Building Trust Behind a Company’s Social Media Account

We never really think about who is behind the social media accounts of our favorite companies. It’s not as if the real Old Spice guy is sending out tweets…

“Collegiate athletes do more than play basketball, they also learn math and kissing techniques that can’t be found in the private sector”

“Can I promise that this new wallpaper will not cause your computer to erupt into flames, helicopters and hotdogs? Nope.”

“A new pad device was just announced. Seems cool, but I doubt it can replace my space helicopter pad as my favorite pad-based belonging.”

…but someone has taken on the personality of the Old Spice famed spokesperson in order to promote their product in an entertaining fashion.

Very rarely do owners and CEOs of companies take on the responsibility of running their own social media accounts. This task is usually taken on by someone in the marketing department or a person whose sole position is dedicated to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more.

These individuals are the social voice of the company geared to inform fans of their products, services, events, coupons, and other specials. Many are also asked to interact and try and stir up conversation.

The Horror Story

Last February, Pat Fitzgerald, the head football coach at Northwestern University, learned the hard way what happens when someone else expresses opinions for you. “He” tweeted:

“There’s finally a NBA player who plays hard and says the right things off the court.”

He was referring to the Asian-American professional basketball player, Jeremy Lin, who exploded onto the scene a couple months ago.

Fitzgerald took backlash for this as Chicago Bulls fans exclaimed he obviously hadn’t watched Derrick Rose, who plays in his own backyard (Northwestern is also in Chicago).

People went as far as to call him racist for something that was meant to be a compliment to Lin. Biggest problem…Fitzgerald didn’t even write the tweet. The director of football operations, Cody Cejda, was responsible for the remark.

Think Before You Send

This is where the trust comes into play. The person in charge of a company’s social media accounts must be able to use good judgment when it comes to who and what they are talking about.

Fitzgerald may not be as recognizable as Coca-Cola or Pepsi, but he is the brand of the football program and one of the leading faces of Northwestern University.

There a few seemingly common sense filters that should be considered before publishing.

Personal beliefs should be left at home or on personal accounts, not when speaking on behalf of the company. This is not to say they cannot post something they find interesting or enjoy.
However, always ask the question “Is this in the company’s best interest or would this offend anyone?” before posting.
Touchy subjects such as religion and politics should always be off limits when it comes to speaking on the company’s behalf. Those two topics are a lose-lose situation no matter how you look at it.
Stop and take a breath first. As Herm Edwards, a former NFL football coach and public speaker, has always said, “Think before you press send.

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Crafting a Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy builds on and adapts the principles of traditional marketing, using the opportunities and challenges offered by technology and the digital medium.

User-centric thinking, which involves placing the user at the core of all decisions, is vital when looking at building a successful digital marketing strategy. The advent of new technologies means the digital marketing strategist of today is offered not only a plethora of new tactical possibilities, but also unprecedented ways of measuring the effectiveness of chosen strategies and tactics.

The fact that digital marketing is highly empirical is one of its key strengths.

Everything can be measured: from behaviours, to actions and action paths, to results. This means that the digital marketing strategist should start thinking with return on investment (ROI) in mind. Built into any strategy should be a testing framework and the ability to remain flexible and dynamic in a medium that shifts and changes as user behaviours do. 

If we define strategy as “a plan of action designed to achieve a particular outcome”, then the desired outcome from a digital marketing strategy point of view would be aligned with your organisation’s overall business objectives. For example, if one of the overall business objectives is acquisition of new clients, possible digital marketing objectives might be building brand awareness online.

A tactic differs from a strategy. It is a specific action or method that contributes to achieving a goal. For example, if the overall business objective is acquisition and the digital objective is to increase awareness, a paid search campaign would be a possible tactic towards achieving this.

Any activity with an end goal (whether it’s winning a war, building a city or  selling a product) should have a blueprint or map in place for every person in  the organisation to follow in the process of achieving it.

A strategy needs to cover the questions of who you are, what you are offering  and to whom, as well as why and how you are doing so. The steps and questions  below cover what an organisation should be aware of when creating and  implementing a strategy that will meet its objectives.

The first step in crafting a successful strategy is to examine the context of the

organisation and the various stakeholders

.

1. Context:

• Who are you and what is it about your identity that makes you useful?
• Who are your customers and what needs and wants do they have?
• Who are your competitors? These might extend beyond organisations that compete with you on the basis of price and product and could also be competition in the form of abstracts such as time and mindshare.
• What is the context in which you are operating (social, political and  economic factors) and how is this likely to change in the future?

A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is an ideal way to understand your business and your market.

Once you have examined the market situation, the second step is an examination of your value proposition, in other words, what value your organisation can add to that market.

2. Objectives:

Digital marketing has technology at its heart. It is therefore crucial to involve both technical and aesthetic minds in the initial stages of strategy formulation.

The objectives should speak to both system and story and the tools afforded by technology should be a starting point in the process of developing strategic objectives.

The second factor to consider when setting objectives is that all channels of a brand operate as part of a greater whole. Digital marketing objectives should be aligned with the brand’s greater strategic objectives.

3. Value-Exchange:

•  What value are you adding to the market, what are you trying to achieve and how will you know if you are successful?

Digital can achieve many things in terms of users and value creation. Once you have defined what constitutes success and have delineated your prime objective, you can examine other goals that support this objective. For example, if your prime objective is for people to view the full range of products that your organisation has to offer, supporting goals could be “we want people to share their comments to support our range development” or “we want to identify the most enthusiastic users and recruit them as brand ambassadors”. Exploring all the options before defining the most specific and focused direction will result in the most successful direction.

4. Tactics and Evaluation:

A diverse variety of digital tools and tactics are available once you have defined your digital marketing objectives. The strength of the tools is dependent on the type of objectives set for the brand – for example, acquisition (or gaining new customers) may be best driven by paid search, while email is one of the most effective tools for selling more products to existing customers.

Tactic                                                               Outcome

Email Marketing                                              Customer Retention

Online Advertising                                           Branding and Acquisition

Affiliate Marketing                                          Sales and Branding

SEO                                                                 Customer Retention and Acquisition

PPC                                                                  Customer Retention and Acquisition

Social Media                                                    Branding and Participation

ORM                                                                Customer Retention, Branding and Participation

WebPR                                                            Acquisition and Branding

Once the objectives and tactics have been set, these should be cross-checked and re-evaluated against the needs and resources of your organisation to make sure your strategy is on the right track and no opportunities are being overlooked.

5. Metrics:

Metrics are important in defining what successful value-exchange is worth to an organisation and how this worth will be measured. This step needs to be considered in conjunction with value-exchange. As previously discussed, digital is an empirical medium and digital marketing should start with ROI in mind. Setting up the analysis and measurement tools early on in the online strategising phase will enable you to measure returns from inception. The metrics that matter to your business objectives are referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs).

6. Ongoing Optimisation:

The growing necessity for an organisation to remain dynamic and agile ties in with metrics and should be considered in the early stages of  strategy formulation, as well as being a continuous process in refining and optimising tactics. The user experience and journey is vital to building successful brands. Budget should be set aside upfront to be dedicated to the analysis of user data and the optimisation of conversion paths.

Social thinking and socially informed innovation are also valuable and uniquely suited to the online space. Socially powered insight can be used to inform strategic decisions and execute on various areas of the organisation, from product roadmaps to service plans. Brands are beginning to shift from being present in social media to actively using it, aligning it with actionable objectives and their corresponding metrics. This is critical in demonstrating ROI and the repeated impact of social channels on the bottom line.Managing the learning loop (the knowledge gained from reviewing the performance of your tactics, which can then be fed back into the strategy) can be difficult. This is because brand cycles often move more slowly than the realtime results you will see online. It is therefore important to find a way to work agility into the strategy, allowing you to be quick and proactive, as opposed to slow and reactive. It may be necessary, for example, to incorporate constant monitoring into any strategy

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Social Media Industry Report 2012

The Social Media Examiner published the 2012 Social Media Industry Report on April 3, 2012.  This year’s report surveyed over 3800 marketers of all ages employed in a variety of different industries including agencies, small businesses and B2B/B2C companies.  

•  Marketers still place high value on social media: A significant 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.
•  Measurement and targeting are top areas marketers want to master: Forty percent of all social media marketers want to know how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of social media and find customers and prospects.
•  Video marketing holds the top spot for future plans: A significant 76% of  marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.
•  Marketers seek to learn more about Google+: While only 40% of marketers are using Google+, 70% of marketers want to learn more about it and 67% plan on increasing Google+ activities.
•  Top three benefits of social media marketing: The number-one benefit of social media marketing is generating more business exposure (reported 85% of marketers), followed by increasing traffic (69%) and providing marketplace insight (65%).
•  Top five social media networks/tools for marketers: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube were the top five social media tools used by marketers, in that order.
•  Social media marketing still takes a lot of time: The majority of marketers (59%) are using social media for 6 hours or more each week, and a third (33%) invest 11 or more hours weekly.
•  Social media outsourcing underutilized: Only 30% of businesses are outsourcing some portion of their social media marketing, only a slight increase from 28% in 2011.

   

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