Building the Foundation for a successful Social Media Marketing Initiative
August 09, 2010 • by Peter de Gosztonyi • 6 Comments • Categories: lessons learned, social media
I don’t know about you, but this entire social media wave has at times completely overwhelmed me - the pace at which the whole trend is moving and changing is breathtaking. Yet, as a business owner, I know that one can’t ignore this. It certainly is not going away, so you have to get on the train or be left at the station wondering what happened.
Being a very logical and process oriented individual (OK, I admit I am an engineer), I approached this whole social media thing as a logical, one-step-at-a-time, process. I quickly learned that this is not a linear process. At first glance, anarchy and chaos seemed to be a fitting description of the way things happen.
All You Have To Do.
The most frustrating part for me is the constant stream of “all you have to do is …..” recommendations. Even the first step that we seem to hear - set up a “listening post” for your organization or create a Google alert for your key words - is not trivial for the first timer. Unless your key words are so unique that they rarely show up, you can expect to receive thousands of alerts on a daily basis. Similarly, if you are following lots of tweets via Twitter and news feeds (RSS) the volume can quickly become unmanageable. Just finding and setting up a common feed can be confusing, so a good social media advisor is a huge timesaver. If you are under 30 and a digital native, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. However, those of us who are part of the boomer era are techno immigrants – we didn’t grow up with this stuff, so it is sometimes harder to comprehend why one would do certain things. I digress.
A common theme emerges
After a lot of web cruising and reading – blogs and honest-to-goodness books by the thought leaders of our time (Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is one of my favourites) - an underlying theme actually did start to emerge. This is quite a relief to a logical mind, and while this may not be an epiphany to most people, it put everything into context for me.
Essentially your website is the focal point of your marketing efforts; consider it the hub for both social media efforts and traditional marketing as these multiple channels bring interested people to your website. These channels include search engines, links from other sites, and the thousands of mentions of your organization in the mediasphere.
Expect new challenges and requirements
The challenge lies in managing these many channels. It requires discipline and time management to ensure that your day is not totally wasted just monitoring the social media channels to the detriment of your business.
There was a time when all you needed to do was put 90% of your on-line efforts towards making your website work well. Now you should spend 75% of your marketing efforts on building communities of interest and building awareness of your organization in these different spaces. This will bring interested visitors to your website (of course this only leaves 25% to your website tuning). To retain their interest and keep them coming back you will need to build a dynamic, content rich, collaborative web space.
At the moment, the common belief is that a blog is the best means to build relevant content and focus for community engagement. The traditional website will still serve to convert visitors to customers.
This is the foundation that needs to be in place before you really get your social media activities going.
Are you ready to take the social media plunge?
How then do you know if your current website is capable of meeting your social media needs?
Perform an audit. Take a close look at your organizational objectives. Can you tie these into the target metrics that you expect your website to deliver? You will then analyze your visitor behaviour by looking at your web traffic statistics – assuming that you are not already managing your website through critical business metrics. There are a number of other tools such as which websites are linking to yours (backlinks), traffic ranking, and so on, which add competitive information to your arsenal.
These steps will allow you to establish your benchmarks for comparing the impact of your social media efforts on your strategic objectives.
Don’t start from scratch
What is interesting is that you really don’t have to toss out the old and completely redesign your website. After all, a successful organization has built a lot of assets into their websites, and customers recognize that value. It is important to determine what those assets are (e.g. content) and dispose of those that don’t bring value to your customers or to you. Again, a good, comprehensive audit is necessary at the onset.
Your canary in the coal mine
Coal miners in the 20th century would keep a canary with them as they dug. If the canary stopped chirping – usually because they were deceased – this would serve as a sensitive and timely indicator to the miners that deadly gasses were collecting and it was time to evacuate.
Similarly, you need to identify the canary for your mine; the measures you can evaluate to see what is happening with your organization. These are based on your website statistics (total visits, unique visitors, visit duration, number of pages viewed, etc.) as well as other strategic inputs (phone calls, inquiries, new orders, repeat orders, etc.). This is where you and your management team will need to use your intimate knowledge of the business environment, your internal processes, your strengths and weaknesses, and your competitors’ actions to select the relevant measures that are sensitive to the strategic objectives of your organization. These will be identified as your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). You don’t need many, but you need to make sure that the ones you use are precise and relevant to identify trends and patterns – your ‘canary in the coal mine’. This will allow you to quickly identify trends and to undertake further investigation to better understand what is happening.
The most important criteria for any metric – will it result in an action that improves your ROI?
Build the foundation first
Even if you already manage your website this way (congratulations! you would be surprised how many organizations large and small don’t), knowing that your website will deliver is critical in making your marketing efforts worthwhile. This is why an audit and strategy review is an essential first step – even if you are well on your way with your social media plan, it is a smart move to ensure that your website foundation can support your objectives.
A solid foundation will allow you to focus your efforts on the conversations and relationship building activities that will keep visitors coming back.
Peter de Gosztonyi - senior associate with Delta Partners - is a long time quality practitioner and web strategist. His analytic background combined with a ‘customer comes first’ philosophy yields some interesting insights into what drives visitor behaviour on websites. Visit his LinkedIn profile for more information.
Comments
Great post.
One thing I might add is that marketers now have the ability to move interactions off the website and onto platforms like Facebook. In fact, you are starting to see more and more campaigns that funnel people to Facebook instead of a microsite or website. Ford just unveiled the new Escape on Facebook.
Personally, I am not always sure that is the best idea because I wouldn’t like being tied to one platform like Facebook and one that deals with privacy and data collection like it does but it should be on a marketers radar for sure.
But I will also continue to argue that social media isn’t really all that hard because it allows you to be human and I think being successful in social media requires a human touch. All it takes to be human is the will to strip out all the bullsh*t marketers have been thinking is right for the past 100 years.
But you’re right, like any other strategy, it has to be viewed as one and have metrics, etc. associated with it.
By Danny Starr on 2010 08 10
As society gets steamrolled by the avalanche of new social media technology, a number of issues are emerging:
1) The “haves” and “have-nots”, or what could be called the “knows” and “know-nots” when it comes to who is participating in the digital economy. THis is a big challenge for organizations, whether it’s Ford selling cars or the Canada Revenue Agency attempting to inform citizens.
2) Declining attention spans, reduced to those of budgies. Humans can only multi-task to a point (which has big implications for our competitiveness). Given the rapidity of change, the busyness of people’s lives and the growing use of social media to reach consumers, companies need to determine where the value-added lies with their strategies.
3) Getting noticed. This links to #2. Following the maxim of less is more, where do organizations fight their battles for the attention of consumers?
When I entered the wild world of blogging over 18 months ago I became overwhelmed with the massive amount of information and pseudo blogging experts who had the “solution.” It took time, but I sifted out the small number of solid bloggers from the rift-raft. I later desubscribed to dozens of blogs because a) I was hearing the same story over and over again (with the same solutions) and b) I was overloaded with reading.
We are in the infancy in the use of social media technology. Who knows what it will look like five years hence. But one thing is clear, the exponential rise in voluminous amounts of information and the expectation that consumers can absorb it is unsustainable. Something for companies to think about.
By Jim Taggart on 2010 08 10
There was a time when control of information meant power, but when there is too much information or even disinformation, trying to get the gems of wisdom that are useful to the individual is the challenge. Similarly as an organization keeping your message focused and on track is also difficult considering the many places you have to be.
In my day ( aging primate that I am) there were only a few channels and one could easily keep track of what was on them, today there are so many channels that a marketing organization can potentially miss the one where their target customers live, such as FaceBook or the many smaller channels that abound.
That is why a presence in these major channels is required ( assuming that you have done the research that tells you they are even there) but rather than develop material for each channel, a first step is to focus on one conversion place such as a website.
This is an opening strategy and a continuous evolution as both the organization changes and the way your target customer group use social media. Because it is a social medium, authenticity and relevant content do become a currency of sorts, and putting out consistently good material, requires a well laid out plan.
For smaller organizations (even those within a much larger organization) the challenge becomes resources and the recognition that it is important to redirect certain resources to the cause.
Business strategies that work have been around for a long time, what it takes is the ability to recognize which ones apply to you and then adapt them to your organization using social media as the context. Add the human element and perhaps your message will be heard in the right places.
By Peter de Gosztonyi on 2010 08 10
Thanks for sending me this. The Centre for Public Sector Marketing has been the acknowledged leader in Ottawa for social media marketing for close to 2 years. What we have noted is that many organizations who want to move into social media don’t understand that social media is a tactic in a comprehensive marketing strategy . What we find is that most organizations want to develop social media marketing programs and projects with out a marketing strategy .
By Jim Mintz on 2010 08 13
Peter (aging primate that you are)...you made me laugh.
I read your blog again since I have been wondering about the “human element” you referred to. I think you brought it into your post with the “aging primate” comment. And, perhaps I did by referring to it. The link you provided for Trust Agents provides an ebook download which is very informative. A valuable discussion there illustrates just how much the world has changed with all the social media we are assessing and adjusting to. The discussion goes like this, “Understand that the digital natives know who’s there to market and sell, and who’s there to build relationships.” To paraphrase the rest, if we cross the line into pure selling/marketing, this diminishes trust, and the new economy is a Trust Economy which rejects traditional “bomb” marketing methods and relies on “hand-to-hand” relationship building. Thank you for a great post and a valuable link.
By Diane Thompson on 2010 09 03
Thanks Diane, I am glad you can relate .... Using the social aspect of relationships and being “Authentic” to develop those relationships is a balance and avoiding the commercialism of the interchange may seem the proper etiquette but we all have to eat, and sometimes that is not enough to achieve even the basic Maslow’s needs (physiological - eat, Safety - economic security, belonging - community, esteem - thought leader, Self actualization - get on the speaking circuit for 50k a shot)
The bottom line is how can one monitize even partial internet fame? Sometimes just basic selling is necessary, so do it well in the right media ( like a website - e.g. Staples). Chris Brogan chrisbrogan.com is a good example of being a top blogger, but converting that into a living was a challenge, and took time to develop both the expertise and the trust for people to start hiring him as a strategy consultant, the book sure helped. If you go through his many blogs, a theme does emerge that you have to sell and inform and it becomes a fine balancing act if what you sell is not easy to define ( as a management consultant one can relate). Lots of opportunity but never easy to make money without hard work. So one can build lots of relationships, but which ones will provide the payoff? (crude but you gotta eat). That is the challenge of Social Media.
By Peter de Gosztonyi on 2010 09 03