JUST BE YOU
A major paradigm-shift in marketing, media, and communications is well under way. Facebook and social networks are ushering in a new era marked by increased transparency and the most empowered consumers of all time. There is no doubt that this shift creates massive opportunities for the organizations that are most able to adapt their thinking and strategies to successfully implement plans via social media. All of the new social networking tools and sites can be overwhelming, and so-called experts, sharing opposing information or telling you to emphasize different priorities, make it even more challenging. In your company or organization, you’re driven and measured by results. Since the results of leveraging social media are often not immediately apparent, it is tempting to rely on traditional marketing tactics that have been proven to generate immediate results instead of utilizing social media. Resist that temptation.
Make good decisions about where and how to allocate your resources. And knowing the tools available through social media will make your job easier. But the process can be overwhelming. The contents of this book alone are likely difficult to digest and implement, so I suggest that when you first explore all the possibilities social media has to offer, you concentrate on these four key concepts: listen, be transparent, be responsive, and be likeable. The biggest paradigm shift of all that social media represents is the ability to listen to what your customers and prospects are saying publicly. You can start listening today for free, and your ability to do so will inform and prepare you to best accomplish all of your social media marketing and advertising objectives. Acknowledging to your customers that you’re listening can endear you to them forever. Before you talk, listen, and once you start talking, never stop listening. Transparency is the new default. People like when others are honest and transparent. You like when other people are honest and transparent. Yet somehow, so many companies and industries are secretive, even dishonest, about aspects of their business. Embrace transparency and openness. Be honest when you mess up and when things don’t go as planned. The Internet becomes more transparent with every day that goes by. For you as a consumer, this is visibly beneficial, and it can also be a great thing for you as a marketer, if you can embrace it. Respond to everyone. The world is talking about you and to you. People everywhere are discussing their problems that you can solve better than your competitors. The world is telling you about their wants and needs that your organization can help them with.
Every time a customer or prospect talks publicly on a social network, it’s an opportunity for you to respond and engage. When you don’t respond, you either make a negative impression or you give a competitor an opportunity to reply. Every time you do respond, however, you have an opportunity to make a positive impression on customers, prospects, and on all of their friends. Focus on just being “likeable.” In the end, succeeding on social networks amounts to your ability to be likeable. There are two fundamental aspects to this term: likeable business practices and likeable content. Adopting likeable business practices means treating customers the way you’d like to be treated. You need to follow the golden rule in each decision you make affecting your customers. Likeable content means you only share updates on Facebook or Twitter that would make you click the Like button if you were at the receiving end. Create and share stories, text, photos, videos, links, and applications that you as a consumer would want to “like,” comment on, and “share.” To be likeable, you must always respect and add value to your community.
One of the most fundamental decisions a company faces is its choice of market or markets to serve. Unfortunately, many firms enter markets with little thought as to their suitability for the firm. They are entered simply because they may be superficially attractive within a market for the firm’s products or services. Without a doubt, a strong case can be made for choosing markets and industries where the prospects are attractive, and also where we can take a strong position. In general terms, the attractiveness of the markets and the strengths of the competitive positions we can take, will bring about several traps to be avoided.
Customers increasingly expect you to provide customer service and that expectation will only grow over time. You might consider using Twitter during live offline events or when hosting live chats. Twitter works well for conversations in which people want to address specific individuals and a general group at once. For example, if you are to tweet someone directly, addressing a message to one person’s Twitter handle only this specific user will receive the tweet. If you use someone’s Twitter handle in the text of a tweet, you are sending out to a group, for example congratulating a user, then both the entire group and the individual will receive the message. You can also use Twitter to host contests and promotions. Twitter can get quickly overwhelming to the novice user, so I suggest using a wide variety of applications to make your Twitter experience easier and richer.
UTLIZING DIRECT MESSAGES
These updates are private messages between accounts, similar to text messages. This comes in need to share or solicit private information, such as an account number or phone number. One of the distinctions of Facebook is that conversations are typically much more public. While people on Facebook mostly share with friends, no less than 5 percent of all Twitter users keep their updates private since most of them opt for all-inclusive, completely open conversations. Because of this, marketers are able to search conversations on Twitter and see all the conversations currently taking place. Twitter search is like the Google of conversation and provides insight to countless companies. Before you even think about a social media strategy, you should head to Twitter to find out what your current social media presence actually is. Don’t think you have one? Whether they’re mentioning your brand by name or they’re mentioning experiences related to using your brand, consumers are talking about interactions with your company or other companies like it and you need to know what they’re saying before you begin your specific strategy. What words do people use when describing the problems your company solves? These are the words worth searching. Use “advanced search” to look only at specific geographic areas if only certain places apply to you. Twitter is also an incredible customer service tool. The main difference between Facebook and Twitter here is that you can, as a brand, send a direct message to someone who’s following you on Twitter, while you can’t on Facebook unless you’re sending it from a personal profile. This situation troubles a lot of companies, but realize that this is to protect the Facebook user from being inundated with “spammy” messages from companies their inbox.
UTILIZING ONLINE VIDEOS
Content is more important than product quality. A good flip cam will do or the camera on your phone. Short and sweet is almost always better. A good rule of thumb is to have fun. About 30 to 90 secondsper video is good. Video is a great way to showcase your brand’s personality. Post it on YouTube and post video to Facebook. Don’t just post Vimeo, and other sites. Consider using a service such as Tube Mogul to syndicate video across many sites. Make sure you are answering people’s comments on social media. Just as you should be responsive on other social networks, so should you respond to people’s comments and questions on YouTube. There is no better way to tell a story than through video, as evidenced by the rise of television advertising as the largest segment of the marketing and advertising industry by far (television accounts for more than 32 percent of all global advertising spending). Yet through YouTube, and other online video channels, your videos can be seen for a lot less money than what you would spend through traditional television advertising. Are you a trusted advisor to your audience, creating valuable how-to videos? Are you completely customer-focused, capturing video of users and allowing them to speak about your products or services? Whoever you are, consider taking the things your brand fans love most about you and bringing them to life on YouTube. Think about why you search online. It’s usually because you want to know something—how to do something or where to find something. Consider creating videos that those quest
ions relating to your products or customer experiences. Also, forget the notion that YouTube is about creating “viral videos” getting millions of views. Is it possible to create videos on YouTube that will go viral? Sure.
EVERYBODY LOVES TO FEEL HEARD
Communication is 50 percent listening and 50 percent talking. Yet for many years, companies large and small have done a disproportionate amount of talking, shouting even. Customer service representatives, marketing researchers, and focus group organizers may listen, but budgets for these “listening” activities amount to little compared to the money spent on mass media “talking.” For the first time in our history, now, through social media, companies can listen at scale to conversations about them and their competitors. You have a front seat to spontaneous chatter of interest to your business. You have the ability to check in on prospective customers or prospects discussing problems your company solves or listen to existing customers talk about unrelated issues just to get to know them better. Checking in on your vendors’ partners, or even your competitors’ customers has never been easier. The amount of data you can gather and the number of conversations you can tap into through social media is nothing short of mind-boggling. As tempting as it may be to “join the conversation” on social networks, Facebook and Twitter simply aren’t broadcast media. They’re engagement media, or listening networks. Besides, how can you possibly know what to talk about in any conversation until you listen, at least a little bit? Ask anyone who has ever dated or been in a successful relationship how important it is not only to listen to your partner but to show him or her that you are truly listening. The guy on that first date who talks incessantly and does not listen strikes out every time. So does the woman at the cocktail party who only talks about herself. Increasingly, the same goes for the company that spends most of its marketing dollars talking and little time or money listening. Social media is the first communications channel that allows for such listening in large scale, and no matter what you sell or market, your customers are definitely talking. Listen first before you talk back. You can join the conversation as a listener.
THE BENEFITS OF LISTENING: WHY DOES IT REALLY MATTER?
If and when customers or prospects acknowledge that you’re listening, you immediately strengthen your relationships with them. We’ll talk more about responding later, but clearly the ability to not only listen but also to acknowledge others makes them feel heard, which makes them happier, which is always a good thing. Even if you can’t acknowledge customers (as is the case for highly regulated industries such as pharmaceutical and financial companies), in which only professionals can legally supply appropriate responses, if they can legally respond at all, there are other benefits to listening. A better understanding of how your customers use your products or don’t use them help you make critical changes to your offerings and information on how you communicate about them. You can also uncover new opportunities you hadn’t thought of or determine features you thought would be big hits that have ended up not mattering to customers, or being failures. Knowing what’s important to your customers can help you better plan offers, promotions, and contests to further drive buzz and sales. Instead of expensive product launches, you can test new ideas carefully and receive feedback quickly, keeping yourself on the pulse of your customers. Avoid pricey ad cams championing things you think people will love about your product or service by listening to what people actually want.
LISTENING VERSUS MONITORING
Let’s briefly compare the word-listening to the word-monitoring. A lot of companies and people use these words interchangeably to describe the process of seeing what people are saying about you, your products, and your competitors. Some may believe it is only a matter of semantics, but there is, in fact, an important distinction between the two. Monitoring has an impersonal feel to it, imparting a certain amount of creepiness. When you hear “monitoring,” you most likely think of the FBI or surveillance cameras. You think of negative situations: “Monitor that cough, it might get worse.” Listening, on the other hand, is an important human process, and I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like being listened to. Do you like being monitored? Do you like being listened to and heard?
HOW TO LISTEN
There are lots of free ways to listen to what customers and prospects are saying online, and there are many paid enterprise systems available as well, with costs ranging from a few dollars to thousands of dollars per month. If you’re new to listening, try these free ways first: Google Alerts, Technorati blog search, Twitter search, Facebook search, YouTube search, Tweet Beep. If you go to any social network and type a phrase or keyword into its search function, you will see what people are saying using that keyword in real time. National and global brands might search the entire Web, while local and regional organizations will want to use geographical filtering to find posts only in their coverage area. Remember not just to search for your brand name but for your competitors and, more importantly, for terms and words that your customers would use. For instance, if you’re a real estate broker, sure, you can search social networks for the name of your agency. But wouldn’t it be more helpful to search for the phrase “want to buy a house” in conversations on social networks in your town so you can find real people in real time sharing their needs with others? If you’re an attorney, you can search for your firm’s name, but it might be more helpful to search for the phrase “need to hire a lawyer” to listen to potential future clients talk about what they are looking for in the way of legal services. For more advanced listeners, or for brands with higher volumes of conversations to listen to, consider a paid enterprise software solution. There are dozens of listening platforms available for you to choose from.
It simply doesn’t make sense not to leverage the resources available to find out what your customers and prospects are saying and to use that information to create better products, services, and processes.
Whether your perfect target audience is one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, or one million people, you can now engage them in a way that was virtually impossible only a few years ago. Once you find your target audience, listen to them to find out what they are looking for, and provide your product or service to meet their needs. You build a relationship with this audience and, even them, to directly buy your goods or services, all using social media, the past, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, allowing marketers to tap into wide audiences of people, based around demographic criteria.
ACCELERATING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIENCES
Currently, millions of people are registered Facebook users. Facebook’s ads aren’t free to run, of course. This means that anyone who wants to, can easily research exactly how many people on Facebook fit into whatever targeting criteria he or she desires, free of charge. In other words, without even running any ads, you can find your target population among hundreds of millions of people simply by feeding Facebook the exact attributes you’re looking for in an audience. The basics—gender, age, and location—allow you to quickly target millions of people on a large scale at once.
Change the way you would be using traditional media. (And before you tell me Facebook is solely for young people, note that in the United States alone there are more than 20 million users over age 60). So, even though it’s very general, if you’re looking for your audience based only on age, gender, or location, you can certainly find it easily. It’s the other categories, however, that allow you to drill deep down to identify your perfect audience. Let’s focus on the two key targeting categories in this process: interests and workplace. In the “Interests” category, you can input literally any interest that at least 100 people have listed on their profile. Note: there are hundreds of thousands of options here. Type in “cooking,” for instance, then more specifically, “Italian cooking,” “Chinese cooking,” or “French cooking.” You could also go with “baking,” then “baking pies” or “baking cakes.” There are, of course, many possibilities and dozens of other cooking-related keywords.
If you work in the food industry, these keywords are powerful search criteria in helping you find your target audience.
Searching for related words you decide to pick will depend on whether your products are meant for Italian cooking, if your company is a spice distributer for a chain of Chinese restaurants, or if you run a flour company, for instance. If you’re a yoga center, consider targeting people nearby who list “yoga” as an interest. Perhaps you’d like to be more specific and target people who list “Bikram yoga” or “Reiki,” depending on the services you offer or are researching to offer in the future. If you represent a nonprofit, consider targeting the thousands of people who list “philanthropy” as an interest. Then take it a step further, and check for specific causes that are relevant or reach out to other nonprofit workers who share a similar mission, locally or even globally. Also included in the “Interests” category is job title. Perhaps you want to target retail buyers, distributors, HR managers, journalists, doctors, dentists, or maybe CEOs. This search function is especially helpful in the B2B space. Remember, even in the B2B space, you’re not marketing to businesses, you’re marketing to people who happen to be decision makers for businesses—this is an important distinction. We’ve grown our B2B business at Likeable significantly by targeting brand managers, CMOs, and marketing directors. For example, when we wanted to land an account with Neutrogena, we targeted marketing directors and managers at their company using Facebook ads. After we got their attention, they called us and became clients within a month. Two years later, the relationship is still going strong. In the “Workplace” category, you can input any workplace that multiple people on Facebook have identified as their employer. This function can actually be a helpful guide for local businesses that are geographically close to similar, larger companies. We have a chiropractor client in San Francisco, for instance, who targets employees of nearby offices. You can also use this function for the internal marketing and communications. Imagine telling the whole staff, “You’re doing a great job, keep up the good work,’’ just by sending out a Facebook message. Get creative with this function, and you’ll figure out how to best utilize it for your organization
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