This document discusses applying social media to business. It outlines the facets of social media like expressing thought leadership, emphasizing brand, driving demand generation, and more. It also discusses the core costs of social media like marketing, product management, and customer service. There are also incremental costs like hiring social media managers and creating content. The document stresses that social media needs to be continuously managed to close the perception gap between a business and its customers. It also provides examples of measuring social media outcomes and discusses how actively engaging on different social media platforms like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube can positively impact businesses.
27. FinanceEven if you have the support of the organization and other business stakeholders ready and willing to help be socially active, there are still enormous costs and dedicated resource commitments needed to be effective! 7
28. 8 Monthly investment of a Twitter account = $2,382 (33K followers) Full-out social media campaign cost per year = $210,600 Source: Focus infographic, 2011 THE CORE COST OF SOCIAL MEDIA 8
29. THE INCREMENTAL COST OF SOCIAL MEDIA A Chief Content Officer A Social Media Editorial Manager A Social Media Community Manager A dedicated and specialized agency to help with AR/PR/social community monitoring A social media analytics/ops resource to leverage the tools to monitor and coordinate social interactions 9
30. THE INCREMENTAL COST OF SOCIAL MEDIA Social Media Partner Community Manager Discretionary budget for unique content creation (videos, ad units, blogs, webinars) Discretionary marketing development funds to co-sponsor blogs and partner activities Development costs (YouTube pages, blogs, microsites, Facebook pages) Advertisement/Promotion fees (promotion on social media sites—e.g., YouTube, Linkedin, Facebook) 9
36. There are tools to measure # of followers, click through rates, share of voice, sentiment, reach, influence, impressions, etc.
37. There are tools to monitor, aggregate and alert when keywords and mentions occur.
38. With cost pressures on the business, unless your CEO or CFO is forward-thinking, these numbers aren’t usually enough to justify the investment needed!13
40. LEAP OF FAITH If we are active, we listen, we participate, we positively contribute, then we will become more “top of mind,” and the community will more likely short list us and conduct business with us! With the changes that Google has made with its search algorithm (Panda), it’s more important than ever to have frequent and unique content to digital properties for page rank and expanded awareness. YouTube’s growing importance in search, content and relevance to business incurs integral cost of original and fresh content. Not participating and (being silent) allows others to portray our business… and frees consumers to speculate. That conversation is happening, and a business has to understand that it probably doesn’t want to relinquish that conversation to others. 15
The problem that I encountered when asked to create a Social Media plan, is everyone has a different idea of what encompasses Social Media! Some only think of it as a cool place to socialize with their friends. Some think it means we add business links to the popular Social Media sites and participate. Some think it’s a new channel to exploit and market and promote to in order drive business demand. The problem is Social Media is vast and it’s all of these things and more. Quite frankly, we’re still very early in this journey and still don’t understand all the downstream evolution and opportunities that will manifest from Social Media.
The problem that I encountered when asked to create a Social Media plan, is everyone has a different idea of what encompasses Social Media! Some only think of it as a cool place to socialize with their friends. Some think it means we add business links to the popular Social Media sites and participate. Some think it’s a new channel to exploit and market and promote to in order drive business demand. The problem is Social Media is vast and it’s all of these things and more. Quite frankly, we’re still very early in this journey and still don’t understand all the downstream evolution and opportunities that will manifest from Social Media.
There are some things in this world that organically can create critical mass within Social Media communities, such as the Royal Wedding. However in most cases that’s not the world we live in either personally or professionally. Most business must make a thoughtful consideration before they participate in Social Media to what extent they’re prepared to invest.
Social Media is like the “Genie in the Bottle”, once you let it out, you’re stuck! The ramifications of participating only to realize you don’t have an appetite, resource etc to manage and maintain can be damaging. So most businesses need to evaluate which facets of Social Media they want to participate, and then appropriately staff and budget to manage, maintain and execute upon strategies to support those particular facets.
It’s not “free”Opportunities are great, but must recognize the cost in time, effort, and money before jumping in. Depending on breadth and depth of your social media strategy, it can include business stakeholders from all areas of the business.
These numbers are just estimates…They probably don’t incorporate all of the incremental costs necessary to do social media right.
That still doesn’t cover the dedicated resources necessary to govern, coordinate all activities. To illustrate this example, here are the kinds of additional things a business would fund beyond getting involvement from core business resources.The resources to set goals and monitor and measure Social Activities and successResources to set editorial calendar and content contribution schedulesResources and discretionary marketing spend to create unique content that’s relevant to the editorial calendar and businessBudget to cover agencies to manage and support AR/PR/Communication to Social Media discussionsIncentives for engagement and contests Cost of tools to measure and monitor social communitiesCost of resources to manage community partners and gain collaboration to editorial calendar and content
That still doesn’t cover the dedicated resources necessary to govern, coordinate all activities. To illustrate this example, here are the kinds of additional things a business would fund beyond getting involvement from core business resources.The resources to set goals and monitor and measure Social Activities and successResources to set editorial calendar and content contribution schedulesResources and discretionary marketing spend to create unique content that’s relevant to the editorial calendar and businessBudget to cover agencies to manage and support AR/PR/Communication to Social Media discussionsIncentives for engagement and contests Cost of tools to measure and monitor social communitiesCost of resources to manage community partners and gain collaboration to editorial calendar and content
Assuming you buy into this…you realize this is table stakes to do business in the 21st Century. This illustration gives you a sense of the enormity of the engagement. I’m you’ve read how Social Media allow you to exponential touch a massive audience in ways that were unthinkable even 5 years ago. It lowers the barrier of entry. This is all because we’re “wired” and connected. So now correlate that concept and the relevance of that to your business, and think about the previous slide about how all business resources need to be engaged, and then think about the incremental investment to support, manage, execute, coordinate, create, govern to that outcome, and think about this illustration. It’s a bit daunting, isn’t it?
Assuming you make the commitment to do all of this…even participating in Social Media has somewhat unpredictable outcomes. Here is an example of a CRM study from IBM’s Institute for Business Value Analysis. Surprisingly, businesses sometimes make the wrong assumptions on why customers interact with them in their social media communities. So this illustrates that this is a “journey” and reinforces the need for the investment pre-described to continuously manage, monitor, analyze your social community outreach for success. Businesses’ assumptions about why consumers interact with them may be mistaken.Different engagement: B2C vs. B2B?What your audiences expect/want impacts which social channels you use (and how you use them)
It’s not all about the numbers. What can be measured doesn’t translate into traditional marketing benchmarks. The number of Twitter followers you have doesn’t translate directly into revenue.Trying to calculate ROI on social media is like calculating the ROI on imagination.
Much like the approach with Marketing funnels and approaches, Sales Pipeline, and CSI measures, we make inferred guestimates based on total base, stages of the base, trend analysis, conversion rates and derived revenue outcomes. Over time I’m sure tools will come out that will provide more traceability of Social Media activities to Marketing, to PR to CRM etc. Very bright people will come up with a Social Media Funnel that talks about the various stages of Social Media constituents. Something like Net promoter where social media people that aren't part of the community will be prospects, and then once they begin participating they become advocates, and then once they denote themselves appropriately they become partners, or customers and then at some point they identify themselves as loyal or evangelical. So what we really need is for the Social Media community vendors to form a global standard of community participant dispositions, and uniformly apply this designation as a drop or disposition in all of their sites, and then maybe business and people will be able to provide analysis and trend analysis that correlates a Social Media funnel from prospect to evangelist.
However, there is a “leap of faith” with Social Media that requires some fundamental beliefs.
Green = goodYellow = okayRed = badColor coding of these slides drawn from the CMO’s guide to the social landscape http://www.pamorama.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/social-media-landscape-2011.jpgRegarding site traffic (study by Outbrain): http://www.webpronews.com/study-says-social-media-sucks-at-driving-traffic-2011-08On Twitter losing SEO value: http://www.technize.net/twitter-will-lose-its-seo-value/
Green = goodYellow = okayRed = badSkype partnership and Facebook for Business are fairly new – July 2011ComScore’s ratings system (for measuring brand exposure on Facebook) - late July 2011On SEO:In December 2010, both Bing and Google admitted that they had been factoring Twitter and Facebook links into their search rankings for some time. One of the major innovations they announced at that time was the use of social authority to determine how much a Twitter or Facebook mention ought to be worth — a tweet from someone with a large, diverse set of followers is worth more than a tweet from an average Joe. In May 2011, Bing began not only using Facebook “like” data to calculate rankings, but also displaying that data within the search results page.A few years ago, the only way to create SEO value was to give end users link-worthy content and hope they would link to it on their blogs or web pages, or post an embeddable badge. Historically, search engines have used “link graph” data (which sites link to which other sites) to determine importance. You can contrast this link graph with the social graph (which people and entities are socially connected to one another online, through Like, Follow, and Friend relations). Since Facebook’s content is all hidden from search engines, because you have to be logged in to see what links are posted, links shared on Facebook are not part of the normal link graph.Google +1 Button Source: http://www.digett.com/blog/04/13/2011/seo-value-google-1-button
Green = goodYellow = okayRed = badMost important social media tool for B2B (BtoB Online study): http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/4837/linkedin-top-social-tool-for-b2b-marketerSelf-employed use of LinkedIn: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/small-businesses-benefit-most-from-social-media-study-reveals/
Green = goodYellow = okayRed = badVideos with 1000 views can rank higher than videos with 10M views because of huge initial boost (a few days post-launch)