Marketing Blogs
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by Matt Granfieldon Jun 12 |
Developing a social media strategy for your brand
You’ve got a marketing plan of course, and a business plan, and a company mission statement, and you’ve probably got a bunch of other formal forms informing you of the formula for formulating strategic marketing decisions, but in all of that there’s probably not a single bit of guidance on what to do when TeenyBopper88 from Mildura starts telling all her Twitter followers that your product a) is brilliant and should be bought by everyone, b) is entirely unremarkable or c) left her without sight in one eye.
Presuming anyone is actually talking about you of course. If they’re not, you’re probably scratching your head wondering exactly how you get the conversation started. You’ve probably got a Twitter account setup, you’ve probably got an agency (or a cousin) telling you to create a Facebook page, and you’re probably reading stuff from social media ‘experts’ telling you to just jump in and start talking. Which would be fine, except you’ve read all the horror stories about brands that tried to do that and given that you actually have people to answer to should things start looking like a pear, you want some sort of roadmap/plan/strategy for getting there without burning your fingers, your hand and your brand.
Funnily enough, you’re not alone. A recent survey revealed that 109% of marketing managers were keen to make a move into the social media sphere but 201% were so shit-scared of the consequences of doing it wrong, that no-one has heard so much as a tweet from them. That’s a complete lie. I made those figures up. But the truth isn’t far off. I get to talk to a lot of brand and marketing managers through the ad agency I work for, and at various industry events about the place, and I haven’t met a single one yet who doesn’t want to start playing in the social media space but can’t quite get their heads around how to do it, or can’t afford to hire a social media manager to just take care of it.
If that sounds like you, you need a social media strategy. Here’s how to create one…
Step 1: Gather the conversations
Use social media monitoring tools, to collect relevant snippets of conversations happening about your brand, industry and competitors online. Depending on the level of activity that you are monitoring, a three to four week collection period should be enough to give you an overview of the type of conversations taking place.
Step 2: Analyse the conversations
Once you’ve got a pile of dialogue sitting in front of you, sort them out and look for trends. Are they all positive? Are the mostly negative? Are they all by women? Figure out what they’re talking about, what the sentiment towards your brand is, what platforms people are using to talk and the type of people engaging in the conversation.
Step 3: Review your brand’s personality
At some stage you (or someone before you) would have probably gone through a formal process of defining your brand’s values. You may have discussed what movie star your brand would be (George Clooney of course, every brand says they are George Clooney; smart, sophisticated, sense of humour, popular, ladies want you, men want to be you, mature, but still fun, has a mansion in Lake Como; I want to be George Clooney, why wouldn’t your brand?), what car your brand would drive (hope it’s not a Volvo), what your brand would do on weekends for fun (sprightly dinner party with lively conversation anyone?) and where your brand fits on a circular diagram with other similar brands (let me guess, you’re in the middle). Dig up those diagrams, go through the reports and remind yourself where you want to be and what sort of personality your brand has.
If you’ve never been through a formal brand identity process, now would be a good time. You can hire a big-name branding consultant with an extensive collection of thick whiteboard markers, or just write you and your competitors names on a set of darts and throw them at a copy of Who Weekly and you’ll get basically the same results.
Step 4: Compare personality vs. reality
Compare where you want to be with what people are actually saying about you. If people are talking about your brand as if it’s George Clooney, you win. If people are comparing your brand to George Bush, you have some work to do.
Step 5: Develop social media objectives
Subtract the reality from your ideal personality and you’ll know what you should be aiming for. If your brand is talked about positively and seems to have lots of fans, your goals should be to build relationships with and turn your fans into brand ambassadors. They’ll be likely to sign up to a Facebook page, they’ll want your newsletter and they’ll be over the moon if you give them opportunities to connect with you – make it a goal to build a database of fans and give them access to your brand.
If things aren’t so good and you have a bunch of hecklers out there, your goals should be to understand the problems and start owning the conversation. Let people know that you are listening and give them opportunities to air their dirty laundry in more appropriate places.
If you’re not being talked about at all, your goal should be conversation creation. Start working with your marketing team, your boss, your PR agency or your ad agency and get people talking about you. Give them reasons to talk. Start being remarkable.
In each objective work out:
- What you’d ideally like the conversations to be about?
- Where you want them to do the talking?
- What you want to change?
- How much it will cost?
- How long you think it will take to get there?
- What you need to do differently to make it happen?
- How you will measure success?
- How you are going to monitor progress?
Step 6: Get advice
Once you have some goals in place, not is the time to engage a social media expert, ask your PR company. Speak to your ad agency. Hire an in-house social media manager. Join LinkedIn and start making friends with people who know the space. Make sure you ask for credentials though, there are a million social media ‘strategists’ out there, but few who have helped companies achieve real results that have benefitted the brand.
Signs of an expert social media advisor include:
- Quantifiable results
- Happy clients, the bigger the better (and usually the more expensive)
- Press coverage
- Peer praise
- A history of working in marketing/advertising/PR before the words ‘social media’ were used in the same sentence, and
- A lively, insightful blog and/or Twitter account.
Step 7: Review
Once you’ve started actioning strategies to achieve your goals, go back to step one and start keeping a close eye on social media conversations. Look at the objectives that have been set and monitor the progress and relevance of what you are doing.
If you’re not meeting your goals in a realistic timeframe, revisit your objectives and explore alternative approaches. Assess the levels of conversation in terms of volume, content and sentiment.
If you’ve started to meet your goals you’ll notice that people are talking about you more often, and they’ll be saying nice things too. If they’re not, you’re doing something wrong somewhere and you’ll have to set some different goals. Having a boring brand is no excuse ether, blenders and canned fish have been two of the most talked-about products this century thanks to the stories those marketers have attached to them.
In summary…
Social media is such a new and evolving landscape to be playing in, but plenty of companies are starting to get it right. You don’t have to just dive right in and force your CEO to start Twittering tomorrow. Take the time to set some goals, make a plan, get some advice, and you’ll almost certainly start reaping rewards for your brand, no matter what people are currently saying about you.
Got any questions? Leave a comment below…
Many thanks to you both.
Why not simply create a blog which is simply another word for a newsletter. This means you will improve Google juice on your website bringing more people to it. People can subscribe either the old fashioned (email) or modern way RSS). And you can distribute your message more widely.
@anon 2 Looks like you've been keeping up with what is said on Marketingmag.com.au, which is great!
The conversations that you engage in apart from building brand advocates also have enormous benefits for the business such as insights for new product development, feedback for customer service etc.. ensure that you have the ears of those departments before you begin to maximise the investment in the social media strategy.
While pr agencies, social media consultants and ad agencies can help you steer the social media course it is important to develop those social media skillsets/knowledge internally to help you truly own and manage that strategy.
Cheers
Everyone else, thanks - and Mark, yes, the first comment was my own. Because I can.
You mentioned in your get advice section "to engage a social media expert, ask your PR company, Speak to your ad agency etc"
Do you think one day the industry will develop in a way that there will be specific companies set up to solely create social media strategies, monitor social media conversations and create viral content or do you think this will always go through PR companies and ad / media agencies?
I understand there are a few companies that might claim to offer this service but do you think these companies are a sustainable concept?
I was talking about Matts philosophy on email as old-fashioned.
The most interesting play IMHO with regard to social media is the involvement of PR companies. The line between social media marketing and social media as become very blurred: I personally dont think that PR companies should offer social media strategy, simply because I come from the perspective that the social media marketing angle should come first, and PR is removed from marketing (yes, before the PR people squeal their disapproval). I acknowledge there is overlap, but I wouldnt get my digital agency to do PR. In fact, the whole ethical issues that are arising with regard to authenticity can be traced back to the merging of "spin" with what is supposed to be unedited consumer interaction.
But I digress. I actually strongly disagree with parts of this article. The conclusions are great, the premise is solid, the writing is entertaining, but the order of the steps to me dont seem correct and in fact muddy the waters.
Step 5, "Develop social media objectives," could be made Step 1, and renames "Develop media objectives. The reason this is important is twofold.
Firstly, social media is a channel, and as such should be discussed in the same playing field as other business objectives. To consider it in situ seems a mistake to me, and this is unfortunately what many brands tend to be doing.
Secondly, unless you know what you are looking for, as a consequence of knowing what your objectives are, there is no point monitoring conversations. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and result in paralysis by analysis. There is so much data, that if we adhered to Matts steps, step one would end up being confusing. Matt in step one writes that you have to collect "relevant" data, but unless you know what the objectives are, everything is relevant and hence a lot of time is wasted.
Know what you want to achieve first, then look at the current state of play to work out how far you have to travel on your brand journey. Not the other way around.
So we can have a fluid conversation, it would be ideal if anon commentators could sign off with a name (can even be bogus!).
I will check with our patient tech team about the Safari 4 issue as well.
Ive been coming across some good pieces lately (Kate, your last about the ranking /marketer is a challenge for my thoughts).
I usually dont attack people or bots using comments, I much prefer doing face to face, but Its so tempting to believe that we are merely broadcasters, putting together a play list and hurtling it out to the rest of the world, louder is better. Sometimes I wish people would be quite rather than talking or writting, anyway such is life...
My first RANT:
Anonymity - This is a plague - this hurts Internet and do not collaborate in anything at any level. Everything bad over Internet is hidden behind anonymity - http://marketingeasy.net/anonymous-notgood/2009-03-20/ .
My second RANT:
Social Media is not a strategy and its not a tool either. If there was no Facebook or Twitter, Social Media and consumer engagement would still exist in some level.
Considering everyone respects Seth Godin more than Jesus Christ, let me copy and past his definition of social media success:
The pillars of social media site success
Why people choose to visit online social sites:
* Who likes me?
* Is everything okay?
* How can I become more popular?
* Whats new?
* Im bored, lets make some noise
None of these are new, but in the digital world, theyre still magnetic.
If you want to understand why Twitter is so hot, look at those five attributes. They deliver all five, instantly.
And if wasnt for twitter would be for some another tool that would deliver the same.
Anonymous - I wish i could call you by name - I need to agree with you, even though the Matts piece is solid and smart, Business Objectives comes before to "where do I fit" .
Lucio
Peter Bray and Lucio: The first step in formulating a social media strategy for your brand should always be to listen, plain and simple. You can't set goals if you don't know what is (or what is not) being said about you. (And your industry, and your competitors). It would be like deciding you want to launch strawberry flavoured potato chips and then trying to convince people it was a good idea. I would suggest that a better idea would be to listen to what people are saying about potato chips and then asking them what they think the new flavour should be.
Lucio: No (BAD WORD FILTERED).
The best jazz musicians have a ‘feel’ for what works; they aren’t robots enslaved by ‘methodology’. The way they play their instrument is guided by their mood ... by the mood of the audience ... by the atmosphere. What actually happens on that very night, in that very room, can’t be predicted. And can’t be controlled.
So it is with social media. Whoever executes your social media strategy, day to day, should have more in common with a jazz muso than a classical pianist. Both highly talented, agreed, but send the classical guy to work in Accounts.
Running an effective social media campaign is about ‘living in the moment’ ... ‘going with the flow’ ... ‘being in the zone’. Why? Because the fans fiddling with Facebook, and the tweeps tweeting on Twitter are all doing just that. It’s all about NOW.
Like the mood of the jazz room, trends are transient, fads are fleeting, and only the player with the gift of intuition can ‘play to the crowd’. Heard of ‘Susan Boyle’? ‘Fair shake of the sauce bottle’? ‘Utegate’? In the nanosecond world of social media, such trends skyrocket then crash and burn, while the mainstream media is still stammering, ‘What happened?’
When you’re choosing someone to make your social media campaign happen on a daily basis, if they have a clarinet in their hand, give them the job. If not, ask them if they know the meaning of ‘bohemian’ or ‘zeitgeist’. If they don’t, wish them well and shout, ‘Next!’
I can’t improvise with a saxophone; I just do it with comedy at product launches and other corporate events. But there’s always that same magic ... that same warmth ... when moods and ideas connect. Jokes ... jazz ... whatever ignites the right connections between brands and people. That’s what you’re after. You can’t hold it in your hand ... you can’t exactly plan for it ... you can’t really measure it. But by God you know when it’s there.
Happy improvising.
Matt this thread is certainly getting the tongues wagging!
Everyone, Matt's latest installment is in – I will post it on the site tomorrow so keep an eye out!
:-)
Peter's second point about objectives first, yes, I agree that's how things should be and precisely because social media covers so many opportunities which are far beyond the scope of "agencies" - which is another debate. We are talking about fundamental changes in buying habits which even McKinsey has recognised. This transcends brand and hints at corporate survival in many sectors. IBM just released a new product not only designed and named socially but also the marketing messages and language came from the community.
Matt says you have to listen first. Listening is critical and I understand his explanation. In fact we even use one acronym LISTEN - Listen, Inform yourself, Start to converse, Test the feedback/affects, Engage with the communities, Note the results and adjust.
Perhaps we emphasize planning and objectives because we are totally business oriented and businesses work in workflows and paradigms such as strategy + objectives, roles + responsibilities, teams + performance, investment + return (ROI), feedback + improvement (Quality Control). We train managers and consultants in integrating social media into this environment and aligned to current programs and objectives across branding, marketing, sales, product development, service & support, HR, and logistics and distribution.
Our Leadership Class over 8 weeks and 16X2 hour sessions is being enthusiastically received - worldwide - because of our holistic approach.
Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy (Australia)
http://www.socialmedia-academy.com.au
As far as Seth Godin's reasons why people "choose to visit online social sites" I would say sure that's half to story. Sometimes we also have to think for ourselves and what we like to call "common sense" tells us that in both B2C and B2B sales people visit social sites to gather information to inform their choices. That's why such a media is of interest to business.
The challenge which surfaces time and time again is that corporate folks are looking for education in how to go about it in a business-like manner. How would you suggest that is best done?
Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy (Australia)
http://www.socialmedia-academy.com.au
As to who is best qualified to drive the campaign - PR, marketing, advertising, in-house etc - then that, obviously I would have thought, depends on who has the skills and the insights. Bear in mind, however, that the fundamentals of public relations, when practiced to its optimum level, are so synergisttic with social media it's scary. I discuss this here: http://craigpearce.info/?p=63
It also depends whether it's a product promotion or perhaps a program more aligned with overall corporate reputation.
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