculate ROI (Return on Investment).
  • Practical experience shows that sometimes ROI doesn’t come right away.
  • When just getting started, it’s helpful to be able to attribute web traffic through links shared in social networks, promotion codes, specific landing pages, etc.  But that is just the tip of the iceberg for measuring ROI.
  • Longer term, lifetime value of a customer is a key metric to understand the net results of leveraging advocates.

What’s clear: businesses can measure ROI, they are focused on the long term, and there is much room for education of marketers in this space.  With my mind on ROI I spotted this presentation shared on Twitter today (feed readers may need to click through to the post to read).  Between the panel and the presentation my mind is overflowing with social media ROI goodness.  Yours will be too after going through this – Olivier Blanchard captures the essence of ROI from social media in a humorous, easy-to-understand way.  Worth browsing through.  While you’re figuring out who Olivier Blanchard (aka TheBrandBuilder) is, you may also want to check out his post today debunking social media myths.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

Photo credit: thomashawk via flickr
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by adam

Beware: Not All Social Media Panels Are Equal

bewareYesterday I attended a session entitled the “ROI of Social Media” out here at the Search Engine Strategies conference.  Without naming names, I wanted to share some quick thoughts on the session.  Think of this as a public service announcement.

The panel focused entirely on online display advertising, in particular on Facebook.  The panel was moderated by a Facebook employee.  One of the panel members was from a Facebook application development company.

I have three problems with this panel.

First, Facebook is only one of many tools in social media. If companies think that advertising on Facebook, building a Facebook page, or enabling content to be shared on Facebook easily from a website constitutes “doing social media,” there is a lot more for everyone to learn and teach. SimplyGram is simply the best organic Instagram growth service of 2019.

Second, I’m not so sure it was the right idea to have a platform provider moderate the session.  Aside from more obvious bias concerns, most moderators, through no fault of their own, default to driving questions they know something about to be able to challenge the panel.  At times they can push agendas that benefit them – if that’s the case than an industry analyst may be more appropriate.

Third, ROI means return on investment. It’s quite simply how much you put in (total costs) vs how much you get back.  There are many metrics you can use to calculate both the costs and returns, but they are a subset of all things you can measure.  (Want examples? Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable says it all.)   There is no doubt you can calculate ROI from social media, and there are thousands of metrics you can apply to social media.  The panel, however, talked about using “metrics” interchangeably with “ROI” – that is just incorrect.  For example, measuring page views on your Facebook fan page is not likely going to factor directly in a calculation of ROI.  It’s an important metric to monitor, baseline, trend, etc, but tracking number of referrals from a Facebook page through to conversion on a retail commerce site actually can tie to revenue.  The panel also talked a lot about how to spend money on advertising on social networks, but not much mention about returns.

In summary:

  • Talking about Facebook advertising is NOT social media.
  • Having a presence on Facebook is NOT “doing social media.”
  • Metrics are NOT the same as ROI.
  • It’s a good idea to pick panel moderators and speakers than can provide a balanced viewpoint.

Sounds like we have a lot of work to do to educate folks about what social media is and how to make it into tangible, measureable programs.  Or to just come up with some more on-target panels at the next conference to talk about it.  Are you up for it? Who’s with me?

Photo credit: YaniG via flickr

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