So your CEO is frustrated that you, savvy marketing director or vice president of a $250 million Corporation, haven’t yet launched the brand’s Facebook Page. After all, Competitor X and Household Brand Y are all over social media and the new “connected” age, and the CEO has given you a generous bump in next year’s budget to jump all over social media. But how do you explain to him/her that a successful social media plan is a strategic corporate initiative that takes more time than money? Better yet, how do you bite your tongue from telling him/her that your company probably shouldn’t even be on Facebook, or that maybe that he/she should find another way to show his kid that he “gets it”?
With more and more indications hinting at double-digit upticks in social media spending next year, every brand is looking to strengthen up their social presence (meaning good news for the seemingly endless list of “new media experts” out there). A word of caution to you though: don’t take this as a carte blanche and spend all your resources on the fastest-talking social media consultant you run into at that ad:tech or Web 2.0 Expo party. Understand that the practice of Social Media Marketing is still trying to find its way out of the ROI penalty box, and your particular social media marketing plan will need to meet some requirements if it maintains any chance of success. Rather than jump blindly in the fray, meet each of the following requirement so you can develop a social media strategy that fits your brand like a glove.
1) Executive awareness
Even though top executives know that there’s a direct correlation between a company’s social media presence and its brand awareness, unfortunately many don’t know that social media marketing is really *not* as simple as just launching a Facebook Page or Twitter profile. There remain the niggling issues of budget (yes, social media marketing costs money), P&L, staffing, communication, legal policies, brand management, vendors, and other “details” associated with any marketing plan, all of which remain unbeknownst to them, especially the CEO. And probably for good reason, since he’s the top boss and shouldn’t have to deal with that stuff. (And because you’re the person he fires if you don’t do what he says.)
To build a plan that makes sense for your brand, you’ll first need to assess how the top brass currently understand and use social media. Start by creating a Social Media Executive Task Force, comprising you, the CEO and management from sales, customer service, product development, legal, operations and other core business units. Develop a questionnaire that gauges their personal web and social media usage, their knowledge of social media marketing, what value they feel social media provides, the effect they perceive social media will have on each of the company’s other business units, and what benchmarks and KPIs they think are necessary to gauge the success of a social media initiative.
And pull no punches – without a hint of arrogance or know-it-all-ism, ask the question: “define social media.” If the answer is silence met with a confused look, or over a full minute of inconsistent rambling and wild hand movements, chances are they need some education – quick.
2) Social Media Brand Audit
Before you execute on any social media plan, you’ll need a baseline snapshot of your online brand equity, and a general grasp of what’s been successful and not in generating mindshare among consumers. To do this, you’ll need to undertake the monstrously boring resource-intensive task of assessing your social media brand equity vis-a-vis researching conversations about your brand, your industry, your competitors, your customers and your total addressable market.
Start simple. Search for existing Facebook and LinkedIn groups dedicated to your brand, your offerings and your target audience. Sift through Yahoo! Answers and opinion sites like Yelp and Epinions for conversations about your product and service. Seek out user groups and online communities where enthusiasts (or scorned customers) discuss your brand and its competitors. Throughout this process, discover what differentiates your ordinary customer from your coveted brand evangelist. Isolate instances of extreme praise and criticism and forward to the relevant groups within your organization. And identify the feedback channels which are most effective for facilitating communication between the public and your social media presence.
Paid services such as Radian6, Scout Labs, and Attentio are helping to automate this data collection, especially for larger brands where simple open source discovery is just too difficult. While many are appealing, none provide the right all-in-one solution – especially when it comes to the juicier bits, like sentiment analysis and influencer tracking/ranking, two of several areas that no vendor has mastered. Also, the overwhelming bulk of conversations you’re looking for remains in the deep web where these platforms cannot reach.
Gather and analyze up to a limit of 200-500 conversations, as a start. Overall, you should take away a strong sense of what your stakeholders are saying about you and what means they use to say it. Plus, this research will also armed with the bulk of what you need to implement a solid social media monitoring plan.
Depending on how surprised you are by your initial findings are and judging by the pace of how quickly you anticipate your and your competitors’ social media presences will grow, these audits should be conducted either monthly or quarterly. Also issue an annual report tracking the year-over-year success of your social media marketing programs.
3) Cross-departmental integration
By now, you should realize that social media marketing is not a silo’d marketing program. It’s not as simple as a social media team reporting to the all-hands meeting every week on numbers of new Fans or Followers or Retweets. Social media marketing is a layer of processes that optimize your brand’s accessibility to the public via popular online platforms and tools. Simply put, it’s the natural (and required) evolution of your marketing department. And more than ever before, it’s going to require improved communication between, and increased buy-in from, every department in your organization.
Let’s use the press release as an analogy. When a company gears up for a major announcement, it commissions the public relations team to write the release. They ask the product team about features and differentiators. They get industry and demand projections from sales. They pull soundbites from the CEO. They run everything by legal to make that engineering’s claims, sales’ projections, and the CEO’s soundbites aren’t entirely fluff. And then they coordinate the announcement with the right media targets to ensure the message is broadcast far and wide.
The obvious difference with social media is that there’s a reactive element to the process, where communication between company and public is bilateral and real-time. Customers’ questions about an announcement must be responded as quickly and accurately as possible, and the marketing team doesn’t always have the information it needs. To effectively position your brand as one that’s truly social, you will need to establish a free flow of communication between your company’s different business units, and get as many – if not all – internal eyeballs monitoring your brand’s social media programs. This not only ensures that the brand is properly maintained, but it also motivates each business units to create a social connection with their relevant stakeholders. Which leads us to…
4) Internal champions
So who’s going to find and respond to all those relevant conversations taking place in online communities and forums? The messenger usually bears the unfortunate task of ‘doer,’ and you have got a million other things on your plate.
It’s tempting to outsource or hire an army of social media coordinators to respond to Facebook Wall posts, monitor retweets and replies, and ghostwrite blog entries. But aside from the top-level strategy and trend awareness that a new hire or social media vendor can bring you, they lack the depth of expertise on your company and products. The answer is sitting to your left. And your right. And pretty much all over the company. The most effective way to create your champions is by appointing existing resources. Fellow employees are all ready to be converted to brand emissaries, and chances are, the recognition will be more than enough incentive for them to get involved.
Granted, there’s a large element of control that should always rest with you and your trusted team (e.g. administrative control of all social media platforms, final cut over content, etc) to ensure against accidental or intentional brand tarnish. But your internal team can’t monitor and engage on every conversation in every relevant community. The key is to get as many employees involved as possible in areas that pertain to their subject matter expertise. For example, ask the development team to monitor communities and conversations focused on your product; have customer service monitor GetSatisfaction, Yelp or other relevant opinion sites; convince the sales team they can generate leads by monitoring conversations of competitive brands, etc.
Before you delegate these responsibilities, ensure that the champions have access to a comprehensive internal knowledgebase which provides a process or resource for every conceivable issue. These knowledgebase takes form of official brand guidelines, messaging matrices, scenario and response worksheets, influencer rules of engagement, and other documentation that serve as reference.
Once you identify these champions, it’s time to educate them, which will be covered in Requirement #5. Check back next week for this, and the other two requirements.
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