November 20, 2009

It Is Not About the Inbox

A Practical Guide for Monetizing Social Media

Social Media for Lead Generation

The Discovery Value of Twitter

Social Media Spending and Trends

Email Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing. Why is every email marketer besides me trying to make email the center of the Universe?

For so many years email has been the place where everything has centered for transactions, communications, interactions and relationships. However, over these past two years we have seen a shift from a location-centered communications strategy to a wide net strategy. Communication no longer simply takes place via a website/inbox relationship. In the growing social media reality, the places where we as marketers must be engaging prospects, leads and customers has changed the dynamic.

What is interesting to me is how marketers that have traditionally relied on one location strategies are now on the move. We no longer have the luxury of focusing our energies on simple, singular locations, but now are obligated to adopt the wide net mentality. The conversations are happening in multiple places all the time. Marketing messages are no longer relayed on the time tables of campaigns and the inbox. They take place anywhere and everywhere the consumer has a place to voice their opinion, or can lurk and read the opinions of others.

The Shift from Telling to Listening
We have lived in a world where the marketer has been in control. The marketer has existed with a strategy to talk and tell without listening and learning. Well the new marketer must change in order to work email into the new media social conversation. We must now develop and implement new ways to understand the wants, hates, desires and needs of our audiences in order to use email as a conversational marketing system.

Can you hear me? I hope that as a brand you understand that you no longer own or control the conversation with social media. The tables are turning on you and your brand fast. Do you know where your audience lives? What they are saying about you, your products and your brand? These conversations are not taking place in locations where you control the copy, actions and the attitude. They are everywhere and omnipotent, rapidly changing the structure of your email marketing programs. Modern campaigns are something that can no longer be planned far in advance, but instead must be based on daily changes in the online world.

They live inside Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, message boards, forums and blogs. Have you set up ways to hear what is being said? Have you mastered strategies that can positively and effectively drive them back to you?

What you need to do in order to be successful today is to listen and engage. It is no longer a proactive world but a reactive one. As a marketer, the ownership of meeting your goals now falls on you in more ways.

So with limited time, means and budget, you need to be resourceful in order to shape campaigns from the onset. By setting the shape and focus from the start, you have more control as to how your programs are going to fare. How will you do this? Well here are my thoughts on what you can do to stop relying on the inbox for this control.

Set your sights on these locations, and approach them with plans to extend your campaigns outside of the inbox. Ways to look at this can be as simple as this:

• Listen to the metrics of your website and email campaigns.
• Listen to the conversations going on in all the social locations with Google Alerts, by building your own Yahoo Pipe, or finding a company like Radian6 to help you with software tools to capture this data.
• Use new media to expand your email campaign reach. You can still send your campaigns via email, but in order to join them into social media you can Tweet to your audience that they are coming (use idek.net to track the link in your tweets). You can add alerts into MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn if they are relevant to your audience with the creation of a page or account for your brand.
• Add an RSS feed for your email campaigns to give subscribers and non-subscribers ways to still get the content as it is published.
• Add a post to your blogs about the new campaign.
• Don’t forget to test! Get eROI’s new Email Testing Guide with 32 different email tests to raise ROI right now.

To me, the main idea with email and social media is not relying on social media features in the inbox, but using the other mediums to find and engage your target audience where they are at that moment in time. If they are subscribers they are going to fall back to the inbox to find the message, but not all conversations and the people having them are living there as much as they used to. New media is not going away but growing each day. It is your job to learn about every opportunity and see how you can leverage them to grow your campaign results.

Are you ready?

Author Profile
Dylan Boyd is VP of Sales & Strategy at eROI (www.eroi.com) a full service interactive agency specializing in online strategy, websites, email marketing and social media. Dylan can be reached at dylan@eroi.com.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

A Practical Guide for Monetizing Social Media
Ryan Deutsch, Vice President of Strategic Services & Market Development, StrongMail

As consumers continue to flock to social websites, marketers are spending even more time — and money — figuring out how to reach them there. The challenge for most brands is that traditional methods for marketing to consumers simply don’t work on the social web.

As marketers seek to leverage social media to drive brand impressions and revenue conversions, they must do so responsibly, preserving the integrity of the social web and growing their businesses at the same time. How do you do that? By building advocacy within your consumer base and motivating consumers to deliver your brand messages on your behalf. Friends want to hear from friends, not brands, on the social web.

Brands that can identify, motivate and track the behaviors of these advocates and influencers are the ones that'll multiply program results on the social web.

Identify
It’s hard to get somewhere with a new initiative if you haven't figured out the starting point. A brand looking to use the social web must identify the following two things:

• its current footprint within social communities; and
• which of its current customers are active on the social web.

Motivating influencers
Very few marketers have figured out how to take the knowledge of their social presence and make it actionable. Marketers must understand that successful social marketing is based on getting identified influencers to carry their messages within their personal networks or social graphs.

When building social programs, companies must consider how one or many social motivators are leveraged to drive sharing among influencers and their networks. These factors are rarely considered by marketers in traditional direct programs. Ignoring them on the social web can severely hamper your social marketing efforts.

Measuring social media
As with any effective digital marketing channel, social marketing programs must be tracked. Without specific metrics and success criteria, organizations will cut funding to social marketing programs. But, what are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that marketers should leverage?

In working with our clients, my firm has developed the following KPIs to help track success in the social programs that we develop.

• Contact reach. Knowing how many contacts email recipients have in their online address books can tell you a lot about the size of their networks.
• Social conversion. Since companies present opportunities for influencers to share content, track conversion from the social experience — whether it be a sale or a subscription.
• Social invitations. As influencers engage with your social programs, do you know how many invitations were shared and in what manner friends were asked to participate?
• Invite conversion. One of the most interesting metrics in social direct marketing is invitation conversion rates across social channels.

It's not yet clear where marketers will take the power of consumer advocacy, but one thing is clear: The social web is here to stay. Consumers will continue to turn to a variety of “influencers” within their social networks when making purchase decisions.

Whether researching a brand or a specific product, consumers will spend more time discussing purchase decisions with their friends — making it all the more important to integrate your message into those discussions. Understanding who your brand's influencers are, how to motivate their behaviors and how to track the results is the only way to get a seat at the table.

This is a summary of a three-part series on strategies for monetizing social media. For full articles, click on the links:

A Practical Guide for Monetizing Social Media, Part 1 – Understand and Identify

A Practical Guide for Monetizing Social Media, Part 2 – Motivate

A Practical Guide for Monetizing Social Media, Part 3 – Tracking and Measurement

Author Profile
Ryan Deutsch is Vice President, Strategic Services & Market Development for StrongMail (www.strongmail.com), a leading provider of online marketing solutions for email and social media. Reach Ryan at rdeutsch@strongmail.com.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

Social Media for Lead Generation
Elyse Tager, Founder and Principal, Elymedia, LLC

We have been working on a large lead-generation campaign for a new consumer-biz client, and we were delighted that they allowed us to incorporate social media into the plan. I know, it seems counter-intuitive to use social media for a mainly commercial objective, but if it is handled delicately and with respect for both the brand and the SM audience, it can be done very well.

Below are a few pointers that should be taken into consideration:

• Social Media is all about creating and joining community and adding value. Keep this ahead of everything else.
• First join the community – join many groups and participate, linking back to your offer every now and again. Build your network with keyword or category searches to find good prospects and interested followers.
• Be strategic – your messages should vary by target audience, the landing page should echo the content of the original message or post, and the ultimate call-to-action wording should support both.
• Content – Decide what issues and topics are interesting for your target audience. Invest some time to become a member of the community. First listen in, then ask questions, and only then define whatever your target group is excited about and what topics you should be addressing. Your content is about establishing a relationship with your community, not about re-purposing your sales presentation.
• Be sure your posts are a combination of conversation and links to your offer. We aim for at least 50% posts providing information on relevant topics, asking questions, responding to followers, and 50% talking about our offer and providing a link to our landing page.
• Standard lead-gen practices hold for Social Media – convert with the landing page. As is true with any lead-gen strategy, the landing page does the heavy lifting. It should be clear and simple, with a crystal-clear call to action. Don’t offer options or links taking the reader off the page. The registration form should appear above the fold. Assume your reader will not be scrolling down, so keep all the salient points up top.
• SM offers wonderful opportunities for viral content to happen. You can’t control it, but here are some clues on what gets shared and what doesn’t…Rarely shared: product info, free trials, hard offers, selling posts. Often shared: new data, trends, funny videos, reference to top-notch blog posts.

We will continue this topic in future posts with more specifics on how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for lead-generation with specific tactics for each.

The key is to be a participant in a community, and provide value to create enough interest so that your followers and readers will want to find out more about your offer. It CAN be done.

Author Profile
Elyse Tager is founder and principal of Elymedia a media strategy and buying agency providing services in traditional, online and social media marketing and has worked with many of the world’s most recognizable brands from Microsoft to PowerBar. She is the SVAMA Morning Forum Manager for Social Media Marketing, a frequent speaker on all things Web 2.0, a past columnist for ClickZ, a contributor to Network World’s marketing e-newsletter, a blogger at Elymediafrenzy, a Twitter fanatic, and a social media evangelist. Her Twitter handle is @ElyseTager.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

The Discovery Value of Twitter
Paul Gillin, Social Media Consultant and Author of  The New Influencers

The most frequent criticism of Twitter that I hear is that the service is a waste of time. It’s all about people telling the world what they had for breakfast or how long they’ve been waiting for a bus. Don’t we have better things to do?

I decided to try a short experiment. I clipped a 100-tweet block from my Twitter stream at random and examined the contents to see just how much useful content there was, if any.

A little background first: I follow about 1,150 people and I prune my list with some care. If someone’s tweets are completely irrelevant to my interests, I unfollow that person. I only follow people who interest me or who send me a personal request asking me to follow them. That weeds out the spammers and bots.

Here are my results

• 42% of the tweets were what I’d call random. These were mostly along the lines of what people had for breakfast or ongoing conversations I hadn’t followed.
• 12% contained news of general interest (BTW, Twitter has been one of the best places to monitor the ongoing news of the recent Samoan tsunami).
• 33% were referral links to information that the writer found interesting.
• 7% were notable quotes.
• 6% were either self-promotional messages or requests for advice.

Two statistics interested me in particular. One was that 45% of the tweets contained a link. This indicates that Twitter is used at least as much to point friends to interesting information as it is to comment on everyday activities. After all, you can’t link to what you had for breakfast. The other statistic is that at least 20 of the tweets interested me enough that I wanted to learn more.

This wasn’t the kind of reading I would find on a typical news website. Here’s a sampling:

• “Subjects of news coverage now try to write the stories themselves using pro journalists"
• “33 Wordpress Plugins To Power Up Your Comment Section”
• “Video Viewing on the Rise: 161M Viewers, 25B Videos”
• “Blogger Relations is a Two-Way Street”
• “5 Ways to Make Your Business More Transparent”

It isn’t CNN.com, but then I don’t use Twitter for the same reason I use CNN. The bottom line is that the 4 1/2 minutes it took me to read 100 tweets yielded at least 20 items of interest. There are other places on the Web where I could consume more information in less time, but it’s a different kind of information. It’s not less valuable, just different.

Newspaper and magazine editors often complain that the rise of customized news services has shortchanged readers by removing the element of discovery that a printed publication delivers. However, the Twitter stream and Facebook news feed deliver just as much surprise and delight as any professional media entity, if not more. The only difference: the recommendations come from people I know instead of professional editors.

It turns out that avid Web users are just as interested in discovery as print readers. It’s just that they’ve found a faster, more personal and more ecologically friendly way to go about it.

Author Profile
Paul Gillin is a writer, speaker and content marketing consultant specializing in technology and new media. He has been a technology journalist for 25 years. His award-winning book, The New Influencers, was published in 2007 and his most recent book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, was published in late 2008. His next book, The Joy of Geocaching, will be published late this year.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top

Social Media Spending and Trends
Janet King, General Manager/Vice President, IDG Research

Social media is just one area of media market, but one that is being closely monitored for trends. Read on for IDG Research Services’ summary of social media movements in the United States.

As of February 2009 there were 88.1 million social network users (approximately 44% of all Internet users); by 2013, this number is expected to grow to 114.6 million (52% of all internet users). The landscape of market share of visits to social networking and forum websites, between August 30, 2009 and September 5, 2009 breaks out as: Facebook 41.1%, MySpace 22.1%, YouTube 13.6%, Twitter 1.37% and LinkedIn 0.25%.

Since 2008, the number of adult Twitter users in the U.S. has increased rapidly, growing from 6 million users to an expected 26 million in 2010. In terms of brand and agency use, Facebook and Twitter top the list of social media sites utilized by both segments.

Spending on social network advertising is forecasted to grow over the next several years, reaching $1.39 billion in 2011 (up from $1.14 billion in 2009). According to a survey conducted in September 2009, 75% of U.S. marketers plan to increase the social media portion of their 2010 marketing mix (followed by 51% indicating a planned increase in web search/SEO). In terms of spending allocation, eMarketer reports that in 2009, 43% of social network ad spending was allocated to MySpace, 20% to Facebook, 30% to other destination social networks and 9% to widgets and applications.

U.S. social media marketers report success in terms of branding strategy. Over one-third report that social media marketing has been very effective in influencing brand reputation, increasing brand awareness, improving search engine rankings and increasing website traffic. Additionally, a survey conducted in July 2009 indicated the most common activities performed by U.S. social networking site users include becoming a fan/follower of a company/brand (52%) and saying something good about a brand/company (46%). eMarketer reports that LinkedIn (26%) and Facebook (23%) are the social networking tools providing the most marketing value to U.S. marketers, followed by Twitter (17%).

Author Profile
IDG Research Services specializes in marketing and media-related research. With extensive experience in quantitative research for advertising agencies, media companies and technology marketers, they are uniquely equipped to help you better understand your market through the design, execution and analysis of customized, creative, actionable market research. For more information contact Janet King, General Manager/Vice President, IDG Research at janet_king@idgresearch.com.

Contact  |  Comment  |  Back to top