The presidential campaign in 2008 was a milestone in Social Media history. Where does it go in 2012? As of now President Obama is the clear leader in the race for president in 2012 when we read the emotions of the American people.
In accordance to Overdrive Interactive who managed to accumulate all the data points in the social web, Barack Obama has a higher rank in the US population than all other candidates together. So far so good but what does this really mean?
The world is rapidly shifting to social media integrated advertising. Twitter's Adam Brain explains: "Promoted Tweets offerings are auction-based while Promoted Trends now cost $120,000 per day – up from $25,000 to $30,000 at launch in April 2010"
ZDnet writes: "Great news: Promoted Trends on Twitter now cost only $120,000 per day!
The obviously surprised ZDnet journalist Stephen Chapman writes: "Yes, you read that correctly. The current cost of a Promoted Trend for a day is a whopping $120,000. For added perspective and emphasis, that’s more than the average American will make in 3-4 years… before taxes!
While social media in business is in full swing and many companies are gain a serious competitive advantage – more and more businesses are failing to get any success out of social media. Often times the whole social media engagement is put to bed after a few failed attempts. Quick and dirty social media is no longer working – there is no free lunch. We interviewed a few companies who failed over the last two years:
"We started to create a blog, then a fan page and opened a twitter account. It was pretty motivating for the team and some of our customers actually responded, followed us or liked our page. But now – 12 month later – in retrospect it didn't do anything for us. We are back to email marketing knowing that it doesn't generate great results either but if it brings one new deal per quarter we can at least survive."
"We had a pretty savvy social media consultant come in – at least we thought so – who built a support forum and our blog and website. We invited our customers to join. Several came and it looked like a good start. But after 6 month we just lost momentum and after a year or so we shut down the whole thing. It just didn't work out. We are still trying to find out why some companies are pretty successful and some are not."
"We are still in the middle of the engagement but feel that we will end it. It's a lot of work, takes a lot of time and resources and we just don't see the economic return. We want to help our franchise partners to embrace social media but at the present, we seem to just not be able to figure out how."
"We basically started because some of our larger competitors is pretty engaged as far as our customers told us. We built a fan page, have an agency tweet for us every week and try our best to pick up speed. But after 6 month with no traction we had to replace the social media consultant. The new consultant promised us to help us get more leads but we had to decide to stop her engagement as well. Maybe we should sue those wannabe consultants. We know there is something – but we just can't figure out what and how."
"We are known for successful social media campaigns but at the end we have yet to show real success. We created some campaigns where we sold systems through Twitter by getting a special promo code only ion Twitter. But we could have done that on any media and it didn't have anything to do with social. There was nothing that strengthened customer relationships or brought us social media related incremental revenue. The revenue created through Twitter was below 0.1% of our overall revenue and the campaign was faded out. We lately moved away from random tactical measures and became more strategic and that is where we begin to see real impact."
Not really. There are equally many businesses who are very successful in leveraging social media to grow business, market share, brand reputation, reduce cost and optimize their organization. But there is a major difference: Quick and dirty, trial and error – versus – strategic approach.
If you have a few people do the "social media thing" but the rest of the organization is doing business as usual, what do you expect? Do you think a few people can do the magic and provide 5% increase in revenue to a $100 Million organization – or is able to reduce cost by 5% to make a significant impact on the bottom line? Or do you think that customers are so much more happy because of 3 people tweeting all day long so that the clients start to make references to their business friends and make suggestions in forums, groups and communities? No way.
Social media is now eight years old. LinkedIn started in 2003, Facebook in 2004 and we have 2011. The days where social media was so new and hot that almost anything got people's attention are over. 700 Million social media participants create a noise level that is so high that somebody who is firing up a fan page and hoping somebody will come has just no other way than being ignored unless that someone is creating a robust strategy to engage and create new relationships. Even the largest corporations have a hard time to get fans, followers or any other way of attention. It's time to come to the realization that social media is not about attention creation but about relationship building.
Businesses who don't have a fairly robust engagement strategy will fail – simply because their clients stopped listening long time ago.
1) Invest some time and do a thorough assessment of your brand, your customer presence, your partners and your competitors.
2) Create a social media strategy that clearly describes goals, benefits, resources and actions. Make sure you have a robust strategy framework and not just yet some other tactical thoughts.
3) Develop some initiatives together with your market that will help you and your clients to gain some mutual benefits from the whole strategy.
4) Train your entire team about the social engagement opportunities and ensure that all market facing departments are leveraging social media to improve their respective work
5) Monitor progress and success and continue to work on the relationship process that in turn will help you build ever smarter collaborative initiatives.
Ideally: Pull in a social media strategist who has a 360 degree view of all aspects of social media and is skilled to develop a purpose driven cross functional engagement strategy with you and your clients and partners. As long as you do everything yourself – you are limited to the skills you acquired so far.
Here is a list of skills and capabilities when you are "Selecting a social media strategist"
Today I was pointed to one of your articles on NYT and wanted to comment. But that was not possible, readers apparently can't comment. I liked what I read and so I wanted to at least tweet about it. I learned that I have to be registered to be 'allowed' to tweet the content. As you can imagine, I was quite surprised. There are businesses to pay people to tweet about them and here is a company struggling for growth and making it so hard to interact with. I wanted to connect with you to share my thoughts but couldn't find you anywhere in the social web.
Please understand – this is not a rant about New York Times, or you, or the print media industry. This is about helping your industry to not only survive but grow. I trust your 2011 Annual Report could read quite differently (see below).
It all started with a surprise project in 2008 – I wrote about it on my personal blog and on some public blogs like Customer Think and Social Media Today. And as promised I continue writing about it.
2008 – One morning…
… a small group of sales and service people from Company-Red realized that they could go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups and YouTube and get a list of all the people who were discussing the good, the bad and the ugly about their products. After spending some time and doing some digging, Company-Red realized that this list was basically their customer list with lots of insights about usage, problems, advantages and more. It was a shocking event as the customer list was one of their best guarded secrets – now publicly available to everybody. Of course nobody published the list but customer discus and explore solutions and as such out them as a customer of whatever they use.
2010 was the year were businesses entered the social web. And of course not everything was a good experience. Many just pumped their "message" into what they call "the new channel" hoping that somebody will pick it up. Others were a bit more innovative than that. Our latest experiment with a virtual exhibition and conference generated great results.
The Social Media Academy was exhibiting at Vue2010 this week. We didn't have a lot of time to chat with business friends and others prior of the event about what we are going to do. We also had only three people on the booth as we thought maybe 50 people will actually swing by. But after 5 hours on duty we counted 553 leads, over 200 conversations and 70 who picked up virtual gifts which we gave out.
There are approximately 10,000 webinars going on at any given point in time. Virtual online exhibitions are the next big thing after the physical trade shows – but how do you get your customers and partners to attend?
What was true for your email shots is now true for your webinars. The mass marketing approach is no longer working. Not because you are not a cool company or you have a none attractive product – the reason lays somewhere else. The noise level of 500 Million individuals has finally overshadowed even the largest marketing booster of global enterprises.
So if you are attending or organizing an online event – like we do at Vue2010 you may consider very different measures than just 5 years ago.
Advertising is when one throws something at a mass and hope they listen.
Social media is when many throw something at one and hope that the one is listening.
So it looks like social media and advertising are orthogonal to each other. But since "social" is the way to go, advertising agencies are seeking ways to add social media into their mix. Some try "tweeting for clients", "run social media advertising", "building fan pages"…. but with only little success. More frustrating: those services don't bring the six digit figures like the TV spots or print campaigns of the past.
Absolutely. But certainly not the way Joe Doe Creative Director thinks. Tweeting for clients is the least successful, mostly even counter productive way to bring a client into the social web. Thousands of Fan Pages are dormant URLs after the first enthusiasm is over and haven't done *anything* for the brand. Giving out promo codes in Twitter is not social media but a very traditional way to give out promo codes anywhere – this has nothing to do with social media.
So what can an advertising agency offer?
>>> 'User generated' Chief Marketing Officer<<< was the recommendation of a reader when Heineken announced they will replace their current CMO – the third in a row.
In accordance to a study that was done a few years ago by John Todor Ph.D. an average American adult is confronted with about 4,000 brand messages every day. It's like living near a train station and no longer hearing the train, living near an airport and no longer hearing airplanes, or like living in Gilroy and no longer smell the garlic – we are living in "Advertising Gilroy".
Here is an example how a resort town is using social media to attract tourists *before* they make a decision where they want to spend their vacation next year.
Tourists are much better informed about the destinations they are targeting. Long before they make a decision, they read reviews from other tourists, explore the places on Google Maps, and often times know more about the place than all the travel expert sites together. The glossy brochures have less and less influence. The week of vacation is too precious to just trust advertising.
One resort town decided to make a difference. They wanted to get in touch with tourists long before a decision is made and have a chance to get in touch with the tourist long before arrival. Here is what they decided to do:
1) Social Media Monitoring
The tourist information center was equipped with social media monitoring tools to learn about people asking questions like "has anybody been in XYZ" or "We plan to go to NNN" where NNN is a similar place but not our resort town. We developed a comprehensive set of searches and an internal escalation plan so everybody knows what to do based on the results.
2) Social Relationship Building
They then add the people they find into Xeesm and do two things:
a) Getting in touch with tourist in the social web and develop a relationship.
The team is visiting the tourist a few times, to learn about their optimal place.
Xeesm is the social relationship manager keeping all the contacts and their social profiles in one place.
Also Xeesm helps to keep track of the visits, contact intensity and so forth.
b) Introduce tourists to former visitors
The team then introduces the tourist to former visitors of the town to increase the number of positive suggestions.
Especially if the search is on a competing town it is important to let the tourist know what others think of their place.
In this case Xeesm acts as a database for former tourists and their social sites. So that a virtual introduction does not need to reveal any email addresses but for instance a Facebook URL. That way a tourist can make their own intro, asking the person how they liked the respective place. Introductions are made only to people who are already publicly stating their support of the resort on their fan page.
The tourist center has a young team who reaches out to over hundred people a day and you can already imagine what impact that has. No tourist had ever experienced such a personal touch to a resort or place *before* they even made a decision. Obviously the team is *not selling* but just socializing. The team is not allowed to make any hotel suggestions, give out pricing, promote a place or any other promotional effort unless explicitly asked for. The overall task is to be that friendly guide before the tourist even arrived. Obviously the team was well trained and is equipped with URLs to "show people virtually around". With an outreach team of approximately 100 (most college kids) the tourist center is able to reach over 25,000 tourists a month. After some additional ramp up the goal is to be in touch with a quarter million tourists long before the summer season 2011 even begins.
An interesting aspect to mention is that the whole initiative is all about relationships, personal touch and individual connections. There is no traditional social media marketing like contests, pricing competition or any of the "old world" promotion involved. The cost to the tourist center is primarily hiring the team for an hour or so per day and is distributed to sponsors, mainly resorts and SPAs. But none of the sponsors get access to the people and the people are not getting any advertisement. The reward for the sponsors is to get a fully booked hotel in 2011.
Xee you next year in…. ah ah no selling :)
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