When mixing marketing and social media you never really know what you’re going to get. The response look like just another drop in the ocean or as overwhelming as a tsunami.
I came across the video below at Jason Keath’s blog, the evolution of media, in a post that compared dancing to viral marketing. How does a dancing man at a concert relate to viral marketing? Well, you’ll just have to watch to find out.
As marketers, we’re under constant pressure to prove that our tactics are working. In order to show that what we’re doing is effective, we need numbers – cold, hard, measurable numbers to back up a high return on investment.
Unfortunately, when it comes to social media, finding those measurable numbers can be quite challenging.
Marketers cited the “inability to measure ROI” as one of the largest barriers to adopting social media tactics by their company, according to MarketingSherpa research.
“This barrier is more of a perception than a reality because social media often requires qualitative measurement rather than the quantitative metrics that online marketers have become accustomed to,” say the Sherpas.
In order to measure ROI, you need two numbers: an investment cost and income returned. The easier you can find these two factors, the easier it is to measure your tactic and show that what you’re doing is working (or not).
MarketingSherpa’s most recent Chart of the Week reveals the social media tactics marketers find to be the most accurately measurable.
Proving the ROI of social media
The top three most measurable tactics include advertising on blogs or social networks, online news release distribution and user reviews or ratings.
Instead of throwing out the bottom tactics – forums or discussion groups, blogging on a company blog, creating profiles on social networks – the Sherpas suggest factoring in more qualitative values into your perceived ROI.
“Those who don’t include qualitative factors in the planning of their social media programs may find themselves employing much less effective tactics, simply for the sake of perceived measurability, resulting in a loss of confidence in performance.”
I ran across some great advice today at the B2B Marketing Blog that needed to be passed along. In today’s post, Brian Courtney delivers some wise words:
“People will be talking about your brand with or without you. You may as well take part in the conversation.”
And he warns that there’s a new type of ROI out there – the Risk Of Ignoring.
Thirty years ago, when a customer was upset with a company over their poor customer service they could spread the word by calling friends on the phone, sending a complaint letter, or could possibly go as far as to write an editorial in their local newspaper.
Today, letting others know about shoddy customer service is as simple as pressing the power button on your computer.
If you are doing business these days, you have to recognize that the world has changed. As consumers, we expect good customer service. If we don’t get it, we don’t just forgive and forget. We never buy from you again. We tell our friends not to buy from you. We tell the world not to buy from you.
That’s right. In the days of blogs and search engines, customers have the final word. That’s why you need to bend over backward to keep them happy. Because the happy customers stay quiet. It’s the angry customers who speak up, and deter others from doing business with you.
After a terrible experience with a major computer manufacturer, this customer made it his “new hobby” to let everyone know about it. He’s estimated that his tactics could potentially move $500,000 in sales away from the company by not buying their product for his organizations and compelling others to do the same.
Whether he hit his goal or not will continue to be a mystery, but it still shows the lengths to which an angry customer will go in order to get their voice heard.
Training customer service representative to resolve customer complaints is essential to the success of your business. As soon as a customer feels like they have been mistreated, they can quickly get online to start telling all of their friends and online connections about it.
Always remember the tried-and-true formula that a happy customer will tell one of their friends, but an unhappy customer will tell three. If that unhappy customer is active in social media, they may be able to quickly spread their story to 300,000 of their friends in just a matter of minutes.
Technology is forcing customer service to reach new levels of satisfaction. Representatives must be aware that the customer on the other end of the phone can easily spread the word about their experience just minutes after the call is over.
But it doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom. When a disgruntled customer vents about their problem on the internet, it could give your company a second chance to resolve their problem that you may have initially overlooked.
Say you come across a blog post from a customer who recently had a terrible experience with your company, what’s the best thing you should do?
For starters, you could leave a comment on their blog as a representative of your company. Tell the customer that you’d personally like to help with their problem.
If you can’t personally do anything to remedy the problem, continue to work with the customer until they are satisfied. Connect them with someone else in your organization that could help and remember to follow up to see if their issue was resolved.
Listen to what customers are saying about you online with tools like Google Alerts. If what they have to say is positive, tell them ‘thank you’ for their kind words. If their words aren’t so kind, ask them how you can help.
When customers share their opinions about your company on the Internet it can either be good or bad (sometimes, really bad). It’s up to you to determine how to handle the comments once they’re made.
Despite the economic recession and marketing budgets being slashed to pieces, almost every social media marketer (95%) plans to maintain or increase social media spending.
Forrester researcher Jeremiah Owyang recently released his study called “Social Media Playtime Is Over,” based on a survey from December of 2008.
Marketers will increase social media spending
Some of his key findings reveal that:
More than 50% of interactive marketers plan increases in their social technology spending. Only 5% plan to cut spending.
The fastest growing categories include social networking, blogging and user-generated content.
Social media spending is small compared to other types of marketing efforts. While the marketers surveyed came from companies with at least 250 people, 75% are still spending $100,000 or less on social technology efforts.
From the report’s executive summary:
These inexpensive tools can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth, and properly managed, can deliver measurable results.
Though you may not have someone in your organization with the title of ‘Social Media Marketer’, the study shows that social media is a strong marketing investment, even when our economy is in the dumps.
Like the report says “Social Media Playtime Is Over,” it’s time to get serious.
Is your company planning to increase spending on social media efforts? Why, why not?
Social media has pulled ahead of email as the most popular online activity, according to the latest research from Neilsen Online.
More than two-thirds (67%) of the world’s online population visits social networks and blogs, making participation in “member communities” the fourth most popular activity online.
Social media more popular that email
Activity on social networks and blogs ranks fourth behind search, portals and PC software, but has moved higher than personal email use.
Social networking and blogging now account for nearly 10% of all time spent on the internet and have “become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online. “While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing. Social networking will continue to alter not just the global online landscape, but the consumer experience at large. This study explains why.”
This isn’t evidence that email marketing has become ineffective, it depends on what works for your business. What the research does show is that whether your B2B or B2C, more of your customers are active in social networks and are reading blogs.
Your customers are using social media and so should you.
One of the biggest fears companies have when it comes to getting started in social media is how customers will respond to your presence and how to control the communication coming from your organization.
A simple way to ease the fear of handling customer responses is to come up with a plan.
The U.S. Air Force is an organization that is taking social media very seriously. To help their Emerging Technology Division know how to handle comments, they created this detailed chart.
How to set company standards for response in social media
By answering a series of yes-or-no questions, those within the organization can determine exactly how they should approach each comment posted within their social networks.
Using a chart like this ensures that everyone involved in your organization’s social media efforts will know the correct way to respond to your audience.
If your company has been hesitant to join social media out of a fear of losing control, you can ease some of those fears by setting standards for communication, like the Air Force’s chart.
Visit Global Nerdy if you would like to download a full-size PDF version of the poster.
What do you think of this chart? Does your organization have a “standard operating procedure” for handling communication in social media?
More than one in ten (11%) online adults in the U.S. say they have microblogged, on Twitter or elsewhere, to share personal updates or view updates about others, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Those who use Twitter are more likely to use other social media. Both blogging and social network use increase the likelihood that a person also uses Twitter, according to the study.
The study also revealed that Twitter users are also heavy consumers of blog content. About 21% of Twitter users read someone else’s blog the day before they participated in the survey and more than half (57%) have ever read a blog.
The research provides just a few more reasons why your B2B organization should be involved in social media and networking. But at what point does using Twitter for business go too far?
Maybe when you find something like this in the office:
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