Social Media Communications Strategy

 Robin Gurneyaltex marketingwww.altex.ee

The Hype: Twitter Enters Trough of Disillusionment

2007 Sir Martin Sorrell

Head of WPP, the world's largest marketing and communications group....

Didn’t get it.

Guardian Interview 2007

May 2010: Martin Sorrell Is Learning Too..

“Invading these [social] media with commercial messages might not be the right thing.”

Tubli Martin !

 

Macro Economic Factors

Recession means many companies are seeking:

• Emerging markets - older (rich) people, geo-reach (export).

• Customer insights.• Cost savings.

Are we emerging from the Age of Acquisition?Are we entering the Age of Retention?Can social media help us?

Strategy Isn't About ROIIt's About WINNING

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”  Sun Tzu in The Art of War

•Strategy is not a plan.•Strategy is not a timeline.•Strategy is not a goal.•Strategy is not the tactics you will use to achieve your goal. 

Steps to Defining the Strategy in Your Social

Media Strategy 1. Push for clarity around the overall business strategy2. Push for clarity around the strategies you feel social

media should be in direct alignment with; i.e. marketing, communications, customer service, human resources, etc.

3. Ask yourself, how will you extend this strategic alignment to the social web? *hint, focus on guiding principles or rules of engagement.

4. Ask what experience/reaction do you want people to “take out” when they interact with your brand/company online.

5. Is your strategy proactive or reactive? Will you actively seek people or wait for them to find you/mention you?

Setting ObjectivesIt's a long term game.  Social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick SMART goals. S = SpecificM = MeasurableA = AttainableR = RealisticT = Timely 

But Before You Start...Q & A

• Can and do you track in “actual or near real time” what people are saying about your business, brands, people and industry online? Do you have a dashboard or are feeding all the data into one place?

• Are you really listening to what they are saying and therefore listing and prioritising the issues they care about?

• Have you researched the way your target audience’s live, how they have fun, what motivates them personally and professionally?

• If someone says something bad about you do you step in fast and fix the problem and take steps internally to make sure this/these same problem(s) don’t happen again?

• Do you proactively join in discussions about your business, brands and industry?

• Do follow and participate in ALL the various social media channels your target audiences use?

• You should not hide behind fake or anonymous identities when you do get involved: transparency is a good thing.

• We have written down our policy for social media marketing online and have shared/will share it both with employees and the public.

• Do you just incentivise people to be your friends with special offers etc. e.g. on facebook? Not good. You should want real friends and fans, who can offer the potential for multiple, real, human connections.

• Do you REALLY want to offer your target audiences genuine added value?

• Have you committed enough time and money to create quality content for your audiences?

• Are you aware why people like to share what you say and do online?

• Is it really, really easy for people to share what you say and do online?

• Do you measure, evaluate and tweak your social media marketing programme? How do you measure and evaluate? What goals have you set?

• We have an experienced social media marketing strategist (in-house or agency side) leading our efforts.

• Our PR agency and/or in-house PR are understanding and 100 per cent supportive. They see the value of social media marketing online and want to add value.

• We have people inside our business who live and breathe social media. We listen to and involve them. We recognise our people’s talents.

• Our strategy is not a gimmick, fashion, stunt or simply dictated activity from the boardroom because “we must do something, like our competitors”.

SM Might Not Be For You..Yet

• Don’t “join the conversation” to hit your quarterly numbers.

• Don’t create a Facebook Fan Page if your product sucks.

• Don’t use Twitter if a “student” will post for you.• Don’t engage if you won’t listen and change.

Connecting with customers, partners and employees can drive innovation, decrease cycle time, improve customer service and so on.

It has a transformative power but, like fire, not everyone is ready to wield it without getting burned.

Source - Mashable

Saving Money with Social Training, Ideas, Education

• Building a knowledge base, like a wiki or other collaborative resource center, to avoid having to reinvent and redeploy training materials, and to spread the effort and costs of development across all of the contributors.

• Creating a video library of employee-generated tutorials, tips, and ideas based on common training needs for new employees.

• Building an internal social network or communication platform so that employees can share their best practices and learning on and ongoing basis.

• Looking into attending seminars and events virtually, or curating materials, links and information from backchannel discussions, like on Twitter.

• Hosting organized peer-sharing sessions on Skype to do remote meetings or training sessions

• Deploying an internal UserVoice or other idea capture/voting mechanism to curate ideas for improving business processes, like a virtual suggestion box.

Source

Saving Money with Social: Real Cases

• HP saved $10 million in call centre costs by infusing social listening into customer service.

• Procter & Gamble says nearly half of its innovation is coming from outside the company through forms of social engagement, like its InnoCentive initiative.

• IBM is infusing ongoing real-time social intelligence across the organization for myriad use cases.

Social Media is about business redesign. Source

KODAK Social Media Strategy

Kodak strategy interview

Monitor and Measure (not same thing)

Monitoring is not measuring.People often get confused.

Measuring is how we calculate the results of our monitoring over time against our objectives to test whether we are achieving them.

Measuring is important because tells us if we are having success.

Monitoring Social Media

Monitoring Social Media

What to Measure

• Traffic: remember quality beats quantity.• Interactions/Engagement: forum participation,

downloads, reviews, ratings, newsletter sign ups etc.

• Sales: Dell made $1m sales from Twitter in 18 months.

• Leads: brochures requests, contact/enquiry form fills, Skype chat button activations etc.

• Search marketing: The SEO factor is really important. Good social media footprint means lots of inbound links. Google loves links.

• Brand metrics: Positive brand associations from social media marketing can help drive response to paid search marketing, email marketing, online display ads etc.

• PR: If you can measure PR then you can measure social media. Find out and measuring the sentiment of what people say about you, your brands and your people.

• Customer engagement: By listening and acting you can improve your business, your products, and your levels of service. You can measure the ROI of these actions.

• Retention: Retention rates and repeat orders should increase with positive interactions in social media. But only if you add value – just pushing will see a measurable decrease.

• Cost savings: Recruitment, purchasing, internal communication and other costs can be reduced significantly using social media.

Sources & Resources

• US defence Social Media• iMedia Connection Case Study • Slideshare - Winning the internet way• Slideshare - The Third Industrial Revolution And Pr• Mashable -

The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration• FutureLab - Social Media Case Study: LEGO CLICK• Altitude -

Practical Social Media Measurement: Awareness, Attention, Reach

• Mashable - HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI• SocialSteve - Measuring the Value of Social Media• Slideshare - Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

• Shannon Paul - Social Media and the C Level: It’s Not Them, It’s You

• Lithium lithosphere - Social Graphs: The Art and the Insights• iMedia Connection - 6 experimental social media campaigns• Marketing Profs Social Media• Slideshare - Case Study: The Barack Obama Strategy• Altex’s social media policy

Presentations from Tallinn Blogfest 2010 are shared on Slideshare

Thankyou Need help navigating the social web?

Get in touch.. I should be easy to find on social media..

More Sources & Resources