The Social Media Landing Page Phenomenon

northernlightsAs social media channels become outposts for companies, their websites need to keep up.  The big challenge: the two concepts are diametrically opposed.  Build a compelling, optimized website to bring customers (and potential customers) to you, versus establish social media outposts to go where your customers are.  Enter the new art and technique of the Social Media Landing Page (SMLP for short).  The SMLP is a bridge between the two, both to add legitimacy to social channels like a Twitter account but also risking pulling customers away from your website.  Companies who establish these pages are trying to give the subtle hint of “Nah, doesn’t bother me if you leave our domain” with “We want to hear from you.”  Here are three examples of big companies who have integrated their social media presence into their websites.  How do you think they do?

AT&T

Tagline: “Continue the Conversation”

AT&T is in the midst of more press than you can quantify lately for many reasons. Many might not understand the breadth of which AT&T is reaching out to connect with customers via social channels.  Enter the AT&T SMLP.  AT&T is using Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Blogs and even Posterous to build a footprint.  Intregrated into the “About AT&T” page on their domain, it’s easy to find as “Social Media” in the 2nd level navigation.

AT&T Social Media Landing Page

Best Buy

Tagline: “Everyone’s talking”

Best Buy took a slightly different approach.  Their recently launched (still says “new!”) SMLP is called “Community” and can be found at the bottom of their home page.  They showcase how they are leveraging forums, ratings & reviews, Twitter (also via their Twelpforce), blogs and other social media channels throughout.  I like that BestBuy is showcasing their IdeaX community where customers can collaborate on ideas for the company.

bestbuy

Microsoft

Tagline: “What people are saying about Windows 7”

For the recent Windows 7 launch, Microsoft built in conversations directly into the Windows home page on their domain.  Their clicking through to “See what everyone’s saying” brings you to an innovative SMLP that not only shows links to follow the brand’s presence elsewhere but actually aggregates the conversations on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and other social networks.  A customer has to leave the site to participate, just like the others, but right on the page loading in relative real time are actual comments.  This is a great technique but requires a lot of confidence in the product, to say the least.  I’m curious if Microsoft has any automated filtering on the feeds it brings in.  They aren’t filtering for negative comments – one in the screenshot I took was a comment on how “Windows 7 killed my laptop.”

Windows 7 Social Media Landing Page

Of the three here, I like Microsoft’s approach the best – it’s more innovative and interactive to bring conversations and topics directly into the site.  It’s also very easy to find and has a simple URL.  What other SMLPs have you come across?  Are these signs that social media is here to stay?  So many other questions open up for me, including how companies will optimize the pages – to drive followers? To engage in more conversations?  At least they are embracing social media channels head on in their web strategy.

Photo credit: studiolit via Flickr

Gargi also expressed, reluctantly, a lack of

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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The Zen of Advocacy

zenZen is not some kind of excitement, but merely concentration on our usual everyday routine.” – Shunkyu Suzuki

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Myspace. Blogs. YouTube. Community platforms. These are all tools to enable conversation. But that’s it – they are just tools. Having a presence on all of them doesn’t mean they will impact a business.  Stop thinking a Twitter strategy or a Facebook page is going to solve all your marketing challenges.  They won’t.  Instead, think of all of these channels as tools to leverage in order build advocacy.

Advocates, as customers,  are pivotal to growing a brand.  Here are some things that advocates can do for you:

  • Recruit new customers, or ultimately new advocates.
  • Share information with their networks.
  • Come to the defense of a brand in a crisis.
  • Develop new product or marketing ideas.
  • Provide purchase behavior insight and a shortcut to expensive market research initiatives.
  • Influence detractors.

As I talk to clients about social media, the concept of building advocacy gives social media marketing initiatives a purpose.  An advocacy program can arm the best customers with “to-dos,” and all of the available tools in social media give an easy way for them to collaborate and share.  When used effectively, community solutions and other social media outlets – paired with the right strategy – can give advocates meaningful and direct ways to execute all of the above.

I was intrigued by a story on the Wikipedia entry for Zen.  The story was about a martial arts master addressing a student having challenges with other students impacting his technique.  The master took the student to a stream.

“Look at the water,” he instructed. “It does not slam into the rocks and stop out of frustration, but instead flows around them and continues down the stream. Become like the water and you will understand harmony.”
Soon, the student learned to move and flow like the stream, and none of the other students could keep him from executing his techniques.

Imagine if companies treated cultivating advocates the same way the student and master viewed achieving harmony. By sorting through all of noise and focusing on connecting with and empowering advocates, marketers can create programs that have clear business impact – surrounded by the noise and echo chambers of social media.

What are some other benefits of advocates and what companies do you see that are embracing this concept well?  I’d love your input.

photo credit: h-k-d via flickr

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