5 ways to tell if your company is really ready to adopt Social Media Marketing
Does this sound familiar? You arrive to the office on a normal, bleary-eyed Monday morning to find an email from one of your company executives. He or she has just returned from a conference where “social media” was the topic du jour. You can almost feel the excitement oozing from this individual as he or she exclaims how your company needs to start doing social media, beginning with a blog you need to ghost write for this awestruck executive.
Once you get over the shock of hearing an executive issue a mandate to do a particular marketing tactic without a solid strategy behind it, you wonder if he or she is really serious. How do you know if the company is truly committed integrating a social media marketing strategy into your overall marketing mix? Well here are some ways to tell if they are truly convinced or if they are just paying lip service to the idea in hopes they have discovered one more new and “untapped” channel through which they can talk at customers instead of with them.
Does your company use social media tools internally?
This may only apply to large corporations, but one way to tell if your company is serious about social media is if they use blogs, forums, wikis, and other collaboration tools internally. For example, do creative teams allow for new designs and ideas to be discussed or critiqued on internal forums? Do organizations cross-collaborate using wikis? These are a couple easy internal ways to test the waters of social media before diving in deep.
Does your IT department limit access to external social media tools?
I know a company—that shall remain nameless but no, it’s not Intel—that so severely restricts their employees’ access to external tools like YouTube and even Google that folks must use a password every time they access the internet. At other companies I’ve heard IT folks are allowing access for “legitimate business use” only. Yet in the age when more and more marketing goes viral, one can’t often discern between a really funny spoof and a corporate-produced video. (for a great example - see this video, a good viral video, but yet another example of a company not quite getting it since they require full registration just to learn more, as lamented by a system admin friend of mine.)
Are you looking to implement social media marketing simply to save money?
Although many social media marketing tools are often less expensive than glossy magazine ads or a 30-second Super Bowl spot, if you are looking to use social media to simply save money chances are likely your program might not be as successful as you hope. Saving money is a nice goal, but social media strategy should be dictated by business goals like minimizing returns by listening to customer product feedback or ensuring brand affinity by engaging with customers more deeply. Pick what you want to accomplish and then look for the best tool to help you meet your mark.
Do executives think social media is just about blogging?
Blogging seems to be the next hot thing just behind email marketing and SEO. Yet blogging—like the others—is merely one tool in your social media toolbox, and it may not even be the most effective one. Help your company by understanding several of the various tools out there and how they can help accomplish your unique objectives. You may skip the blog and go straight to developing an online discussion forum or community. My new motto? Think beyond the blog!
Are you being asked to quantify the ROI of your social media efforts in comparison to other marketing programs or campaigns?
Having spent the past 15 years analyzing the effectiveness of my marketing programs I’m naturally prone to this proclivity. But measuring social media effectiveness requires a new yard stick. No longer are simple page views and clickthroughs enough to know whether your campaign is successful. And because of this, it is like comparing apples to marshmallows when analyzing marketing programs side-by-side. Try instead to measure intangibles like customer engagement with metrics like repeat visits to your website or numbers of invitations forwarded by your engaged customers.
It’s ok to snicker and roll your eyes because, of course, we are all doing social media marketing correctly, right? Yeah right. Many of us still struggle to remember the most effective ways to market to our customers or talk with them. (Here is the full disclaimer that I might, on occassion, be totally guilty of doing some of these things I decry). I guess it’s nice to know we’re not alone. Many companies struggle to implement social or conversational marketing techniques without knowing exactly what they hope to accomplish. They simply figure they’re missing out on something hot if they don’t participate.
So what should you do if your company doesn’t quite get it? Tell them to read the book. I’m referring to Groundswell, my new social media bible written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester. Not only does this book do a great job of tying strategies to effective social media tactics, it provides a much-needed backgrounder on the various elements of social media, or what they call the authors call “the groundswell.” Another piece on my required reading list for folks interested in adopting social media marketing strategies is The Cluetrain Manifesto, a critical reality-check to companies who think they can “control” the messages and media to their advantage.
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Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
word up girl.
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
several good points on this one Kelly. Thanks for referring us to the Cluetrain Manifesto. You’ve given the 3rd reference to this book in about as many months. time to go to Amazon!
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Nice list. This is a marked change from last year when people were still trying to sell upper management on social media. Now we’re trying to keep the bulls out of the china shop
Along with seconding the two previously mentioned books I would also put a plug in for Naked Conversations.
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 8:26 pm
@Tac Anderson
YES!!! I read that book a few months ago. Great read.
Michael
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 9:55 pm
It’s hard to get people to understand the value and the profound changes that new media are creating in our business and personal lives. When people ask me for the ROI of social media, I ask if their company has to justify the ROI of email or LANs or the Internet in their organizations.
Getting people to understand the strategic value of new media is a little harder but they need to understand both the concept of new media as a cluster of innovations, and the value of integrating these innovations into their business. It can’t be viewed as a menu of tactical options where this week we blog and next week we add widgets and the following week we put a video on YouTube and hope it goes viral.
One part of the value proposition is in obtaining two-way real time information about their customers. Another aspect of the strategic value lies in the ability to repurpose this two-way information in ways unimagined. Moreover companies gain a competitive advantage in having their employees develop knowledge and skills sets that can be repurposed under changing business conditions.
–I agree with the book list here and would add “Wikinomics” by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, as well, but do start with Shel Israel’s book first.
-Brenda
Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 6:53 am
As soon as someone says “corporate social media marketing strategy” or other such phrase to denote that a social media program is designed to serve some kind of formally stated, short-term, corporate-wide business goal — that program is doomed.
Attempts to “corporatize” social media miss the point completely — it’s as silly as saying, “We want to have a corporate strategy for the conversations in the hallway and a corporate strategy for the conversations at your family barbecues and a corporate strategy for the conversations you have with your friends when you’re walking from the subway to the office.”
Invariably, the managers and executives who utter such phrases — or worse yet, write them in emails — just don’t get it. Social media is inherently informal. That’s its fundamental strength. Social media is a quick translation of human thought into words, transmitted across the Internet — which, the last time I looked, is a free, open and largely unregulated global platform.
Attempts to throw a lasso around social media won’t work, and people just look foolish when they try. Here’s the real question: Can you bring your corporate marketing programs into alignment with trends and attitudes that you have gleaned or extracted from careful analysis of social media content? Yes, absolutely!
But you have to bring an open, uncritical mind to the process. And you can’t expect some kind of instant, trackable ROI — because that just ain’t gonna happen. At the end of the day, it’s all about sales revenue. If you can leverage the knowledge you extract from social media content — from a segment of the continually expanding universe of social media content — and turn that knowledge into new sales revenue, that’s a brilliant success!
But it’s a whole different animal than the “social media marketing strategy” that a marketing manager tosses into an email.
Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:34 am
@ Brenda,
Thanks for the comment. And I agree–”Wikinomics” is another great read.
@ Mike Barlow - Hey there friend! Well said. I think as a tech company, ours prides itself on its genius product and design engineers. So I often hear statements from folks who wonder why we would listen to the groundswell over our highly-trained professionals.
Clearly companies need to attract top talent who can out innovate competitors on the product front. But listening to conversations customers are having isn’t contrary to that approach. And that’s what many don’t get; that it’s the combination of listening and acting on customer feedback along with great product innovation that will help companies–tech included–stay competitive.
Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:44 am
All but the smallest of companies will have to be engaged in social media to some degree within the next 3 years. As younger consumers continue their inexorable march to power, the importance of “real people” and their online opinions vis a vis your brand will start to outweigh “real journalists” and their opinions.
Consequently, even if you’re just monitoring conversations and occasionally jumping in with a comment from the company, social media will be the new SEO - a must do for every company.
After all, knowing what people are saying about your company is a fairly fundamental business principle. This notion of companies rejecting social media because they don’t want to be ensnared in some sort of controversy ignores the massive benefit of actually knowing what flaws customers see in your operation.
So, even if it’s just to play defense, social media (or at least online reputation management) will become de facto eventually. The SM conferences will be as big as SES, there will be M&A of SM firms. It’ll be deja vu all over again.
Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
good thing the video wasn’t on YouTube, or else I wouldn’t have been able to watch it!
My new mantra: baby steps & education
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Good steps!
Saving money is a nice goal, but social media strategy should be dictated by business goals. Many marketers are unsure of how to approach marketing in the social networks or even if they should approach it. The primary aim of social marketing by its original definition is social good, while in commercial marketing the aim is primarily financial.