Savvy Operator

Building On-line Social Habits

Stephen Joyce — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:18:24 +0000

The underlying goal of any social media strategy is to build corporate social habits for your organization. In the same way that you and your staff interact with people in the “real world” you should be interacting with them in a similar manner in the social web. The philosophies and techniques that you use to handle customer interactions face to face don’t change when you handle customer interactions on-line, the only difference is the tool that you use. If you are able to apply strong customer service and messaging standards within your organization, they will translate into a positive and successful social strategy as well. Why? Because how a customer perceives you is based on expectations that you give them. If you provide the customer with the expectation that they will be cared for and treated fairly then they will come to expect that in the delivery of your service. As long as your service meets or exceeds their expectations, then they will have no problems with recommending you to their friends and business colleagues. If you are there to make that recommendation easy and straightforward, then you have the opportunity to drive continued return customers, or at the very least, a strong source for word of mouth referrals.

A social media strategy does not live in isolation within your organization but rather becomes part of the fabric of your company and your customers’ experience. From the moment they see your promotion in Facebook to the moment they write a testimonial for your service online, the opportunity to participate, share, and contribute is part of the fabric of the social web and should be a part of your organization’s corporate fabric too.

Reviewing Your Social Media Plan

Stephen Joyce — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:57:29 +0000

The plan you create based on the Listen, Engage, Articulate, and Demonstrate social media strategy should be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure that the objectives for each phase are being met. I recommend you schedule the following reviews into your social media plan:

Monthly review – This review should look at how effective you are at executing on your plan. For example:

Are you listening for the right things? Are you getting any results for the keywords or phrases you have chosen?
Are you responding to comments in a timely manner?
Are you engaging with customers on Facebook and Twitter.
Are you finding the weekly schedule too difficult to manage?
Are you able to produce content at a reasonable and consistent rate?
You should record, but not necessarily act upon follower and friend counts.

Quarterly review – At the end of each quarter you should take time to review trends in your metrics. Since you should have some more data to work with, your review should be focused on improving your success metrics as you have defined them. Some things to consider include:

Are you gaining or losing followers and friends?
How many mentions are you getting compared to the previous quarter?
Are you able to see referral counts in your analytics?
How have your referrals change since the last quarter?

6 Month review – During the six month review you should take a hard look at your plan and determine whether or not you are seeing the results that you want for your chosen success metrics. This will be a good time to ask:

Should you be listening for other phrases keywords, if so, what are they?
Are there other social networks that may be more effective?
If there are no social networks for those interested in learning more about carbon management should you consider creating one?
What other promotions can you develop around your chosen networks and communities.
Are your success metrics the right ones? If not, what should they be?

Your Social Media Success Metrics

Stephen Joyce — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:06:56 +0000

Your success metrics will be different for each step in your L.E.A.D. social media strategy. To summarize, you can expect the following outcomes from each phase:

Listeningb

Where users are talking about you
What users are saying about you and your brand
Where users are talking about subjects that are important to your business
What information users are looking for and how they hope to get the information they want.
What articles, posts, and press mentions are being written about subjects, brands, and/or competitors that are important to you.

Engage

Increased link backs to your site (identified through Google Alerts).
Click throughs to your specific profile page (another reason to have it) measured through your analytics tools.
Improved Google search results (not guaranteed but likely depending on the level of engagement).
Increased mentions of your brand or site on third party sites. This may be in responses to your comments, through others mentioning your comments, or through guest contributions on blogs.
If you use a referring code that can be tracked through through your conversion process, you should be able to measure revenue as it relates to engagement.

Articulate

Increased referrals to your website from your blog or articles.
Increase in “time on site” as users read blog articles.
Increased blog search, web search, and mentions in Google Alerts.
Increased comments on articles and greater engagement with reading audience.

Demonstrate

Increase in comments and engagement on your forum of choice (eg. GetSatisfaction.com)
Increased follows on Facebook and Twitter (primarily).
Increased engagement from existing fans including comments, photos, and videos from followers.
Identify key evangelists of the business. This includes customers who love your service or business.

At every stage there may be additional benefits or success factors that have not been described. Remember that as you continue to listen for mentions, you might find opportunities to connect with other media sources both locally and outside your region. For example, as you build your fan base and can show engagement with customers local media sources (newspapers, radio, television) will look to authorities in certain segments. Follow your media sources and comment on articles that apply to your business. These may range from comments on your region, business, industry and more. The important thing to remember is that if you demonstrate your expertise then media will default to those it perceives as experts.

Simplifying Your Social Media Schedule

Stephen Joyce — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:34:40 +0000

Being successful with your social media strategy means having a schedule that allows you to participate and actively engage with your various channels. I recommend you break up your tasks so that the work required to listen, engage, articulate, and demonstrate are staggered throughout the week. A sample calendar might look like this:

Sunday – LISTEN - Take a well deserved break but keep listing. Check your Google Alerts and make note of any mentions that sound interesting. If you have a smart phone, then I recommend you push alerts to your mobile rather than having to sit in front of a computer. Listening doesn’t have to be disruptive.
Monday – ENGAGE - Respond to mentions on blogs that you hear over the weekend.
Tuesday – ARTICULATE - If you are writing a blog, publish your article today. Tuesdays are the best day to post an article or send an email newsletter because most people are swamped with emails on Mondays. Continue to listen and respond to mentions as required.
Wednesday – ARTICULATE – DEMONSTRATE – Post photos or videos to your Facebook page/Flickr/Youtube accounts.
Thursday – ENGAGE – DEMONSTRATE – Review your social network profile pages and respond to comments or wall posts. Thank your customers when they post comments
Friday – LISTEN – ENGAGE – Listen and respond to mentions and tweets.
Saturday – LISTEN - Listen only. If you can, respond or just wait until Monday.

You will probably find that as you become more comfortable with the social web, your mentions and hits will increase requiring you to listen and respond more quickly or more frequently. In most cases, responding can be done very quickly using an Android, iPhone or Blackberry application for Twitter. In the case of the fan page or other blogs, simply make note of the mention and respond to it accordingly. Not every mention will require a response.

When it comes to parties, it pays to go to right ones

Stephen Joyce — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:04:57 +0000

Let’s face it, when it comes to getting attention, you’re better off going to one A-List party then going to 100 block parties. You only have so much time on your hands and social media has a very real time cost associated with it. Unless you have a team of social media people working for you (and if you are like most small businesses, then you don’t) you won’t have the time to dedicate to managing 10, let alone 100 different social media profiles.

Simply put, reduce the number of parties you join. You will find more success by focusing on key social spaces like Facebook, Twitter, GetSatisfaction, and LinkedIn. That is not to say that other spaces will not be successful either, however, you will need to listen to learn what spaces will be important for your brand moving forward. To begin with, stick with the ones you know people participate on and draw the attention to yourself first. Once you have their attention, you can look at other networks.

When considering a new network or creating a new profile, consider following these steps before activating your profile:

Are people on this network my target customer (what is that)?
Are people on this network interested in my brand, niche, region, etc.?
Are there any other companies like mine on this network? Are my competitors on this network? If not, why not?
Are there other complimentary companies on this network? If not, why not?
Is this network friendly to businesses/companies?

If your answers lead you to believe that the network/community might be a good fit for your business then create a profile. Once you commit, do so properly. Complete your profile including your company domain name, description, logo, head shot, about and contact info. If the community turns out to be less than you expected, at least you have another referral link out there that may (or may not) drive traffic back to your main site. If the site has an RSS feed, then add the feed to your feedreader or Google Alerts and start listening. Before you spend time writing content and posting updates, make sure the members of the community are interested it what you might have to say, otherwise you may just be wasting your time.

For more details about the listen, engage, articulate, demonstrate phases of the L.E.A.D. social media strategy, take a look at the social media series on the SavvyOperator.

Social Tools for Demonstrating your Expertise

Stephen Joyce — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:12:44 +0000

There are many tools available for demonstrating your involvement in social media and your comfort with customer engagement. Many of these tools you are probably already using without even thinking about it. Let’s take a look at a few of the the tools/sites that you can use to demonstrate your expertise:

Facebook – Focus on your Facebook page and avoid creating a Facebook profile for your business. You will want to focus as much attention on the business as possible and since the Fan page is publicly accessible, it will provide the greatest search benefit. Feel free to syndicate your blog posts through your Fan page but try to create content that is relevant just to the Fan page as well. This might include asking questions of your fans or updating on Facebook only specials or promotions. Since you will have a fairly low fan base to begin with, you will need to make it more enticing for people to become fans by inviting them directly or giving them an incentive for joining. Invite your customers to post their own comments, recommendations, or tips. Because Facebook fan pages are publically accessible, I recommend you post photos and videos to the fan page first. Although Flickr is more photo oriented, we are not necessarily talking about high quality photos, these are for sharing purposes.
Twitter – Similar to the Facebook fan page, your Twitter account should not be used exclusively for delivering notifications of content posted on your blog site. Use your stored searches in Twitter to find out what people are talking about with regards to your preferred subjects and use your twitter account to respond to tweets from other users. This engagement will show that you are both listening and responding to customer (and potential customer) requests in the channel. When you contact customers via phone, email, or through the web, be sure to ask them to follow you on Twitter. WestJet has a weekly event called “Winglet Wednesday” where customers tweet their photos of WestJet winglets. The event has become a very popular part of the twitter experience. The idea is to build interest by providing unique content that is geared towards the audience on Twitter rather than simply re-hashing existing content.
LinkedIn – B2B social networks are particularly well suited to organizations that are selling to businesses. There are a number of groups and sub-networks within LinkedIn that may be of interest to you. If the principals of your business do not have LinkedIn memberships, I highly recommend they create profiles. Use the tool to create connections with existing partners, vendors, and even customers. The opportunity to participate in groups will present itself, but you will want to establish your profile first before trying to market the business.
Ning – You may want to consider forming your own social network around your particular business or niche. For example, if you are a wine tour company, you may want to start a social network around wine enthusiasts. Be sure, though to keep the content and the social network separate from your brand. In the same way that the Savvy Operator blog is sponsored by Rezgo or the Small Fish Big Ocean network is sponsored by TourCMS, you are free to sponsor your social network, just be careful not to make the network a sales platform or you will not attract or keep members.
BuddyPress – Another option to creating your own social network is to use BuddyPress, which is a plug-in to WordPress. BuddyPress uses the existing blogging platform can allow your members to write their own posts and articles as well as message each other and create a profile page. Although BuddyPress is a free opensource platform, the installation and set-up can vary in complexity.

I recommend that you focus on the the primary accounts and add only where you feel the addition is valuable to your brand or reputation. In the case of existing accounts, make sure that each account has a link back to your primary website. At the very least, these existing memberships should be driving traffic back to your main website. If the account has no way to link back, then leave it for now. Remember that the quality of interaction is more important then the quantity. Having a few social media channels that are well used and popular is more productive and will have more impact on your business then created profiles on a hundred different sites.

You’ll begin to see results right away with the demonstration phase. Because this phase is all about engagement and communication, you will be actively communicating with customers, vendors, or partners using the various social channels you have created. Whether you are responding to a message on Twitter, a wall post on Facebook, or a group message in LinkedIn, you will see the responses almost immediately and you will be able to gauge how engaged your customers are in the arenas in which you choose to engage with them.

Throwing Your Own Social Media Party

Stephen Joyce — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:26:41 +0000

L.E.A.D. social media strategy is about demonstrating your comfort and use of social media. The purpose of the demonstration phase is to direct your customers and potential customers to YOUR social media places instead of engaging with customers in THEIR social media spaces. In essence, during this phase you are orchestrating and facilitating the conversations you have with your customers rather than just joining in on existing conversations. A simple analogy for this would be throwing your own party as opposed to going to someone else’s party.

An important thing to remember with the demonstration phase is that customers will only participate with you in your space if they trust you and if they feel comfortable sharing with you. Even though you are having a party doesn’t mean anyone is going to come. You need to invite them to your party and you need to make it worthwhile for them to come by providing something of value. In this case, you may provide them with access to interesting articles, content, and knowledge they can’t find elsewhere.

The objective of the demonstration phase is to better manage the conversations around your brand. Remember that like all social media, you will never be able to control the conversations, but you can influence where, when, what, and how people talk about you on-line if you are listening to what they say and providing information that is relevant and timely for them (during the articulation phase).

Success in demonstrating is measurable by the number of people that choose to accept your invitation to connect and by the increase in brand recognition you receive. The primary ways to measure your success are:

An increase in the number of fans and overall engagement of fans on your Facebook fan page. You will also find that your Facebook fan page will rank highly for your chosen keywords and your brand when searching on Google. This is why it is important to have it stand out differently from your regular website and blog.
An increase in Twitter followers and overall engagement of users on Twitter. This may not be directly attributable to an increase in followers but could be because you are actively engaging with other Twitter users. It is okay for you to follow a large number of users on Twitter, however, be careful not to follow spam followers or robots, because this will only result in spam filling your friend feed.
If you run any promotions, then the level of engagement of the contests will also be a good indication of how involved your Fans are with your brand and how interested they are in receiving promotional messages from you. This is why I recommend that the contests be unique to the channel and have their own specific targets. In this way, you can effectively measure the success of each promotion by channel.
Increased engagement with B2B through LinkedIn. This will occur organically as you build your network and connect with people you know. This is particularly true if you are in a visible position with the organization.

As we dive into the demonstration phase, we’ll take a look at a variety of different tools and methods for demonstrating your expertise. As with all good things, you must be patient and persistent in your demonstrating. The perfect party takes time to plan.

The Impact of Letting Your Content Go

Stephen Joyce — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:38:33 +0000

The articulation phase of the L.E.A.D. social media strategy has a direct impact on two parts of the marketing funnel. Inspirational content will influence the user during the awareness stage and the consideration stage. This is nothing new. Companies have been providing content in this manner for decades. In fact, the earliest magazines, including Ladies Home Journal were used to push content about advertiser products. That said, consumers have become much more savvy when it comes to endorsed product pitches or blatant marketing messages, so it is important to provide content that is not a product sales pitch. The early Michelin tourist guides are a great example of this sponsored but non-sales related content.

You can measure your success by correlating bookings or inquiries directly from content created for your blog or other third party sites. For example, if you write a piece of content for a travel blog, make sure to use a Google Analytics referral code with the piece in order to directly track your conversions from these articles. If your tour or activity booking software supports referral codes, you could apply a unique promotional code or referral code to your links to track revenue from these sources. If this is not possible, then measure your referral traffic through your analytics in order to compare direct traffic or organic traffic versus referrals from your blog or third party sites. It is important that this is measurable so that you can determine how successful your articulation practices are in terms of impact on your business. Remember that, although the direct marketing costs are limited, there is a time cost associated with the successful implementation of the articulation phase. If you take the time to listen carefully to your audience and focus your writing efforts on addressing their specific needs, your results will be much better than if you simply attempt to write for the sake of attracting traffic.

Your posts and articles will be indexed very quickly and you should see alerts for the content almost immediately. Don’t expect to see comments from readers right away. It will take time for your content to be recognized by others in the community. To improve your chances of being seen and heard by others, make sure to use your experience with commenting on other sites to draw more attention to your own posts. Some simple ways to drive traffic to your content include:

Mentioning that you have written a post about a particular subject on another blog site.
Contacting bloggers with whom you have created a rapport and asking them for their feedback on your posts.
Sharing your post on Facebook or Twitter using the tools like Facebook share, notes, and Twitterfeed.
Including a summary of your post in your monthly newsletter.
Syndicating your posts through credible blog sharing sites like BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, and Technorati.

The build it (or in this case write it) and they will come philosophy really doesn’t work for social media. With so many blog sites (many of which are spam sites) there is actually a decreasing likelihood that your content will be found if it is not good, relevant, and timely. Out of all the phases of the L.E.A.D. social media strategy, the articulation phase has the potential to have the most impact, but also be the most costly. How effective your content will be is completely based on your commitment to writing good content and your consistency in producing it.

Set your content free

Stephen Joyce — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:24:56 +0000

There are a variety of tools available for you to use to execute your articulation objectives. Most of the most popular tools are free or very low cost and can be integrated with your existing web site withe relative ease.

If you are not already using a content management system that supports blogging, I would highly recommend that you consider setting up a blog on a CMS that supports blogging. Joomla, Mambo, and Drupal can all be made to support blogging. In addition, the WordPress platform (which was originally developed as a blogging platform) can be used as a CMS. If the platform does not support blogging, then I recommend you create a separate blog site hosted on your domain, for example blog.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/blog.

Additional modules that should be part of your blog include:

These additional modules are available for various blogging and cms systems and will increase the social sharing of your content and give your readers the ability to spread your content when and where appropriate. In addition to your blog you can now distribute your content from your blog to your Facebook fan page and through Twitter using Twitterfeed. In order to connect your blog to Facebook and Twitter you need to make the following adjustments:

Facebook – Connect your fan page notes to your blog feed. Facebook will allow you to import your blog feed on a regular basis and re-publish your blog posts on your public fan page.
TwitterFeed.com – Twitterfeed allows you to post notices to your twitter account whenever you add posts to your blog. It is important that this should only be used in conjunction with regular conversational tweets. If not, your account will be perceived as a push marketing mechanism and will not be actively followed.

The bottom line is that the technology to get your content on-line is the least challenging part of the equation. In order to be successful during the articulation phase, it is imperative that you produce content that specifically meets the needs of your customers based on what they tell you during the listening and engagement phases.

For more information about building your content strategy and plan, I suggest you review these post:

Build Awareness of Your Brand by Articulating Your Offering

Stephen Joyce — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:57:13 +0000

L.E.A.D. social media strategy is also a transition phase. It is transitional because during this phase you will shift from being a content consumer and commenter into a content producer. The articulation phase is about generating content that fulfills the customers’ need for relevant information and details about your products or services. During the articulation phase, your goal is to drive demand for your services by influencing them to use what it is that you offer. This phase is the most challenging for most because of the content production requirement. It is, however, also one of the most important steps because it confirms what you have learned during the listening and engagement phases and provides a framework for future engagement with potential customers.

To better understand the role that articulation plays in the social media cycle, you first have to understand the three phases of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel consists of:

Awareness: This is a research phase. The customer is looking for a solution to their problem (whether it is something to do while on vacation, or where to stay) but is not sure what service to use or where to go. This research will include reading blogs, reviewing websites, reading news and potentially discussing options on-line. The more you participate in the arenas where this research will occur, the more awareness you will build about your brand.
Consideration: During this phase the customer has defined some parameters around the solution that they want and is now considering which ones to use. During this phase, it is essential that you provide all the information possible to help the customer make the decision to choose your service over your competitors. This may include things like providing a competitive analysis or chart, outlining your features in detail, a video introduction, slide show presentation, tips or howtos, or perhaps even a personal contact.
Action: Once the customer has decided to use your service, make sure that there is a clear call to action and that it is measurable. If the action is to book a tour or hotel room, then make that clear and make it easy for the customer to do so. If you want to drive the customer to a call, then make that obvious and use a phone number that can be tracked to web referrals.

Your articulation objectives are to:

Write content that helps to influence the customer to do business with you.
Provide the customer with information that will help them choose a strategy that aligns with your business offering (whether or not it is with you).
Provide your potential customers with all the information they need to make a purchasing decision with you.
Give the potential customer the customer service experience that they have come to expect from the materials you have provided for them.

Now that you have a better understanding of what the articulation phase is all about and what your expectations are, we can look at what tools and services you might want to consider using to increase your chances of success.