This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Managing a Community.

Whether you are just beginning to build a social media community, trying to revive one, managing a thriving one or wanting to become part of one, one thing is certain; none of those tasks can be accomplished unless you’ve built strong, solid relationships with the members of the community, both direct members and peripheral members, meaning the general community at large not specifically a niche community.

It takes time to build solid relationships that will help you manage a community.  Those relationships, those bonds of friendship that form, are built on a lot of trust and that just doesn’t happen overnight.  It happens by continually being of value to the other individual.  That value can take many forms, as we discussed in the Four Pillars of Social Media Marketing series, such as giving people content they find valuable, answering their questions, providing special incentive, being consistent with your words & actions and most of all, always saying thank you and you appreciate the other person’s time and contributions.

You can’t build solid relationships with community members by looking at them as another place to put your press release to test market your product or service.  If that’s all you’re into social media for, you might want to rethink your strategy and incorporate these 5 very important steps.

• Be Transparent

  The first thing any marketer needs to do when they are first stepping into any social media environment, whether its YouTube or a niche forum, is be transparent about who you are and why you are there.  If you aren’t honest about your intentions from the get go, you won’t be able to build any relationships, let alone solid ones.  The community is smart, they can smell a fake a mile away and when they uncover your true intentions, there’s no repairing those relationships that have been destroyed.

• Be Consistent with Your Words & Actions

  Everyone on your team and your company needs to be consistent with your messaging.  You can’t have the email team saying one thing and your social media team promoting something totally opposite.  You also can’t have one team offering something and another team saying that offer expired.  That does nothing for your creditability with the communities at large and makes members think your company has no clue what’s going on behind its own doors, and that does little to build the trust you need to build those solid relationships.

• Don’t Blatantly Market to Them

  Resist the temptation to just start pushing your products or services as soon as you step foot in a social media community.  To build solid relationships with key members of social media communities you have to realize that they are there to, first and foremost, share their own experiences.  Second on the list is to gain or acquire knowledge that they might not have had before.  They really don’t want to be marketed to.

• Appreciate Their Time & Contributions

  It takes time to share what people are experiencing.  Whether they write a blog post about it, shoot a video, or take pictures, that is still time the community member could have taken to do something else rather than share their experience with your product or service.  Even if it’s not the experience your company wants to hear about (no one really likes “Bad News”), you still need to be very cognizant of the time they took out of their day to contribute their experience.  They wouldn’t be doing it unless they really cared at some point in time.

• Always Say Thank You

  There’s something to be said for taking the time to say “Thank You”.  There’s even more to be said about taking the time to write one – more on that later next week when we talk about Rewarding a Community.  It takes only a few seconds to post a comment on a picture on a fan page, that a fan uploaded for you to say “Thanks for contributing”, or “really awesome picture, so thankful you share it with us”.  Making sure you thank the community and its members is a very important factor in building a solid relationship with them, not only does it show you appreciate them, it shows you aren’t taking advantage of them either.

Without solid relationships being built within your own community you’ll find it extremely difficult to manage and promote it all on your own.  There is definitely that aspect of “Being Social” to have a successful social media community that is needed.

5 Steps to Building Solid Relationships is a post from: Social Conversations

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This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

We’ve covered some pretty basic concepts that companies and marketers need to consider when they are starting to build a community in social media and I’d like to round out this weeks topic with the importance of Learning the Rules of the Road.  Communities have them for a reason, and if you don’t pay attention to them, you can really find yourself either in a heap of trouble with community members or out in the cold and having no friends or allies to build a community with.

Read the Written Rules

When a community posts its rules for everyone to see and read, they mean it.  You may get lucky if your break one of their written rules once by exclaiming “you didn’t know there were rules”, but if it’s a rule that was put in place because it angers community members and they know you are a marketer, claiming that you “didn’t know” might not be something that saves you.

Over the years admins of communities have been hammered by spammers, and abused by marketers.  For these reasons, a lot of times, this is why the rules are posted.  You might not be allowed to drop a link, you might not be allowed to be promotional, you might not be allowed to use your company’s logo as an icon, you won’t know unless you read the rules first.  The rules can be your friend, they can help guide you through the ins and outs of the community as well as give you subtle queues and hints into the reasons why the rules are there in the first place.  The last thing you want is for your actions to be a reason another rule is written, so read them and use them wisely.

Learn the Unwritten Rules

The unwritten rules, or norms, are a bit trickier to navigate in the beginning.  These rules aren’t written anywhere and the only way you really get to know them is to first, observe and then engage.  The first layer of norms you’ll be able to see when you watch how the community interacts.  Perhaps the community is a bit relaxed and a small bit of vulgarity is acceptable, or it can be a completely professional and conservative community where if you use any remotely vulgar language in your engagement, you’ll find yourself shunned.  That takes observation to figure out.

The second layer of norms that you may encounter isn’t until you actually start engaging.  The way you interact with people can have a whole other set of norms you won’t uncover until you start making friends in the community.  Maybe there are back conversations going on behind what’s posted publicly.  You won’t find that out just by lurking.  Once you start building the relationships you’ll find that the members might converse off the site via IM, or email or the private message system the community offers.  These unwritten norms can be tough to learn and slow going, but in the end are well worth learning to move your efforts forward.

When you learn the rules and use them as a guide, whether they are posted for all to see or you have to figure them out, you’ll be much better off than if you just jumped into the community with both barrels blazing and pissing community members off because you didn’t take the time to respect them or their community rules.

Learning the Rules of the Road is a post from: Social Conversations

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This post is part of a series entitled The Community Building Series.  This week’s topics revolve around Building a Community.

Transparency can have many levels and if you are a company that is planing to send your marketers into social media communities, making sure your companies actions are transparent on all levels is a very important part of building a community.    Building solid relationships built on trust is what makes your efforts continuously success in social media, it’s also what will bolster you up when firestorms hit.

Be Transparent About Who You Are

Let’s face it, in any community, the members are smart.  They are in there day in and day out, conversing, sharing, and experiencing.  They form relationships and can queue in instantly to anything that remotely smells of a fake.  The worst thing any company can do is go into a community and “disguise” themselves as a customer or fan.  The moment you start interjecting that your brand is great, your brand would be a solution, or just automatically start talking about your products, services or company, without establishing yourself first, trust me, the jig is up.

Community member protect their own, whether it’s other members or the integrity of the community itself.  The moment they smell an impostor, they are hot on the trail to dig up who that person is.  In today’s day and age, you might think you are anonymous, but admins in these communities can see your IP address.  An email to the technical team of any social networking site about suspicious activity will send that IT person on a trail to hunt down who you really are.  When that become public – and trust me it will, you won’t ever have another shot with your community again.

This is why its important for the very start off in your community building efforts with being transparent about exactly who you are and don’t try and hide it in covert ways.

Be Transparent About Your Intentions

Right up there with being honest about who you are when you engage with different social media communities is to make sure you are very transparent about your intentions for joining the community.  If you are there to gain a better understanding about what people think about your company, say so.  If you are there to just listen, engage and share, say so.  If you’re there just to hand out coupon codes, make sure you are very upfront about it.

A huge misstep would be to say “hey we’re just here to listen and learn” and then the next week start posting links to your weekly or daily promotions.  That’s one way to piss off a lot of community members really fast.  It’s also the quickest way to a cold shoulder from community members.  Stating your intentions and sticking to them is a very foundational concept that marketers miss a lot of times with all the excitement of implementing their social media tactics.  Once they dig in and see all the possibilities, this totally miss the opportunity to make sure they are transparent about their new intentions and then soon find themselves out in the cold of the community they just joined.

Be Transparent About Changes Within Your Company

When ever change comes to your company and your team knows about it, make sure you are transparent about that too.  The last thing you need is your social media marketing team hung out to dry with a community because they were made to look like they lied about some change that happened within your company that was beyond their control.  When changes happen, your social media team should be one of the first teams to know what’s going on.  Word travels in social media communities faster than you can imagine.   If your team is up front and honest with your chosen social media communities that the changes are coming to your product, services, company or even your employees your foundation of trust grows and your community feels more connected to you.

If they have to find out from another news source, it could look like you are hiding something from them, or worse you lied to them.  Neither of which bode well for you to keep building a solid community.

At the end of the day, trying to trick any social media community or keep information from them is a bad move.  When the truth comes out, you’ll have a worse firestorm on your hands.  At least if you’ve been transparent about who you are, your intentions and anything going on within your company you’ll have more of a fighting chance a building a solid community, one that may actually stand by you when those firestorms hit.

How Transparent Are You? is a post from: Social Conversations

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This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

At the beginning of the week I wrote a piece about Letting Go of Your Ego. Not always the most popular of topics, that I admit. It’s a pretty tough pill to swallow for any C-Suite or senior level management to realize that in Social Media, it’s not all about their company or themselves. That being said, another tough pill to swallow is understanding that the next big idea about your company, it’s products, its services or even how it markets itself might not come from inside your company’s walls. It may very well come from your engagement within social media, that is if you are open to it.

Being Open to Your Audience

When you truly engage with your audience, interact with them, listen to them, ask them questions, the rewards can be plenty.  From ideas for product upgrades, to additions to your services that will make your customers buy more, listening and engaging can lead to so much more.  It can even lead to some really great ideas, even for marketing tactics that appeal to the audience that is really purchasing your products.

Some companies close themselves off to their customers, thinking that the next innovations have to come from their own brain trust.  They think that the people they hired for their marketing efforts will be the best people to know how to speak to the consumer.  While on many levels this still holds true, sometimes its the collaborative efforts of combining the best of your internal teams with those really engaged social community members that can lead to some of the best ways to propel your company forward.

Look At Dell

Dell could be the poster child for understanding that they just might not always have the best ideas, but they didn’t start out that way, it was a process over time.  From their blog where they posted about “Dell Hell” and the exploding batteries, to the Idea Storm community, Dell engages with it’s audience of very engaged consumers. This just isn’t just on their blog, and not just on Idea Storm, but in just about every social media channel they are active in.  By having people like @StefanieatDell engaging in Twitter and not just letting it be a constant RSS stream of their products, they added $6.5 million dollars to their bottom line last year.  Dell’s let go of their ego, Dell is open to listening and engaging with it’s audience and look at the rewards it reaps.

LOFT Listens Too

I can’t take credit for finding this wonderful example of listening, and understanding your community, it totally goes to Mashable, via Cindy Krum (@Suzzicks).  The marketing team at LOFT* really loves their new silk cargo pants.  They posted so on their Facebook Fanpage to all of their over 55k fans.  The problem though came when those photos of the pants they showed were of a rail thin model, who really didn’t look like she’d be the average person who’d shop at an LOFT store.

Thanks to platforms like Facebook, the consumer now has a voice.  Boy, did LOFT fans use it!  The women who were commenting on the new posting were not impressed, in fact many asked LOFT’s staff to actually show those pants on “real women”.  They were not at all convinced that these pants would look right on all women, whether they were tall, short, pear shaped or curvy.

Guess what happened?

LOFT was open enough to its audience it listened and engaged.  It commented back and then they got to work.  They got women of all shapes and sizes from 2 to 12, from sizes 5’3″ to 5’10″ to wear the pants and show the different styles and looks.  When they posted their employees wearing the cargo pants – real women, not models, they got a resounding feedback of “thank you”s and “you’re great”s.  Talk about understanding that sometimes your audience has the better idea!

At the end of the day, being open to new ideas, new concepts is great.  What’s even more valuable in social media and marketing in these communities is being open to the possibility that those ideas come from within the social media communities and not just your company’s four walls.

*Ann Taylor LOFT has changed their name to just LOFT, thanks to Julie from LOFT for stopping by and letting us know about that!

You Don’t Always Have the Best Ideas is a post from: Social Conversations

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This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the third pillar, Engagement.

One of the major advantages of social media is that it can allow free and instant access to pre-built audiences in a wide variety of channels.  The real question is: how do you convert these audiences into brand loyal enthusiasts that will consume your products and services for years to come?

The answer is a 1-2 punch of active participation and opportunity for landing.

Reaching Out Through Participation

The concept of “joining the conversation” is one that’s well-worn in the social media landscape.  In order to become an industry thought leader, it’s important to engage in relevant forums, tweet ups, LinkedIn conversations, and influential blogs.

The Gift of Content

If the conversation is the honey, consider online content the flypaper.  Authoritative content is the gateway to your site.  Don’t feel shy about pointing the link to your content so long as:

1. It is extremely relevant to the conversation and
2. It will be of great service to the audience.

Otherwise, you run the risk of looking too self-serving which will severely hamper your ability to create a following.

Here just a few ways you can build a social media following through valuable content:

• Guest Contributions
  Reach out to well-respected bloggers and key influencers.  Tell them how much you admire their content and offer up your services to write a post or two—even feel free to pitch a couple ideas.  Not only will this allow you the opportunity to receive visibility from your target audience, but also the chance to drive the occasional incoming link or two (remember, rich anchor text and deep within the site).
• Multimedia
  Remember, content is so much more than just articles.  Don’t forget to post optimized video and image content on websites such as YouTube and Flickr.  It’s a great way to introduce your brand in a helpful and informative way.
• Press Releases
  Writing a press release is one of the most powerful ways to utilize offsite content.  A creative and headline grabbing press release is one of the quickest and most effective ways to stir social media interest around your brand.

Don’t Forget: Convert the Traffic!

You’re so close to actually converting social media visits into sales!  The final phase is the conversion—the call-to-action in which you allow the user to take the plunge from casual fan into paying customer.  Make sure your content has attractive offers that don’t impede the quality of the content. Also, be sure to offer at least two conversion points per page.  Additionally, experiment with both soft and hard conversions.  An example of a soft conversion might be “sign up for our free report” whereas a hard conversion is typically more along the lines of a sale.  Varying your conversion points will allow you to accommodate consumers along varying stages of the buy cycle.

Using Content To Extend Your Reach Through Social Media is a post from: Social Conversations

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This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

If you’re aiming to tackle social media monitoring, then finding a suitable tool is simple. A stable of popular products such as Alterian SM2, Radian 6, and Sentiment Metrics offer users the ability to conduct complex searches through millions of historical records. The process generally entails inputting a list of important keywords–some of which are bound together by Boolean operators–and examining the output of records in order to answer questions such as, “which web communities are the most popular for a given keyword?”, and “who are the key influencers in these communities?”.

In theory, the social media monitoring tools provide these answers along with a variety of pretty charts and graphs that further illustrate the point. In practice, however, those of us that are tasked with reporting on this output are occasionally encountered by a sea of unintelligible records in which the charts and graphs are at best, misleading, and at worst, completely erroneous. Every client is different, and the variance between each keyword set can make one project a breeze while another project a burden. If you aren’t experienced in finding coherence within a large data set, you’re likely to be left with a disproportionate number of burden projects. But have no fear, adhering to these five key principles can drastically improve your efficiency and help you fully navigate through a sea of records.

1. Start with the most recent data – Your end goal may be to provide six months of historical data about a product, brand, or a specific subject area, but there may not be a need to immediately query all six months at once. If you’re critical, you’re operating under the assumption that the first set of search terms will need to be tweaked several times before returning acceptable results. By starting with the most recent results, your social media monitoring tool spends less time searching and returns fewer total records. This allows you more time to find negative terms, and more time to find recent relevant records that may warrant new keywords. It has the added bonus of ensuring that the top domains returned are likely to still be active and the sentiment will reflect the most current market perceptions.

2. Branded terms may be your bread and butter – When prioritizing which questions you want to answer through social media monitoring, you should consider that the most specific keywords will often return the most relevant results. Branded terms often offer the kind of keyword specificity that can perform the heavy lifting required to filter irrelevant results. For example, imagine how much more targeted and relevant search results for “Sausage McMuffin” would be instead of results for “Sausage Biscuit”. By leveraging specific branded terms, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend manually filtering spam.

3. Be aware of ambiguous terms – Sometimes, branded terms are not the silver bullet for relevancy.  For example, for every specific car brand such as “Volvo”, “Mercedes-Benz”, or “Lamborghini”, there may be a “Dodge”, “Saturn”, or “Smart”. The latter terms also offer little in the way of negatives that could refine these searches; attempting to create a comprehensive list of negatives can potentially open a can of worms that sucks time away from other valuable areas of investigation. Therefore, if you are trying to gauge the relative volumes of conversation about Volvo versus Dodge, you’re better off comparing specific models such as the “Volvo S40” versus the “Dodge Avenger”.

4. Do not always equate high volume with high influence – When reporting on key influencers, it may be tempting to choose the domain in which a keyword appears the most often. Make sure you consider factors such as multi-channel reach, unique monthly visitors, PageRank, and other factors that may enhance the authority of one domain over another.

5. Show no mercy for Twitter – When searching for short-tail keywords, spammy Twitter feeds can often overcrowd the result pool. The solution to reducing the volume of these results can be to use more complex search terms that reduce the likelihood a result will be returned given then 140 character limit. You may miss some important domains, but you can be confident that the ones returned are more likely to be targeted and relevant. A better way to find important twitter feeds may be to find high value domains that also use twitter to release content and engage their audience.

Social media monitoring is a work in progress, but hopefully these five key principles will help you decide on how to proceed. Surely, semantic analytics will advance by both process and technology, but in the meantime, there is a large enough space for ingenuity in social media monitoring to drive a truck through.

Human Analysis in Social Media Monitoring: 5 Simple Steps to Navigate a Sea of Records is a post from: Social Conversations

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This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media.  This week’s topics revolve around the first pillar, Research.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Help Your Online Marketing Strategies

Buzz monitoring and the tools you need to use to monitor the key words and key phrases that are important to any online marketing strategy whether it’s Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), eMail (yes, it’s still alive and kicking!) and even Affiliate Marketing endeavors are vital to putting your strategies on the right paths to success.  However, where buzz monitoring tools can play a significant, foundational role, is with Social Media Marketing.  Buzz monitoring tools, whether they are your basic entry level tools like Google alerts, or enterprise level, such as Alterian’s SM2 (formerly known as Techrigy) can give you insight into things you would never find just by using a search engine.

That being said, buzz monitoring tools may seem like a god-send for any marketing researching planning or beginning to plan a social media marketing strategy.  However, marketers need to keep in mind, buzz monitoring tools cannot tell you everything.  They certainly can give you the “scent” of the conversation, but there’s a lot anyone can miss if they rely solely on buzz monitoring tools alone to set up their social media strategy, pick marketing tactics and set goals and metrics by.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Give You the Basics

Buzz monitoring tools give you the essential, basic information you need about the conversations swirling around the chosen key words or phrases you are monitoring.  Unfortunately, sometimes even the basics can be misleading, especially when it comes to sentiment.  Unless you have a buzz monitoring tool that allows you to change the dictionary in the sentiment area, you could either be falling down a lot of rabbit holes or worse yet, missing some conversations entirely because your buzz monitoring tool placed the conversations into the “general” or “neutral” area.  Your bare bones buzz monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, don’t even give you the option of sentiment analysis, so when using that tool, you really are at the basics of buzz monitoring.

• They Tell You What
  Any of these buzz monitoring tools will tell you either in a long or brief description, what’s being said around the words or phrases you are choosing to monitor for your strategy.  That’s a basic need of any strategy.  Understanding what’s being said about you, your company or it’s products or services is vital, without it you are pretty much operating in the dark.

• They Tell You When
  Did the conversation happen withing the last 24 hours, or the last month or the past year.  Depending on the tool you use, will depend on how far back your research in buzz monitoring can take you.  Some tools can go back into the databases for as long as they’ve been collecting data.  Others limit you to 90 day, 6 months or a year.  Google alerts will let you go back as far as it has the data, however, that’s very manually intensive work for anyone on your team.  Deciding on how long to look back at is important too.  90 days (or 3 months) can be a relatively short space of time that you won’t be able to see the ebbing and flowing of conversations, on the other hand going back 2years could be too much data and overwhelm your researchers..

• They Tell You Where
  Buzz monitoring tools also give you a vital clue, or a scent / trail to follow by telling you where the conversations are happening.  However, that being said, marketers doing research have to keep in mind, sometimes buzz monitoring tools cannot get into each and every niche forum.  If they are behind a “walled garden”, where usernames and passwords are required, those conversations generally will not come up in the buzz monitoring results.  While buzz monitoring tools can give you a pretty detailed pointer to go and look at a particular thread in a particular community, or a tweet stream, or a Facebook page, no one tool is going to tell you where every conversation that has gone on..

• They Tell You Who
  Finally, buzz monitoring tools can tell you who is talking about you.  For the most part you can at least see the major players in the conversations about the words you are monitoring.  Now they aren’t going to tell you name, address, phone number and email.  However, they will tell you their twitter name, blog URL, avatar/moniker in a forum  and some  tools might even give you an idea of how influential the conversationalist is.  This can help you a lot in your research in deciding how to approach and engage with different individuals.

What Buzz Monitoring Can’t Tell You: How or Why

The missing pieces with buzz monitoring tools is the how and the why conversations are triggered.  How did the buzz about your product get started?  Why did someone feel compelled to share a conversation in a forum?  These questions are also very basic and fundamental pieces of research that should be answered before you pick any online marketing tactic to place in your social media marketing strategy.

Buzz monitoring tools are great at pointing you in the right direction.  Much like a hunting dog aids the hunter, they are indispensable tools you need to get the job done.  Without them, you wouldn’t be able to know the conversations go on at all.  But just as important as knowing Who, What, When & Where is the “How” and the “Why“, and to understand those you need human analysis.  Someone actually needs to go in and perhaps watch or lurk, as well as listen and learn in a community to get a feel why conversations happen they way they do.  They might even need to ask questions of your targeted community’s participants to get a better handle on how they originally found out about your product or service.

In our next series piece on the Research Pillar of the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, Kevin Olson, Serengeti Communications’ research guru, will be explaining how Human Analysis affects the research process for social media marketing.

Buzz Monitoring Tools Can’t Tell You Everything is a post from: Social Conversations

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This week has been a pretty busy one for the team here at Serengeti Communications, especially those of us blogging here at Social Conversations about Social Media Marketing.  On Tuesday both Beth Harte and myself presented at the Social Media Plus conference in downtown Philadelphia.  It was a great conference full of a lot of really insightful presentations and questions from the audience.  Beth and I spoke on two different issues surrounding social media – B2B Marketing and How Search & Social Media Mix.  Then on Wednesday I had an interview with Cover Story on Webmaster Radio talking about our new social media measurement dashboard,  Social Snap, how we at Serengeti Communications approach building strategies for Social Media Marketing and also about my new book, Social Media Marketing:  Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media.

We’d like to share our presentations with you and would love to hear your feedback or questions!

Social Media & Your B2B Marketing Mix

Wondering how social media marketing can fit into your marketing communications efforts for your B2B business? Beth Harte’s presentation gave attendees of Social Media Plus just want they needed to understand planning, expanding, executing and measuring when it comes to Social Media & B2B Business Marketing.

Social Media & Search Marketing, What’s the Link – How Can it Work For You?

Wondering what the link is between Social Media Marketing & Search Marketing? Well at the core, it’s about being found. Liana “Li” Evans’ Social Media Plus presentation gave attendees information about how social media marketing and search are related and tips on how to capitalize on it for their own online marketing and social media marketing success.

Social Media Strategies, Social Media Measuring Dashboards & Social Media Books

In this interview about Social Media Strategies & Tools, Li Evans discusses the release of the Social Media Marketing Book, plus a new social media strategy tool called Social Snap, a dashboard that gives organizations quick insights into the results of their Social Media marketing program in one place. Just hit the “play” button below or “play in popup” to get the podcast started.

Like I said… quite a busy week, but a lot of great conversations about Social Media Marketing!

Conversations About Social Media Marketing is a post from: Social Conversations

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I get a lot of questions about how I approach Social Media Marketing. The team here at Serengeti Communications has a very methodical approach, we like to ensure a solid foundation for every strategy that we put in place for our clients. In doing that there’s four fundamental ideas, or as I call them “Pillars” that help stabilize any efforts taken into social media marketing. As a team here, we decided that we’d like to share some of our experience and knowledge with the 4 Pillars of Social Media in a series throughout the month of June. Each week, we’re going to have 2 to 3 posts on both Social Conversations and on Endless Plain about each week’s Pillar.

• The first week we’ll be discussing the first pillar of social media marketing: Research. Those posts will be published between June 1 and June 4th, 2010
• The second week we’ll be discussing the second pillar of social media marketing: Strategy.  Those posts will be published between June 7th and June 11th, 2010
• The third week we’ll be discussing the third pillar of social media marketing: Engagement. Those posts will be published between June 14th and June 18th, 2010
• The fourth week we’ll be discussing the fourth pillar of social media marketing: Measurement. Those posts will be published between June 21st and June 25th, 2010

We’ve also designed specific training around the 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing, with two areas of specification:  B2B and B2C.   These two types of businesses take rather different views when it comes to each one of these pillars, that’s why the training we provide to our clients addresses the specific needs of these two very distinctly different types of business.

So stop by next week when you’ll get the first edition of our Four Pillars of Social Media based around Research.

The Four Pillars of Social Media Series is a post from: Social Conversations

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Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York on a panel discussing social media and how it works with the marketing mix. I am a firm believer that while mass marketing and communications has driven marketers away from their roots of being “market-centric,” social media is the catalyst that is forcing those roots to be firmly planted again. 

What does ‘Market-Centric’ Mean?  

Typically learned in Marketing 101, the three stages of marketing evolution are usually forgotten by time the next semester starts and it’s definitely ancient history by time students of marketing start their first job. Let’s look at a quick overview: 

• Product orientation: A focus on quality and quantity of output, assuming that customers would see out and buy items that were made well and reasonably priced. Typically demand for goods exceeded supply and finding customers and marketing is a relatively minor function. You could look at this mindset as “We build it, they buy it.” (Late 1800s – on)
• Sales orientation: A developed focus on sales as consumers tightened their belts resulting in less spending. Companies realized that they needed to stimulate sales and to do so they turned to advertising and aggressive sales tactics to move product. The typical management mindset is “If we build it, they will come.”  (1930s – on)
• Market orientation: A recognition that companies had to build what customers wanted to buy instead of what they wanted to make or sell. A market-oriented company is one that understands its market well and doesn’t create product (or services) unless they know there is already a demand. That’s a “market centric” mindset. Management knows “We don’t build it, unless we know they will come.” (1950s-on) 

The problem today, is that a lot of companies are still stuck in the product and sales orientation stages and consumers aren’t even aware of their products or are ignoring their pushy sales/advertising all together. There are many current challenges that this one post won’t answer, but I hope my slides from SES NY will get some wheels turning and demonstrate why companies need to become “market-centric.”

The Marketing Mix: Social media touches every aspect of the marketing mix from product development to pricing to distribution to promotion. But companies need to “listen” to what people are discussing online to take advantage customer and prospect wants/needs. For example “I really like X, but the price is too high.” If a company hears that sentiment more often than not, it’s time to consider your current pricing. 

The Four Ps vs. the Four C’s: For sometime there has been argument that the 4 C’s should replace the 4 P’s in marketing. I think we need a combination of the two in an attempt to balance the need to be market centric and meet market demand, but also to meet the company’s goal and objectives.   

Integrated Marketing & Communications: There seems to be a misnomer that “integrated” marketing and communications is simply about making sure marketing pieces match (i.e. seamless branding and messaging). That is only one part of what IMC is about. The main philosophy of IMC is to be data-driven. Typically, the only data companies could rely on was primary or secondary research or the data that sits in their CRM systems. Usually both don’t really tell you about the unique needs of your customers as individuals. That’s where social media can fill the data gap. Customers act completely different when they are in their “own online space” (i.e. social networks) than when they are being interviewed with questions that are orchestrated internally to either build upon an argument (“See, we proved there is a need for XYZ!”), develop PR (“Survey says…”) or get a pat on the back (customer satisfaction surveys). 

Why Integrate Social Media: Another misperception is that customers interact with marketing pieces (direct mail, email, ads, etc.). They do not. What they do interact with are the brands that they have a relationship with. And now with social media, they don’t only interact with brands but the people that represent those brands. 

Thirty Seconds: That’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention and change their perception or get them to act. By sending mixed messages or messages that are ineffective you’ve wasted those precious seconds and your budget. 

The Problem with Integration: Silos. Companies function with too many silos. This is particularly an issue within marketing. There are too many functional teams, too many separate budgets and too many politics. At the end of the day, customers do not care about your internal silos and pandering to the silos is an ineffective way to do business. 

Five Key Steps to Integration:  

• Identify your customers and prospects
• Estimate the value of your customers
• Plan communication messages and incentives
• Estimate return on customer investment
• Evaluation and future planning               

If you want to learn more about these five key steps, pick up a copy of Don & Heidi Schultz’s book: IMC The Next Generation: Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns Using Marketing Communications. 

Integrated Companies: I selected two B2C companies and one B2B company that I see as doing a great job to integrated social media into their marketing mix. They are Geico, Coldwell Banker and BreakingPoint. Again, it’s not just about cohesive branding/messaging, but listening and evolving.

Is your company market centric? If so, what are the benefits? If not, what are the challenges?

Social Media and the Marketing Mix is a post from: Social Conversations

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