Member-to-Member

Using Social Media as Build Meaningful Customer Relationships

Part II of this series looked at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. This installment recommends how the CMO can take on corporate leadership through customer relationship development using social media. Read the full article.

Part III: CMO Guide to Social Media

Many of the shifts and changes discussed in Parts I and II are understood in piece parts throughout your business and no doubt you and your executive peers are engaged in developing strategies to respond. The CMO has a special opportunity to contribute to this effort and lead the way forward in using the power of social technology to retool the company's key stakeholder relationships - prospect, customer and employee relationships especially - from transactional to relational. This transformation should take you from providing value through the product to providing value through the relationship (the product being a central aspect of the relationship). When customers perceive their relationship with the company as valuable beyond merely the utility of the product you sell them, they will provide value to you beyond the dollars they spend on your product, entering into a dynamic, interactive and co-creative effort to help you succeed.

What's really going on underneath the market craziness of social media?

Part I of this series introduced the subject of social media as a phenomenon that is changing marketing dramatically. This installment looks more deeply at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. Read the full article.

Part II: CMO Guide to Social Media

Before you can use the new market realities to your favor, you have to understand the changes at a deeper level than the symptoms that show up in morphing marketing plan assumptions. The key takeaway here is that social media is much, much more than just another communications channel.

CMO's Guide to Social Media (Part 1)

How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunity

I recently gave the following presentation to The CMO Club. The subject of CMO leadership through social media is so rich that I documented my notes and included over 45 links to relevant articles and data in the eight page article, the first section of which is included below. At the end of this post is a link to the full article.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have it rough these days. Recession marketing is always tough, but this recession happens to bring with it destabilizing forces affecting the market dynamics between many businesses and their customers. The socialization of the web is both a cause and effect of these changes and thanks to non-stop headlines about social media CMOs (and pretty much everyone in marketing) find themselves frequently responding to social media-related questions like "Do you think we should be on Facebook?", "Let's start a blog!", "Why aren't we Twittering - Tweeting... whatever you call it?"

A CMO's Guide to Social Media: How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunities

View more OpenOffice presentations from Dana Theus.

 

Social Networks Make Lousy Marketing Tools? Patience.

It turns out people like to socialize on social networks according to Knowledge Networks, but we still don't go there to buy stuff, as indicated by user opinion about advertising on social network sites. This is news?

"Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now  using it - and more than half doing so on a regular basis - according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry's hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will." - Joe Mandese, MediaPost

As a social network user and marketer, I think the real potential for social networks to influence purchase decisions will remain untapped for a while longer. I believe this because I see three factors in this nascent space that have yet to mature:

Marketers, Get Real

By now we all know that the day of the banner ad is past and that the formula for social marketing is being created by us. Here. Now. I believe that this reality is forcing the profession of marketing to change and that the successful marketers of the future will be leaders in their organizations, using not just communications techniques, but deploying social marketing campaigns that provide real social value all by themselves. In other words, if the recipient never takes your call to action, they would still have acquired value from you.

The very nature of that statement seems counter-intuitive to many marketers. What? Provide real value without them paying for it? Like it or not, as the age of message  bombardment passes and the social sale becomes more prevalent, marketers will need to provide social value simply to get people's attention, to prove their good will and to demonstrate that they really understand customer needs and motivations.

Case Study: Facebook Causes Increases My Personal Fundraising ROI 220%

I recently got older. Rather than get depressed however, I found reason to celebrate my encroaching mortality with Facebook Causes. The reason I'm writing about it is because Causes' new birthday application enabled me to garner social profit for myself and financial gain for those I'd like to help in a unique way. By evolving their cause marketing platform from an "invite your friends" model to a "run your own fundraising campaign" model, they personally helped me increase my Causes fundraising ROI by 220% and helped me raise $160 for my chosen cause, Educate Tomorrow. Based on my rather general assumptions detailed below, by creating a social marketing tool that let me build my own fundraising campaign, Facebook Causes could raise their donations revenue by as much as 93% (or $18 million).

On Leadership

Jamie Notter accidentally started a meme on leadership for association executives which I've enjoyed reading. He didn't tag me but as I was reading people's entries, I realized that while working with executive teams, I've developed a few "themes" that - while grounded in my social media marketing view of the world - are applicable to organizational leadership more broadly. This advice is pertinent to commercial companies, non-profits and associations; it is targeted at CEOs and their direct reports but any leader should find it useful. Here are my three pieces of advice for leaders:

1. Lead Towards a Vision Impossible 
2. Try to Put Yourself Out of Business
3. Be the Best of Who You Are.

Case Study: U.S. Air Force Social & Traditional PR

The social media consultant's mantra lately has been "social media needs to be integrated with traditional marketing channels". While this seems self evident and I've written about it before, last week I found a great example from the U.S. Air Force I wanted to share because it provides a straightforward, best practice example of how an organization can use a single event to spark separate communications through traditional and social channels, targeting unique audiences to accomplish independent goals. The subject is the Department of Defense's decision to allow media attendance as the remains of those killed overseas are brought home to Dover Air Force Base in Maryland.

In the two different excerpts at the end of this post you'll see that the official press release from the Department of Defense Public Affairs office is directed at journalists with information of relevance to them about the new policy. It is crisp, official and factual, designed to announce what had become a controversial decision and provide information about the new rules. The blog post, by contrast, is targeted at the Air Force's Airmen employees and the general public, written by a named individual and addressing the behind-the-scenes changes that are taking place in how the Air Force communicates with the public. It is personal, humble and heartfelt, effectively putting the human spin on a challenging subject.

What is notable to me about these two examples is that while both communications sidestep the controversial aspects of the policy itself, each is effective in reaching its unique audience in a way the other channel would not be able to duplicate.

Blogging in the Long Tail - Part One: Quality vs. Quantity

"Should we write a blog?"

Whenever I introduce myself as a social media strategy consultant, this is very likely to be the first question I'm asked. My answer is always, "Maybe." I qualify my answer because blogging is a commitment of resources and doing it poorly is bad marketing, but many organizations in B2B or other specialty markets are wary for other reasons; they're used to marketing in the Long Tail economy where success isn't always a quantity game and they assume the main reason to blog is to go viral. A sign of this concern is when they say "but no one would post us to their Facebook." When they tell me this, I am always quick to assure them that no matter how arcane their subject is, if it matters to their customers then blogging on those subjects can be a powerful strategy for unearthing buried marketing treasure. Long Tail blogging means that high volume traffic numbers and viral appeal don't tell the most important part of the story and what matters is whether your blog positions you well with your most important audiences.

It's easy to get caught up in the stats, and we DO want to see the stats grow in any web communications effort, but Long Tail blogging is less about being the next viral phenom on Facebook or YouTube and more about leveraging existing web content and staff brainpower to reach a well-defined core audience in a way that more effectively positions the organization to that particular niche. This approach applies no matter how far down the tail you are. For this reason blogging in the Long Tail is a particularly powerful B2B marketing strategy in specialty areas with defined - even if narrow - audiences (e.g., chemicals processing or OEM equipment manufacturing).

Web Sites Need Strategic Plans Too

I recently ran across a list serve request for a "Web Site Strategic Plan." I was happy to see the words "strategic" and "web" strung together like that so I pounced on it. My modified response below. I think this applies to any technology initiative regardless of the technologies it leverages, social or otherwise. Hope you find it useful. Note: this was for an association, so many of the examples are too.

Having written and implemented any number of web site plans for a wide variety of organizations, programs and products, I can tell you that your web site's strategic plan should be as unique as your organization. I agree strongly with [someone else's] recommendation to align your web plan with your organization's plan very closely and to put yourself through the rigor of a "business case" analysis which defines as precisely as possible what benefits (financial and otherwise) your effort will produce at what cost. There are two reasons to do this:

• you will be able to get executive and peer support more easily if you show them how their financial and personal support will help them accomplish their primary business objectives through a successful web initiative; and
• you will have more confidence in your own efforts and better understand how to make priority decisions about functionality, changing technology choices, budget etc., because you know your end game.

The place where I see web strategies often go wrong is in the imprecise statement of their objectives. It's easy to allow objectives to be too many and too broad. Of course we want to "serve our members" and "grow the membership base", but this gives little meaningful guidance to designers and marketers and results in expensive iterations of everything from coding to design. More precise objectives like "provide the membership with better networking opportunities" and "attract new members graduating from college and graduate school" are much more likely to produce effective web sites.

Here is a high-level Strategic Plan outline to get you started. Make it your own and you'll succeed.