Tag Archives: Social media marketing

September 4, 2013 · 9:45 am

Behind The Big Ears

One of the challenges in any business is to systematize operations and processes.  It’s nice to be able to do something well once, but what distinguishes great from merely good is the ability to repeat that activity over and over at the same high level.   I raise this because I’m not sure many businesses think of social media as that sort of process yet.  Maybe they consider it to be jazz – mostly improvisational – without understanding that even improvisation in music has a lot of built-in systems.  In any event, one company – Cisco – seem to “get it.”  Here’s why and how it can affect your business.

Fingers in ears

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chris Brogan coined the expression “grow big ears” when it comes to social media.  I like that notion since it distills what’s critical in social down to three words.  It means companies need to listen – to put together ways to monitor activity on the various social media sites and to draw actionable conclusions from the data they gather.  It’s a process, one that needs to be put together and run by executives with enough business experience and company awareness to make it productive.  Yes, that’s a shot at the businesses who turn the social media keys over to interns with little or not instruction other than to stay active.

What Cisco has done goes well beyond that.  As Media Post reported, Cisco, using Radian6, has developed:

…a rapid routing and tagging system as part of its social monitoring strategy that automatically opens a service ticket after detecting a negative tweet or post on the Web… Aside from complaints, social reports also guide the company’s marketing strategies for campaigns by allowing search and social marketing teams to share information. The search engine marketing team feeds keywords to the social team related to products and topics. In turn, the social team feeds search marketing new lists related to social networks they wouldn’t typically find for themselves. This allows the company to identify features and technology internal teams should emphasize to customers.

In other words, big ears that feed a replicable process.  The process yields benefits (search keywords, features, customer service) that go well beyond being able to tweet out a clever quote or informative article.  Even the most engaging social media activity pales when measured against this sort of intelligent back end.  Something to consider.

How big are your ears?  What’s on the other end of them?

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August 20, 2013 · 9:06 am

Being Faster

One question I get asked from time to time by clients is about how they can be better at social media. Given social’s influence particularly among younger people, it is an excellent question. The answer is usually give is to “be faster.” For most companies, that’s much easier said than done and let me explain why.

English: Aircraft carrier in Portsmouth Harbour

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent most of my professional life in the corporate world.  On a good day, they make decisions slowly in that world.  Not only is it like turning an aircraft carrier in that it takes a long time but you often have a hard time finding anyone who will admit to having a hand on the wheel or to get them to turn it.  For many decisions, that’s fine.  For those wanting to be good at social, it’s fatal.

Part of the problem is no one is quite sure who controls the social sphere and it varies from org chart to org chart.  PR, marketing, customer service, and other functional areas often have their fingers in (it’s not hard to find companies with multiple Twitter accounts).  Sometimes they have different agendas.  More importantly, they’re often staffed lightly and/or by interns performing the social monitoring and updating.  Memes last hours in the social sphere.  If you respond in a week, you’ve missed the peak.  Look at all the (lame) Harlem Shake videos that are still popping up.

Being faster means having a clear set of guidelines, finding professionals to implement them, and trusting them to do so without running every tweet up the corporate flagpole.  Most of the really embarrassing social faux pas have been made by clueless staff.  Sure, there is the occasional well-intentioned failure when a campaign gets hijacked but most are the result of just being lame and not paying attention.

We can count the number of corporately-created things that have “gone viral” on one hand.  Social media seem to have a pretty good nose for a company that’s trying too hard to create that social media hit and the backlash is often brutal (and funny).  Being faster has to recognize that hasty and fast aren’t the same.  But for any company to succeed the usual decision-tree needs to be pruned or uprooted completely.

Do you agree?

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August 14, 2013 · 9:04 am

Facebook Fadeout?

A basic law of gravity says that what goes up must come down and I suppose those laws apply to social sites as well. Witness MySpace, Zynga, and others. Now I don’t believe that social media is going anywhere. It’s become too important a communications channel and too ingrained into people’s lives. However, I do think that which social sites are the focus of social activity will continue to be an ever-changing landscape, particularly among the young and among early adopters.

I see far less activity on Facebook from my younger friends (by young I mean under 30 and under 25 in a number of cases) than I do on Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and other places.  You might have heard about the Piper Jaffray report stating, as TechCrunch reported,

that interest in Facebook seems to be declining heavily among teens. Though teens still dub Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website.

What it more interesting to me is the report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that found that even though 94 percent of teenage social media users still have Facebook, more and more are jumping ship to Twitter and Instagram because of what Pew found as “increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful ‘drama.’”

Then there are brands who are trying to tap into that audience.  As usual, marketers tend to be their own worst enemies:

Retailers that push fewer posts, but better and more targeted ones, are gaining an edge over those that pursue volume when it comes to publishing Facebook content, new data suggests.

The 50 Social Retail Report from enterprise social media management company Expion analyzed 16,000 posts for the top 50 retail brands as designated by Interbrand. It found that as a whole, fan engagement and volume decreased for retail brands on Facebook, despite their increases in published posts – implying a need for more thoughtful earned and paid media strategies on the platform.

As we’ve discussed before, there really is something to be gained from listening and engaging rather than yelling and spamming.  Quality is demonstrably better than quantity.

All these reports tie together in my mind.  No matter how big a social site is, there are those who become bored and who move on to the next thing.  It’s like the old Yogi Berra quote about a place being too popular so no one goes there anymore.   Kids don’t want to be hanging out in cyberspace with their parents (or teachers or old guys like me!).  They don’t want to be deluged by massive amounts of marketing jetsam.  Is Facebook dying?  No.  But if you’re putting your marketing eggs in that basket in an attempt to reach the younger demo, you might be.

Thoughts?

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