A lot has changed the five or so years that Out-Smarts has been focused on social media marketing. For a start, most people now know what Facebook is, many are even using it for more than “being social”. Studies show that 60% of all Canadians are using social media and 44% of small to medium sized business decision makers use social media, but are businesses using it the right way to build their online presence strategically? In many cases, they’re not. Here are the top 10 mistakes that companies make when using social media.
1. Not taking social media seriously
There’s over 800 million people using Facebook, and over 200 million Twitter users - not to mention, a similar number of folks on LinkedIn, and yet many businesses still dismiss social media as a flash in the pan. Your business has the potential to take advantage of this massive online hub; ignoring it is a huge folly. You don’t have to start with a presence of your own if you’re not comfortable. Using social media to listen to, and learn from, others in your industry can be a valuable research method, and it is also a great way to get a feel for how social media is used in your sector.
2. Ignore it and hope it will go away
Back in the early nineties when I sold Internet technologies, lots of companies weren’t convinced that the Internet would take off, so they ignored it and hoped it would go away. Many were left scrambling at the last minute to catch up online and some didn’t survive. A hundred or so years ago many naysayers dismissed the phone. The same story is now replaying with regard to social media. Don’t stick your corporate head in the sand – social media isn’t going away and the sooner you accept that, the less risk to your business.
3. It’s only for small business
I’ve read a few articles recently that write off social media off as a tool that’s only useful for small to medium sized businesses. Many large, established businesses use this as an excuse because they have done things the traditional way for so long that they know no other way. However, pioneers like Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines and Ford are proving that social media can be a driving force for larger organisations too, if it’s done right.
4. The Intern can do it
Many organisations get a young intern to maintain their social networks because this person has hundreds of Twitter followers, or is on Facebook all the time. However, just because you are familiar with using these tools socially doesn’t mean you know how to use them for business. I am not saying an intern can’t do it, but you should make sure that they understand your goals, mission, audience, brand and such first, so that they can represent you appropriately online.
5. Failing to consider company strategy
Point 4 leads me nicely to point 5 – not approaching social media from a strategic perspective. Only 8% of companies surveyed in a recent Forrester report are using social media in ways that tie in with their corporate objectives. Again, companies often embark on using social media for the sake of using it rather than using it from a strategic perspective. Before your company sets out on the social media path you should ask – who is your target audience, what is your message, which tools are right for your business given your brand and mission, and how can you use social media to augment your everyday activities. If you do that, your social media efforts are more likely to amount to something.
6. It’s all about you
In the old business world, marketing was all about corporations; all activities centered around the product and service, and not the consumer. Every message had to be vetted – which took time and meant the the company was in control. Many organisations take this approach to social media, and then wonder why they are spending lots of resources but have few results and little return to show for it. They aren’t succeeding because they need to re-engineer their approach. These days, it is not about you, but rather, it’s about your audience and every social touchpoint should reflect that. To be effective in social media you need to focus on your target audience, be able to move faster, and to communicate in the moment before content gets outdated.
7. Blatant selling
This is the biggest faux pas you can make with social media. Never use social media to blatantly sell. It is okay to promote your offering, but in your face selling is off putting. Here at Out-Smarts, we use the 80-20 rule – 80% of our posts are aimed at adding value, and only 20% are promotional.
8. Failing to set goals and objectives
As with any other business function, you should set goals and objectives before you start rather than haphazardly setting up your social shop (as it were). What is it that you hope to achieve? You may want to build community with your target audience, extend your reach to new communities, use social media as a conduit to extend the reach of your content, drive traffic to your website, etc. Whatever your goals are, you should document them, quantify them and make sure that they are achievable.
9. Failure to measure success
Many companies have no idea whether their social media presence is benefiting them or not, nor are they able to respond to what is being said about them online. Once you’ve determined your goals, you should put in place tools that allow you to measure your success and to listen effectively. These might include free tools – for example; for web traffic analysis you can use Google Analytics, to measure your Facebook following use Insights, for Twitter use counters or paid tools like Radian6 that allow you to monitor and measure engagement.
10. Failing to take a holistic business approach.
Up until recently, many businesses have looked on social media as a stand alone approach rather than considering it as a way to complement and augment their entire marketing strategy. 2012 is going to be the year when the penny drops and companies realise that the best social media projects are those that complement their real world activities.
Ever stumbled upon brilliance? It comes when you least expect it, in the most surprising of ways, and at the most useful of times. Such is the brilliance of StumbleUpon. Social media discovery tool StumbleUpon has developed into the internet’s version of PVR, essentially selecting sites and references most applicable to the viewer and recording them in one strongly organized and easy to use location. Recently reaching the 25 billion click mark, StumbleUpon users have grown to appreciate the site’s keen sense of finding what is new, what is interesting, and what is most relevant to them.
Why bother stumbling?
With the amount of material available on the internet, getting access to information that has already been pre-scanned by people of similar interests greatly reduces time wasted on websites of little to no relevance on topics of interest. After all, who can complain when a free internet service is similar to having 20 million personal secretaries pre-select articles based upon your profile?
By employing essentially an open call, or crowdsourcing strategy, in which an undefined set of people are able to contribute information and opinions regarding web searches allows the compilation of more valuable and fresh concepts, ideas, and links. To illustrate, stumblers help one another find hidden gems, pieces of information not easily found using any average search engine. As well, collaborative ratings from fellow stumblers and stumbler friends establish the worth and value of the website in reference to its content, clarity, and helpfulness. When one voice makes a comment, it can only be heard so far, and only be taken so far into consideration. However, when millions of voices combine together, they can be heard around the world, and their collective perspective is then able to demand greater respect and attention. After all, one may not hear an individual’s footsteps, but it is hard to not acknowledge the presence of a stampede. Finally, both new and old companies alike can benefit using StumbleUpon’s services as new traffic can be generated and directed towards their websites, the only downfall being a higher bounce rate. Yet, all traffic can be seen as good traffic as exposure for a website is key to gaining attention and broadening an audience.
In today’s people-driven world, the ability of a website to combine in perfect harmony social behaviour and interaction as well as time effectiveness is a formula which ultimately sets it apart as a website catering to the real needs of the user. Next time you are looking for a little inspiration, don’t be afraid to explore what you just may have stumbled upon.
Every now and then we share with you our social media and internet marketing reasons to be cheerful – a compendium of links to gems we discover online that are interesting, useful or downright wacky. Here are our latest discoveries for your cyber enjoyment.
Diaspora is an interesting concept. Still in beta, it purports to allow you to “share what you want, with whom you want”; you choose exactly who you share your photos and what-not with, and you retain ownership of your stuff. You can sign up for an invite on their website.
If you are a Twitter fan, you should check out Trensdmap which gives you real time local Twitter trends so you can get the scoop on what is happening in your Twitterverse.
CoverItLive is another social media add-on tool. This one is aimed at bloggers – CoverItLive is a tool that allows you to broadcast live commentary to your followers.
Ghostery calls itself a “window into the invisible web” – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on your web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior. It tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
SocialBakers is an online tool providing social media statistics across countries, brands, articles, Twitter and so on. Very handy for internet marketing types.
Empire Avenue is another interesting website, this one lets you grow your social capital (whatever that means). It is actually a social game that lets you buy and sell shares of people online and websites.
And strictly for fun, if you are looking for some new ideas, why not swap some on The Idea Swap – keep swapping until you get an idea you like!
Today and over the next few weeks we will be taking a close look at social media for non profits: we will even share some of our “Social Media Strategy Smarts” specific to this sector with a view to helping you understand how using social media can benefit your organization and help it grow.
Keep It Simple and Achievable
The Out-Smarts mantra for our non profit clients has been “Keep It Simple and Achievable”. Adding social media tools to the strategy of non-profit business is essential in our networked world and tools such as Facebook, email, blogs and twitter are not only cost effective they also encourage a two-way conversation between people and organizations that can effectively increase the momentum and reach of a non-profit - but it has to be manageable given your time and resources.
Good Planning Makes for Good Fortune:
Non profits that focus first on developing a clear strategy are best positioned to succeed with an Social Media program. The first step is to develop a strategy that authentically reflects the organizations strategic goals and vision – whether the aim is to increase fund raising opportunities, engage volunteers or educate the public.
Here are some questions to explore to jump start your Non Profit Social Media strategy:
1. What do you want to accomplish with social media?
Determine how much time you can you allocate to your strategy?
If your Non Profit can answer most of these questions it is clearly ready to step out onto the Social Media stage with your message. Remember keep it simple and achievable. Treat your first steps as experimental. Go easy and record your successes and challenges to share with others.
If you were planning on dating someone met online, you’d want to find out everything you could before committing to a real date. That’s the way it is when choosing a vendor for your business: you want to find out if they have a reputation for breaking (business) hearts or for being dependable.
Using Social Media to Make Good Business Decisions
In 2009 PR Newswire reported that a whopping 86% of recruiters use social media to research candidates and make the right hiring decisions. As business people we can use the same techniques to help us make the right decisions when it comes to determining which businesses to work with or to outsource to. It is important to get the right people on the bus and social media can be a great tool to help you determine whether or not to work with a vendor (or even a potential new client). This blog post is aimed at showing you how.
Bad Date
Social media is a tool for connecting, communicating and building community but it can also be great for research and that is exactly what you should do when making any important entrepreneurial decision. Gone are the days when you had to rely on gut instinct and the assurances of your prospective business partner.
When I meet with a potential client for the first time or talk with a would be vendor or supplier, I always do some due diligence to find out a bit about them in advance but also to make sure that they are who they say they are and that they are the right calibre of business or professional to work with Out-Smarts. I am not being arrogant here but exemplary customer service is paramount and if we make the wrong decisions in the court ship phase of a relationship it can often come back to haunt us down the road and we don’t like doing anything that will jeopardize the standard of our work.
Social Media for Due Diligence
When conducting due diligence like this, the first thing I do, after checking out their website (and especially their testimonials) is to Google the name of the business person in question as well as the company. A Google search can tell you a lot about the person’s personal brand online and will often deliver the pertinent search results you are looking for. But this is all very well and handy when the name is unique (try Googling Mhairi Petrovic – I think I might be the only person on the planet with this name) but the same cannot be said for the John Smiths of the world.
Social Media Research Tools
One way to hone in on the right person to research and find out a bit about them is to use Pipl. Pipl comes in extremely handy if the person in question has a common name because it allows you to narrow it down by place. Pipl is a simple tool which searches the “deep” web for mentions so the results are often quite extensive. Simply enter the first name, last name, city, state and country to start the process. The results that are delivered provide a comprehensive list of mentions across the web with links to the source content so that you can check out the person.
A similar tool to Pipl is Social Mention which provides real time social media search and analysis. Unlike Pipl, which is centred on people, Social Mention delivers search results on any term you choose to enter – this can be an individual’s or company’s name or any word or phrase you want to search for. You can search across blogs, comments, bookmarks and more or you can do a universal search.
Another approach, and one of the best ways to research a business or an individual, is to use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest “professional” social network with over 90 million LinkedIn users worldwide (3m in Canada) as of January and this means that, if you want to find out about a professional or business person there’s a really good chance that there will be on there. There were nearly two billion people searches on LinkedIn in 2010 and over 1 million companies have a presence there. Its search functionality is great but the most beneficial aspect of LinkedIn is that once you have found the right person you can review their professional profile to check out their references and to see if anyone else in your network is connected with them. We humans are social people, if we find that someone we know has given the person or business a good reference on LinkedIn then we are much more likely to trust and work with them.
No Active Presence?
So what happens if you do all this research and fail to come up with any information at all about the vendor or business person? You’ve done your digging but they don’t have a presence online. Well, it’s up to you whether to work with them or not but in my personal opinion, in this day and age if someone isn’t even slightly active online, you have to question their commitment to their business. My advice would be to give them a wide berth.
One last thing to consider is that this is not a one way street: the chances are that the next time you meet with a prospect they will have done their research online as well and this time you or your business is in the spotlight. So, it’s always a good idea to run through the steps outlined above, check out your own profile online and ask yourself – would you do business with you?
Just like find out about someone before going on a first date, do your research and sleuth work in advance before embarking on that first business “date”, it can help you avoid a costly “divorce” or worse in the long run and the tools to allow you to do so are at your fingertips.
In December I read an article in the Vancouver Sun that inspired me. The article, called “How Social Media Have Globalized the Shopping Experience”, related how the writer, Gillian Shaw, simply had to Twitter about her choice for next car and lo and behold she got a response from a GM dealer offering her a test drive. Here’s an excerpt:
My Social Media Experiment
So, I decided to try this out for myself to see whether organisations using social media are actually doing a good job of listening and responding to customers and prospects.
Twitter
First stop Twitter where I decided I would use the tool to plan a ski trip. So I Twittered:
To date I haven’t had a response. I tried a different tact and sent a Tweet to Sun Peaks who were listening to direct messages and did, thankfully, respond:
A few days later I got stuck in an elevator: what a perfect opportunity to see if anyone was listening and could help me. So I posted my dilemma on Facebook and Twitter. Followers we’re listening – I got 2 responses from friends, both in Alberta, both in no position to help me escape!
Facebook
On to Facebook, where I commented on the Marks & Spencer Page about my frustration with their delivery service (more often than not gifts for my family in the UK arrive broken or damaged):
Here was an opportunity for M&S to respond to my concern and to correct it in the public forum, to enhance their customer loyalty but again I had no response. Very disappointing – this year I will find a more reliable supplier and M&S just lost a loyal customer of 20 odd years because they weren’t listening or were choosing to ignore my comments.
Shut Up and Listen
Whilst I might not have the following of a journalist like Gillian Shaw, I do have over 2000 Twitter followers and am very active online – I really expected to get more response to my social media comments.
What is my point here? I have two:
1) Shut Up – First of all companies should realize that we are living in a new world, one where they can and should interact with their customers in these forums to build loyalty and improve customer service. Your audience expects this and not doing so puts you at risk of negative exposure. This is no longer a push to market model where companies bombard their audience with one way messages but a two way street where they can build loyal and valuable relationships with customers and prospects and enhance brand value. Shut up about yourself already and focus instead on your audience and providing value for them.
2) Listen - the first step any company should take when approaching social media is to implement effective listening strategies. Listen to what online communities have to say about your products or services, company, industry and competitors. By doing so you will not only get a feel for what is appropriate (very useful when building your social media strategy) but you will also identify sales opportunities, chances to improve customer service and to build loyalty so that customers keep coming back. Our article Are You Listening? talks about tools you can use to do this effectively.
Conclusion
I look forward to the day when companies stop talking about themselves and start listening to and fulfilling the needs of their audience on social media. There is a vast source of information and opportunity about your company and your market online just waiting for you to tap into it. What are you waiting for? Shut up and listen!
I recently had the opportunity to attend a leadership round table headed up by Judy Bishop of Bishop and Associates. Judy has been a key player on the Vancouver business scene for 20 years and her discussion surrounded building your personal brand.
During the conversation Judy pointed out that “branding” is not a term that should be used in a business context and that it in fact should only relate to cattle or livestock. Its an interesting point and got me thinking about the process we go through as marketers trying to influence our audience. A mistake is often made in focusing on “us” (ie the company, product or service) and not “the audience”.
Taken literally as a verb, using -ing to form the progressive tense: branding, is grammatically correct. However, I think its not the grammar that Judy has a bone of contention with but the implication. Branding implies that we actively seek to make our mark on the audience when in actual fact its not marketers who are in control of our brands but the audience itself. Many marketers fail to recognize this and go about building their brand from the inside out without giving too much thought to the audience who is on the receiving end.
So what has all this got to do with social media I hear you ask. Well, since you asked, I think its vital. You shouldn’t go about using social media as a means “to burn your brand” into the minds of your audience. Social media users are particularly sensitive to manipulation. Rather, look on social media as a great tool for making contact with your audience, to understand them better (what makes them tick)and to allow you to build better products for them. Use it as a tool to build better relationships with them so that they, in turn, build a great perception of your company in their minds and are more likely to turn to you when in need. The best way to do this is to constantly be on the look out for ways that you can help your target audience and add value for them. The key point here is that it is all about them not all about you.
Unlike Judy, I may use the term branding from time to time to categorize the efforts we make as marketers to build awareness but I do see her point. Branding is something that is done to something else – the word implies a lack of respect. Building a brand is all about respect: understanding your audience and catering to their needs. By placing your customer front and centre and catering to their needs not yours, your marketing efforts will be more likely to succeed.
Social media content is a great source of information for research, customer service and planning purposes. Its important to use tools to effectively listen to what is being said about: your company, its products services and representatives; your competitors and clients; your market niche as well as your target geography and other marketing considerations.
With millions of people on-line every day exchanging opinions, thoughts, feedback and other information – this data source shouldnt be ignored.
But how to listen effectively, what to listen for and how to do so in a timely manner? As with any other market research initiative, it is important to have a social media listening strategy or plan that outlines what you are hoping to learn, the information you want to track and how you will analyze and use it.
There are thousands of social networks, millions of blogs, how do you sift through this information to find the gems that are relevant to your company and industry? Its important in advance to know what you want to listen for. Identifying and listening for keywords pertaining to your company name and product or services names is a good start. This allows you to get going with something concise and manageable and get a feel for the type of information you will return.
There are a number of tools available to effectively listen some are free, the obvious one being Google and some charge. If you expect that you will use these tools extensively or if you hit the wall with free tools then you may want to consider the paid options as they provide structured and strategic solutions.
Here are some more specific services:
FREE
Google Alerts – this service sends e-mails outlining Google search result for your keyphrases.
There are a plethora of Twitter tools like Twitter Search, Monitter (my current favourite) and Tweetlater that allow you to monitor for keywords via email or online.
Pipl – great tool for assessing your personal brand online across multiple social networks
