Social: The Plan and the Review…not just the Do

Five very useful resources around Social media strategy and measurement have come across my desk this last week that I thought they were worth collecting.  But perhaps at the pointiest end was the comment in an article by Brian (@brianSolis) Solis: “Social media has a problem and it needs to be addressed now.”  I found that confronting because it probably hits at the heart of where many organisations are going wrong at the moment.  Social might not be seen to be delivering because no one knows the answers to the following questions:

1. what is Social Media supposed to be delivering?
2. why?
3. how would we know anyway?

Alignment

“The truth is that a majority of social media strategies employed by some of the best brands out there aren’t linking activity to business goals and results. “

Mr Solis has hit the nail on the head I think.  I see a lot of Social Media begun the exact opposite way to how most organisations do almost anything else.  It begins very tactically and in the more junior ends of the marketing department – for the most part.  Sometimes it reminds me of how corporate use of the web took off in the mid-1990s: Chief Executives would play golf, exchange business cards and one would have “www” on their’s but the other did not.  Invariably, corporate use of the web was being driven by arbitrary one-upmanship on the 18th hole – with the deadline being their next golf game.  In Social media, activity is usually driven by the off-the-hand question at a senior level, “what are we doing with Social Media?”  Very quickly a Facebook page is started merely so the answer “something” can be used to answer that question.

Measurement

Social Media is terrific for generating no end of data to track – Likes, Followers, Pins, Retweets, Comments – but the question should always be, what should we track?  Whatever this is it needs to be inexorably tied to the business goals identified in the strategy development.  Too often it is easy to get drawn off track by the Social Media monster.  Activity can end up following the crowd or being driven by the conversation or just what is fun and easy to do, instead of being focussed on the overall outcome.  Too many organisations are chasing vanity statistics like “Likes” on their Facebook page for the sense of validation it gives, instead of determining if they are the right “Like”s, or even if the activity producing the “Like” is even delivering any return.  If you determine what the desired outcome is, then measure activity against it, a much more defensible argument can be made to justify the campaign back to senior management.  Senior leadership will resist more budget if a seemingly very successful Social Media campaign in the wrong channel delivers nothing measurable of any worth.  (I wrote more on this  challenge earlier this month in “Making Social Count“.)

So many companies – particularly in the B2B space have been begun Social activity with not enough thought as to why, what it might achieve and how would it be measured.  A strategy that aligns very closely with business goals and delivers measurable return against those goals is key.  In any other part of the business this 101-type statement would be filed in the “bleedin’ obvious” draw; but when it comes to Social Media it too often appears a revelation.

Anyway, here are some very valuable, bookmark-worthy resources to help attack this problem:

• A Social Media Monitoring Maturity Assessment (see below) from Mike (@Michae1Green) Green at Kinship Digital
• The “Five Steps to Effective Social Media Measurement” eBook from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud team
• “Six Digital Metrics You Should Be Watching” from the team at Clickz
• “Five steps to a successful Blog Content Audit” from Endurence Marketing
• Finally, the new Brian Solis book that started it all: “The Seven Success Factors of Social Strategy“

Artechulate develops Social Strategy Blueprints for clients that align Social Strategy with the overall business and marketing strategies, and align overall corporate value proposition and messaging with the Social content strategy – and identifies measurement criteria in order to track success.  If you are interested in assistance with Strategy development, please get in touch here.

Social Media Monitoring Maturity Assessment Model KINSHIP-digital from KINSHIP digital

Picture Credit: Greenway’s Reflective Model

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Social Marketing: Making it Count

I was asked to write a guest post submission for the @BadRhinoInc Blog.  Bad Rhino is a A community of Social media professionals and enthusiasts sharing ideas about all things Social.  I chose an important topic to cover.  Important because – as I start the post – the most common question today about Social is about how to measure, justify and turn it into revenue.  This case study from Social Tool Radian6 (a company now owned by Salesforce.com) shows how a very small company without a huge marketing budget, can monitize Social.

But it was an interesting experience because through the process of working with Bad Rhino I saw in action another piece to that puzzle – soliciting blog contributions from third party authors.  Clearly Bad Rhino have a robust Social Content calendar and do an excellent job of systemising Content Production really effectively.  

The two toughest and yet most important questions I’m asked by clients about Social are “how do I know it is working?” and “how do I turn it into business?”  Right to the heart of the matter.

The two toughest and yet most important questions I’m asked by clients about Social are “how do I know it is working?” and “how do I turn it into business?”  Right to the heart of the matter.

 

Last week at “Salesforce-at-CeBit” I grabbed an opportunity to drill down on an important story that helps me answer these questions.  I had a rare chance to speak with Sarah Carver, an early employees of Radian6 who can bear testament to one of the pioneering attempts to adress what we know better in jargon terms as Social ROI  and Social lead generation.

 

Sarah is today globally responsible for telling customer stories for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud , into which Radian6 has now been rolled up into following its acquisition by Salesforce.com in 2011 .  But in the early days at Radian6 Sarah saw at close hand how this innovative Social start up team used blogging to derive lead generation and understood how to measure its effectiveness.

 

More specifically, Radian6 pioneered a technique to create a “funnel” for Social.  The team created a maturation process that moved beyond purely driving inbound web traffic and used “gated” content to take interested blog visitors to the next level.  The team were systematically tasked to create compelling and useful content – customer stories, how-to content and trend commentary – for the blog.  But beyond the blog posts, they were KPI-ed to develop – in their spare time – high-value content assets such as white papers, case studies and “eBooks” – for which they could ask for contact details from those wishing to download them.

 

To some extent this separates the wheat from the chaff, automatically pre-qualifying leads as interested parties worth a phone call.  Moreover it provided valuable ROI data by providing immediate measurement on the value of the content and the relevance of the subject matter.  But most crucially it moved the blogging strategy beyond driving mere inbound web traffic to a focus on genuine lead generation.

 

While this methodology has now become best-practice and common across the industry, it’s always valuable to talk to pioneers who created something new when everyone was grappling with these fundamental questions about Social.  But as Sarah said, the fundamental lesson it taught them was that Social content must add value, it must be about the customer and the customer’s pain points.  Traditional product-focussed marketing content simply did not fly.  At that time – in the mid-naughties – a small start up like Radian6 – lacking a huge marketing budget – found they were able to drive a huge growth curve out of creating a systematic Social content generation machine.  This is a lesson about very cost-effective Social Content Marketing I believe every B2B business can learn from.