Contenu connexe Similaire à Intro to Social Media - for Accountants (20) Plus de Justin Souter (13) Intro to Social Media - for Accountants3. Has to eat humble pie 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 28. The four-step approach to the groundswell People Assess your customers’ social activities Objectives Decide what you want to accomplish Strategy Plan for how relationships with customers will change Technology Decide which social technologies to use P O S T 29. Key roles and their groundswell objectives Development Support Sales Marketing Research Groundswell objectives Roles Listening Talking Energizing Supporting Embracing 62. Stats from Marketing Charts - 11 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/socnets-have-miniscule-effect-on-brand-perception-9732/ Notes de l'éditeur Souter Consulting Limited 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Not saying that Accountants would be the first people to make edgy adverts and put them on YouTube but hopefully you can get a feel for potential impact! 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 The signs are posted in the players' lounge, locker rooms and referee's office, and read: "Many of you will have Twitter accounts in order for your fans to follow you and to become more engaged in you and the sport - and this is great. "However popular it is, it is important to warn you of some of the dangers posted by Twittering as it relates to the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program Rules." They add that sending "certain sensitive information concerning your match or other matches and/or players should be avoided. Depending on the information sent out this could be determined as the passing of 'inside information.‘” 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Relevance for you Edge Push vs. Pull Innovation Management Top Down Bottom up 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Souter Consulting Limited 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Amhurst College is a private arts college in Massachusetts, USA that was ranked ninth in a Wall Street Journal survey of feeder colleges to the top 15 business , law and medical schools in the country. Of the 438 students who enrolled in 2008, only 1% said they could be contacted via a landline, a recent survey found. But 99% had a Facebook profile. Professional services firm Ernst & Young has a voracious appetite for new recruits: it adds 3,500 graduates to its payroll every year. The figures fromAmhurst College demonstrate why, for Ernst & Young, having a recruiting presence on Facebook is not so much an innovative http://www.information-age.com/research/650236/ernst-young.thtml 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 When two Domino’s Pizza employees filmed a prank in the restaurant’s kitchen, they decided to post it online. In a few days, thanks to the power of social media, they ended up with felony charges, more than a million disgusted viewers, and a major company facing a public relations crisis. In videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere this week, a Domino’s employee in Conover, N.C., prepared sandwiches for delivery while putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches, and violating other health-code standards while a fellow employee provided narration. ““ One of the main benefits that comes from understanding the audience’s intent, is that we as PR professionals can begin to tap into to the always-on focus group that is social media. Looking to add value for users means that we are gaining insight about how to optimize not only our communications, but the brand itself.” Read more: http://www.corporate-eye.com/blog/2009/04/social-media-the-always-on-focus-group/#ixzz0RHpTbWjm” 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 LISTENING. Finding out what your customers are really saying. Best tools are brand monitoring, private communities like Communispace, ratings/reviews. SPEAKING . Connecting with your customers in new ways, extending PR and marketing. Best tools are blogs, podcasts, participation in MySpace/YouTube and other user-generated media. ENERGIZING. Getting your best customers to evangelize your products. Best tools are public communities and ratings/reviews. SUPPORTING. Helping customers solve their own and each other's problems. Best tools are blogs, forums, wikis. EMBRACING. Working with your customers to make products better. Best tools are communities, user-generated media. Protect your name. Even if you aren’t planning to use the applications right away, grab a username. Just like with Web sites, Facebook and Twitter profiles are going fast. If you don’t grab your name now, someone else might. Then down the road, when people are looking for you, they will find someone else. If your name is a common one, it might make sense to add CPA or your town after your name. Start slow. It’s OK to be a fly on the wall, just watching what other people are doing before throwing your own information out there. If your business doesn’t want to be seen or heard, stay away. Establish goals and revisit them often. Figure out what your firm wants to achieve by using social media. Is it to draw hits to your site? Attract clients? Track the competition? Learn and grow intellectually? How often will you post? What types of things will you post? Check in quarterly or even monthly to re-evaluate what’s working and what needs to change. Commit. Don’t start social networking if you aren’t willing to spend time building relationships with your friends and followers. If your firm is only going to post once a week, state that on your Web site to set expectations. Someone in your firm should “own” the social networking project. Hint: It might be younger staffers who understand these tools better than partners because they’re using them in their personal lives. Find fans and potential employees. Some accounting firms have established Facebook groups to get their staff all talking in the same place. If firms have younger employees, those employees are likely on Facebook and could be talking about the firm. Create a place for them to do it so partners can be part of the conversation, too. Some college students have joined those firms’ groups as “fans,” declaring they think those firms are cool. What better way is there to recruit new accountants? Consider multiple personalities. It may be wise to create one account for the entire firm, separate accounts for each employee or separate personal and professional accounts. Adding outside voices brings personality. On the other hand, it can create confusion for the corporate brand if messaging isn’t consistent among all employees. In that case, it may be wise to have someone be the primary filter through which all communication flows—at least until executives feel comfortable in whatever social networking medium they’ve chosen to explore. Act professional. Whatever you write on these sites might live in cyberspace for a long time. Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want clients or colleagues to see. Highlight area expertise. Success stories include a CPA firm that specializes in dentists and Tweets as dentalcpa to drive traffic to its Web site and blog, and an outsourced CFO who found her largest client by Tweeting QuickBooks tips. The client approached her after reading the Tweets, and the CPA didn’t even have to make a pitch to land the business. Ask questions. While many people push information to others, at least one participant in the panel session said she uses LinkedIn to pose questions to professionals in the industry. Many people are willing to offer free advice. Don’t abandon face time. Social networking sites could help people connect with colleagues and prospects they’d never meet otherwise. But sometimes meeting for drinks or lunch can draw people together like nothing else, especially when those people have never met in person. 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Measuring the effects of social media in 10 steps 1. Traffic This is one of the more obvious ways of measuring social media. Remember that quality often beats quantity , though not always (as many CPM-focused publishers will surely testify). 2. Interaction Participation is a valuable indicator for many publishers (and brands). It says something about the kind of traffic you are attracting. Remember that an engaged customer is a highly valuable one . Interaction can be anything from leaving comments, to participating in support forums, to leaving customer reviews and ratings. It can happen on your website and on other websites. Keep your eyes and ears open! 3. Sales We at Econsultancy are tracking sales from organic Google referrals and also paid search. It didn’t seem like much of a leap to track other channels, such as Twitter. Try it. Dell did, and discovered that it made $1m from Twitter in 18 months . Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend?’ campaign on YouTube helped to drive “a five-fold increase in sales”. 4. Leads Some companies simply cannot process sales online, because their products or services do not allow for it. For example, the automotive industry, which tends to measure the effects of its online ad campaigns by the amount of brochures requests, or test drives booked in (as opposed to car sales, which is, in marketing terms, an altogether more macro effort). B2B operators are in a similar position. If you are a consultant and spend time interacting on LinkedIn Answers then there’s a way of tracking that activity to enquiries about your services. The same applies across the spectrum of social media sites. Choose your weapon, thought leaders. 5. Search marketing The SEO factor cannot be understated. Social media can be far more powerful in this regard than you might initially imagine. For example, a well-placed story / video / image on a site like Digg will generate a lot of traffic and a nice link from Digg itself, but the real win here is that it will generate a lot more interest beyond Digg . Bloggers and major publishers are following Digg’s Upcoming channel to unearth new and interesting stories (Sky News now has a Twitter correspondent). One link and 20,000 referrals from Digg might lead on to 40,000 referrals and 100 links from other sites. The long tail, in action. 100 links means that your page might well wind up being placed highly on Google, resulting in lots of ongoing traffic. Remember too that you can use sites like Twitter and YouTube to claim valuable search rankings on your brand search terms (‘social search optimisation’). 6. Brand metrics Word of mouth and the viral factor (inherent in sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg) can help shift the key brand metrics, both negatively and positively. These include brand favourability, brand awareness, brand recall, propensity to buy, etc. Expensive TV ads are measured in this way, so if these metrics are good enough for TV then they’re surely good enough for the internet? Positive brand associations via social media campaigns can help drive clicks on paid search ads , and responses to other forms of advertising. We know that TV ads boost activity on search engines, resulting in paid search success stories, so I'd bet that social media can do the same. 7. PR The nature of public relations has changed, forever. The last five years have been largely about the traditional PR folks not really being able to figure out the blogosphere. But if PRs cannot control the bloggers, then how on earth will they handle consumers? The distinct worlds of PR, customer service, and marketing are fusing. Twitter means everybody has a blog these days, and somewhere to shout about things to their friends (and beyond). Social media sites are the biggest echo chambers in the world! In any event, if you can measure PR (beyond adding up column inches and applying a random multiple to the equivalent size on the rate card!), then you can measure social media. 8. Customer engagement Given the prevalence of choice, and the ease with which consumers can switch from one brand to another, customer engagement is one of the most important of all metrics in today’s business environment. Engagement can take place offline and online, both on your website and on other sites, particularly social media sites. Customer engagement is key to improving satisfaction and loyalty rates, and revenue. By listening to customers, and letting them know that you are listening, you can improve your business, your products, and your levels of service. The alternative is to ignore customers, which sends out a terrible message. Our research found that an engaged customer will recommend your brand, convert more readily and purchase more often. 9. Retention A positive side effect of increased customer engagement - assuming certain other factors in play work in your favour - is an increase in customer retention. This is going to be a crucial factor in the success of your business in the years to come. Make no bones about it: we are moving into an age of optimisation and retention . Watch your retention rates as you start participating in social media. Over time, all things remaining equal, they should rise. Zappos, which is a case study in how-to-do-Twitter (and active on MySpace, Facebook and Youtube), is closing in on $1bn of sales this year, and “75% of its orders are from repeat customers”. Go figure, as they say. 10. Profits If you can reduce customer churn, and engage customers more often, the result will surely be that you’ll generate more business from your existing customer base (who in turn will recommend your business to their network of friends, family, and social media contacts). This reduces your reliance on vast customer acquisition budgets to maintain or grow profits. It makes for a far more profitable and more efficient organisation. I really hope that more businesses will find a better balance between acquisition and retention, sooner rather than later, from a resourcing standpoint. Too many acquisition strategies appear to be ill-conceived, are not joined up (both in terms of marketing and also operations), and as such are ripe for optimisation. Plug the leaky bucket and you won’t need to turn the tap so hard to top it up. And remember that old adage about it being cheaper to keep existing customers than to seek out new ones. 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Here's a framework for measuring social media: Attention. The amount of traffic to your content for a given period of time. Similar to the standard web metrics of site visits and page/video views. Participation. The extent to which users engage with your content in a channel. Think blog comments, Facebook wall posts, YouTube ratings, or widget interactions. Authority. Ala Technorati, the inbound links to your content - like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video. Influence. The size of the user base subscribed to your content. For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page. There's an "x-factor" that comes into play well: sentiment . The spirit driving user participation matters. The net result of these adds up to a score for social media engagement. 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009 Future Crowdsourcing Twitter example Lots of followers Feeling like atop a pedestal ask your community 17/09/09 © Justin Souter 2009