Is Social Media Strategy Required or Redundant?
Posted on 25. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Guy Kawasaki, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media ROI, social media strategy, social media tools, Twitter
I don’t have a problem with Guy Kawasaki. I enjoy his books. His track record in business is substantial. We have friends in common. But on the subject of social media strategy, we disagree in every possible way.
Last month, Guy was interviewed (that happens a lot) in Inc. Magazine about social media, as was asked whether entrepreneurs should hire a consultant and develop a social media strategy. (edit: for clarity, this is the exact question he was asked: “Let’s say an entrepreneur is new to the whole social media thing. There’s a tendency to hire a consultant and formulate a plan. Is that the right approach?”) To which he replied:
No. Just dive in…It’s very difficult to create goals and strategies for something like Google+ or Facebook or Twitter if you’re not familiar with Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
I reject everything about this sentiment, but perhaps most vehemently the notion that you should have a strategy for Google + or Facebook or Twitter per se. There is no such thing as a Twitter strategy. Or a Facebook strategy. Or a Google + strategy. Participation in these (or other) social outposts are tactics used in service of a social media strategy, which in turn is in service of a marketing (and sometimes customer service/retention) strategy, which is one element of an overall business strategy.
The goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business because of social media. Never forget that.
The Pyramid of Social Media Strategy
A Social Media Strategy of Denying You Have a Social Media Strategy
Perhaps the greatest irony here is that Guy Kawasaki actually has a very clear, multi-faceted social media strategy that maps to business outcomes. He advises people to just wing it, while he is doing anything but. Is this a disingenuous misdirection, or a semantic misunderstanding?
Inside the Guy Kawasaki Social Media Strategy
Recently, Kawasaki has embraced Google + as tightly as any non-Google employee on Earth not named Chris Brogan. (I like Google + myself, and believe Google has the leverage to eventually make it a major player. Guy’s new e-book on Google + is doing well, and I admire him sticking to his guns and predicting that the pundits have prematurely written the platform’s obit). I enjoy what Kawasaki does on Google + as his curated links are almost always interesting photos or videos. He clearly understands what is often missed about Google Plus – that it is a multi-media discovery network.
But like most of the popular members of Google +, Kawasaki made his social media bones elsewhere, most notably on Twitter where he has 750,000 followers. Let’s look at that element of the social media strategy.
Each day on Twitter, Kawasaki shares 25-50 links to interesting content on a vast array of topics. He does not interact personally from his @GuyKawasaki account. No replies. No mentions. No thanks. Just link after link after link after link. Unlike most heavy curators on Twitter, however (including me), Kawasaki does not link to source material. Instead, he links to his own Alltop website, where he excerpts the original content and then includes a link for the “rest” of the story. (disclosure: On a couple of occasions, my blog posts have been tweeted from his account)
Each of these Alltop pages include five banner ads. Thus, Kawasaki is directly monetizing his tweeting by running ads on top of content he did not actually create. Whether you agree with its lack of humanization and intellectual property mechanics, if that’s not a social media strategy then the Hunger Games isn’t going to start a youth archery boom in the U.S.
Another mystifying quote from the Inc. interview:
You really can’t spend money on social media unless you really try. Social media is really more about effort than expense.
Firstly, I’m guessing the providers of social media management software (a hundreds of millions of dollars per year industry) would disagree with Kawasaki’s thoughts on this point. I do too, but for a different reason.
As Charlene Li said first, social media isn’t inexpensive, it’s different expensive.
Effort IS expense. Everything in life, business, marketing, and social media has an opportunity cost. All the minutes you spend on social media are minutes you could be spending on something else, and even if your full-time job is social media, there are labor and overhead costs associated with your participation. It’s not an insignificant time investment to do it well, and to give the impression that social media is “free” is reckless and incorrect, like having Lindsay Lohan host SNL.
Social Media Strategy is Easier Without All That Pesky Labor
Perhaps one of the reasons Kawasaki overlooks the effort required to excel at social media is that he hasn’t had to expend as much as the rest of us. Kawasaki has at various times been listed on the Twitter and Google + “recommended followers” lists, which enable you to accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers in short order. But that doesn’t really bother me. Follower counts are overrated anyway, and there’s a lot of people with even more followers whose value to humanity is subject to debate.
Snooki showing her social media "strategy"
To be sure, the links shared on Kawasaki’s Twitter account are uniformly interesting. They scream “click me” and you could easily devote a decent chunk of each day following those links. (in fact, one of our clients – Right This Minute – is a daily TV show and website that takes the same approach but solely with awesome videos). But the thing is, Kawasaki doesn’t find all the great stories he tweets, or write all the excerpts, or even send all the tweets. His Twitter account is ghost-written (at least partially) by professional staffers, and has been for years.
This makes his quote about social media being free even more puzzling. Are these ghost-tweeters working for oxygen and tap water only? If so, I need to talk to the HR Director at Alltop immediately. (disclosure: my managing editor tweets one “greatest hits” post of mine each night from my account)
Social Media Strategy That Actually Has a ROI
I don’t know enough about Guy’s Facebook, blogging, and other social media programs to understand how they fit into the master plan, but I can guess at how the Twitter program supports the business strategy, because it drives direct revenue. We can actually determine the ROI of the Twitter program (which is how you calculate social media ROI – always at the tactic level first. Then, you combine the ROI of each tactic to determine the ROI of the social media program in its entirety).
I am of course guessing at these data points, but here’s how you’d go about the calculations:
Return
- Average of 35 tweets per day x 30 days = 1050 tweets per month.
- Average click-through rate on each Tweet of .2% (what I average) = 1,500 clicks per tweet = 1.575 million clicks per month.
- Average sharing rate of 1% (a bit lower than usual, due to excerpts only) = 15,750 sharing-driven visits = 1,590,750 total visits per month.
- Average pages per visit of 1.25 (what I average) = 1,988,437 pages viewed per month.
- Five ads per page (one is sometimes a self promo, so make it 4.5) = 8,947,968 ad impressions per month.
- Average ad CPM of $2 = $17,894 in gross ad revenue per month from Twitter program.
Total Monthly Return = $17,894
Investment
- 2 half-time employees at average of $3,333/month each + 40% overhead factor = $9,333 per month in direct labor costs.
- 10 hours per month at $500/hour yield rate for Guy’s oversight = $5,000 month in indirect opportunity costs.
- Amortized server/design/admin costs = $2,000/month
Total Monthly Investment = $16,333
ROI (Return minus Investment, divided by Investment) = 9.5%
What do you know? The Guy without the social media strategy may be making almost 10% off of every tweet.
Social media has too much opportunity (and too many pits of real-time quicksand) to just blindly jump into the deep end of the pool. Of course, if you’re only involved in social media personally, these rules don’t apply. My wife – who is on Facebook only to connect with actual friends and family – does not need a social media strategy. But for business? I don’t care if you’re big or small. B2B or B2C. New or old. Enthusiastic or suspicious. You need to know how and why you’re getting involved with social media so that you can rightsize your resources, relationships, and expectations.
A social media strategy allows your company to focus on being social, without worrying as much about doing social media and the tactic du jour. It provides guidance (and math) that help you make better and more effective decisions in the social universe.
To me, it’s worth it.
You?
Crystal Light Challenged Getting Ready For Bikini Season
Posted on 24. Feb, 2012 by Lisa Loeffler in Blog, brand communities, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media case study, social media optimization, social media strategy, Video Marketing
Guest post by Lisa Loeffler, Research & Analysis Lead at Convince & Convert. She is also founder and principal of Genuine Media, a marketing agency that helps clients build their individual and brand reputation through social media.
It started out innocently when I saw Crystal Light’s new TV commercial last month.
After rewinding it a handful of times and rolling in my personal laughter I thought it was funny enough to share. I grabbed the footage on my iPhone and loaded it up on YouTube.
Watch the video now to follow along on this post.
Like many other social media marketers you need to know a bit about SEO. And after loading the video to my YouTube channel I ran through my mental check list to optimize the title, description, tags etc. I even added a poll question for a little extra fun in the video description: “If you were stuck on a deserted island, what would you want to have the most?”
The next day out of curiosity I checked the views. I was pretty surprised to have more than 300 hits in 24 hours and 50 visits to my website. Pretty good stats as Crystal Light’s YouTube video only had 1,490 hits and they’d loaded their video 13 days before I did.
Today, seven weeks later, I have approximately 36K hits with 116 likes, 42 dislikes and a lot of comments – many of which I’ve had to remove for their surprising illicit content.
I attribute my video’s success mainly to optimizing my YouTube video, because through some searches (in which I logged out of Google) my video usually comes up number one for the terms “Crystal Light Commercial,” “Crystal Light Bikini Beach,” “Crystal Light Plane Crash Commercial.”
Below you can see the difference in the meta titles, description, tags, etc. between Crystal Light’s and mine. Initially when Crystal Light posted the video, they had no link directing visitors to their Facebook page. This was added approximately three weeks after the video was uploaded around the middle of January.
Crystal Light Commercial lacking SEO optimization and campaign detail.
My Commercial, SEO Optimized:
Curious to see what other people were saying about the commercial, I headed over to Crystal Light’s Facebook and Twitter sites.
When I landed on Crystal Light’s Facebook page I saw this fan gate…
But not until after liking Crystal Light’s page did I see this fan gate…where Crystal Light asks viewers to vote on the commercial’s ending. You can read the ending here.
I checked their Facebook wall and discovered they were promoting the contest regularly there…
As well as on Twitter…
But as an initial non-Crystal Light Facebook fan landing on their welcome page I was confused.
I, and I’m sure several thousands more, didn’t see the Crystal Light Challenge campaign reveal until after liking Crystal Light’s Facebook page. I wonder if they lost other people in the transition, especially those who didn’t know they had to like Crystal Light’s page in order to participate in the campaign after being directed from YouTube, Twitter or just casually landing on their campaign page.
That’s why it’s always important to test your campaigns before they go live. If possible, utilize some people outside your organization and others who may not be readily familiar with your brand so you can gain more audience perspective.
Crystal Light Challenge Campaign Overview
What they got right:
- Shock Value. Don’t over think the plane crash bit – this video is fabulously funny!
- Takes you to the fantasy and out of every-day life.
- Creates controversy and passion. People love it OR hate it!
- Attempt at social media integration – but doesn’t hit the mark.
What they could have improved:
- Add CTA (Call-to-Action) at end of TV commercial to drive viewers to Facebook promo landing page
- Push out official press release or SMR (social media release) to tease it
- Promote “Crystal Light Challenge” commercial on website
- Enhance YouTube SEO description and tags
- Drive people to “Crystal Light Challenge” landing page with Facebook/Twitter Ads or retargeting program.
What they got wrong:
- Bury the promo behind the fan gate on Facebook. You can’t see the promo until you “like” Crystal Light’s Facebook page.
- Non-Fans who visit via Twitter are directed to the fan gate page asking them to join the Crystal Light community – Again no mention of the promo on fan gate prior to “Liking” page
- Poor SEO optimization of YouTube video
- Title, tags, description lack depth for optimized search
- A little too late: They initially didn’t have a URL to drive people to Facebook, but added the link approximately 3 weeks after video launch.
I’m sure Kraft spent thousands of dollars hiring a creative agency, scheduling TV airtime, developing campaign graphics and utilizing their social media marketing team. But they failed to take full advantage of the entire tool chest to promote their ad and just picked a few – Facebook, Twitter & YouTube.
If they had taken the time to integrate their campaign across more channels, they may have experienced media success similar to Old Spice – The Man You Could Smell Like.
Take away:
Don’t make art for art’s sake.
When you develop an advertising campaign for your brand, step back and take a look at all the channels you can re-atomize your creative content to grab the most eyeballs.
Incorporate a strategic blend of social media, SEO, your PR and social teams, website, email and other channels you think (through research and testing) will get you in front of your customers and potential new customers.
Remember to develop a list of success metrics for your campaign (comments, reposts, downloads, forwards, RTs, etc.) and standardize your list against future campaigns so you’re measuring apples to apples.
If you do…You’re likely to come up with bigger success and more profits.
Agencies: Walk Your Talk
Posted on 17. Feb, 2012 by Margie Clayman in Blog, Guest Posts, margie clayman, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy
Marjorie Clayman is the resident blogger at www.margieclayman.com. She works at Clayman Advertising, Inc., her family-owned full-service marketing firm.
Recently, Jay wrote a post here called The Only 4 Reasons agencies Should Care About Their Own Content. In addition to making me think about the specific content marketing angle, Jay’s post brought to mind what may be a key problem haunting the reputation of agencies in the business world. In a desperate effort to prove their value, I fear some agencies may try to guide their clients in areas where the agency lacks knowledge or expertise. This can sometimes create miracles, but it can also create the scenarios that inspire people to cast agencies as the “bad guy.”
To illustrate this point, let’s take a look back at another post Jay wrote, this one back in 2010. In this post, called The 7 New Roles Agencies Must Play To Survive Real-Time Business Jay talks about different roles agencies need to undertake in order to be useful in this new world of marketing. Let’s look at each of these 7 roles and how a lack of knowledge or experience could create disaster instead of value.
The Cartographer: Jay suggests that agencies need to be able to guide companies on how to map a social media campaign, not only so that the company can interface with the external world but also so that everyone within the company is on board.
The agency must understand how to navigate the online waters and the agency must also understand how the internal workings of the company have been formulated. What needs to change within? What messages will or will not work in the online world? If an agency moves into consultation mode without understanding or experience, they could map a path to disaster for their client.
The Scout: Here, Jay notes that an agency needs to be able to know how to insert the company into relevant conversations in the social world. Opportunities are out there and the agency’s role is to guide the company towards those opportunities.
One need look no further than the recent Camry debacle on Twitter to see how bad advice can create a PR disaster instead of a social media success story. If an agency does not understand the difference between tweeting conversationally and spamming everyone in a certain demographic, they are only going to create heartache for their clients.
The Interpreter: In this mode, the agency should be able to dissect a company’s message and spread it like dandelion seeds across the online world.
If an agency attempts to counsel a company on how to do this, or if an agency begins to work in this manner without understanding the company’s true brand in addition to the best ways to repurpose and alter content for different platforms, the entire effort will once again backfire.
The Politician: An agency in today’s world needs to explain to companies how to converse in the online world so that brand evangelists or fans are not simply collected but are actually nurtured into the role of customers (you know, people who buy things).
On the surface, this can seem like an easy goal to achieve. All you have to do is talk to people and drive them to a page where they can buy your stuff, right? But if an agency begins to guide their clients towards just that mode of operation, or towards buying fans and then trying to nurture them, what will happen? An agency must be well-versed not only in the company’s brand but also in how that company’s customer base wants to receive communications. Where are they? What do they respond to? This is only the tip of the iceberg, too. If an agency does not have experience in legitimate marketing, they may misdirect their client away from a branding message and more into a “what is our Klout score” type of campaign. What is the pay-off for that kind of scenario?
The Firefighter: You’ve seen companies like BP melt down in the online world. More recently, the Susan G. Komen Foundation had to battle an online blaze. The agency in the firefighter role needs to have a plan in place to fight these fires as soon as the first spark is lit.
An agency that is unfamiliar with the intricacies of PR, not to mention PR as it exists via the prism of social media, could cost their clients everything. An agency must have enough familiarity with policy-making, their clients, the online world, and potential reactions to different types of news so that they can guide their clients away from these ugly disasters. If the agency guides their client towards a misstep in these cases, it can cost everyone involved everything.
The Accountant: An agency working in the marketing world today MUST be able to understand how to measure everything. Yes, that includes social media marketing. A recent survey indicates that only 24% of companies measure social media success based on increased revenue. An agency that fails to show the impact of social media marketing on overall sales will lead their client straight to the red. Agencies must be accountable for the marketing they propose and execute for their clients, and marketing carried out on social media platforms is no exception to that rule.
The Trainer: In this case, an agency can take on more of a consultation role as it provides suggestions and advice to a client executing its own social media marketing plan. It’s not hard to figure out that an agency with little experience in or knowledge of social media marketing can easily create disaster for this company. Bad advice about blogging, tweeting, or a Facebook page can make the social media gaffe grapevine in 5 seconds flat, and then we are back to the PR disaster scenario.
It’s easy for companies and their agencies to feel like the world of marketing today is nothing but silver bullets that can cure all of those recession ills. However, it is incumbent upon agencies to make sure that all knowledge handed out to their clients is credible, backed by at least some knowledge and experience, and verifiably true and useful. If some agencies out there are missing this key point, it could be the primary reason that agencies get such a bad rap in the online world these days.
What do you think? Is a lack of preparation creating the bad reputation that agencies have today? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Social Pros Podcast – Justin Levy, Citrix Online
Posted on 16. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy
This is Episode 3 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Justin Levy, the head of social media for Citrix Online. Read on for insights from Justin, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: are people comfortable giving their credit card information to social media sites?).
Next week’s guest is Lauren Fernandez from Landry’s Restaurants.
Listen Now
Click the play button to listen here:
Download the audio file: http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/play/v7h7s4/SocialProsEpisode3.mp3
The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469
Please Support Our Sponsors
Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy)
Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment
Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com
Jay: Hey, it’s Jay. We’re here on Episode 3 of Social Pros with my trusty digital marketing and social media sidekick, Eric Boggs from Argyle Social. Eric, what is going on?
Eric: Hello, hello, Jay. I’m very happy to be here. It’s a nice, cool day in North Carolina.
Jay: It’s not a particularly warm day in Indiana, either. It’s nice to be back on Social Pros with you after last week’s live podcast in a sports bar in Tampa Bay with Scott Monty.
Eric: That was a good time.
Jay: It was a good time. We’re back to the regularly scheduled program. We’ve got a fantastic guest today, Justin Levy from Citrix Online, who’s going to talk to us about all things GoTo; GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToBathroom. There are all kinds of products they have that he’s going to fill us in on and how he whips them into shape in social media.
First and foremost, though, I want to thank our sponsors, including Argyle Social, the presenting sponsor of Social Pros, as well as our friends at Infusionsoft, who we use for all of our email stuff, and Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Jim’s going to take the hosting chair here in a couple weeks. He’s going to jump in while I’m out of town. So make sure that you are kind to him, Eric.
Eric: I will be as nice as possible.
Jay’s Thought of the Week
Jay: I appreciate that very much. We’ll start off the show as we always do with my thought o’ the week. It’s funny, this one rings a little bit personal. I got into it on a blog last night and the comments with somebody who wrote a blog post about social media “experts” ruining the ethos of Pinterest by posting social media-related content and infographics and things like that.
I created a board about best social media books and some other things and put up some quotes, and apparently that rubbed some folks the wrong way. I feel like it’s one of those circumstances where the social network of choice of the day takes on the personality of its early users, but then when somebody comes in and says, “Oh, I want to use it differently,” there’s a hullabaloo about that.
Eric: Nobody can kill the goose that lays the golden egg faster than a marketer.
Jay: It happens every time, doesn’t it? We cannot help ourselves. If we see an opportunity, we must exploit the opportunity. You may have seen the cartoon, we’ll make sure we link it up in the blog post about this podcast. There’s the guy at the keyboard and he’s freaking out, and it says “Pin All The Things.”
Eric: Yeah, I think Shauna Causey gave that in her talk at Social Fresh.
Jay: Exactly.
Eric: That was a very funny picture.
Jay: In this blog comments that I got into yesterday, there’s one that says “Must Co-opt All The Things” with the same guy. It’s super-duper funny. I’m actually starting to use Pinterest as a bookmarking tool. In lieu of Delicious or something along those lines, I’m actually using Pinterest as a place where I log and store all the things I want to remember that I read in social media. It’s sort of a visual Evernote, but on that platform.
Eric: That’s an interesting use case. There are certainly many more, I’m sure. I’ve seen a few, in particular, B2B software companies, use Pinterest as a visual gallery for whitepapers and videos and things like. It actually looks really good. You’ve got to wonder if they’re getting traffic or traction. But it really is a beautiful way to present otherwise boring resources.
Jay: One of the things to think about is that when you’re creating a blog post, in particular, I think most people feel like you should try to have an image in your blog post. But with Pinterest and the whole notion of pinning, it becomes really critical to have a signature image large enough for Pinterest and the browser plug-in to grab and that will actually resonate when people see it in their Pinterest stream.
Eric: There’s the next cottage industry to pop up. You have email subject line testing, you have tweet timing and content testing. There’ll be Pinterest thumbnail image testing before we know it.
Jay: Sounds like a company we need to create on the side with today’s special guest.
Eric: I just patented that, by the way. First to invent.
Jay: Excellent. We will put up the registered trademark icon when we talk about this in the podcast.
Eric: Pinterest actually came up at Argyle today, so it’s funny that you brought this up, Jay. Jill and Tristan, I’m not exactly sure what they were talking about, but the quote from Tristan, I think, was, “This might sound ridiculous, but we should probably consider Pinterest for that.”
Jay: I always like when the marketing guy prefaces it with, “This might sound ridiculous.” Way to sell your ideas in there, Tristan.
Eric: What was funny, Tristan said that and Jill, basically, responded with a “Ha, ha, ha. I told you so. We should use Pinterest.”
Jay: You guys have so many interesting charts and graphs from the research that you do. It’s not infographic, though you have done some infographics, but part and parcel what you do is you’ve got a lot of interesting individual data points. I can certainly see a circumstance where Pinterest would be a play there.
Eric: That’s been one of the interesting things about the advent of Pinterest and this tidal wave of infographics that we’ve seen over the past 18 months. There’s been a re-focusing on the visual presentation of data. The underlying data may or may not be crap, but things that are presented beautifully and creatively and thoughtfully are always interesting, even if it’s NBA basketball scores or marketing data or sleep patterns or who cares?
Jay: I think it’s part of a larger trend towards Johnny can’t read or Johnny refuses to read. If you think about what’s gaining steam across the entire social community, it’s all visual. Pinterest, Instagram, Path, etc., it’s all visual instead of words, and certainly instead of podcasts. But it’s all that direction and I think there’s a larger trend at play there around communicating, not just data, visually, but communicating every aspect of your life visually as opposed to textually.
Eric: I don’t know if you saw the new homepage that Marketo launched. Marketo.com?
Jay: I did. Yep.
Eric: Their homepage is an interactive infographic.
Jay: Yep.
Eric: For lack of a better description. It’s really amazing, it’s striking, but you’ve got to wonder if it’s going to convert the same way that a good, old fashioned landing page will convert.
Jay: Well, if only they were a company that could figure that out.
Eric: If only someone would invent marketing software to track it.
Jay: I’m pretty sure that they have a conversion rate test running at Marketo. I did see that and it’s a really interesting homepage. We’ll make sure that we link it up in the show notes because it is, no question, a stake in the ground. That’s not an evolution, it’s a revolution in how they present their front door to the world. It may or it may not work but I give them for credit for rolling the dice.
Eric: Yeah, without a doubt, it’s a gutsy move.
Jay: Yeah, Maria’s smart like that. She’s got gumption. We’ll have her on the show at some point, too.
Eric: That sounds great.
Jay: Speaking of Pinterest, there’s been a ton of blog posts and research and quasi-research about it that has come out recently which is fueling the mania, a lot of data points. But that’s not today’s social media stat of the week from Eric Boggs.
Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 55% of Adults are “Uncomfortable” Providing Credit Card Information to Social Media Sites
Eric: It is not, actually. The social media stat of the week, though, does have a tangential Pinterest connection. I’ve been hung up on social commerce for the past few weeks, in part because Argyle has done some research in the area. We’ll be unfurling a new infographic in a few weeks. We’re doing a webcast…
Jay: If you’re going to unfurl an infographic, are you actually printing it on a scroll? Is it like on papyrus?
Eric: It is. We’re going to unfurl it on the side of our building.
Jay: I like it, I like it. I appreciate that. I think it’s got the wooden dowels, at the top and bottom. It’s going to be nice.
Eric: Exactly. Social commerce has been of interest to me over the past few weeks for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, Pinterest was in the news because of some commerce-related issues in which they were, I think, injecting affiliate codes onto the end of some product URLs. I don’t want to go down that path, but it is related to a potential business opportunity for Pinterest, and that is really as a commerce engine or a commerce referral engine. Neither here nor there.
I wanted to talk a bit about some research that was published, I think, this week by Digitas, or sponsored by Digitas. It was actually conducted by Harris Interactive. They did a survey of over 2,600 U.S. adults that are 18 years and older, the vast majority of whom identified themselves as social media users. They asked quite a few questions about social commerce. 55% of that sample stated that they were uncomfortable – and I’m doing air quotes, “uncomfortable” – providing their credit card information to social media sites for the purposes of conducting transactions.
Jay: More people uncomfortable than comfortable?
Eric: Yeah.
Jay: Giving their credit card to a social media site. That sounds like a stat. If you replace “social media” with “website”, and published that data ten years ago, it would make perfect sense.
Eric: Exactly. The interesting context around this is the fact that everyone predicts that social commerce is the next gold rush on the Internet. Booz & Company estimates that it’s going to be a 30 billion dollar global industry over the next five years. That was a number that was thrown out a few weeks ago.
It’s interesting to see that social commerce is pretty much agreed upon as a rising tide that’s just beginning to pick up steam. But, when you look at the actual user data and the user behavior, people really aren’t that into it yet. You don’t even have to look at the user data, you just have to talk to your buddies that sit next to you. People just aren’t conducting a lot of significant transactions on Facebook.
Jay: I guess on one hand, I see it as I’m not so sure I want to give Facebook my credit card number either. But then I look at it conversely and say, “Well, they know everything else about me. What’s the big deal about giving them my credit card number?”
Eric: Exactly.
Jay: They can probably infer it, do some sort of algorithm, anyway.
Eric: Exactly.
Jay: They can probably guess it like a safecracker.
Eric: There was another nugget that was pretty interesting out of this same report. One in five, it was like 21% percent, something like that, but basically, one in five of these people, and I’m quoting from the report, agree that, where possible, they would purchase products or services from their favorite brands on a social media site. So one in five, where possible, would purchase. I found the phrasing of that really funny because it didn’t say one in five did make a purchase, it said one in five agreed that they would make a purchase.
Jay: Sure. But I wonder if the thought there is, “Well, then we’re giving the credit card to the brand, not to Facebook.”
Eric: I don’t know. That, along with a few other things, are some questions that this survey left me with in terms of, the people that are afraid to provide their credit card information, how frequently are they shopping online? Is this really going to take the same path as e-commerce, where people, over time, just more and more transact socially as it becomes more the norm? Or is there really some sort of hidden line out there that people are just afraid to cross because they’re nervous about interacting this blend of commerce and transactions and their social daily lives that are online.
Jay: That’s interesting, because I think the party line today around social commerce maybe not being a tremendous force yet is that it is a user experience cluegy problem, as well as a ‘social commerce ain’t that social’ problem. It’s not a better mousetrap today, it’s just sort of a mousetrap.
But maybe it’s something bigger. Maybe there is an important trust factor there that supersedes ease of use and some of these other factors. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. If I were going to put a bet down, I would say that, like we did with regular web commerce, eventually people’s fears will be overcome. Since we’ll be spending so much more time on social networks than on websites of any stripe, eventually social commerce will become the default just because you’ll be spending all your time on social networks. But I’ve been wrong in the past.
Eric: I tend to agree with you. I think it is going to happen. It’s just fascinating to watch how it’s happening through fits and starts and very slowly.
Special Guest: Justin Levy, Citrix Online
Jay: Absolutely. Speaking of somebody who knows a little something, not about fits and starts necessarily, but about social media commerce and communication, it is today’s special guest on the Social Pros podcast, Mr. Justin Levy from Citrix Online. Justin, good sir, how are you?
Justin: I am well. How are you? Sorry I missed you guys down in Tampa last week.
Jay: I know. You were all scheduled to be part of that whole deal and now that you’re a big corporate poobah, you got called into a meeting and couldn’t make Social Fresh. You could have hung out on the podcast live in the sports bar.
Justin: I would have loved to, but you know how those meetings go. They fill up the schedule.
Jay: Actually, I don’t, because I don’t work for corporations, Justin.
Eric: Yeah, I don’t know how meetings go, either. Tell us about those meetings. Actually no, wait, don’t tell us about those meetings.
Jay: I’m not wearing shoes.
Justin: I’m not wearing shoes, either, but I still have to have five or six meetings today.
Jay: What did you use for those meetings, Justin? Did you use something like GoToMeeting?
Justin: Possibly, with HD faces.
Jay: With HD faces. Actually, we were just talking before we went on air, Convince & Convert has been a long-time GoToMeeting user and the new HD faces application within GoToMeeting, which allows you to do HD quality video calls, is really spectacular. I really, really like it. I try to do as many virtual meetings with customers as possible and it’s terrific. The quality is really excellent.
Justin: Thank you. We love it, too. All of our conference rooms use it. We use it on our laptops and what have you, and webcams. We’ve converted our conference rooms to having large displays built into the walls, like a 55-inch TV with just a simple $80 or $90 webcam bolted into the wall. That’s how we conduct all of our videoconferencing now.
Jay: And think about what a videoconferencing system, point to point like that, used to cost. Tens of thousands of dollars.
Justin: In a lot of ways it would only be available to the C-suite or to a very select group of folks because of how expensive it was.
Jay: It’s amazing. Now, I think, most of the GoTo products are available on tablets and mobile and things like that. I have the application on my iPad, I just haven’t done it much. I don’t know why that it, I just haven’t. What’s the penetration rate? Are you guys getting a lot of mobile and tablet usage?
Justin: We absolutely are. We’re seeing a lot of downloads and usage of GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC, especially on the iPad and on the iPhone. As we continue to update the products and add more features, we expect those downloads and usage to go up. But it’s great because you’re not tied to your laptop anymore. You could be at a meeting or in a hotel room with just your iPad and be able to jump on a meeting and see the slides and everything. Whereas before, if you had to be away from your desk and a meeting was scheduled, you’d just have to call in and ask people to advance the slides or to describe something to you on the slides so you could respond to it. But now you can do that right from your phone or from your tablet.
Jay: Amazing. You mentioned GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar and GoToMyPC. There are a lot of GoTo products, as I talked about when the show opened. How do you, as the social media lead, coordinate all of those things? I think a lot of people don’t even know Citrix, necessarily, as the parent company of all these products and maybe that’s by design. But how do you balance the different needs of all the different product sets?
Justin: One of the things that we look at is scale on this. You see a lot of conversations on the web about social media moving into social business. When I take that back internally, the way that I look at that is in order for us to become a social business, we have to scale it and empower our teams.
I work on ways that I can partner, that we can empower product teams. We can have our product teams and our demand generation teams and those responsible for creating content and externally facing teams to actually help us build that content and get out there and manage those properties, and be at events and share, say, tweets from an event or where we might be sponsoring something.
Over the past few weeks, we did three spots on Jimmy Kimmel Live. We had some of our team down there and they were taking pictures and feeding them back to my team so that we could get them up on Facebook and Flickr in real-time as opposed to waiting for a delay or having to send one of our team members there to simply take a picture.
For the online division of Citrix, or Citrix Online, I just did a count and we have 50 active or soon-to-be active social media accounts to manage, including WorkShifting.com and the surrounding properties around WorkShifting. That doesn’t take into account all of the other Citrix properties. We have a corporate social media team that manages those.
Fifty properties in some form of active or inactive state is a lot to manager. But it also depends on the priority. Not all of them need the same level of attention. Twitter is definitely different than Facebook and YouTube. Different teams interact with it. We use Twitter and Facebook mainly as the customer support channel. 65% of all our engagement on Twitter and Facebook is of support nature. We have someone that sits in global customer support whose full-time job is to provide social support as part of the customer support team.
Eric: That’s fascinating, Justin. Are those problems getting resolved through social interactions or is that person routing the social interactions through existing processes and platforms internally?
Justin: Both. His name is Glen and you’ll see him on Facebook. Either star his name and put Glen or the caret symbol on G.D. on Twitter. Glen sits in customer support. He grew up in customer support, a career customer support rep, and showed an interest towards technology. He’s into all this technology and the web outside of work. When we were bringing together our social accounts, he showed an interest in providing support through there. He also had this base of knowledge around our products. Obviously, customer support deals with a variety of different things on a daily basis, whether it’s problems with an account, whether it’s an issue with a meeting drop in our technical issue, it might be feature-set request, it might be workarounds on the products or things like that.
All that information flows into the global customer support team. Glen, being on that team, is able to respond more quickly than if that flowed into, say, a centralized social media manager, who’d then have to go check with global customer support and wait for this delay in response. He’s able to respond very quickly and he generally responds within one to two minutes.
We take that information and flow it into normal business processes that the business has, whether it’s creating customer support cases or adding it to product workflows for feature and enhancements requests or bugs, whether it’s feeding it into a customer insight scene that does research into our customers and might put together surveys and things of that nature. So that information gets captured and then flows back into the business.
Jay: It’s interesting that you tapped him to do social, partially because of his deep knowledge of the company and its products. I think that’s a point that gets overlooked quite often. Instead, what companies do is say, “Let’s find somebody who is inherently social and teach them the business,” instead of finding somebody who inherently knows the business and teaching them social.
Justin: It should be a mix of that. You have to have someone in a strategic role that hopefully understands both, that really deeply understands social and understands the strategy behind social, but also gets the business. Then you can have people on both sides that either really know the business and learn social, or know social really well and then learn the business over a period of time. I think there’s a benefit to both.
Jay: I’m glad you mentioned Glen using the caret and initials. One of the things I noticed when looking at some of your existing 50 channels is that the company is really strong at humanization of social interaction. There’s almost always a name and a face and a real person associated with it. You’re not hearing from GoToMeeting, you’re hearing from Glen or yourself or other people on the team. I really believe that’s the best practice. I think, Eric, you’d echo that as well.
Eric: Without a doubt.
Justin: We see brand humanization as a big deal to the company. For social business or social media over 2012, it’s one of my six key objectives, to use brand humanization. We see it as a competitive advantage to us and also as a way to show the faces behind a company and to show the culture that we have.
It helps with recruitment and retention of employees, but it also helps us to be human to our customers and to our prospects, to show that we’re out there and we’ll have fun through our social channels while we’re helping people, and there’s always someone that you can identify. That’s why it’s important for even something as simple as a caret symbol on your initials; they know who they’re talking to.
Jay: At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a relationship with software.
Justin: Exactly.
Jay: It doesn’t actually exist. You can have thoughts about that software and you can have perceptions about how that software works and how it fits into your life, but relationships are inherently personal and I think it’s really, really smart to do that. It’s amazing to me how many B2B companies, in particular, are resistant to allowing real employees to step out from behind the curtain.
Justin: And there are so many other opportunities to that, which I don’t see people taking advantage of as companies that we’re even trying to do a better job of. I think the first step is to initial your tweets and your Facebook status updates when you’re replying to someone so they know who they’re working with, especially in a customer support manner.
I know that, at least for our company, there are so many things that we do in the community and events that we sponsor and events that we speak at, and things that we do at our company, whether it’s a cookout or it’s a bocce ball tournament that happens at our campus, or just a variety of activities. All it takes is someone with a camera and some best practices and some alignment in partnerships with your legal and HR teams to make sure that you’re covered and that the employees are okay with, if it’s of employees, of sharing the pictures. You have to make sure that your legal and HR bases are covered.
There are so many opportunities to capture content that don’t take additional bandwidth at all. I think a lot of times in social it becomes this big, heavy lift in bandwidth, it’s going to take forever to launch and you have to have all these designs and all that. You can set up a Pinterest account really quickly to test, or you can take a couple pictures at your company barbecue to show the human side, like you said, of a product. Otherwise, it’s just there and it’s supposed to work when you want it to work and if it doesn’t, you call a number. If you identify with the product team that built HD faces during the bocce ball tournament, people feel more beholden to the brand.
Eric: You know, that’s something we did recently at Argyle. We launched a new feature and we took a page out of the Google playbook and had the primary developer behind the feature do the 90-second demo. It’s Stacy on our team and we spent a few hours shooting it, cutting it and producing it. She just looked right at the camera, saying, “Hi, I’m Stacy. I’m a software developer at Argyle and I developed The Hopper.” It was great. Our customers loved it and we loved it because it shows someone from our team who is actually building the guts behind Argyle. We’re huge proponents of that kind of thing.
Jay: Justin, do you have an internal social network that you use to communicate those things within the enterprise?
Justin: We have a few, so we’re testing. We’ve spent probably the past six months or so, maybe more, testing a SharePoint Intranet because our company is a Microsoft company, so we have SharePoint as an Intranet. Our internal Comms Lead updates that regularly and we have a social media section of it. But then we’re also testing with different teams, Chatter, Yammer, and other internal collaboration tools, to see what resonates with employees beyond email and email newsletters and things of that nature.
Jay: Just so people will have a sense of scope, how big is Citrix, how many employees?
Justin: Citrix Systems is about 6000 employees. The online services division, or Citrix Online, as a lot of people know it, the makers of the GoTo products, or the division that makes the GoTo products, is about 1400 employees.
Jay: It’s a pretty going concern over there, no question about that. You mentioned that humanization is one of your six big directives this year. What are some of the other things that you’re trying to tackle in 2012?
Justin: Some of the things are internal focus, the operationalization and governance of social. There’s the need to have enterprise-level toolsets, and we have some of them now and are looking to bring on others or how we manage these tools. As you set up these new accounts on different social networks and start to engage in it, as you look to scale the business, you don’t want to be giving out the corporate social media password to the entire company.
Jay: Right.
Justin: There’s a need to manage that with administrative tools, whether it’s access to Twitter, Facebook or something new like Pinterest, with the contributor function that Pinterest has now and who knows what they may roll out for brands for the future, if they do roll out features. There’s a focus on that, especially, as we expand social globally, which is another one of my objectives.
How do we expand this globally into markets that we are either already in or that we’re looking to enter over the course of 2012, and how do we make that a repeatable framework? There are a lot of considerations that go into entering a global market or entering a new region socially. How can we make that a repeatable framework where we will always have this decision tree to go to when we look to a new market and then actually launch them within those markets over the course of 2012?
Jay: It certainly sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. That is a lot to tackle this year. I’m very impressed with what you guys are doing so far in stitching together a lot of different products under the umbrella. WorkShifting is one of my favorite social media and content programs ever. In fact, we talked about it in The Now Revolution. It’s fantastic and I know you had a lot of hand in that program before you even came to work for Citrix, so it continues to be awesome.
Justin: Well, thank you. We have some big plans for that site. We have a new site design coming really soon with a bunch of new content and new features.
Jay: Fantastic. Please let us know, maybe we’ll talk about it again on the podcast or write a guest post or if you want to write something like that. WorkShifting.com, we’ll make sure we link it up. Justin, thank you as always for the time and your expertise. It was fantastic to have you here on Social Pros.
Justin: Thanks for having me, guys.
Jay: Next week on the podcast we have Lauren Fernandez, who is the head of social media for Landry’s Restaurants. They just made a big move and bought out all the Morton’s restaurants in addition to the existing hundreds and hundreds of restaurants that they own. We’re going to talk a little bit about social media in the restaurant business. Hopefully, we’ll be able to be eating steaks during the podcast. Eric, what do you think about that?
Eric: Jay’s guests are nothing more than a selfish quest to get free good stuff.
Jay: I’m waiting for the social media manager at Don Julio to join us for the podcast.
Eric: HD faces, steak, Ford . . .
Jay: I’m working on it. Justin actually used to own a restaurant. Do you still own the restaurant, Justin?
Justin: I still am a partner in the restaurant, yeah. One of my best friends owns it so I still stay tied into it, obviously, through that.
Jay: Speaking of steaks, Justin originally came to fame in the social media community for his adept usage of social for a Brazilian steakhouse.
Justin: Argentinean steakhouse.
Jay: Argentinean steakhouse, sorry.
Justin: Close enough.
Jay: Well, you know what? If it was a soccer game, that would be a serious transgression.
Eric: Yeah, I think you would have just gotten beaten up, Jay.
Jay: Yeah, that’s OK. That’s all right. That’s why I live in the Midwest. So that’s on the docket for next week. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Argyle Social, also Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch.com. Until next week, thanks very much.
Planning Your Content Marketing: Bricks vs. Feathers
Posted on 15. Feb, 2012 by Chris Sietsema in Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, content marketing, infographic, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy
Chris Sietsema is Social & Digital Operations Lead at Convince & Convert. He also runs a digital agency called Teach to Fish Digital where he provides insights on search, social media, email marketing, and analytics.
Do you remember this trick question from grade school: Which weighs more – 5 lbs of bricks or 5 lbs of feathers? Some of us (self included) were initially fooled by this obvious test of common sense, but as it relates to your content marketing, should you be focused more on building substantial content productions or presenting your audience with a steady array of minute snippets that define your brand and message?
Defining Bricks & Feathers
Bricks are larger content productions such as research reports, events, white papers, video series, mobile apps, etc. They typically require decent budget and time to produce but have the potential to make a larger splash when executed and promoted correctly.
Feathers are comprised of simple text and photo content published via popular social media tools like 
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, etc. Less intensive than bricks from a production budget standpoint, feathers are created consistently to maintain an ongoing stream of communication between a brand and its audience.
Deciding Between Bricks & Feathers
The graphic below illustrates the key differences between bricks and feathers for content planning and production. Here’s an more detailed explanation of the attributes you should consider.
Position / Identity
While there are varying degrees of thought leadership, larger productions allow you to position your brand as a reliable resource for superb ideas. By continuously sharing small bites of information, you would likely be considered a news maker by the audience. Both positions are attractive in their own right, but businesses which have the capacity to create and share short, informative posts on a daily basis are more inclined to go the feathers route. Those brands that simply cannot provide entertaining, enlightening and/or educational content on a daily basis (e.g. law firms, insurance companies, some medical facilities, etc.) should focus more on building bricks for the purpose of conveying their value to prospects and influencers.
Content Life Span
Video series, graphic illustrations and even research reports have a greater chance of becoming evergreen compared to your everyday tweets and Facebook posts.
SEO Potential
One key reason to consider incorporating more bricks into your content mix is their propensity to attract high quality and relevant links, a “must have” for any organization focused on improving activity from natural search. To a lesser degree feathers can be utilized more as a social signal or as a link to key content on your website/blog. If shared by key influencers, shorter posts can have a noticeable impact.
Required Resources
Simple posts merely demand the attention of a dedicated community manager to create and measure impact. Bricks, on the other hand, are typically more involved. Due to the various skills required to produce an event, a podcast, a high quality infographic or a mobile application, you could potentially include creative, technical and other marketing resources in your development process.
Opportunity Cost
One potential issue with bricks is that there is really no way to predict what will resonate. Your organization may have research to support that there is a demand for a specific piece of content within a particular medium. However, there are no guarantees that your bricks will generate interest, links, traffic, leads, sales, etc. Thanks to the time and resources needed to create bricks, there is a much higher opportunity cost when compared to feathers.
Primary Metrics
Success for feathers is often gauged by how many audience members saw a posts and, more importantly, how many of those people actually took some action (i.e. clicked or shared). In addition to those important metrics, you may find other crucial means for reporting the impact of bricks such as downloads of content, number of event attendees, leads collected in exchange for access to content and so on.
Best of Both Worlds?
Does your organization (or do your clients) produce both bricks and feathers? How do you determine what kinds of content to produce? What methods do you utilize to manage production and promotion of all that you create?
The Power of Transparent Marketing to Rock Your Business in 2012 and Beyond
Posted on 17. Jan, 2012 by Marcus Sheridan in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy
Guest post by Marcus Sheridan. Marcus passionately speaks and writes about business and marketing on his blog, The Sales Lion. Make sure to download his popular, 230-page FREE eBook—“Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy”
‘Transparency’
Ahh yes, one of the most over-used words, yet under-utilized actions, in our society today.
- News stations, despite their incessant claims, aren’t close to being transparent.
- The folks in Washington DC, on both sides of the aisle, couldn’t be any less transparent.
- And as for businesses small and large, this void of true transparency is the M.O. of the majority.
Everyone has an angle. Everyone is biased.
Alas…
The Opportunity is There
But the reality is this folks—This dearth of transparency in modern society is also giving folks like you and me a tremendous opportunity to stand up, stand out, and brand ourselves into something exceptional.
And with powerful tools like social media and blogging, there has never been a better platform for what I call “Transparent Marketing”.
Jay brought up a similar subject as the one I’m going to describe here in his recent article: 6 Stages to Exposing Yourself with Content Marketing. Upon reading that post, I could only laugh at the end when he asked what stage each of us were in with our marketing, because my answer was blatantly obvious—The Full Monty, or as Momma used to say—‘Naked as a Jaybird’ (full pun intended Mr. Baer 
)
Transparency in Content Marketing
You may be asking yourself what ‘Transparent Marketing’ actually is, and so that’s exactly what I want to talk about in this article. Specifically, I’m going to focus on blogging and the subjects you can address in your company’s content marketing efforts to not only completely stand out from the crowd, but also generate more leads and sales than you’ve ever done before.
I used to be a ‘pool guy’. In fact, I still own a company in Virginia where we install inground fiberglass swimming pools. The reason why I so passionately write and speak about inbound and content marketing today is because in 2008, when the economy crashed, my company was literally on the brink of closing its doors. We had a massive infrastructure to support yet with the housing-market collapse, the number of potential customers to sustain that overhead was very slim.
It was during this time of incredible stress and frustration that I was forced to change everything I’d ever done to market my business. By March of 2009, we had jumped head-first into the new world of blogging, and our strategy for success was very plain and simple:
Address every question we’d ever heard from our customers.
Like I said, not too complex, right? But the truth is, most companies in today’s world don’t want to answer consumer questions well. They don’t want to be great teachers. They shirk away from telling the truth (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and instead lean on pretty ad copy to garner sales and ‘close deals’.
Such a strategy is not long for this world my friends, and we can thank social media and blogging for it.
To help you see exactly what I’m talking about, here are 4 articles that we’ve written on our swimming pool blog that are everything ‘transparent marketing’ is all about. Also, with each article I’ve listed how many times the page has been read, as well as the inbound links coming into that post. When I said there was power in transparent marketing, hopefully you’ll see exactly what I meant by that here:
1. How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost?
Why is it transparent?
Most companies refuse to talk about and address the subject of pricing on their company website. Considering ‘cost’ and ‘price’ questions are always one of the first queries of a prospect, why would anyone refuse to address it? And remember, addressing a question doesn’t mean you have to answer it specifically, but you should at least be willing to give your prospects a feel as to what they can expect when it comes to cost and price. If you do this, not only will it earn you respect from potential customers, but it also may do very well in terms of SEO. (Google the phrases ‘fiberglass pool cost’ or ‘fiberglass pool price’ to see the results of this post.)
Final Results: 124,000 page views and 1,529 inbound links
2. Top 5 Fiberglass Pool Problems and Solutions
Why is it transparent?
Why would a company that sells fiberglass pools talk about the problems that some consumers have with fiberglass pools? Ahh yes, good question. But the answer is very simple: Fiberglass pools are not for everyone. They have limited sizes and shapes. But they also have other benefits to consider. When a customer reads this article, they immediately get a factual take on a subject that is often times of great concern to a potential customer. And not only that, but their trust in the author for being so transparent goes through the roof. (Google the phrase ‘Fiberglass Pool Problems’ to see the search results of this post.)
Final Results: 46,000 page views and 428 inbound links
3. Small Fiberglass Pool Design Awards 2010
Why is it transparent?
Have you ever considered complimenting your competitors before? How about positively mentioning them in a blog post? Well, that’s exactly what this article does, a strategy that is very against the grain when it comes to marketing. (Google ‘small fiberglass pools’ and ‘small pool designs’ to see a few SEO results with this post.)
Final Results: 18,400 page views and 196 inbound links
4. How to Winterize a Fiberglass Pool (Video)
Why is it Transparent?
Each year, our company winterizes hundreds of inground swimming pools. Notwithstanding, we show a video on our website teaching pool owners how to complete this task themselves. And instead of losing business because of this video, customers watch it and realize they’d much rather have us out to winterize their pool than doing it themselves, something most of our competitors would never consider based on this need to ‘hide’ their services and thus great teaching. (Google ‘How to winterize a fiberglass pool’ to see the search results to this post)
Final Results: 1,700 page views and 8 inbound links
As you can see, all of these posts (plus many, many others I’ve elected not to mention) have done quite well in terms of reads, links, and keyword rankings. But this was all made possible because as a company, we were willing to show our cards and be very transparent in terms of the content and subjects we addressed.
So that’s my challenge to you my friends. Are you willing to address every question you’ve ever heard from your customer base? Are you ready to tackle subjects that no one else in your industry will consider? If your answer is ‘yes’ to these questions, and then you consistently produce such content, I can assure you that your web visitors will increase, your brand will explode, and your company sales will be affected dramatically.
Your Turn
OK, lots of conversation opportunity here folks. Why do you think so many companies are afraid to be transparent when it comes to their marketing efforts? Also, do you adhere to my rule of ‘if they ask it, you address it’, or do you think there are consumer questions that should be left unanswered? Finally, can you think of a time you or your company was very ‘transparent’ with content and it paid big dividends?
3 Tips to Use QR Codes For Information, Not Destination
Posted on 15. Jan, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy
QR codes ask a lot of prospective users.
- Possess a smart phone
- Download a QR reader app (or other format like Microsoft TAG)
- Have the phone nearby and usable when you encounter a QR code (easy in a magazine ad, perhaps less so for QR codes now appearing on highway billboards)
- Be motivated enough to actually perform behaviors 1-3
While nifty, QR codes are often not the easiest and most convenient method of information retrieval, and when utilized to convey data that could be more seamlessly delivered in another format, they become downright head-scratching. This is the case with the increasingly popular use of QR codes in place of Web URLs.
It hasn’t been all that long since URLs began to appear on advertisements and other communication components. I vividly remember debating whether we should use www.internetdirect.com or http://internetdirect.com on a series of ads my first online company ran in PC Magazine, Net Guide, and Internet World in 1994. Now, however, all but the most brand-driven and obtuse ads include a URL, in the way that the prior generation of marketers included a phone number, and before them, a street address. So to replace a perfectly good URL with a QR code requires changing behavior that’s pretty well established at this juncture.
I’m not so sure people are ready to abandon written URLs. After all, with URLs you don’t need a smart phone (or a phone at all), or an app, or a data plan or anything whatsoever other than a modicum of short-term memory. Thus, unless you are in the pharmaceutical marijuana trade, I believe replacing a URL with a QR code falls into the category of ordering pizza online – doable, but more trouble than it’s worth.
When QR Stands For “Quite Realistic”
So where then does the QR code fit? When should it be used? In short, QR codes should unlock information, not a destination. I recently stumbled upon a terrific use of QR codes, at Scotty’s Brewhouse in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. Scotty’s is a 5-store chain of sports pubs rightfully lauded for their social media prowess, burgers, special hot sauce, and for generally having their act together in every respect. In fact, owner Scott Wise recently won the MIRA Award in Indiana for new media excellence.
I love this use of QR because it unlocked information that was contextually important to me at the time I encountered the code. I cannot overstate that characteristic enough. People need to stop what they are doing and in the absence of any other activity, grab their phone, turn it on, open the app, point the camera, wait for the code to register, visit wherever it takes them, and then decide what to do next. For all that, there better be some immediate payoff, and an extensive beer list qualifies.
Scotty’s of course still has printed lists for patrons who are not on the QR express, but they are printing far fewer than before (green! sustainability!) and because their beer offerings change frequently, it’s easier to keep the electronic list current (just-in-time data!). Perhaps even more impressive is the 32-page takeout menu which is also available via QR code at the front counter, and once snapped is stored on your phone.
Of course, as I wrote about in “Does QR Stand for Quasi-Ridiculous” and “Using QR Codes for Instant Sampling,”, it’s a requirement for what lies behind your QR codes to be perfectly formatted for mobile devices, as both the beer list and takeout menu are in this instance.
3 QR Code Must-Dos
- Unlock information, not a destination
- Lead the user to information that’s relevant immediately
- Perfect mobile formatting of the information delivered
Bravo Scotty’s.
Putting the Social in Social Good
Posted on 10. Jan, 2012 by Harrison Kratz in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy
Illustration by Joelle Leung
Guest post. Harrison Kratz is the Community Manager at MBA@UNC, the new online MBA degree program from the University of North Carolina. Harrison sticks to his entrepreneurial roots as the founder of the global social good campaign, Tweet Drive.
Like anything in social media, the need for evolution comes pretty fast and furious. Time and time again, we become enamored with the latest trend, buzz word, or tools and focus on it incessantly until something else comes along or that topic isn’t just no longer bright and shiny, it’s just dull. Being a “social entrepreneur,” it worries me that Social Good is approaching that saturated status.
While it is inspiring to hear all of these different causes and advocates under the umbrella of social good, I feel that often we misunderstand the meaning of social good. While everything remains in good spirits and rarely absent of good intentions, I think there are a few issues to be addressed and solutions that will keep social good on a healthy track and continue to be an engine for positive change not only throughout the world but throughout the social media atmosphere.
Social Good is More Than a Twitter Campaign
Yes, Twitter campaigns have raised millions of dollars for causes around the world and will continue to do so, but a social good campaign is much more than “For every tweet with said hashtag, so and so will donate a dollar.”
Social good is about a social impact that enhances the life of a cause or agenda in addition to just raising money.
Yes having people donate in the form of tweets is great, but we need to start thinking outside the box and understand how we can use these tools to – as Jay says it – not just have social but to be social throughout the cause.
Social Good Cannot Stay Online
I founded Tweet Drive, a social good campaign that brings together social media communities around the world to collect toys for children during the holiday season. When I started this in 2010, I envisioned a campaign where everything would be done through Twitter and our online presence would be the measure of success.
Over 4,000 toys later, we’ve realized that the social in this social good campaign didn’t really mean Twitter and Facebook. It meant bringing together people in real life to meet their social communities and participate in giving back during the holidays.
Yes, we may start online, but to make a difference and understand what it is to be social, we have to understand our success isn’t measured in followers but the change we inspire through these tools.
Social Good Isn’t Simply Charity Work
Most people think that social good means charity work in the digital space. I disagree. Social good is the process of using social media and and social-focused communities to create a positive impact on your surrounding environment. Paying it forward through digital, if you will.
This can mean mentoring young professionals or students. From my experience with MBA@UNC, it can also be changing the way we receive our education. Social good is filling a void by using your social tools and voice to solve a problem or improve the lives of others – that extends much further than generalized philanthropy.
Take Social Good Beyond the Buzzword
Social Good is on a tipping point where it could become much more than a buzzword and a mainstay in our daily lives or it can remain a buzzword and lose momentum because rather than a lasting idea it stays a digital trend. It is up to us to evolve social good to the concepts that we use every day when being social through our brands and businesses, to ensure that it continues to evolve and bring social communities together both and online and off.
Technology Marketing: Is Your B2B Social Media Strategy Sending Mixed Signals?
Posted on 10. Jan, 2012 by Ashley Zeckman in B2B, Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social media strategy
Is your social media strategy sending your customers mixed signals?
As a B2B organization with a focus on technology, you may believe that you are facing additional obstacles that your B2C counterparts are not.
Many of you have tried to implement social media in the past without much success. However, you may still believe that B2C companies have it easier because they have a direct line to their consumers. The good news is, you do too! In fact, 58% of IT buyers use social media to make tech buying decisions.
Getting in front of the proper decision makers and influencers when selling SaaS, IT, or any other technology is not as hard as you may think. It is imperative that you follow a series of social media best practices directed at finding, engaging, and motivating your social network to take action.
Developing Social Media Personas
The first rule of social media for technology companies is to know your customers. How can you connect with your customers if you don’t know who they are? Well developed personas will help you answer a variety of questions about your customers including:
- Where they spend time online
- How they interact on social chanels
- What type of information they share most frequently
- What motivates them to interact, buy and refer
Establish A Voice & Stick With It
The growing pains associated with implementing a social media strategy often include finding a defined voice and direction for your brand. While you may be working with an internal or outsourced team to execute your social media strategy, you must find consistency. A good first step is to sit down with your team and discuss your company mission, goals, offering, and pain points of your customers to determine how information should be presented. Then take some time to research your top 5 competitors and see what type of interaction and success they are having with their campaigns.
Confusing Content Kills Network Growth
While there is nothing wrong with providing a variety of information on your business profiles it is key that you remain consistent. If you are targeting CFO’s responsible for technology purchases at large organizations, it is important that the content provided is helpful, informational, and aimed at solving their business problems. It can get tricky when you are targeting multiple decision makers and influencers like the buying groups often associated with B2B purchases, so be mindful of exactly who your audience is and what type of content and context will have the desired impact.
Facts Tell & Stories Sell
When selling a complex solution or service, sharing stories about customers that you have helped can be of enormous value. It’s true that your typical CFO or purchasing manager will be very mindful of the ROI associated with purchasing your product. But do not underestimate the power of a well written client case study or testimonial. A client story will add validity to your message, which is of enormous value when marketing via social media. Keep in mind that you are asking for an investment, and in order to gain the trust of that customer you may need to provide additional information that builds trust.
If you have a more traditional marketing background try to remember that many of the same basic marketing principles apply to social media marketing. It is extremely valuable to research your customers, find consistency in branding, create cohesive content, and share meaningful customer stories.
If you are just beginning to develop an online marketing strategy or are a social media networking professional I would recommend running a social media audit of your existing social media marketing program and incorporating the tactics included in this post. Not sure where to start? You can always contact the team at TopRank for additional information on what is involved and where to begin.
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6 Potentially Wildly Inaccurate Observations about Tostitos and Social Sentiment
Posted on 09. Jan, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy
It’s entirely possible you love this commercial. I don’t.
The Tostitos “talking bag” commercial ran extensively during the bowl game extravaganza on ESPN and other channels on January 2. (There are actually at least two spots, but this one ran more often).
Given that I almost never watch television without an iPad nearby, I quickly retweeted displeasure about the commercial.
Just think of how bad the other ideas for the Tostitos commercial were if that talking chip bag was the best of the bunch #marketingfail
— Dusty (@DustyHunt) January 3, 2012
Thinking I would find other funny tweets criticizing the spot, I did a Twitter search for “Tostitos”. But within seconds, I determined that I was in the minority – the commercial was a hit among many TeleTwitterers.
Sentiment Graph for a Talking Bag
Using Sysomos social monitoring software, we found 500+ tweets mentioning the Tostitos commercial on January 2 and 3. Among them, 142 were clearly negative, 190 were neutral, and 180 were clearly positive.
Lessons Learned From a Talking Bag
1. There’s no such thing as universal agreement
Especially in a highly subjective arena like advertising, tastes vary widely. Hell, 12.7% of the American people APPROVE of the job Congress is doing right now. As a marketer, don’t sound the alarm just because you see a few negative tweets or forum comments doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Sentiment may even out in short order. As we wrote about in The NOW Revolution, you have to clearly understand what constitutes a crisis, and a few negative tweets isn’t it.
2. Twitter is a living focus group
Business has wanted to eavesdrop on customer conversations since the time of Pompeii, and now they can. Provided they were listening (and I very much suspect they were), Frito-Lay garnered hundreds of near-instantaneous points of feedback about their new advertising. Powerful mechanism. That does not mean that the people who liked the commercial will buy more snacks, or that the people who hated the commercial will swear off Tostitos. The belief that sentiment and social mentions lead directly to commerce is a dangerous assumption, and requires your own verification and testing. Results can vary wildly based on company and intensity of feeling.
3. Could Twitter be used for on-the-fly ad optimization?
As mentioned, there are at least two of these talking bag commercials. If I recall correctly, the one above ran, then the other one, then the first one again. Based on the volume and sentiment of tweets, could Frito-Lay have determined that the initial spot was better received (and it was, according to the tweets), and then decided to run it again as a result? For a major event like a college BCS bowl game, it’s not inconceivable that Frito-Lay could have been in contact with ESPN in real-time, and told them which spot to run a second time.
This has implications for rotation and optimization of broadcast. What about running a different ending to a scripted show show on the west coast, depending upon the tweets from eastern and central time zones? Hmmm.
4. Sentiment scoring remains an inexact science
Even with the excellent technology in Sysomos, we still had to manually review all tweets and recategorize a few from positive to neutral, neutral to negative, and so forth. Automated sentiment scoring is nearly impossible, and if you or your listening team aren’t at least spot checking sentiment, you’re probably dealing with data that’s not entirely correct.
5. Differences in social listening software are vast
We ran the same exact report in Visible Technologies, and found approximately 150 tweets for the same phrases and date ranges. We like Visible a lot. It’s solid software with great user interface. But the different between 500 results and 140 is pretty vast. Just like with Web analytics software (where the data differential between Webtrends, Omniture, Google Analytics and the rest can be large), there is no objective “truth” in social media listening.
6. Did the agency use a crowdsourced idea to devise the talking bag concept?
On YouTube, this commercial for a talking Doritos bag was uploaded as a response video. The description notes that it was created for the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl crowdsourced video contest in 2010. Interesting that both snacks are Frito-Lay brands, and that entries of the Crash the Super Bowl can be used and modified by Frito-Lay without exception, and in perpetuity.
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