The Plain Scoop on Social Media

From the talented minds of Common Craft comes this simple, and engaging explanation of social media marketing today. Simple format – clear and concise message. Enjoy…

Kick Start Your Social Media Campaign

A few of us at SmartBrand have been working hard to establish a way to help our clients create and implement a successful Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign can prove to be one of the key catalysts in growth for a small to medium sized business. It can increase brand and PR exposure for a fraction of traditional advertising costs and effort, as well as provide larger scale market research and product/service refinement ideas at virtually no extra charge.

Here’s our official first release of that campaign. And as always, we’d certainly welcome your insights and thoughts as they relate to our offerings, and your experiences.

A successful Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign can prove to be one of the key catalysts in growth for a small to medium sized business. It can increase brand and PR exposure for a fraction of traditional advertising costs and effort, as well as provide larger scale market research and product/service refinement ideas at virtually no extra charge.

The speed in which trends evolve on the internet can often be daunting, but SMM campaigns by large companies can be emulated in whole, or in part, even by very small businesses. It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that separates success and failure. Big ideas can honestly beat big budgets.

Social media marketing goals will often involve different overall strategies and social media channels. It is possible to market with the aim of achieving all the following benefits; they do complement each other and some results naturally arise when other goals are achieved (e.g. better brand awareness eventually brings links).

SMM Campaign Benefits:

Increased Revenues - New sales opportunities through customer-generated content and brand engagement.

Powerful Customer Relationships – Establish and maintain valuable customer relationships through social media networks that increase brand loyalty, cultivate a network of evangelists, and maintain ongoing dialogue that will help position future marketing and business development initiatives.

Increased Traffic to Site – Increased search engine visibility effectively drives traffic to your site from fast growth channels.

Competitive Market Insight – Valuable data on behaviors and interests which helps you better understand your customers’ needs.

Enhanced Brand Presence – Seed branded messages within existing online conversations to amplify marketing efforts and manage public perception of your brand.

The power of recommendation. – Would you rather buy from an unknown company or from a company that people recommend?

SOCIAL MEDIA SERVICE OFFERINGS:

Social Media Strategy Development – Identify content, brand messages, communities and influencers with the greatest potential for our clients’ social media engagement. Create a roadmap based on marketing strategies and goals to coordinate and execute social media campaigns as a key component of the overall sales and marketing plan.

SMM QuickStart: $500 (one time fee)
➢ Profile background information and data gathering
➢ Strategy Session / Goal Setting (1 hr. in person/teleconference)
➢ Asset Compilation (graphics, broadcast, public relations)
➢ Recommendations (Phased development if required)

Social Media and Blog Launch – Create personal relationships with the influencers and evangelists that have the greatest voice within their online social networks.

BlogStart: $1,500 (one time fee)
➢ Profile background information and data gathering
➢ Strategy Session / Goal Setting (1 hr. in person/teleconference)
➢ Asset Compilation (database mining, graphics, broadcast, public relations)
➢ Installation & Profile Set-up (free platform only)
➢ Content Creation Launch (1st posting only)
➢ Content Creation Schedule Recommendations
➢ Maintenance & Update/Usage Training

Social Media Distribution – Optimize communication placement through blogging, video uploading and sharing, podcasting, webcasting, tagging and social bookmarking to maximize distribution throughout social media networks.

BlogSphere: $500-$1,500/month, 3 month minimum.
➢ Strategy Session / Goal Setting (1 hr. in person/teleconference)
➢ Installation & Profile Set-up (free platform only)
➢ Content Creation & Scheduling – monthly/weekly/daily (goal dependent)
➢ Link SMM Outreach Campaigns with existing Sales & Marketing Strategies
➢ Mobile Media (Twitter 1x day)

SMM Influencer Direct (ID): $500+/month, 3 month minimum
➢ Create and distribute electronic press kit
➢ Develop & distribute content for editors, bloggers, influencers, online columnists, and industries use to disseminate to their users and readers

Campaign Management – Manage clients’ social media initiatives in coordination with your search engine optimization and paid search marketing efforts.

SMM Management: $250+/month, 3 month minimum
➢ Content control, archiving and tracking
➢ Internet marketing strategy coordination
➢ Monthly or weekly reporting of trends, comments and response(s)
➢ Monthly or weekly recommendations to targeted topics/tactics

Brand Development and Strategic Partnerships: Design, development and refinement of affiliate-based influencer programs to build out Clients’ affiliate networks and drive their sales. Price TBD

Brand Strategy & Creative Development: Viral video/webisode production, viral email, promotions and contests, social network design: blogs, and other interactive content recommendations and distributions. Price TBD

Monitoring and Reporting – Combine technology and human insight to provide “buzz” tracking and performance analysis for social media campaign.

SMM Monitoring/Reporting: $150-$500/month, 3 month minimum.
➢ Monthly or weekly content response reporting, archiving and tracking
➢ Monthly or weekly reporting of trends, comments and response(s)

Training - Provide a full training curriculum on how to effectively utilize and integrate social media into future marketing strategies.

SMM Training: $125 hr., 2 hour minimum.
➢ Complete training for corporate staff
➢ Enable channel updates
➢ Determine ongoing reporting mechanisms

Of course, we believe this is a comprehensive, inexpensive approach to establishing a social media marketing campaign for just about any potential target market. That said, we know you may have had experience in these areas that might help guide our efforts – so please feel free to comment on our structure and pricing…we’d really appreciate your thoughts and suggestions!

Set A Foundation For Your Social Media Campaign

For the past few weeks, I’ve begun to notice that marketers in general haven’t tuned into the important differences between a social media strategy – and the campaign itself. One seems to easily roll into the other, and yet many rush into the campaign without considering the strategy as its basis.

To our experience, truly acknowledging the great distinction between strategy and campaign may well be the key to social media marketing success.

As a marketing collaborative that’s quickly venturing into a wide range of social media campaigns, we’ve been asked for both – often by folks that need just the other of what they’re asking for. So what’s the distinction?

> Social Media Strategy (SMS) is the birthplace of the social media campaign. If we had our wish, SMS would come at lease 6 months ahead of the intended campaign release date. For this period of time, you might gather internal assets and develop materials, analyze intended audiences, and begin to engage with the target communities – without ever asking for anything in return. This allows enough time to establish a bit of credibility with your target audience – while gathering some important information that could help steer the course of the campaign.

> A Social Media Campaign then, is derived from your social media strategy (seems simple enough, right?). In this launch phase, we should understand the audience that cares about your effort, and know a bit about where they are and gather. If you’ve spent enough time and effort giving away quality information to an increasing base of followers, you can more readily establish realistic goals for the campaign results. By now, you’ve activated your audience, and you are in a position to get something from them with reasonable projections to levels of success.

More than too often, clients wait to consider social media in their marketing mix until they have a campaign, and they’re under some pressure to set and achieve goals in short order. But to act on a campaign without the established base is rushing into a campaign without basis.

Once the platform of trust and communication has been established, you can begin to ask for response. And then you’ll have to re-assess if the offer is of real value to that certain sub-set of the population.

The challenge here is convincing clients to take the time necessary to establish the basis of the strategy before launching the campaign. And of course, for all of those search engines (like Google) to find and index it. And just a little time for people to find it…learn a bit about it, and establish a relationship with the brand that will enable them to share it without reserveration.

Once that sharing process begins in the campaign portion of the process – the true value of a SMM campaign can be revealed. And for the cost of setting the strategy and campaign into motion – there simply isn’t a better ROI in media for any marketing campaign

Start A Social Media Campaign

I think we can all agree that all types of organizations and campaigns will use some form of social media marketing in their mix. And like all emerging communication channels, the pitfalls will come first to the early adopters.

Establish And Measure Your Goal
Good endings begin with good beginnings. Seems simple enough, right?

But far too many social media campaigns are undertaken with the expectation that entering the sphere of conversations will, by their very nature, create the campaign momentum the company is looking to achieve. In fact, social media is simply an accelerator of that campaign momentum – and certainly not a creator of it.

The good news is… social media is somewhat easy and immediate to measure. Response to blogs, web offerings and overall sales can be tied directly to the social campaign itself – especially if personalized capture points are implemented as needed for measurement.

Provide Real Value

In the social media sphere, traditional messaging simply doesn’t work. Most savvy participants are careful to not to engage in conversations without understanding the context of that conversation. Authenticity, then, rings loudly to the social media audience. More so than the internet – rules of engagement are a sign of intelligence, and as in any social setting, no one wants to be thought or branded ignorant or immature.

And more to the point, social media enables us all to truly give of our knowledge, interests and discoveries. If that information is pure in it’s nature – then a relationship of trust can be built between the company, and the social media network at large.

Dollar for dollar – that is a level of brand loyalty you simply could not afford to buy in today’s tightening, competitive market.

It’s A Conversation, Not A Platform
The largest of corporations have tried their hand at social media campaigns – many (if not most) of them unsuccessfully. Part of the problem is obvious – any type of corporate dialog is suspect of being a thinly veiled attempt at sales – and not the hones conversation between brand and public it could be. Therein lies the challenge – to present and create dialog that is truly useful to all participants – and not just an attempt to announce a product or service.

Conversation is king – openness is the key to the kingdom. Restricting dialog because of self-imposed corporate brand standards simply doesn’t work in this truly social environment.

Give It A Go!

Once the decision is made to begin your social media marketing campaign (SMM), there are a few considerations that you might review before getting started.

> Message Consumption – hopefully, you’ll develop or have a blog. One surefire way to accurately measure engagement is through monitoring who is reading your blog, where they are from and exactly what content they are reading. Most blogging services provide some form of web analytics that will provide you with these reports.

> Content Response – Who’s actually interacting with your content? Comments may very well be the easiest way to find out – and if your message is compelling or thought provoking – you’ll receive comments from both positive supporters and negative comments. Either way – you’re making progress.

> Social Media Bookmarking – Who’s adding your content to sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. Engage your web analytic tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons. Or, simply create profiles in each of the individual bookmarking sites and search for your specific web addresses.

> Who’s Subscribing to your RSS feed? An easy way to measure how many of your readers are actually engaged is to monitor how many of them are directly subscribing to your RSS feeds

> Who’s referring and engaged about you? Many blog platforms have the ability (like WordPress) to tell you who’s linked to your site. If that’s not an option in your blog platform, you might a blog search engine Technorati for your domain’s current interaction.

> Profile Engagement: Even if you don’t have a blog, you might have a profile on Myspace, Facebook, or Mybloglog. Simply use the same methodologies for any blog, and you’ll watch the growth of friends and profile visits in real time.

Successful social media marketing (SMM) campaigns will likely be a key catalyst i for a small to medium sized business to grow their business strategy. Without a great deal of expense, and if implemented correctly, it will increase brand equity and public relations reach at a small fraction of traditional advertising costs and effort. Not to mention it can also provide market research and product refinement guided directly by the target market for little, or no extra cost.

Clearly, having a comprehensive SMM strategy for your business is essential in today’s increasingly competitive market. If you’re interested in jumping into this powerhouse marketing strategy, but simply don’t have the time or expertise to do it yourself – give us a call.

Social Media Opportunities

Just about anyone in today’s marketing/advertising/pr community can tell you – social media is here to stay, and may very well be the most powerful channel media in today’s marketplace

Creating an accurate list of social media/branding opportunities is impossible, as the exponential growth of services like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (to name just a few) continue to provide new layers of connectivity and interest. However, there are a few major opportunities that each of these channels share, each of which is well worth the investment of time and brand equity development.

Engage Truly Loyal Brand Users

No matter what the topic (product or service), there’s an audience discussing it in detail somewhere…. and if there isn’t, the opportunity to create one is immediate and at virtually no cost. It’s never been easier to reach interested and loyal prospects and users than it is today.

These opportunities are very different than in the past. Advertising basically employs disruptive practices to communicate with its audience – reaching greater extremes with each layer of communication to rise above the clutter of messages bombarding the market every day. Social media provides the opportunity to engage these audiences on a one-to-one basis, without the need to interrupt or disrupt their stream of consciousness.

Building Loyal Relationships

By allowing your audience to build a relationship with your brand on their own schedule, you’ve begun the communication process without having to force your viewpoint, or worse yet, interrupt the audience to literally “cram your perspective down their throat”. Which is more effective, cold-calling sales, or responding to a request for a sales contact?

Through your perspective and a “insider expert”, new traffic to websites and blogs can be generated without relying fully on traditional and digital channels of advertising and marketing. Establishing these channels of information allows the audience to build their own sense of loyalty, at their own pace of acceptance. While that may not reflect in direct sales, it does establish the baseline of loyalty that builds the long-term brand affiliation that will, in fact, impact sales in the long run

Creating A Deeper Basis of Brand Loyalty and Recognition

Through the shift from sending messaging to engaging messaging, brands and their companies can reach out to enable new and old prospects to discuss their brand affinity, and expand that experience through dialog and promotions. Through social media, a brand can create an endless array of way to enhance and sustain the brand experience to customers that voluntarily choose the message – suddenly, communication is now two-ways, and not just a “shout into the void

The Truth and Nothing But The Truth

Ask a company what’s important to them, and if they understand their brand, they’ll tell you that “feedback is king”. Online forms gather a narrow set of criteria when evaluating a brand, but that methodology requires effort from the participant – which can easily lead to skewed (or even frustrated) responses.

Get a response to your company blog, however, and a world of communication opportunities opens both positive and negative comments from customers

The immediacy of tapping into public response at virtually no (or low) cost enables the company brand to adjust to immediate input – allowing for product revisions and offerings to be updated with current, and valid input trends.

Value, Measurement and Refinement

Needless to say, beginning a social media campaign can be a tremendously cost-effective portion of any marketing/advertising/pr campaign. If the budget is in the millions to promote and establish the brand, an investment of $30,00-$300,000 can be the most cost effective, highly measureable arm of the campaign’s arsenal.

Add that to social media’s ability to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and re-shape them for greater impact and effectiveness, and social media then becomes a necessary portion of any comprehensive brand campaign

Next up?

How to take the first steps toward your social media campaign.

A few easy, interesting points to consider as you ramp up.