Are You Treating All Your Social Media Channels The Same?

Social media marketing is getting easier every day, especially with great tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck that simultaneously spread your message across all your social channels.

A recent study by ad network Chitika suggests that broadcasting the same message across the various social networks may not be the most effective way to engage your customers.

The study noted that the type of information consumed on four popular social networks – MySpace, Digg, Facebook and Twitter – varied by network.

Twitter users were significantly more interested in news, while MySpace users had a penchant for gaming and entertainment.  Digg users had the greatest interest in news, celebrity & entertainment, and gaming, while Facebook users were interested in news and community.

Just like your audience varies on different social channels, the information they desire is different as well.  So if you are treating all the channels the same way, you may be missing the opportunity to truly connect.

Social media is about creating a forum to communicate with your audience, listening to them, and providing them with information they want to receive. Doing so creates interest, trust and ultimately evangelists.

By engaging your audience with relevant messaging, you can learn what they what they want from your company, what you are doing well and where you can make improvements.

Passive social media gives you the ability to listen to your audience and understand their wants and needs.  Listening can help your company become more efficient, more innovative and more customer-focused.  And when that happens, both your company and your customers win.

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Let’s Make Sure This Goes Viral

Have you ever uttered the words “this is going to go viral” or know someone who has? Are you amazed at how a video of a kitten playing the piano can reach 3 million people, but only 15 people view the corporate video you posted on YouTube – and 12 of those people are employees or relatives?

Why some things go viral can’t always be explained; however, in the book “The Viral Loop“, Adam Penenberg does a nice job discussing how businesses can create success by knowing what a customer wants and creating an environment that encourages people to share.

Penenberg gives real world examples like Twitter, Facebook and Ning as well as Tupperware – one of the earliest examples of viral marketing.

“The trick is they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread their product for them through their own social network of friends, family, colleagues, and peers.”

The key to success is designing your product or service the right way.

As you start looking towards 2010, take a look at this book to see how you can apply some of its principles to your business.

The Elevator Pitch Revisited

The past few weeks I have been involved in many conversations regarding the perfect elevator pitch.  In each conversation I’ve challenged people to evolve their idea of an elevator pitch to fit in with today’s technology.  This requires keeping their pitch to 140 characters required by Twitter or the 70 characters allowed by Google AdWords.

To that end I am reposting this blog entry from January of this year.

Google AdWords are those “sponsored links” in the right hand column on any Google search results page.  While we’ll discuss these further another time, these are cost per click ads that are placed by a company to get your attention based on your search terms.

When using Google AdWords as a marketing tool, the challenge is communicating your point of difference in 70 characters (including spaces).  This limited amount of space also needs to motivate the audience to take action.  Just like your elevator pitch.  This got me thinking- are Google AdWords this generation’s version of the elevator pitch?

Could you differentiate your company in 70 characters?    It’s not easy.  Luckily for me it only required a 35% reduction in characters bringing my AdWords pitch to “We increase your marketing return without increasing your investment”.

There is a sales adage that says know when to stop talking.  That same advice can be said about your AdWords pitch.  Make it relevant, distinct, motivating and to the point – 70 characters will force you to do just that.  Then once you’ve said your pitch, let your audience strike up the conversation to find out more.  If they don’t want to learn more then maybe your pitch isn’t as strong as it needs to be.

If it isn’t please refer to our previous entries – Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch and Who’s On First?

So see if you can get your AdWords pitch down to 70 characters.  Doing so is just another way to market smarter.

Measuring The Impact of Social Media

The attraction of social media is based on its ability to reach an audience with few out of pocket costs.  However, social media does require a financial investment through an employee’s hours and opportunity costs.

As a result, companies need to know how their social media efforts are making an impact on their business.

Part of that impact should be measured by social media activity that was generated by consumers, not your marketing department.  By measuring consumer comments regarding your company, you get a good sense about their interest in your brand – good or bad.

Two new tools can help measure this activity:

BackType lets you monitor what people are saying about your company or your competitors.  Its trend section is under development but will allow you to trend activity.

Addictomatic creates a dashboard of things like flickr, digg, twitter, youtube, blogs and other tools to give you a current picture of what is being said about your brand.

The benefit of social media is bringing you closer to your consumer by understanding what they are saying about you.

BackType and Addictomatic are two tools that help make that goal easier.

The next hot thing in marketing

In the latest issue of Fortune magazine, prominent people talked about the best advice they ever received. Lauren Zalaznick, President, Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, NBC Universal, stated the best advice she ever received was to listen.

Great advice – probably the best for anyone in marketing. And with today’s social media tools, it is now easier than ever.

Twitter:  Peter Shankman (twitter.com/skydiver) tweeted about the great service, but poor wi-fi, at a hotel he was staying at.  Someone at that hotel was monitoring Twitter and immediately had the problem resolved.

Facebook: Totino’s Pizza has 47 fan groups on Facebook where people talk about their favorite pizza, best toppings to add to a pizza and products they don’t like.  Think about how much the Totino’s product team could learn about their evangelists without paying a dime for formal research.

Rating Sites like Yelp, Kudzu, City Search: Ratings sites allow people to post what they like and don’t like about your company.  If you aren’t getting five-star ratings, do you know why?  Looking at your customer reviews will let you know what you are doing well and where you need improvement.

Blogs & YouTube: People are passionate.  And now they have the tools to express their passion through words and video.  What are bloggers writing about your company?  Have people posted videos about your service?  Remember the YouTube video where a Comcast service tech fell asleep on the couch while waiting on the phone for Comcast technical support?

Every day I am asked how to use social media for marketing.  My response? Listen to your audience.

Marketing Checklist

We get so caught up in the day-to-day crises of our jobs we often forget the communications basics.

Use this checklist at the beginning of each week to keep tabs on your company and your competition.

Your Company

• Check all the links on your website to make sure they are still live
• Search your company on Google, Yahoo, etc
• Search your company on blogs through technorati or blogsearch
• Update Google Alerts
• If you are using paid search like AdWords, test different terms. Test ad content.
• Monitor web traffic
• Update your blog
• Determine what to post to Twitter this week
• Update your Facebook page

Your Competitors

• Check your competitor’s websites
• Check your competitor’s web traffic on Compete.com.
• Search your competitor’s on Google, Yahoo, etc
• Search your competitor’s on blogs through technorati or blogsearch

Starting the week off following this checklist gets this out of your way and, more important, gives you time to work on anything you might discover.

Monetizing Twitter

Twitter is the “hot” thing in social marketing.

The concept is simple: Provide people with quick updates called tweets (140 character limit) in this one-to-many microblog. You try to attract as many people as you can to follow you on Twitter so more people can “hear” what you have to say.

Fame on Twitter is often measured with how often you are “retweeted” – when someone tweets your tweet – and/or how many people recommended you on Follow Friday.

But like most social media, the question always remains: how does a company monetize their efforts?

Twitter has created a cottage industry of search engines, alerts, popular topics and an advertising mechanism: TwitterHawk.

TwitterHawk allows you to send a marketing message to someone who tweets about a market you serve.

For example, if you are a credit union, you can send a marketing message to anyone who tweets about a negative experience about a bank.

The cost is an incredibly reasonable $5.00 for 100 messages. You can set your message to automatically respond or you can go through the send queue to make sure your message is truly targeted by viewing the potential message recipient’s twitter profile.

The latter is more time consuming but much more effective, especially if your company serves a limited geography.

As Facebook tries to figure out its advertising model and LinkedIn’s model focuses on keywords, TwitterHawk has found a way to reach people at the exact moment they comment about something.

So if someone tweets about their car breaking down, Ford can send them a message to capitalize on the situation.

I am not certain it is the most effective marketing tool, but to be able to hone in on that “pain” moment in a cost-effective manner may become a great way to market smarter.

The Google Alerts for Twitter

Just before Thanksgiving I wrote about Google Alerts and its ability to allow you track your company and your competitors in blogs and on the web.

I recently learned about Tweet Beep  which allows you to see who’s talking (or tweeting) about you on Twitter.  

For those of you who are not aware of Twitter  – it is a social marketing tool that allows you to communicate with your network through short statements.  It also lets you follow your network to learn what they are up to.

TweetBeep is another way to see who is talking about you online  allowing to listen to your audience and through this knowledge, market smarter.

Measuring Social Media

I recently learned about ViTrue’s Social Media Index which is a good thing because people are always asking me about how to measure success in social marketing.  

The Social Media Index (SMI) is a tool that measures your impact within various social media like blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter), networking sites, and photo and video sharing sites.  While still in BETA form it is interesting to see how a company or personality is faring in social media compared to its competitor.

For example on 11.10.08 Obama had a SMI of 7130 compared to McCain’s 3410 demonstrating that Obama is mentioned 2x as frequently as McCain in the various social media.  

To help you track your social marketing efforts, ViTrue’s full version allows a company to dig deep to understand which micro-blogs or photo sharing services, etc it has a presence.

Currently, the full service version is only available to companies who work with ViTrue to set up their social marketing programs, but there is discussion that companies may be able to subscribe to the SMI in the near future.  I’ll keep you posted.

Until then, check it out weekly to get a gauge on your company’s success in social marketing.

The Social Marketing Index is just another tool to help you market smarter.