Here’s a site, just dedicated to figuring out if Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. celebrities are real. Or not. http://valebrity.com/.
The site has rather a lengthy procedure you have to go through to make sure that you’re “real.” See it here: http://valebrity.com/tag/getadded/. So now you can find out if you’re really talking to that beautiful Brazilian model, or some kid in middle America typing on her behalf. Creepy.
Jeez. You just don’t know what’s real any more do you?
There are dozens, no hundreds, and probably thousands of decent articles about how corporate brands should get started with social media marketing. This article may, or may not, bring you something new. For me, it reflects a little of what I have learned about how brands can start thinking about managing their marketing funnel online through social media.
Your social media marketing strategy is different to, or rather an adjunct of, your general integrated marketing strategy. The latter is about awareness building and demand generation and likely involves time-limited specific campaigns like product launches or specific awareness campaigns.
Your social media marketing strategy is an umbrella strategy. It should be included as a part of all the integrated marketing campaigns you do, and it should be an on-going evergreen strategy.
Here are some discussion points.
1. All brands can be social
How can you be social? Start a conversation with your customers. Do it through a blog, a Twitter, an online forum, a social marketing page. Make sure it’s staffed by YOUR staff. Not your agency staff. You need to learn this stuff.
2. Start with Twitter and expand from there
Twitter is an easy way to get started. And get started you must. I have another post on this blog about how to get started with Twitter. Commit to being on there every single day — including weekends. Choose one, or two, people as the official Tweeters and have them agree from the start on their approach, voice, strategy and the most interesting things to tweet about with your brand.
3. Be clear about your message
What is the message you want shared about your brand? Be clear from the start, and be consistent. Your message is not only your brand’s core value, but also your brand’s personality. Are you fun, irreverent, serious, youthful, crazy, honest? And what is the cornerstone message you want to keep coming back to?
4. Determine your investment in your social marketing program
You can spend a fortune on an agency to help you. Or, you can kick it off by getting out there and getting started yourself.
Bring in an agency when you don’t have the resources to manage and implement your campaign. But don’t leave all the strategy and key learnings to your agency. You have to have formed an opinion yourself and determined a good approach yourself. Don’t pay the agency for this work up front. They are there to validate, fine-tune, and reflect.
I strongly recommend at least one in-house staff person having hands-on involvement in all aspects of your social media presence. That way you are investing in your own corporate knowledgebase, not in your agency’s knowledgebase. Don’t abdicate all these important tasks to an agency. If you feel you don’t know enough, hire a knowledgeable person to teach you and do the work. Much more valuable in the long term.
Don’t start with ‘what will it cost?’ Start with what you want to achieve, how you can measure it, how you can get your feet wet with little or no cost.
Remember, there is a risk to being outside the conversation. Jump in and learn to swim.
5. Selling up to management
How do you convince management to participate when they may not have a clue what social media marketing is? Further reason to get started internally first and gain key learnings. “We wouldn’t have known this without having done that.” Show value and engagement in small ways, and then extrapolate value beyond that initial engagement.
Show off what your competition is doing in this area. Or, if they haven’t arrived there, show off cool things that related brands are doing. These things are very hard to measure in terms of strict ROI. It’ll take months to get something off the ground. If your management is very reticent, try to kick off with things that are low-risk and low-cost. There is no fee to start a Facebook fan page and a Twitter stream, so that’s a good place to start. Begin writing your own corporate blog, without publishing it, to show what posts might look like. Again, with a tool like Blogger there is no cost to get started.
We’re all loving this Honda “Let It Shine” viral ad. It’s beautifully done, and a great example of how advertisement can be entertainment. See it here.
Somewhat interesting post here called “Six Tips for Building Deeper Connections in Twitter”. It’s all quite fine, but isn’t this fairly obvious? That people don’t want to get spammed? That people want to be thanked?
I am learning a lot as I work with the Photobucket Twitter community. I say “thank you” to people who use Photobucket. I say “can we help?” to people who are stuck. 99 times out of 100, people say “thank you” back. Occasionally I get told to go away, but I’m not taking it personally! If your users know you are watching out for them, and are there to help, they honestly won’t mind.
I re-tweet and “heart” shout-outs and kudos. I follow links publicly posted and admire the photos or artwork. And I post links about features and content that I honestly think is useful to Photobucket followers.
These are pretty obvious Twitter tactics. But I guess not. If they were obvious, people would be doing them more often.
Interesting article on PaidContent, titled ” What Are A Million Social-Media Followers, Friends or Subscribers Worth.?”
These are such new phenomenons that brands are struggling to understand if there’s specific monetary value in all these lines of communication. I say consider them as conversations with people you care about, rather than potential revenue streams. The value to be had from those conversations is persistent and two-way. It’s not about squeezing money. It’s about learning, helping and evangelizing.
Here’s how I approach the thousands of followers I tweet and ping on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace:
Avoid spam. Don’t over-tweet. I some people I follow tweet 50 times a day. It’s just too much. I don’t have time to read it all. I keep tweets to no more than three or four a day. That may change as we progress, but that seems right.
As for messages (Facebook) and bulletins (MySpace) those are more infrequent. They feel more formal, and spamming in those forums is not recommended. So when there’s something specifically relevant to those users on those sites, I’ll send an update/message. But keep it relevant. Always.
I am listening to a talk by Bob Buch, vp of business development at Digg.com. Some of the key points he makes about what makes a successful social media site include:
Mr Buch focused on Facebook, Twitter and, naturally, Digg.com.
Wired.com, by example, only focused on sharing with sites that their users regularly use. They focus on the top sites that users share to most frequently, and moved the other less-used sites below the main Share feature. Photobucket has done the same thing, with the new Share interface powered by Gigya, which offers the main sites Photobucket users work with most frequently.
An interesting twist on this is to offer a customized experience based on where users are coming from, so if they’re coming from Facebook or Twitter, change the experience based on that source site.
Facebook Connect really helps a site build connectivity and engagement. Any site that requires registration and connectivity can use Facebook Connect to authenticate, and allows an automatic bridge of information between Facebook and a publisher’s site. Additionally, you can use Facebook’s built in user information to target ads and information to that user, and allow a publisher’s content to become syndicated back to the Facebook Newsfeed. Many sites have seen large increases in registration and engagement as a result of using Facebook Connect to log into the site.
I think the key point here is the incredible leverage and network effect that can be gained from building on top of Facebook’s existing network of 175 million registered users.
Just started following @starbucks. Naturally, it’s all about coffee. Lots of flavors and permutations. But I like the way they answer their users … they seem real.
As part of my job, I think a great deal about how to connect with teens. But the thinking goes way deeper than it just being part of my job. I have two teen girls in my household. So that makes the issue of relevance and communication very important.
Here’s what I have learned from my own experience:
On any given day, I’ll SMS with my teens four or five times at a minimum. It’s the only way to guarantee they answer.
Late at night, we’ll IM with each other using iChat, Facebook chat, or Google chat. They don’t use Yahoo, MSN, or AOL. iChat because it’s so much part of their Mac. Facebook because they’re always on Facebook. And Google (one of them only) because, well it’s Google and it’s what they do.
Cardinal rule: don’t post on their Facebook walls. Send private messages. Monitor, but stay out of the way. If you’re lucky, your teens’ friends will friend you, and that’s fun.
MySpace and Facebook record impressive time on site numbers. According to comScore, Facebook users spend at least 9.8 minutes/visit on the site and MySpace* users 16.2 minutes/visit**. (Though I have to say there must be a whole load of people coming and going quickly, because my kids spend hours on their social network of choice.)
So how can brands participate on these sites? Without just buying ads? I’m not going to quote formal study data here. I’m going to voice what I see happening personally — I visit MySpace and Facebook every single day (some weekends excepted).
Both Facebook and MySpace have accessible ways for brands to gain customer insights, build loyalty, engage users in discussions and improve the reputation of a brand.
Facebook has set up a system for building brand Fan pages that’s easy and fun for a small, or big, brand to use. They don’t charge you for it. Your favorite TV shows probably all have fan pages, as well as all kinds of consumer brands from Nike to Monster Energy drinks. You find out when your friends join Fan pages, and like as not, probably join them yourself too.
Once you’ve built a Fan page on Facebook, you can bulletin your fans, send out updates, start discussions, post interesting data, invite fans to events. Regular users get engaged in what you are doing. How much better is that than a flashy old MREC?
MySpace lets brands build pages too, but MySpace puts financial barriers in the way of their fan pages — it’s pay to play. That leaves little brands with no budget out in the cold. There is no easy and simple discussion board mechanism. And unless you have access to cool creative and HTML resources, your page looks very same-old. Nonetheless, plenty of brands go the MySpace page route, and find it successful. Again, better than any ad.
I manage a Fan page on Facebook, and a brand page on MySpace. I find that I can post more, and more often on Facebook, because there are just fewer steps to get there. Plus, I can tie it into my blog for auto-posting, and my Twitter. But I find I can post more engaging things like slideshows and photos on the MySpace page. I have more control over how the MySpace page reflects my brand on MySpace. On Facebook all the fan pages look much the same. The user activity is different also. My bulletins to MySpace friends don’t generate very much response, but I usually get a few responses from the Facebook bulletins. I have about the same number of friend/fans on both. It’s an ongoing learning experience to find out what engages people on these fan pages.
I’d be willing to bet that before long, Facebook will offer some sort of premium fan page service to brands willing to cough up the bucks. And by that time, we’ll all be so addicted to chatting to our users on our Fan pages that we’ll all pay.
* Full disclosure: as of the time of writing this post, I work for a division of Fox Interactive Media, the same company that owns MySpace.
** comScore Media Metrix, US statistics, February 2009
A while ago, I started tweeting. Somewhat late to the game … by Silicon Valley standards … but way early by the standards of the rest of the normal, sentient world.
I wrestled my company’s URL — twitter.com/photobucket from some URL squatter (thanks to the kindly people at Twitter) and started poking around.
First, I simply searched for Photobucket. Wow. Lots of tweets. Then I searched for photo sharing. Then I searched for various competitors, and big brands to see what people were doing and saying. I reviewed the sites of my competitors, and of brands I admire, to see how they were handling their Twitter presence.
In the first two weeks I learned a ton. I started to get a feel for the language and environment. I started shyly following people. Hey, they started following me! It felt a little bit like opt-in stalking.
I started tweeting … pointing to news about Photobucket, blog posts, or fun images that we found on the site. But it was all one way.
Feeling emboldened, I started to answer questions or respond to specific users who mentioned Photobucket. And not just those that said “*&^% Photobucket” — one or two did for whatever reason — but also those that said “I love Photobucket” or “Sitting here tweeting and uploading hundreds of pics to Photobucket.” How did I respond? With a simple “Photobucket here. Thanks for using Photobucket! Let us know if we can help with anything.”
Response? So far universally positive. “Hey, I just got a tweet from Photobucket. How cool.” Or, “No I didn’t really mean that, it’s all ok. Thanks for the help!”
Having got a bit of a feel for the world, I drafted a delightful member of our customer service group to tag-team me. He answers the technical support questions. I answer the “F Photobucket” or “I Love Photobucket” comments. Every day I look at the list of searches and @messages.
Worthwhile. Really worthwhile. Jump in. Find out what people are saying about your brand. Learn the language, and get tweeting. Even if you only have 300 followers, you’ll still learn something.