The corporate content ownership dilemma

With the increasing importance of content, particularly digital content, in many enterprises’ marketing communications programmes, it is interesting to speculate on which corporate discipline will take ownership of ‘content’.

It has been called the Content Convergence Dilemma, the power struggle over who owns corporate content, who controls its generation, publishing and maintenance? Will Content Departments emerge to create and co-ordinate content?

PR is the discipline listening to online communities

If product marketing teams — for instance — produce content independently, the enterprise overall won’t have the benefit of getting the maximum out of content and, to the customer, content may appear disjointed or uncoordinated. Content integration requires each department to be candid about their objectives and to be willing to negotiate, and contribute resources, to a mutually-agreed content plan and calendar.

You might think that the drive for more corporate transparency, coupled with social media’s voracious appetite for content, would have internal corporate departments vying for the rights to push out content.

In reality, brands’ internal departments defer to PR and say, either, “You do it” or, “Tell us what you need and we’ll see how we can help”. PR is not necessarily the repository of all the skills that are needed. They will depend on Marketing, or outside agencies, for copywriting, graphic, coding, video and editing skills crucial to content development.

However, PR professionals probably have the best feel about what content will appeal most to an enterprise’s communities. They already participate in communities, offline and online. They’re the ones tracking what the mainstream media want to write about and talking to editors and journalists. They’re the ones who often monitor social media in PR programmes — talking to community members and customers, running polls, testing out hashtags, flagging potential landmines and running buzz and sentiment monitoring.

Brands can derive huge value from PR’s ability to create, manage and tweak the workaday content calendar. It’s from their efforts that Marketing should be monitoring the nuggets to develop into the big ideas which have already been proven within online community interaction.

This case study illustrates how a PR team’s community relations groundwork led to insights into an audience sector, what concerned them and how media campaigns could be constructed around the insights.

Social media will continue to reveal key marketing information and public relations could develop another string to its bow as early testbeds for accessing, developing and trialling creative ideas.

Social media in 2012

The tension between social media (to the consumer) and social media marketing (to enterprises) will increase as a majority of brands finally work through how they can participate successfully in social media.

Social media will be a part of most larger, B2C enterprise’s marketing communications armoury, as an option rather than a tool, and coming to terms with the fact that these platforms are controlled by consumers. Marketing communications departments will continue to re-organise internally on that premise.

B2B businesses will increase their efficiency in populating sales pipelines from unexpected (social media) directions and business blogs will develop more sophistication in interacting through social media channels.

Could Path be one app to watch? www.path.com — “The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love”.

Expect more campaigns like Old Spice and Tempurpedic: advocacy campaigns on social networks are going to be more popular in 2012 as enterprises realise the power of their social fan base.

The launch of Google+ in 2011 gave Facebook a brutal warning of a coming battle for knowledge, and the hearts and minds, of the consumer. The stakes are high for these two companies and their primary streams of revenue are at risk. The only limiting factor in their peaceful co-existence is time: we are simply not able to spend enough time on both of them.

Watch for Google to integrate social into everything in 2012. As a Google executive now famously said: “Google+ is Google.”

Could staff in enterprises repressive with social media be the next 'spring' protests?

Customers will begin to understand and clamour for technologies that cause social interactions within their organisations. The 59% of companies that prohibit, or aggressively control the use of social media at work, will discover that they are the equivalent of Arab dictators and employees are the empowered ones: could there be a Spring Freedom 2012 within oppressive, large enterprises?.

Survey have consistently found that, among the marketing communications programmes businesses planned to invest in during 2012, email and social-media marketing topped the list.

The difference between content marketing and content curation is simply who’s writing the blog posts, composing tweets and creating videos. So while it’s a good idea to share interesting industry-relevant news with your online network, enterprises will need to create some content of their own in 2012. This implies planning and production. We are all both businesses and publishers these days: the more original your content, the better.

Content production: should you just give it away?

In the last decade, the digital story has moved from persuading enterprises that they even needed a website, to a place where “content marketing” and “storytelling” are now a serious part of corporate marketing communications tactics.

Either as a micro-enterprise or as a larger company, is it always an advantage to create and give away digital content?

To study the relative merits of content production and dissemination as part of a marketing communications approach, let’s explore six main scenarios in a content marketing continuum.

1. Modesty

The first scenario in sharing content is to not to share it at all: the enterprise does not focus on online thought leadership, concentrating efforts on other approaches. Many businesses don’t blog, create white papers, produce podcasts, or anything we would consider to be modern content marketing. Apple Inc doesn’t blog or release white papers but lets its products speak for themselves.

2. Playing away

The second scenario is creating thought leadership by participating in communities and content opportunities not under your control. Most consultant/speaker/authors in the social media space are prominent in social media. The exceptions spend considerable time on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Empire Avenue, building bridges and making contacts. They write guest blogs and reply to posts on other blogs. Their presence is their Gravatar and the digital footprint they leave on other sites.

3. Earning revenue

The third scenario is producing your own content, but doing so for a fee. Many online gurus offer a free email newsletter and a series of free tools to build a distribution list (for major online figures, subscribers often number well into six figures). He then offers paid products to that list, creating a passive income stream.

4. Garnering leads

The fourth scenario is a familiar one to many B2B marketers: producing content and making it contingent on capturing data. Clearly, this approach can generate a significant volume of inbound leads for the sales team. Content of value to business professionals will always succeed: the ‘price’ of parting with data and subscribing to a list is very minor compared to the knowledge imparted.

5. Teaser

The fifth scenario is when companies produce significant, freely-distributed content but do not reveal their core operational secrets. For instance, a firm of accountants could offer a plethora of tools to calculate tax, monitor cashflow and run basic book-keeping but not reveal their auditing and analytic processes that make the firm competitive.

6. The Full Monty

The final scenario is unrestricted content creation and delivery. For example, any company could adopt practices that give them a huge digital profile: they could spread their content as widely as possible on their own and other platforms. They could offer content freely and without any restriction, arguing that a data collection form is the enemy of a wide digital footprint. They could also create content for the majority of the market that doesn’t know who they are, instead of the minority that does. An enterprise can still use content production to maintain close relationships with current customers and prospects, giving them sneak previews of new content before it is made more generally available.

Which of these scenarios is ideal for your business? IThere is no right answer, just the answer that’s right in your circumstances.

The best way to identify it is to test. Set up a dashboard using the Four Types of Content Metrics to measure the effectiveness of your efforts and then create related pieces of content. For example, create two related white papers and give one away free and exchange the other for contact data.

There is a Content Marketing Testing Plan here that you can download free to help you with content production planning.

Marketing on a shoestring: inbound, outbound tactics and SOSTAC®

I orginally wrote this as a reply to Jane Hatton on another blog about her new enterprise Evenbreak, which matches employers, who value diversity, with disabled candidates.

Jane, there seems to be a lot of confusion between ‘marketing’ and ‘marketing communications’ in recent discussions online.

The difference is more obvious the bigger an enterprise gets, when responsibilities are delegated to separate departments and outside agencies but it is still an important distinction for a micro-enterprise to make.

Smaller enterprises invariably have to heap a bundle of management responsibilities onto one person. To draw a parallel in accounting, even a small firm distinguishes between book-keeping (keeping accurate financial records) and management accounts (financial information for decision-making), even if the same person is responsible for both and they can merge into the same activity. So marketing and marketing communications should be seen as distinct activities with different purposes.

Jane is herself disabled and can only work in this position

Marketing used to be functionally divided into the four ‘P’s — Product; Place; Price; Promotion. What you are talking about in your post is promotion: but before promotion begins, a true marketing approach means that you need to have ensured that your product and price are market-ready and market-acceptable. Small enterprises can rarely afford the luxury of market research or trial launches so it is normally carried out as part of day-to-day operations, using feedback from early adopters..

In any case, many pundits now advocate — in the era of Web 3.0 and social media — using the five ‘E’s — Experience (instead of Product); Everywhere (instead of Place); Exchange (instead of Price); Evangelism (instead of Promotion) and, finally, Enablement — using crowdsourcing, polls, wikis, viral effects, SEO, blogs and social media.

‘Everywhere’ indicates the universal nature of the Web but I suspect there is still a natural limit to Evenbreak’s reach — probably mainland UK? Exchange is the practice of having a pricing model which allows some initial functionality free and gradually charging as additional features are used.

What you describe in you post is Promotion — now better-labelled Evangelism and Enablement. Two commoner names for these (marketing communications) functions are Outbound Marketing Communications and Attraction Marketing Communications (or Inbound or Digital Footprint or any number of terms which online snake oil sellers are trying to make their own).

You may think I am being pedantic in continually using the term Marketing Communications (MC) — and I may be — but the division is useful if it persuades an enterprise to return to the marketing drawing board if some of the fundamentals of a service prove unacceptable to its marketplace through sensitive, two-way MC.

What you have described, very thoroughly, is an Inbound MC Programme, with the exception of the hard copy letter, passed by the Chief Executive, and events. These I would class as Outbound MC — Evangelism.

I have worked for a start-up over the last few weeks and, because he had done his market research quite carefully, I helped him plan both Inbound and Outbound MC Programmes which I am helping him to execute.

Why both? Because he need short-term results and I have facilitated acquiring data on his target individuals at 30p a shot (commercial property landlords in development mode) and using a home-based B2B telemarketer whom we can task, flexibly, at a minimum of two hours at a time.

She sets up appointments and feeds the data into an online CRM system which also links into the email marketing database for a number of follow-up emails according to landlords’ response and resulting position in the sales funnel. Plans for a webinar in the new year are in hand.

We run a modest PPC AdWords Campaign, partly to help us research and optimise our Keyword List.

We are also running an Inbound MC Programme — blog, social media, links, SEO, guest blogs, LinkedIn Q&A, digital PR — but results will take two to three months to come through and, meanwhile, the Outbound MC Programme is getting the sales funnel moving immediately.

We use Paul R Smith’s SOSTAC® Planning System [http://www.prsmith.org/sostac.html] and have created two documents — a Marketing Plan and Marketing Communications Programme — using the SOSTAC template. Rather than written in stone, they are in Google Documents and available to the whole team and continuously amended to take account of marketing intelligence and remarks from telemarketing and data from the CRM system and a Digital PR Dashboard (also in Google Docs as a spreadsheet).

The Dashboard has all the indices necessary to monitor and measure the progress of the MC Programmes and help us decide how much telemarketing or inbound activity to commission each week to meet sales targets.

When referring to your (Inbound MC) tactics, you say “most cost nothing but time and imagination”: time and imagination are in short supply, probably more so than cash. That is why my customers pay me — to supply them. They also pay for dedicated execution which is a key part of creativity. Ideas need to be delivered!

I am a great admirer of your enterprise — in both meanings of the word — and, if I can advise in any way, I would be happy to provide some of that free time you mention.

Google rolls out Analytics to YouTube

YouTube has replaced Insight, a tool that let users see detailed stats about their videos, with Analytics, which offers a similar interface to Google Analytics.

A familiar analytics interface

Analytics gives registered YouTube users all the data from Insight in a more straightforward interface, with several handy new options.

It offers:

• a summary report for your content on YouTube,
• a data filter that allows you to filter reports by content, geography and date,
• an interactive map that accompanies most reports, showing you the geographic distribution of the metric you’re interested in.

You can now also easily see which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions for you, as well as how long viewers watched your videos.

Finally, you can now download the currently displayed report (rather than all data).

Google says it will be rolling it out to “everyone on a modern browser over the course of the day.” A detailed FAQ covering all the features of Analytics is available here.

Best statement on Google+ aims I have seen

Christian Oestlian, Lead in Social Advertising at Google, recently gave a talk at AdTech New York where he said:

 

Christian Oestlian, Lead in Social Advertising at Google

“We don’t think of Google+ in terms of what other people are doing today. Certainly, there’s that feature-race, where we want to make sure we have enough products featured in and around Google+ to make it interesting. But for us, even if there was no social service out there today, we would want to implement this strategy.

Google+ is about transforming your relationship with Google. The number of people going to Google on a daily basis rivals virtually all other properties out there. If we can take that experience more social, interesting and personalized, that’s something we want to do no matter who else is engaged in the same space.”

All businesses are now storytellers

No doubt as an assiduous marketing professional, you are well aware of Seth Godin’s book ‘All Marketers Are Liars’. The book is actually about telling and using authentic marketing narratives but, ironically, Seth got his own storytelling wrong.

Fortunately, his publisher has given him a second chance and the new title now represents the gist of his story much more accurately. Few of us get a such a second chance in a world with instant, 24/7 media.

As a creative content creator, Godin’s new title will become one of those stories that will illuminate my own narratives and illustrate the importance of authenticity and accuracy.

As Godin says, lying doesn’t pay off any more. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast.

So, it’s tempting to be economic with the truth but it doesn’t take long for the reality to catch up with the story. We can spin a tale about a piece of technology or a customer service policy but once it is exposed to social media, we’re lost.

Godin’s book talks about two sides of a universal truth, one that has built every successful brand, organisation and candidate and one that we rarely have the words to describe.

Every day, we see brands fail because they failed to ask and answer these questions. We see worthy candidates fail to demonstrate authenticity in a most public way and flawed ones bite the dust. Ask US Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Perry.

There are small businesses that are so focused on what they do that they forget to take the time to craft the story of why they do it. And so on and so forth.

If what you’re doing matters, really matters — and it should do to you — then I hope you’ll take the time to tell a story: a story that resonates and a story that is authentic and true.

List of social media marketing metrics

Social media marketing strategy arguably has two concerns: one is about producing the nitty-gritty metrics that are used to justify investment in terms of time and resources and to steer future involvement and activity.

The other concern is about lifting your ahead high enough above day-to-day activity to get a clear enough view of social media marketing from a wider organisational viewpoint.

An organisational approach to social media marketing measurement looks at the macro-figures that really matter: sales, profit margin, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Concentrating solely on the social media detail is not the full story.

On the other hand, just standing back and looking at the bigger picture is not going to be enough for your colleagues and boss: they are going to want to see hard evidence that social media marketing is going to bring tangible business benefits.

When we talk about social media, we’re really talking about attracting and developing interaction. The goal of any social media marketing strategy is to provide the right tools and content so that communities can interact with your brand and act as your brand ambassadors.

Here’s a ‘long list’ of indices that can give you measurements of interaction and participation:

• Your brand mentioned
• People storing and sharing content
• More frequent website and blog visits
• More blog comments
• Referring your brand’s content to their friends
• People in communities using interactive content more frequently
• Incremental enquiries, or quotations, or sales
• Improved cost of sales

Customers and prospects interacting with your brand content are far more likely to score high on other measures. So how can you boost community interaction? The tools and onsite functionality you need are going to depend on your business, your strategy and your goals. What you’re ultimately looking for is a wide range of tools to help people interact.

This list of metrics should help you work out what can be measured and also what kind of tools/functionality you may want to introduce. In doing so, you’ll able to determine the relative success and adoption of new features. You may also unearth trends and spot opportunities or issues. In any event, monitoring how the sum of community interaction changes over time can really help you position your organisation as a community-centric organisation.

You can apply different weightings to different interactions (for example, a ‘love this’ rating is worth less than a ‘follow item’). Social media managers can then identify the buzz and act accordingly (better promotion, interviews, videos).

Tracking and making sense of interaction is a fundamental part of social media marketing. You can score different interactions and devise an algorithm to create some kind of overall interaction index. It might help you condense interaction measurement noise into a single metric.

Before we jump into the list there are a few caveats:

• Not all of these will be relevant to all sites (for instance, ‘posts’ won’t be any good for sites without blogs and a comment facility)
• ‘Print page’ as an interaction measure is barely worth looking at…or is it? In any case, some of these things are more important than others
• There is some crossover: for example ‘bookmarks’ and ‘wishlists’ may be the same thing on your site
• Some metrics will have sub-metrics
• Avoid confusion: if a widget just doesn’t do what it should do then it doesn’t matter whether 10,000 people installed it last week: they’ll still hate it
• Human power is needed to really understand the detail behind the numbers and to act on that knowledge: interpretation is key to turning metrics into indices that you can act on
• It’s about quality not quantity: this list is not exhaustive

Here’s the list of possible social interaction indices:

1. Alerts (register and response rates by channel, CTR, post-click activity)
2. Bookmarks (onsite, offsite)
3. Comments
4. Downloads
5. Email subscriptions
6. Fans or friends (become a fan of something/someone)
7. Favourites (add an item to favourites)
8. Feedback (via the site)
9. Followers (follow something/someone)
10. Forward-to-a-friend; share
11. Groups (create/join/total number in group/group activity)
12. Install widget or app (on a blog page, Facebook, iPhone)
13. Invite/refer (a friend)
14. Key page activity (post-activity)
15. Love/like this (a simpler form of rating something)
16. Messaging (onsite)
17. Personalisation (pages, display, theme)
18. Posts
19. Profile development (update avatar, bio, links, email, customisation)
20. Print page
21. Ratings
22. Registered users (new/total/active/dormant/churn)
23. Report spam/abuse
24. Reviews
25. Settings
26. Social media sharing/participation (activity on key social media sites)
27. Tagging (user-generated metadata)
28. Testimonials
29. Time spent on key pages
30. Time spent on site (by source/by entry page)
31. Total contributors (and % active contributors)
32. Uploads (add an item – articles, links, images, videos)
33. Views (videos, ads, rich images)
34. Widgets and apps (number of new widgets users/embedded widgets/apps)
35. Wishlists (save an item to wishlist)

Question on LinkedIn: How are you helping traditional clients embrace digital?

There are two strands to an organisation’s evolution into digital thinking.

The first is a communications challenge: this involves integrating website, email marketing, social media presence, SEO, blog…with the internal processes behind content production. Allied to this reorganisation is a change of attitude to one of listening to digital buzz, analysing and adapting to feedback from relevant communities.

The second challenge is realignment to new thinking: in the hearts and minds of senior management. They are already under pressure but time must be made for a workshop on how digital interaction needs a new management philosophy, one of openness, transparency and honesty.

Under traditional command and control hierarchies, this doesn’t come easily. Information used to be power. Now sharing information is power among the digital communities talking about your business every day.

Digital embraces recruitment, customer service, marketing, sales and manufacturing.

My help consists of a programme of workshops allied to some direct, hands-on help in getting marketing communications systems re-engineered. The returns can be phenomenal.

Buzz monitoring tools: an introduction and a list

Buzz monitoring is an essential Digital Marketing and Digital Public Relations skill. It is the digital equivalent of research, focus groups and surveys. Digital listening includes information that was previously unavailable to a marketing communications professional, including online forums, social media conversations, pictures, blogging, audio and video. Its digital nature means that you need a new approach and awareness of not only what can be monitored but how to turn that data into actionable information.

Ackura BuzzMonitor
With a professional buzz monitoring platform like KMP Digitata’s Ackura Buzz Monitor, you can monitor the social Web and find your brand mentioned on millions of blog posts, viral videos, reviews, audiocasts, photos, Twitter updates. You can undertake real-time monitoring of mentions of your organisation, product, issues and competitors.

Ackura Buzz Monitor homepage

You can analyse buzz about outcomes of specific marketing campaigns and social media investments. You can be aware of which content is making an impact, what needs to be managed and uncover key influencers online by topic, based on user-determined weightings.

The process of listening, watching, analysing, deciding and engaging is complex at first but that’s what agencies like Juice are for. If you want to make a start in a more modest way or for a smaller business, this post contains a list of useful buzz monitoring tools, some free and many with fee levels.

Key Conversation Indicators (KCI)
Similar to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), KCIs establish social marketing metrics for brands and/or social campaigns to measure online buzz, as well as gauge a social programme’s success.

KCIs can measure social engagement, sentiment and opinion, as well as specific consumer actions. Although the metrics measured are different for every brand, some of the items you might consider measuring are:

• Conversation volume
• Sentiment
• Topics of conversation
• Ratings
• Favouriting
• Friends and followers
• Passalongs

Establishing the criteria you want to measure and track will help frame the direction of your research and social media strategy.

Free listening and monitoring tools

Google Alerts
Google Alerts is the mother of all monitoring tools. You can target keywords that are important to your brand and receive streaming or batched reports — choose your own flavour.

Technorati
The original blog search engine, Technorati, has been helping bloggers and blog users stay informed for years.

Trendrr
Trendrr from digital agency Wiredset uses comparison graphing to show relationships and discover trends in real time. Use the free account or open an Enterprise level account for more functionality.

Lexicon
Lexicon is a native tool to follow language trends across Facebook by looking at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter “love, hate” (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

Monitter
What are people talking about on Twitter? Beyond the integrated search facilities of Twitter apps like Twhirl and TweetDeck, Monitter provides real-time monitoring of the Twittersphere And can also track trends and add widgets

Tweetburner
In the world of Twitter, URL-shortening is a vital tool. Tweetburner also lets you track the clicks on those shortened links, giving you some hard numbers.

Twendz
twendz is a Twitter-mining Web application that utilizes the power of Twitter Search, highlighting conversation themes and sentiment of the tweets that talk about topics you are interested in. As the conversation changes, so does twendz by evaluating up to 70 tweets at a time. When new tweets are posted, they are dynamically updated, minute-by-minute.

Addict-o-matic
Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results across a number of search and social media platforms. Addicting!

Bloglines
A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.

Blogpulse
A blog search engine that also analyses and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere

BoardTracker
BoardTracker.com is a forum search engine, message-tracking and instant alerts system.

Blogflux
Watches comments/follow-ups on blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.

FriendFeed Search
Scans all FriendFeed activity. FriendFeed is an important social media aggregator.

HowSociable?
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

IceRocket
Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace and includes a tool called IceSpy to monitor online subject trends.

Keotag Labs
Keyword searches by bookmark link, generates tags and searches tags by keyword.

MonitorThis
Subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a search term and click the ‘make monitor.opml’ button to get a list of RSS feeds in OPML format.

Samepoint
Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about.
Discover, learn and share new websites and ideas.

Surchur
A Web, blog, image, video, and social media search engine, Surchur has just relaunched their online dashboard. The “dashboard to the now” delivers a well-designed and comprehensive view into the real-time web.

Tinker
Tinker from Glam Media Labs is a simple way to discover what people are Twittering about now.

TweetDeck
Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you. You can also monitor Facebook status updates. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. According to TwitStat, it is the most popular Twitter desktop application.

Twitter Search
Twitter’s own search tool is a great resource. There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through their service.

UberVU
Track conversations across nearly all social media platforms and reply to them from one place.

wikiAlarm
A monitoring service to send email alerts when selected articles are edited on Wikipedia.

Yahoo! Sideline
A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo! installed on your desktop. Sideline is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest for the Twitter public timeline.

SocialMention
Think Google Alerts but for social media. Receive daily email alerts of a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.

Professional applications

Meltwater Buzz
Meltwater Buzz  allows you to monitor blogs, social networks, Twitter, forums and other social media sites to get a complete picture of what is being said about your organization, your products, and your competitors. It contains an automated sentiment monitoring tool.

TruCast
TruCast provides keyword-based monitoring of the social Web with an emphasis on blogs and forums. Its dashboard applications provide visual representations of sentiment and trends for your brands online.

Radian6
Radian6 pulls information from the social Web and analyses and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand. Radian6 is focused on building the complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be experts in social media. It now has some automated sentiment monitoring tools.

Ackura BuzzMonitor
Identifies the crucial online sources that companies should monitor in order to make accurate business decisions. These sources can be found amongst consumers, suppliers, competitors and government. It is a complete service for larger marketing departments to help them make sense of the social media landscape and maximise its opportunities.

Techrigy
Techrigy’s SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and marketing agencies to monitor and measure social media. As businesses and consumers increasingly utilise and rely on social media, agencies need the tools and expertise to stay competitive.

Collective Intellect
Collective Intellect (CI) is a real-time intelligence platform, based on advanced artificial intelligence. Its solution provides automatic categorisation of conversations based on CI’s proprietary filtering technology. According to CI, its technologies provide credible groupings and reduce the “noise” seen in other keyword-based searches.

BuzzDing!
Uses a keyword approach and returns news, blogs, images, video, and social network activity about a brand, a brand’s competition or a product. Useful options include filters, facilities to organise material into projects, to flag items and to add notes. Prices range from Personal @$14 pcm (one project; one user; three phrases) to Max @$199 pcm (unlimited projects; 35 users; 175 phrases).

Filtrbox
Offers real-time monitoring and alerting across mainstream news, blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and others. With collaborative features, daily email digests and trend analysis, it’s competitive with other offerings. Free trial version as well. Unlimited filters, real-time alerts, particularly strong on Twitter monitoring, continuous updates, trending, reporting, data export.

Heartbeat
A real-time monitoring and measurement tool for social media conversations, to measure key metrics around buzz and sentiment, engage with key influencers and opinion leaders and to conduct comparisons between competitors and topics.

Dialogix
Dialogix monitors the entire social media spectrum, as well as most newspaper, TV and news websites in the world, with a particular focus on Australian websites. Find every news article, comment, blog post, Tweet, YouTube video, forum post and more with ease and be confident you’re not missing a thing. No limits on data for any of plans and no limits to the amount of users who can access the system. Bronze: unlimited data, unlimited users, $595 per month. Silver: unlimited data, unlimited users, sentiment analysis charts, basic key influencer profiles created without contact details, $1,495 per month. Gold: unlimited data, unlimited users, sentiment analysis charts, key influencers ranked by social authority and database of their contact details, $2,495.

Jodange
Tracking a brand or a product is one thing but turning that tracking into a measure of consumer sentiment about a brand or product is something completely different. For that, Jodange has an algorithm called TOM (Top of Mind), which produces consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web with some clever algorithms. £2,500+ per month.

Social media? You really need a reason to get stuck in?

Recently, I have been involved in a number of debates about the usefulness of social media in business. I was slightly taken aback that the business value of social media even needed debating. However, many people are simply immersed in their everyday business and personal challenges and have not had the time to consider or explore these issues.

This short article is to get you started in the ‘why’ social media is so important to future business success. I am not going to pound you with statistics: they now overwhelmingly point to majorities of people being online and involved in social media, even if we need to remember the digital disenfranchised and many businesses that operate perfectly well without any online presence.

Social tools, networks and media have enabled customers to do what they’ve always wanted to do — be heard and to have the power to turn their ideas into ways to make the products and services they love even better. These tools are also allowing them to reach more people like them, with common interests and information needs, creating powerful communities not possible only a few short years ago.

So, if you are in business, and can afford to ignore your customers, and potential customers, clustering online and willing to help you deliver them what they want, then you are missing a huge opportunity.

That’s why the best advice about social media, customer service, or anything other business initiative has always been to master the basics before proceeding to the more advanced topics.

Social media will still be here next year (and even the year after). Take the time to first address any serious issues or problems within your customer service organisation before pushing ahead into social media. And if you really can’t wait and feel compelled to jump right into social media while revamping your customer service organisation in parallel, at least start small and stay focused.

Choose a particular channel — whether it be Twitter, a discussion forum, or an online user group — and put enough resources and effort behind it to make it work. Put in the time. Engage with customers. Show people that you are serious and that you plan to stick around for the long term. If you respect your customers — and the community — they will likely both respect you back.

And that’s a pretty good start. If resources, in terms of people, are either scarce and you can’t find an in-house social media champion, think of hiring an agency. In a future post, I’ll give you some tips about choosing one. Or find a guru like me who has not only been immersed in this stuff for a while and already made all those classic mistakes and learned from them!

What a company develops from venturing into social media marketing is social capital. There are sound economic reasons for the importance of social capital. Oliver Williamson won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009 for his work on transaction costs. One element of his research found that trust reduces transaction costs — in other words, if you’re doing business with someone you know, the cost of doing it decreases.

The manifesto that started us thinking about being connected

Remember The Cluetrain Manifesto? It was a set of 95 theses organised and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what was suggested as a newly-connected marketplace, as far back as 1999. The ideas put forward within the Manifesto aimed to examine the impact of the Internet on both markets (consumers) and organisations.

In addition, as both consumers and organisations are able to utilise the Internet to establish a previously unavailable level of communication both within and between these two groups, the Manifesto suggested that the changes that will be required from organisations as they respond to the new marketplace environment.

Here is a summary, in their words: “These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humourless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about ‘listening to customers’. They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.”

So social media marketing barely needs an ROI, as the current demand is phrased. You just need to decide whether you want to be in business in five years or not. Ignore the sea slowly being sucked away from you and the social media tsunami will catch you unprepared.

We’ve been hypersocial for a while

Suddenly there seems to be a bandwagon around social media and its tipping point has been reached, the latecomers declare. The worst thing about being late into a momentous trend is to display your ignorance by assuming that your arrival heralds the tipping point.

Responsys declares that “social networks are now a true marketing channel”. This is ironic coming from what was, essentially, an email marketing company, not so long ago. The phrase ‘true marketing’ rings totally untrue in the world of social media where the basis of communication is determined by consumers and not corporations.

Display advertisement from Responsys

But all to the good. Social media is certainly all-pervasive and how most of us consume the Internet. We link to people rather than sites, the social rather factual. We are hypersocial beings, most of us anyway, and we need to group ourselves around interests, discussions and (occasionally) brands. The hyper-social organisation is even being studied academically.

Could hypersocial be defined as ‘one who manages their social network identity, often via frequent updating of status, at the expense of real, human relationships’. And what of the hyposocial? Are you hyposocial if you have a drink with some mates, turn your smartphone off and consume some ‘old media’ like England’s World Cup campaign?

The Urban Dictionary defines it thus: “To possess a distinct lack of social skills. From the Latin prefix -hypo, meaning ‘Less than normal.’ [Greek prefix, actually, but let’s not quibble]. It is a descriptive word used to define individuals who display qualities that are against social norms, ie not bathing, use of inappropriate subject matter with peers or co-workers, distinct anti-pop culture attitude and dress. Can be shortened to simply ‘Hypo’.”

Most of us are electronically hypersocial and corporates are still trying to come to terms with a world in which they have to match the pervasive, transparent and exposed nature of social media. Marketing is becoming what it always should have been: listening, absorbing and understanding before communicating.

Social media: a marketing dilemma for the micro-enterprise

Social media are now mainstream. They are a pervasive part of nearly everyone’s everyday life, providing, of course, you have access to a PC and smartphone.

For a micro-enterprise, the dilemma is this. The moment has passed when it is simply a question of using, or not using, social media. Nearly every solo entrepreneur is already on at least one social media site like Facebook or LinkedIn: they’d be crazy not to be.

The primary decision is purely a marketing issue: there is a substantial difference between involvement in social media and social media marketing.

Would social media marketing be relevant to this drinks stall?

Marketing is used to identify customers, to retain customers and to satisfy customers. It is also about being crystal clear about who these potential customers are and exactly how your product or service will satisfy them, beyond expectation. So, as a micro-enterprise, you should ask yourself the same question about using any tool in marketing: will my community of potential customers actually use social media? They might not.

If the answer is no, then use social media for other business functions like advice, sharing ideas, making useful contacts and administration.  If yes, then get ready to face up to all the possibilities, good and bad, presented by regular and immediate online communication with prospects and customers.

Your marketing strategy should include a digital marketing plan which should consider tools like a website/blog (which are increasingly combined), email marketing, social media marketing and content production. It will include marketing communications (identifying and retaining customers) and customer service (satisfying customers).

I have met small businesses which flourish without using social media marketing but rarely come across a business where social media hasn’t been relevant at all. We are all human and most of us are hypersocial. Social media gives us a reach and interactive capability which would have been unimaginable even five years ago. I have come across people that find the technology, etiquette and emphasis on ‘social’ quite challenging.

As a micro-enterprise, you can adapt and change and learn quickly. Your flexibility is your strength. Larger businesses are struggling with the transparency, openness and honesty that social media demands. You could even build social media into your product or service and become what has been called the hyper-social organisation*. And really differentiate yourself.

*The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media; Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran; McGraw-Hill Professional

Staff can be your marketing fifth columnists, if you let them

So often this question comes up in discussions about social media marketing strategy: why on earth allow employees to openly represent an organisation online?

The general answer runs something like this: “If you are afraid of what your employees will say about you online, then your problem is not your employees — it’s your organisation.”

There are nuances to this general principle, of course: for example, staff shouldn’t claim to speak for the organisation in any official or legal sense. But, generally speaking, organisations afraid of losing control over unofficial communication will make the situation worse by banning social media use at work.

There is also a very simple, practical argument against organisations wanting to stop staff Facebook or Twitter access.   With more people set to go online via their mobiles than desktops in the near future, your efforts are likely to be futile.  Much better to have an internal social media policy in place instead.

But the strongest reason is this:  allowing staff to use social media won’t result in them talking your organisation down, just the opposite in fact.

Forrester came out with pretty damning research among 5,500+ information workers in North America and Europe. Half of (49%) of information workers were online detractors and only 27% were promoters, for a net score of minus 23%.   Not surprisingly, directors are promoters but staff — including supervisors — are detractors.   So forget the notion of middle management always being loyal!

At the same time, this statistic is worth everything and…nothing.  According to another AdAge article: “In case you’re wondering if you should allow employees onto social networks (and trust me, you can’t stop them), try this fact: workers who use social media are among the most positive of an organisation’s supporters — 48% would strongly recommend a company’s products and services and only 22% were detractors, for a net score of 26% — among the highest of the groups we surveyed.”

This is part of an instinctive reflex to defend your ‘tribe’.  So you might denigrate your boss or your work to friends and family but seeing a stranger criticise them online is totally different!

Letting staff use social media shows that you trust them to act responsibly and don’t treat them like children.    If you treat them like adults, they’ll more often than not respond in kind and become your organisation’s online advocates.

Arguably, the hardest part of leveraging the power of social media is generating an initial burst of activity. More and more often we read powerful case studies of companies who tap their biggest fans to help generate quality word-of-mouth coverage. While there’s no question that customers are one of the most effective assets in social media marketing, organisations of all sizes often overlook their built-in, positive social network — their employees.

Staff who are equipped with information are more likely to be advocates on their company’s behalf. Consequently, it is the responsibility of enlightened marketers to arm their colleagues with the tools and messages to enable effective word-of-mouth communication online.

Here are a few ways to empower your employees to give your word-of-mouth campaign some momentum.

1. Extend the “all-staff” e-mail. Internal “all-staff” e-mail is the media through which employees hear about all milestones, product updates and announcements. But why stop there? After each important announcement (intended for the outside world, of course), add a drafted tweet or status update — complete with a link to the appropriate news release or landing page. Not only will your well-connected employees share the announcement, their networks will listen — they will be “breaking the news” from the inside.
2. Develop social-media-friendly content. For instance, is there a company PowerPoint that your sales or business development people use frequently?  If you’re fortunate, the PowerPoint summarises the value of your business in ways your website, blog or your e-mail signature just can’t. Get that presentation uploaded on SlideShare, tag accordingly and get your entire staff to upload the deck to their LinkedIn profiles, via the SlideShare application (you can also use Google Presentation on LinkedIn).
3. Persuade staff to “like” where they work. The chances are that all your staff is on Facebook: how many of them have actively “liked” your company? Some people may prefer to keep their personal life separate from their professional life but it never hurts to ask. Most likely, most will accept — and several of them may turn into active (and valuable) participants.
4. Axe the fax and socialise your business cards. Why is a fax number still a standard component of business cards while social media outlets are omitted? Include a link to a blog, a company Twitter account, LinkedIn or Facebook company page and provide potential customers with a meaningful way to interact with your brand. This also applies to your employees’ e-mail signatures. Present your staff with a template — complete with all appropriate social links — and watch your network — and positive digital signature — grow.

A definition of Social CRM

Paul Greenberg on Social CRM:

“First, there seems to be a consensus on the definition already. We all agree on its general characteristics. We see it as the use of social and traditional CRM tools and processes to support a strategy of customer engagement. Or some permutation of that.

Second, there’s too much other work on Social CRM to do. Its time to start figuring out and documenting the business models, policies, practices, processes, social characteristics, applications, and the methodologies that we need to actually carry it out. There is some great work going on in those Social CRM areas already with folks like Graham Hill, Denis Pombriant, Thomas Vander Wal, Brent Leary, Prem Kumar, Chris Carfi, Bill Band, Natalie Petouhoff, Mike Fauscette, Michael Maoz and Ray Wang, among others (please forgive me if I didn’t mention you. There are many others). But we need to create a repository for all this work – and an institution that can represent it agnostically. Right now, the body of practice out there is all over the place. Even with this, the work on Social CRM’s “how” needs a dramatic escalation now.”

Paul Greenberg, author of the best-selling CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century

And here’s his definitions:

“CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

And here’s the tweetable version:

“The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”

A corporate blog: more important than it ever was

Seth Godin on blogging…

“Blogging is free. It doesn’t matter if anybody reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matter is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say. How do you explain yourself to the few employees – or your cat – or whoever is going to look at it?

How do you force yourself to describe — in three paragraphs — why you did something? How do you respond out loud? If you’re good at it [blogging], some people are going to read it. If you’re not good at it, and you stick with it, you’ll get good at it.

This has become much bigger than, “are you Boing Boing or The Huffington Post?” This has become such a micro-publishing platform that you’re basically doing it for yourself… to force yourself to become a part of the conversation, even if it’s not that big. That posture change, changes an enormous amount.”

Tom Peters on blogging…

“I will simply say that my first post was in August of 2004. No single thing in the last fifteen years — professionally – has been more important to my life than blogging.

It has changed my life. It has changed my perspective. It has changed my intellectual outlook. It has changed my emotional outlook, and it’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude I’ve ever had… and it’s free.”

Making business sense of social media ROI

Olivier Blanchard is perhaps the most sought-after expert for those looking to connect the dots between social media and ROI (return-on-investment). This is an interview from SmartBlog on Social Media.

The chatter around ROI seems to be as loud as ever. What would you attribute this to? Are we at a pivotal moment for business proving value for social media activities?

The chatter around social media marketing ROI is as strong as ever for two reasons: the first is simply because ROI points to one of the most important questions an organisation can ask before green-lighting a social media programme: I could spend this budget somewhere else — why should I spend it on social media? Before any other questions can be asked, you have to start with “why”.

The second is that most social media “experts” seem incapable of:

a) being able to define ROI … and

b) plug social media into a profit-and-loss statement and actual business objectives.

Most social media marketers, having no true management background, simply don’t understand how to tie social media measurement and performance to business measurement and performance. This lack of business management experience is a major problem in a field where everyone seems to have become an “expert” overnight.

Olivier Blanchard, Principal at BrandBuilder Marketing

As long as these so called “experts” fail to answer the ROI question, the chatter will continue. Ironically, the question can be answered in about three minutes. All it takes is someone on the social media side of the table who understands how to plug new communications into a business from the board’s perspective.

Have you noticed a recurring point where businesses and organisations decide to get serious about applying ROI to social activities? Is it based on experience, resources allocated or both?

Every organisation is different. Some want to establish upfront measurement practices that include ROI from the very start. These are organisations with a specific focus or clear goals. ROI is based on accomplishing those goals. The programme won’t get the go-ahead until every “t” has been crossed.

Others don’t get around to asking about ROI until six to 18 months after a programme has begun and budgets need to be reviewed. Trust me, when 10% of your group’s budget is being cut, you start asking hard questions. Social media programmes not clearly in support of specific business objectives had better come up with a good answer when the budget hatchet starts to come down.

Typically, companies that start by identifying ROI before a social media marketing budget is assigned, people are recruited and the project is even outlined, fare better than their counterparts.

How can those who are in the trenches, but not selling product or services themselves, best justify their social efforts/hours to their bosses and peers?

By aligning their activities and objectives with key business objectives. The fastest way to ensure that your budget is renewed or validated is to show that you play a part in making the P&L positive.

Perhaps your group saves the organisation money by using social media. Customer service is an example.

Media buying, reach, could also show some interesting cost reductions, with social media increasing reach while reducing relative cost-per-impression. Perhaps your group generates not sales but leads by using social-media channels in interesting ways. There are dozens upon dozens of ways to ensure that your programme can be shown to contribute to either reducing costs or generating revenue. What you don’t want to be is a “cost centre” alone, or worse yet, the project team that can’t articulate its value to the organisation. Which happens.

Never hire a “Social Media Expert” (via Momentum)

Those who really understand how to use social media marketing successfully will have a previous grounding in another marketing communications discipline.

Producing good content is one of the keys to success and there are proven professionals in content production like PR pros and creative agencies.

As this blog says, social media is not new: it goes back to AOL and bulletin boards and user groups.

Anyone with a PC and a back bedroom can be a social media guru. Look for deeper criteria if you are hiring one seriously. Check out what content they produce, for what purpose and how they measure its success. Look out for how it is plugged in to other marketing communications disciplines and to an organisation’s P&L.

Excellence in social media looks at an organisation in the round, its marketing strategy and tactics. A lot of social media is not in social media.

By: Tim BakerOne of my biggest pet peeves is the “social media guru.” You know the type, the person that  spends all their time on Twitter retweeting Mashable articles and Chris Brogan’s blog posts and thinks that having 40,000 followers makes them an instant expert in marketing. These people are bad news for many reasons, but what makes them most … Read More

via Momentum

Inbound marketing reading list update

World Wide Rave

Just titles that I have found useful and a way of building an inbound marketing library.

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media)
Brian Halligan, David Meerman Scott and Dharmesh Shah
Traditional outbound marketing methods like cold–calling, email blasts, advertising, and direct mail are increasingly less effective. People are getting better at blocking these interruptions out using Caller ID, spam protection, TiVo. People are now increasingly turning to Google, social media and blogs to find products and services. Inbound Marketing helps you take advantage of this change by showing you how to get found by customers online.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR
David Meerman Scott
The imminent fall of traditional mass media marketing means new opportunities for legions of smaller companies and independent professionals who need to reach niche markets cheaply and effectively. The way Scott sees it, this is also good news for consumers: the online culture of integrity and information tends to produce quality content for less, as opposed to the vapid, one–sided and pricey advertising of print media and television.

World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories
David Meerman Scott
A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. It′s when communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It′s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. It′s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

The Longer Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand
Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson first explored the Long Tail in an article in Wired Magazine that has become one of the most influential business essays of our time. Now he takes a closer look at the new economics of the Internet age, showing where business is going and exploring the huge opportunities that exist: for new producers, new e-tailers, and new tastemakers. He demonstrates how long tail economics apply to industries ranging from the toy business to advertising to kitchen appliances. He sets down the rules for operating in a long tail economy. And he provides a glimpse of a future that’s already here.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies and has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. This book exists to help companies deal with the trend, regardless of how the individual technology pieces change.

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
Chris Brogan and Julian Smith
Today′s online influencers are Web natives who trade in trust, reputation, and relationships, using social media to accrue the influence that builds up or brings down businesses online. Two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brand′s influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. In this revised paperback version, learn how businesses are using the latest online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business.

The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
Paul Gillin and Geoffrey A Moore
One of those landmark books that has everyone talking and for good reason. The book is an important contribution to discussions of the sea change in marketing and public relations techniques. The democratisation of publishing and broadcasting enables fresh, and previously unheard voices, into the mainstream. With those voices and their new and constantly evolving delivery channels, marketing and public relations will never be the same again.

Get Content, Get Customers: Turn Prospects into Buyers with Content Marketing
Joe Pulizzi
The rules of marketing have changed. Instead of loud claims of product superiority, what customers really want is valuable content that will improve their lives. Get Content Get Customers explains how to develop compelling content and seamlessly deliver it to customers — without interrupting their lives. It’s new marketing and it’s the only way to build a loyal, engaged customer base.

Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back
Rohit Bhargava
The age of the faceless corporation is over. In the new business era of the twenty first century, great brands and products must evoke a dynamic personality in order to attract passionate customers. Although many organizations hide their personality behind layers of packaged messaging and advertising, social media guru and influencer, Rohit Bhargava, counters that philosophy and illustrates how successful businesses have redefined themselves in the new customer universe.

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media)
Brian Halligan, David Meerman Scott and Dharmesh Shah
Traditional outbound marketing methods like cold–calling, email blasts, advertising, and direct mail are increasingly less effective. People are getting better at blocking these interruptions out using Caller ID, spam protection, TiVo. People are now increasingly turning to Google, social media and blogs to find products and services. Inbound Marketing helps you take advantage of this change by showing you how to get found by customers online.

Latest Forrester report shows ‘Joiners’ still increasing

Forrester has tracked the growth of social behaviour from 2007, when they first named social media participants. Forrester categorises online social behaviours into a ladder with six levels of participation; they use the term Social Technographics to describe analysing a population according to its participation in these levels.

Forrester's social media user categories

They called active, content creators, well…Creators,  comprising13% of online adults who write and maintain blogs, update Web pages or upload video they created, at least monthly.

Critics, 19%, post ratings, comment  on and review content. Collectors, 15%, tag Web pages and use RSS. Joiners, 19%, are active online social networkers.

Spectators, 33%, read blogs, watch video and listen to podcasts. Inactives, 52%, may be online but barely take part in any activity.

There have been increases in more complex social behaviours such as exhibited by Creators but, for the first time, there is a change in the growth trend.  Forrester’s latest 2010 Global Social Technographics report demonstrates that much online social behaviour has plateaued.  Why, and what does this mean to marketers?

Is it sensible to believe that Creator behaviour will ever be universal? Not every person has a burning need to be a reporter, an industry expert, a video producer, a musician, a thought leader, an editor or a broadcaster.  The fact that more than 1 in 5 online adults are exhibiting Creator behaviour is a testament to how social technologies have lowered the bar.

Further growth in Creator behaviour will come much more slowly than in the past.  This will cause marketers and those who produce social tools to focus more on how social content is consumed rather than how it is produced.

In fact, there is already evidence of this trend — look at Twitter’s new Web interface, which doesn’t change how people tweet but instead makes it significantly easier to consume others’ tweets. Look for other social tools to follow suit, offering new ways to make tweets, blog posts, product ratings and other social content easier to find, read, use, save and share.

There is one behaviour that is not plateauing, nor is it likely to stop growing for some time: Joiners. These are people who maintain a social networking profile.

While growth in other behaviours have stagnated, Joiners grew again from 2009 to 2010.  As social media has become a major communication channel for many people, it becomes hard to avoid.  Even those with no intent to share continue to join so they can keep in touch with friends, children and grandchildren. Today, avoiding social networks is about as easy to do as avoiding email — it’s possible, but it comes at a substantial cost in terms of relationships and knowledge.

The fact that Joiners continue to grow means marketers must continue to focus their attention and budgets on social networks in 2011. More people will spend more time and get more information through social networks and, where consumer time and attention goes, so will marketing investment.

How to get your blog posts working harder

Use a catchy subject line

The subject line is arguably the most important element of any post: titles that pique curiosity are more likely to be opened. When this is combined with strategic keywords that match the topic of the post, you have a blog that’s going to perform well.

The idea is simply to generate curiosity such as Why isn’t your team performing: perhaps they’re not in ‘flow’? You’re now wondering what ‘flow’ is all about, aren’t you?

Many of us don’t have large subscriber bases, so we need to develop a catchy title that also includes keywords that will get indexed by Google. Brian Clark at Copyblogger does an excellent job of this. One of his generally-accepted SEO copywriting tips is to place these keywords near the front of the title.

You should occasionally test your titles to determine what resonates most with your audience. Titles that offer immediate practical help, like How to get your blog posts working harder will result in higher traffic from a community than those that are too clever and thought-provoking.

Offer easy-to-skim content

When you organise your content so that it’s easily skimmed and assimilated, you tap into a secret of blogging. Time is precious and you have a few seconds to get two or three points across:

• Blog as if you are talking directly  to one of your community members: my audience is business professionals and marketers. They expect you to get to the point quickly and avoid technical jargon.
• Learn to write in a terse, accurate style: if you scan any news source, you’ll notice the paragraphs are short — only a few sentences. The Guardian’s Style Guide is useful and accessible.
• Use subheadings: this helps both you and the reader. I tend to write my first draft quickly for flow and readability. Then I go back and organise with subheadings, while also reorganising and eliminating entire paragraphs so that my readers don’t have to.
• Create lists: lists are the ultimate organising tool, which is why they’re frequently retweeted — thereby attracting valuable links back to your blog. Keep them to a few items otherwise you’ll make it confusing.
• Use italics and bold text for emphasis: if someone reads your blog post word-for-word, it’s usually after skimming it first. Help readers do both by emphasising key points with italics and bold text. Use caps, ellipses (…) and exclamation marks only when they are really justified.

Mix content types and opinion and facts

Delivering great content requires a mix of qualities that keeps your readers coming back for more. The key isn’t always the quality of the message but how it’s delivered:

• Offer your opinions: if you’re an expert in your field, then your opinion is relevant. Who do you respect more, the waiter who says everything on the menu is excellent or the one who looks you in the eye and recommends her favourites (or suggests avoiding some dishes)?
• Use multimedia: make it a point to use images, screenshots and video to communicate your message with more punch.Link to your experience and case studies: advice has greater credibility when it comes from a practical, proven situation.
• Leave out the rubbish: make the effort to edit out anything that doesn’t support your title or enhance your post. Include details to create a mental picture but leave out anything else that is not strictly relevant.

 

The 'Excerpt' feature in WordPress

 

Be aware of SEO factors

Learning the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) is a necessary aspect of blogging if you expect to build a sustainable reader base. While SEO can get complicated, you can be very effective by simply tuning into your audience and writing for them:

• Excerpts: the excerpt of your post is the brief description included with the return of search results and is an extra option in most blogging platforms. A well-chosen description encourages click-throughs. If you don’t build an excerpt, the first couple of sentences of your post will be used as a default. Get in the habit of summarising your post in the first couple of sentences.
• Keywords: learn the common words and phrases being used by your audience. For example, do they use the term entreprise or business? These subtle distinctions need to be made so that you can be found when they’re searching for your expertise.Links: the SEO experts universally agree that inbound links to your blog are useful for achieving a high ranking. How do you get these links? The most reliable way is to write content that people want to link to.
• Anchor text: link to the keywords (known as anchor text) in your post that are aligned with the words you expect to be used by someone searching for your expertise. The classic mistake is linking to click here instead of more relevant keywords such as digital marketing or whatever relates to your expertise.
• Link to earlier posts: link back to your previous posts to encourage your readers to hang around longer. This increases the likelihood they’ll respond to a call-to-action, such as subscribing to your blog or newsletter.
• Tags: tags are handled differently in every blogging platform. Just be sure to use tags that are relevant to the post you’re creating, as well as the audience you’re blogging for. Only use tags that directly refer to your post to avoid undermining their effectiveness through dilution.
• Categories: categories obviously help your blog visitors go deeper into the subject matter or topic that interests them most. Search engines also index your categories for the same reason, so choose your categories carefully. Too many and it is confusing to readers: too few and they are pointless. Aim for six to ten categories.

 

Tag cloud generated from WordPress

 

Encourage interaction and action

While blogging is a platform for publishing, the ultimate objective is to encourage engagement and interaction. Just as an engaged audience gives a speaker feedback on his live presentation, the comments to your blog will do the same.

You can and should learn from every single visitor to your blog by responding and seeking to better understand her point of view. Every comment probably represents the perspective of many others. The more you learn, the easier it is to focus your efforts on what’s most relevant to your audience.

Why else do you want comments? Because comments are social proof that your blog is popular. And this, in turn, encourages more traffic and subscribers to your blog. To encourage more comments, you may not only have to remind your audience to do so but show them as well. Write a post on commenting and use your blog as an example.

Show your readers exactly how to comment, and even go a step further to describe how to share your post by retweeting or using the Facebook Like button.

AIDA can clarify social media strategy

It’s useful, sometimes, to get back to the basics when social media marketing threatens to overwhelm us with an avalanche of innovation, platforms and analytical tools.

Remember that old chestnut in sales and communications, the acronym AIDA?  AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.

This is the most rudimentary of sales and marketing funnels and, yet, is more relevant and useful today because theories and distractions can often cause us to forget the requirements of a successful sales engagement.

Each section of AIDA represents a stage in your sales and marketing process and can help you set your expectations, decide what to monitor and visualise the relationships between each part. Understanding the flow of the tools and tactics will also help you get your measurements and analytics in line with your goals.

Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of this marketing funnel, some tips on how to apply it to your social media strategy and a look at how the model is evolving in the digital age.

Awareness

Awareness is social media’s bread and butter.

You can’t easily display your inventory via Twitter, set up a shopping cart on LinkedIn or fill orders through YouTube: these networks are not going to be your selling environment. Instead, they are your communication and outreach tools — the spokes that lead back to your hub (catalogue, blog, site landing page).

Awareness  is getting people to know you exist and that you can solve a problem they might have. At this level, conversations, interaction and content are king. A few metrics you might want to measure around your brand are buzz — mentions and conversation frequency — and sentiment.

Interest

Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product or service. You can bolster interest with content that shows how you can solve customers’ problems and reflect your unique approach. Features and benefits weigh heavily at this level and social media can help you convert interest into desire.

 

The simple AIDA model has added a 'C' and 'R'

 

Desire

Social media can help bolster desire through communication and engagement but, to fully satisfy someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a site that is streamlined and optimised. Recently, I tried using a popular car rental site to make a reservation but it was so difficult to find out what was available — and its cost — that I gave up, despite having a generous discount code. The user interface killed my desire and I went to a competitor’s site, which made getting a quotation and reserving a car really easy.

Some of the metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.

Action

Now that your prospects are likely to take action, you need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign-up, lead form, event ticket, subscription).

If you have created some targeted landing pages set up for your products or services, those are what you want to link to — not your homepage. Even if you’re not running PPC campaigns, the same strategy of linking to targeted pages through social media is applicable. A few of the metrics you will want to look at here are CTR (click-through rate), retweets (of deals and links) and conversations about specific products.

The action stage is also where you can finally calculate some of your sales metrics, like conversion rate and ROI. This is where you can see how everything is performing and the final impact your work is having. Often, these are the metrics that your boss and directors are looking for.

New additions to the marketing funnel

Over the years, the traditional AIDA has evolved and added two extra levels. These levels represent not only a shift in the technology and methods that are used to market, but the people behind it.

Commitment

How are you getting your customers to buy from you again? One very simple way to reinforce their pleasure in buying is to follow up via the same social media you used in the first place. If you know they purchased via a link on Facebook, send them a Facebook message saying “thanks” and provide them with your customer service contact information.

Use Twitter for customer service. Monitor the online conversations around people who are already using your product and see if they have any questions or problems that you can resolve quickly. You can build social loyalty programs and use the communities you create to keep customers coming back. This is where CRM (customer relationship management) can play a leading role and  social CRM solutions are emerging to fill that need.

A few things you might want to monitor here are repeat buyers, the use of loyalty codes, post-purchase and product use sentiment.

Referral

Advocacy is the dream of any marketer, where your customers do your marketing for you. It’s when customers love your products, brand, services and people so much that they can’t help but talk about you. This is why you want to make it easy for people to share your brand. Any hindrance to this — be it a bad website interface or an anti-social company ethic — will really discourage this extremely valuable source of traffic and interest.

If it’s an option, I’m far more inclined to click on a “Tweet This” or “Like” button than I am to take the link, shorten it in bit.ly, and post it to my various social networks. Remove any barriers to referrals and then both encourage and reward it.

Some metrics to look at here are mentions, conversations and referrals.

Six social media marketing tactics for small businesses in 2011

Try and get some sort of perspective on social media marketing as a small business and you’re overwhelmed with advice, most of it unstructured and amateur. So many experts: so little expertise!

Here are six tactics to put into action quickly, improve your digital footprint and get results. You can safely delegate an intern, or find a part-time resource, to get this moving immediately.

1. Produce interesting content in multimedia: videos are relatively easy to produce and use via YouTube. Rather than just write blogs (although, remember that a blog is the heart of a social media campaign), put some thoughts down on video. Editing tools are ubiquitous and adding music and titles is simple.
2. Message integration: your enterprise’s ‘story’ should already exist and it will tell your key communities just how your enterprise brightens their lives or solves a headache. Retell that story in several forms, illustrate it with metaphors and use it across Yellow Pages, offline PR, ads in your industry handbook and…social media. Keep telling that story in different ways and use your keyword list to stay digitally on message.
3. Make your blog professional: don’t just play at blogging. Plan an editorial schedule three months ahead and designate writers. Conform to your keyword list and hold a brainstorming session to find ways of telling the enterprise story in different metaphorical settings.
   

   Collaboration is important for generating social media content

4. Hyperlocal marketing: if your enterprise is geographically critical, social media marketing works brilliantly at a local level. Use Google’s free Local Business Centre, register on Google Maps and ensure you are listed on Facebook Places, Gowalla and Foursquare. Encourage customers to checkin with point-of-sales requests or discounts.
5. Digital PR: social media marketing is digital public relations, with one important difference. It is very much a multi-directional conversation and your influence has to be subtle to influence people to talk about your enterprise.  But this is not a reason to avoid planning resources, activity and content. Plan social media marketing like a PR campaign.
6. LinkedIn as a sales pipeline: if you are in a business-to-business enterprise, use LinkedIn as a sales pipeline (from your point of view!). LinkedIn now has profiling and listing tools, so go to it! From your communities’ point of view, you will be an interesting company that is helpful and full of resources and ideas.

Websites don’t have content: they are content

In the past, it was easy enough to outsource content production to creative agencies. But the ubiquity of publishing platforms, mushrooming of publishing opportunities and power of technology means organisations can, and probably should, publish relevant content and reap the subsequent marketing rewards.

Apart from the complexity of understanding blogging, social media and technologies like video and podcasting, there is the challenge of creating content. Excellent content educates, interests, amuses or challenges your key audiences and gets them to interact and engage.

Let’s take a small diversion into Web design. As design has become more user-centred, disciplines like user-analysis, information architecture, transactional and visual design and usability testing have emerged and contributed to the clarity of Web-based content.

While these were important steps towards developing great content, there was still a conspicuous gap between infrastructure and the content that went into it. Web content was considered outside of the scope of the theories of user experience and often left, by an agency or studio, to the client organisation to ‘sort’.

Content production should be built-in to a website development project

Content is still often considered as the last-minute stuff that goes into the design and is created in a hurry or migrated from its various locations to the new design. Content has, until recently, been considered merely an adjunct to the primary process, instead of being the core of the process.

One systems designer, Dorian Taylor, captured the essence of this conundrum when he asserts that “…the Web doesn’t have content, it is content”.

Giving content a peripheral role creates problems that are not easily rectified with a tweak to the design or even through more fundamental changes. Putting content centre-stage means changing some of the basic ways we think about content.

The form of an object must be based on its intended purpose. If the purpose of a website is to inform, sell, share or entertain, then the consumption of content is the function. If the content is not created before design begins, then form is not following function: the function is being compromised by the form.

The elements of design – from the architecture and navigation to the look-and-feel to the code functionality – are all components that come together to help the content reach the user effectively. If the content is an afterthought, the experience is likely to fail.

Content development has become too complex to be left in the hands of a website manager, junior marketing executive or site moderator. Not everyone is, or should be, an expert at content strategy and management.

Neither can authors within an organisation necessarily be expected to know enough about content management – keywords, content standards and modelling, re-use models, content for metatags, microformats and writing for syndication. Decisions about content strategy should be made at marketing director and board level or outsourced to a creative agency who has a grasp of content creation.

When website developers say that the content elements of online projects are a major sticking point, they recognise that the launch is being held up by a poor, or non-existent, content development process.

The absence of quality content can often be attributed to a few key failures or omissions. Content on an old site could be unsuitable, inconsistently structured or difficult to migrate neatly to the new site. The content could also be trapped in attachments, such as PDF files or in email, which can’t be moved very easily.

The content, whether written or migrated, could be unusable for the new site or app. It may describe out-of-date functionality or not be written in ways that are suitable for integration with the new design: the new design may not be able to accommodate the content. There is no way to provide the necessary information or instructions within the design that has just been, no doubt, approved in a lengthy sign-off process.

A situation could arise where there is simply no planned content for certain areas – often new, key areas – because there was no appreciation of how long it takes to create suitable content, or there is a lack of awareness about why accurate, readable content is so important.

There could be simply no budget allocated for content development. Content can be a major budget item, so the redesign proposal opted to omit content provision so as to lower the project cost. At a late stage, the client organisation is told they are responsible for content development themselves and they realise they have no time, budget and/or expertise to start creating content.

Don’t spam your LinkedIn Connections

Don’t Spam Your LinkedIn Connections | The Anti-Social Media.

I’m pretty open to connecting with people on LinkedIn because connecting on LinkedIn is the best way to stalk someone. In fact, I typically will connect with anyone who requests to connect with me, so long as they don’t seem like a complete sociopath.

But people have begun to abuse my willingness to connect.

These people who I’ve been connected with for months and years have suddenly decided that it’s OK to use LinkedIn to send me weird pitches. Instead of using it to cultivate a relationship, they just decide to  send me a demo of weird tool I’ll never use. I also get messages that assume I know everything about my connection’s lives, because I’m stalking every single moment of their existence.

/contd

Top 15 Content Marketing Predictions for 2012

With nearly 80 contributors, the predictions were plentiful. But, for whatever reason, here are my favorite 15.  Enjoy!

I believe that Google+ will become a new blogging platform and that in addition to sharing content, users will start creating their own content right on the G+ site. – Ali Goldfield

2012 is the year more organizations embrace the convergence of employee personal branding and corporate branding through content marketing strategies. – Bernie Borges

Content Marketing jobs will be at their peak due to the constant need and hunger for lead nurturing mechanisms. - Celine Francisco

Brand marketers will continue to hire their own brand journalists and build out their own editorial departments. So if you’re a publisher…watch out! Your own advertisers and sponsors will be competing more and more with you. – Daniel Burstein

As real-time becomes the norm and journalists search Google for thought leaders to quote, more and more marketers will newsjack their way into the media. – David Meerman Scott

2012 will be the year of hard work – and the year we all focus on building our content brands: getting famous for great content not just for great widgets. – Doug Kessler

New button is added to social sites… The “Shut Up” button to quiet trolls and people that don’t add any value to the conversation. Okay, maybe it’s not a prediction, just a wish. – Douglas Karr

Media agencies will either create new content marketing specialized groups or expand the roles of “search strategists” to “content strategists” and include effective and efficient content distribution to their responsibilities. – Gilad de Vries

Mobile can no longer be treated as an isolated channel or a “nice to have”; it will become a primary way to speak to customers and prospects. – Gordon Plutsky

Creating content around the needs of the customer, not the needs of the brand has been proven time and again to work. More companies are going to see the value and ease of providing that in 2012. – Jason Falls

There will be a slew of top brands that start to buy established niche media properties instead of starting from scratch. – Joe Pulizzi

Content Marketers will begin to to place even more focus on video storytelling by expanding the distribution of video content at the retail level through the gaining momentum of QR Codes. – Nate Riggs

I think you’re going to see a lot of activity around Social TV. We’re starting to see critical mass around key live events (Super Bowl, Awards Shows, etc.), the same programming that networks charge big dollars for. Social TV integration will either support those traditional ad spends, or be used by those who can’t afford a :30 spot during the Oscars. – Rick Liebling

Brand marketers will realize an editorial function is needed to define their overall content strategy and planning. Content will be tweaked for different media. Brand marketers will not only distribute their own content, but also start curating third-party content to reinforce their messages. – Pam Didner

And my favorite, from my friend Paul Conley, is below (in its entirety).

I expect that 2012 will see two changes in who creates the content in B2B content marketing.

First, public-relations departments and agencies will move into this role in a big way – and do a better job than the marcomm-type folks who dominate the space now. The reason is pretty simple: marketers don’t have a culture that is open to journalism. And make no mistake: if you’re in the content-marketing game in B2B, you’re in the journalism game. News happens. Often when you least expect it — like when your feel-good interview with an executive turns into major news because it contains an off-the-cuff remark about your industry that infuriates people and moves share prices. Most marketers don’t handle things like that well. They don’t have what journalists call “news judgement,” so they get blindsided when they create content that becomes news.

Second, I think traditional B2B publishers, who moved into the “marketing services” space with great fanfare in the past two years, will retreat. In fact, they already are. This was never a good idea. Legacy publishers don’t get the Web. The only thing they had to sell in the market was the one thing they shouldn’t be selling — the ability to co-opt their journalists!

So, what’s your favorite?  What did we miss?

via Top 15 Content Marketing Predictions for 2012.

Social media statistics: B2B marketing communications

There’s no doubt that social media has added a huge dimension to marketing communications. To many of us, it’s not just an add-on, it’s a sea change in the way that enterprises communicate and behave. Social media has changed many institutions and we are in the middle of a revolution in the way technology will help us plan, communicate and market goods and services

Marketeers and business owners need to keep a weather eye on the major B2B social media platforms

Meanwhile, we have to get on with the day job. But what are the numbers behind the most popular B2B social media platforms? In any enterprise, publishing valuable content is a given and I am an evangelist about content production and management but as well as ‘what’, we also have to plan ‘where’.

Statistics are vital when it comes to making decisions about where to publish content: it’s like using the old BRAD or PR Planner (OK, if you’re too young t remember, move on!).

It’s like the old adage about PR: you can’t not do public relations — all that can be debated is whether you manage it actively — or not!

Facebook: 800 million users. More than 75% of users are from outside of the US. Three spikes in Facebook activity tend to occur on weekdays at GMT 4 pm, 8 pm and 1 am (EST* 11 am, 3 pm and 8 pm): however, posts published in the early afternoon, GMT, seem to perform better.

Twitter: 300 million users. A majority of Twitter users are between the ages of 18 and 29. More than 50% of users are female and about 15% of users identify themselves as marketers. Minority internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as are Caucasian internet users. Peak usage seems to occur between 2 pm and 6 pm EST, 7 and 11 pm GMT.

LinkedIn: 116 million users. Many of the people on LinkedIn are professionals, business owners or other talented individuals. More than half are international users. Peak activity occurs between 2 and 8 pm GMT.

Google+: 60 million users. Its user base tends to skew towards males, with most prominent occupations being in software engineering and development. They also tend to be between the ages of 25 to 34.

 

*The Eastern Time Zone (ET) of the United States and Canada is a time zone that falls mostly along the east coast of North America. The GMT time difference is −5 hours during standard time and −4 hours during daylight saving time.

In the United States and Canada, this time zone is generally called Eastern Time (ET). Specifically, it is Eastern Standard Time (EST) when observing standard time (winter), and Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) when observing daylight saving time (spring to autumn).