How are Professionals Using Social Media? Mostly for Marketing

Think social media is just a fad?  Think again.  Social Media use by business professionals is high and growing.  The vast majority of professionals across the world are using social media technologies for business purposes, according to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education. 86% of respondents to the survey of professionals from different industries said they had adopted social technologies. This underscores that social media isn’t just a fad – business professionals are adopting social media and getting results.  Have you started leveraging social media for your organization yet?

The survey also explored which specific business areas professionals are using social media for. The most common use of social media is for Marketing, with 57% of professionals using social media for this purpose.

If your organization isn’t using social media yet, what are you waiting for?  While marketing receives a lot of hype it isn’t the only way that organizations and professionals are using social media.  In addition to marketing businesses are using social media for internal collaboration and learning, customer service and support, sales, human resources, strategy and product development.

How are you using Social Media professionally?

Twitter Ads

Twitter Launches Promoted Trends

I read an article recently about Twitter selling ad space, back in April Twitter introduced Promoted Tweets, a platform to allow businesses to promote themselves within the Twitter stream. Now it seems Twitter has launched Promoted Trends, a feature that will allow advertisers to insert their own trends into Twitter’s trending topics.

Twitter’s Value

Twitter’s value was released the other day at one billion dollars, impressive, but only one tenth of Facebook’s reported value. At some point Twitter will need to find a way to monetize their site, without

making it a pay service. I don’t have a problem with the paid placement of tweets and trends; I think it would be an excellent addition to any Internet or Social Media Marketing Plan.

How Twitter Needs to Handle Placed Trends

Here is what I want to see Twitter do with the paid placements. If they are allowing a company to pay to place an ad within the stream, call it out; make sure everyone understands someone paid to put that ad in their stream.  As far as the Promoted Trends, I want to be able to ignore this feature, because the whole point of Twitter’s trending topics it to see in real time what is happening in the “twitterverse”. You can already choose between worldwide, by country even by city. I don’t want to see the trending topics “polluted” with a paid placement.

By creating a competition for the top trending spot, with a Google AdWords type auction, it would created a nice competition and help Twitter make  money from  selling the ads. As Twitter continues to grow they have got to find a non-intrusive way to bring in advertising dollars while still being able to create enough awareness of the ads.

Mobile Application

More people are logging on to Social Media; Twitter specifically, using their mobile devices. If you use an iPhone and a free Twitter app you most likely have to deal with some sort of ad placement now, so by adding ads to the main Twitter page should be too much of a problem.

Number of Mobile Subscribers Accessing     Twitter via Mobile Browser	3 – month average ending Jan. 2010 vs. Jan. 2009	Total U.S. Age 13+
	Total Audience
	Jan-09	Jan-10	% of Change
Twitter.com	1,051,000	4,700,000	347
Source: comScore MobiLens

– brian tudor
follow @briantudor on twitter

The Challenge of Measuring Social Media

A few weeks ago I was on a panel for Business Wire on social media measurement. James Pilcher, Daniel Lally and I had a great conversation about social media measurement – what, why and how to measure social media.

Since the panel I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and last week I posted about the types of marketing activities that brands are engaging in using social media.  The graph below shows the % of Firms using Social Media for Marketing activities.

As you can see below, brands are using social media for a variety of different purposes including obvious ones, like brand building, acquiring and retaining customers, as well as less obvious ones, like marketing research, finding new audiences for the product and improving current products or services.

What struck me about this list are two things:

1) Brands are using social media in ways that they probably didn’t initial plan to, and

2) Many of these uses are difficult to quantify and measure.

Brands are Using Social Media in Creative Ways

Most brands probably initially engage in social media as a way to drive sales, run promos or build positive equity.  Once they start to build relationships and explore the inner workings of social media it becomes clear that it can be used in a wide variety of ways and provide value that was not initially anticipated.

Much of this value comes from just listening and engaging in a dialogue.  Marketing research, finding new target audiences, improving the product/service and even identifying new products are all very valuable ways to leverage social media.  What is more is that all of these can be achieved just by listening.

Most brands using social media in these ways probably didn’t start out with these benefits in mind, but after participating and exploring 1/3 of CMOs are finding value from this.  It is important to have some fluidity in your marketing objectives on social media and be open to creative and surprising opportunities to leverage it to grow your business.

The Value of Social Media is Difficult to Quantify and Measure

Most of the uses of social media are extremely difficult to 1) measure and 2) quantify the value of.  The #1 use of social media is brand building and awareness.  How do you measure that?  It isn’t by the # of friends or followers, or even how many people are clicking on your links.  The best way to measure this is the way equity is measured in traditional media – run a test and control and look for improvements in recall, sentiment, purchase intent, etc.  This takes planning and a budget.  If you don’t work for a big brand and have money to spend on this there is good news – you’ll still know if it is working.  If you are OK with qualitative feedback the people on the front lines of your social media execution team will know if they are moving the needle and generating traction from their efforts.

The other measurement issue is that many of these activities don’t have easily quantifiable values.  For example, what is the value of finding an entirely new audience to market your product to?  What is the value of making product improvements due to feedback gained on social media sites?  How do you quantify the new product or service idea that was generated as a result of listening and building real relationships?

The answer is that you probably can’t.  The reality is that social media can provide lots of different value to an organization and much of it is difficult to exactly measure – partly because the value is difficult to assess.

The Point: Be Flexible in Your Social Media Metrics

The point is that it is important for brands to be flexible in their social media metrics.  Think of social media and the potential benefit as touching multiple aspects of your organization.  Remember that a lot of value can be derived just from listening and building relationships (ie. without overt marketing).  By being open and flexible you can get some game changing opportunities. Yes, it will be hard to measure exactly.

But hey, aren’t a lot of your business investments difficult to quantify?  What is the ROI on your sales people taking clients to lunch?  Or the training program you invested in?  Or that party you sponsored?  Or the conferences you attend?  Or the networking to invest your time in?  Or the relationships you build?

81% of Firms are Using Social Media for Marketing – CMO Survey

I came across this chart last week that provides insight as to what types of marketing activities brands are using social media for.

The first big A-Ha from this information is that a full 81% of firms are using social media for marketing. If you aren’t using social media to build your business yet you are definitely behind the curve.

According to an August 2009 survey of CMOs 81% of firms surveyed are using social media to build brands and drive brand awareness.  This isn’t surprising – because of the reach of social media it is a great tool for generating awareness and building positive equity.  This also highlights some of the measurement issues with social media – brand awareness and equity (i.e. sentiment, recall, etc) are difficult and expensive to measure.  Specific testing budgets need to be set aside to measure these activities correctly.

There are a number of other surprise take-aways in this chart:

• Marketing Reasearch – Almost half of companies surveyed are using social media for marketing research – and why not?  Social media is a natural fit for research since you can get quick, unfiltered responses, or just listed to what people are naturally saying.
• Brand Promos – It isn’t surprising that 42% of marketers are using social media for promos, contests and giveaways.  The issue is that as the social space continues to become cluttered with brands fighting for attention the promos will have to be more targeted and meaningful.
• Identifying New Customer Groups - Since social media allows you to connect with a wide variety of people you can actually determine new audiences for your product just by paying attention to how people are already using it.  Targeting new groups can be a HUGE driver of new sales.
• Improving Products and Services – Listening and interacting with customers and potential customers can actually help you improve your products.  Learning what they like and don’t like through direct feedback helps brands improve their products.  Not really surprising is it?
• Identifying New Product and Service Opportunities – This is an interesting use of social media.  Social Media allows brands to monitor conversations and hear what customers are really thinking in an unfiltered way, without the expense or issues of a traditional focus group.  Just by listening and monitoring brands can gain insights into their consumers.

Key Takeaway:

Social Media can be used for far more than you maybe initially thought.  Look for creative new ways to leverage the power of social media beyond marketing at people.

Insights from ad:tech Opening Keynote

I’m at the ad:tech conference this week (note – ad:tech is a client) which kicked off with an awesome keynote by Jamie Cohen Szulc, the CMO of Levi Strauss.  The keynote was great – Jamie had a very engaging and entertaining presentation – if you ever get a chance to hear him speak DO IT!

There were a few key insights that I took away that I want to share.

• Play Your Position – Brands approach digitl like 5 year olds playing soccer.  They see the ball and they run towards it.  Play your position and be strategic.  Stay the course.
• Lose Control to Gain Advantages - Brands have to get comfortable losing some control online in order to win in the digital space.  Encourage and inspire conversation and go with the flow to be successful.
• Quality and Consumer Relevance – Are the core of digital marketing.  Provide a great experience that is relevant  to your consumers through your marketing and your product.
• Control over Brand Identity is a Thing of the Past – Brands are being defined through social media and through what people chose to share.  Brand identity is increasingly based on the consumer experiences and articulation of these experiences.
• Strategy and Execution should be Separate – Keep strategy and execution separate to be successful in the space.  This helps you stay strategic vs. reactive.

5 Untapped Social Media Marketing Opportunities

Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and LinkedIn get all of the attention in social media marketing, but there are a number of other tools that can get great results that are less popular.  Leveraging these social media tools can drive sale, traffic and leads to your website or business.

1. SlideShare

Slideshare is a site where you can post powerpoint slide presentations and share them.  You can also link it directly in to your LinkedIn account (in this way all of your presentations are posted on your LinkedIn page), integrate it with Facebook or share it on your blog.  Slideshare is great because it doesn’t take much extra work – if you have already created a slide show it takes about 5 minutes to post it and tag it on SlideShare.  The good news is that you can get a lot of visibility on Slideshare – last year my presentations got nearly 10k views.  While SlideShare doesn’t refer a lot of traffic back (it isn’t really set up that way) you are making high quality awareness impressions.

2. Webinars

A webinar is a live session that includes audio (through a dial in # or online) and video (usually a slideshow).  Webinars can be relatively easy to create and run and are a great way to showcase thought leadership in a specific space.  In addition, you can recruit guests vs. attempting to create all of the content yourself.  One of the other benefits of webinars is that people have to provide their email address to join, which means that you can collect the email addresses for lead generation.  Using a service like gotowebinar you can run webinars for under $100 per month.  The AMA (American Marketing Association) runs webinars as a way to provide extra value to their members and to get new ones.

3. Video

Today, creating video is easier than every – you can do it on your phone or on a flipcam that costs only a few hundred bucks.  Video is a very powerful medium – it creates connections that are stronger than print or images.  You can create a video podcast by recording yourself speaking about a subject or by interviewing other people.  Check out GaryVee who does a variety of videos to promote his business – his passion and energy come across so strongly on video.  A good friend Deborah Cole Micek (@CoachDeb) consistently uses video to connect with her audience by interviewing experts at conferences.  The good news about video is that it can be easier to create than blog posts and make a stronger connection.

4. Email Newsletters

OK, so email newsletters are not technically social media, but they make a great marketing tool to help you promote and draw attention to your social media efforts.  You can set up a newsletter in under an hour for $20 a month on a site like Constant Contact (which is what I use).  You can use your newsletter to promote your content (blog, video, etc) and keep your audience informed.  In addition you can use your newsletter to promote the rest of your social media assets – link to your twitter and Facebook to connect.

5. Search (Search Engine Optimization)

No matter what category or industry you are in people are searching for your product online.  It is important that you consider search as well as the key words and links that you use when building your social media assets.  Many companies get over half of their leads and website traffic from search, and some of our best clients have found us through search.  Search is a great marketing tool because it connects people at the time that they are looking for you.  Creating key-word rich social media sites can help you get to the top of search engines.

Anyone else have hidden gems in Social Media Marketing?

8 Steps to Building Your Social Media Strategy

Building a social media strategy is an important first step to success in the social media space.  It isn’t as simple as joining facebook and setting up a fan page or creating a twitter account.

I’m currently working on a book about social media marketing and I have had the pleasure of speaking with a number of companies that have successfully created and executed social media strategies.  One of the things that they all have in common is that they approach social media strategically.

Sure there are some successes that are flukes, however companies that consistently see results in social media approach it with a strategy in mind.  Here are the steps to a successful social media strategy.

1. Know your Marketing Objectives

What are you hoping to achieve with social media?  Are you going for awareness, sales, leads?  The first step is to understand what you are hoping to achieve.  You can then assess social media platforms against these objectives and also set measures.

2. Know your Target Audience

To be successful in social media marketing you need to intimately know your audience.  What are they interested in?  What gets them excited? What are they passionate about? Where are they online?

3. Develop a Content Plan

If you really know your target audience you can create a content plan that is meaningful to them.  What d they REALLY care about?  How can you connect with them by talking about things they are interested in?  What things, related to your product are they really passionate about.

4. Determine Calls to Action

Based on your marketing objectives you should be able to develop calls to action – action that you want someone to take that will ultimately lead to business value for you.  This might be getting their email address, having them call you, a direct sale online, filling out a contact form, etc.  Knowing your call to action or ultimate goal will help you really drive value from your social marketing.

5. Tools

Pick the best tools for the job.  Based on your content, target and calls to action look for the social media tools that are most likely to achieve your objectives.  The tools you pick will be a function of where your audience is and the flexibility and opportunities for marketers in the various tools.  For example you audience may be on Facebook (since most people are) but they may not be interested in fanning you, and it may be difficult to find them and connect based on the limitations of facebook.

6. Execute & Experiment

Execute your strategy with excellence.  Make sure that you have the time and resources to do a great job with this.  Set up different tests to evaluate different executions.  For example, tweet different things, pose your questions in different ways, try different days and times and see which tweets get the most traction and clicks.

7. Measure

Measure, measure , measure.  During the experimentation stage it is vital to test, experiment and measure your social media execution.  Your measures should help you decide if what you are doing is working.  Be cautious in your measures though and be sure to assess the real problem.  For example, if I gave you a screwdriver and asked you to put a nail into a piece of wood, you probably couldn’t.  It doesn’t mean that the screwdriver is broken, it just means that it isn’t the right tool for the task.  It would be wrong to conclude that 1) The screwdriver doesn’t work 2) The nail can’t be put into the wood.

8. Adapt

Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.  Don’t be afraid to abandon a strategy if it doesn’t work.  One word of caution – beware of your measures.  For example, you may have started using twitter to build awareness, but find that it is actually really effective for customer service.  If you only measure awareness you may miss the boat.  So, while your measures might be specific, be sure to look at tools and success in a comprehensive way.

Take Advantage of the Growth in Mobile this Year with MobileCoupons.com

We are really excited at Boot Camp Digital to be working with a client that has a product that we really think can make a market impact this year.  Adage recently posted an article on 5 Mobile Trends for next year – and mobile coupons and commerce was on the list.

MobileCoupons.com is a free service that allows businesses to create coupons that consumers can find and redeem through web, print, mobile web, text message or iphone and android apps.

Why Mobile Coupons?

Mobile coupons are projected to grow 10x next year and to continue triple digit growth in 2011 and 2012.  The Yankee Group forecasts nearly $2.37 billion in North American mobile coupon transactions is 2013.

For small businesses, getting in the mobile game can be expensive and time consuming.  SMS campaigns can be costly and require users to opt-in.  Iphone apps are expensive to develop and with over 100,000 apps in the app store, many apps don’t pick up significant traction.  MobileCoupons.com gives businesses a free way to get into the mobile game and give consumers what they want – coupons with them when they need them.

How it Works

MobileCoupons.com makes it easy for businesses to start offering mobile deals to their consumers.  It is completely free to use (they don’t even ask for your billing info) and takes < 5 minutes to create a coupon.   Simply create an account at MobileCoupons.com merchant page.  The easy to use coupon creator allows you to input all of your coupon details, and even create a unique barcode or coupon code.

Coupons can be changed or modified at any time and businesses can also track the views and clips of their coupons.  For example, if a coupon was created for $1.00 off and had only a few clips, you could increase the coupon amount to $1.50 on the spot.  Conversely, if the coupon had too many clips the amount could be reduced to $0.50.

Customers can find coupons online, through the mobile web or through iphone and android apps and redeem coupons simply by showing their phone.  Because mobile coupons are always with you they have up to 10 times the redemption rates of paper coupons.  Mobile coupons also reach younger and more affluent consumers than traditional coupons.

Power Up Your Marketing Budget

With the tight economy many businesses are looking for ways to get more out of their marketing budgets.  MobileCoupons.com offers higher ROI than traditional coupons since there is no cost to create or distribute the coupons.  Mobile Coupons also provides a green solution for coupons since they aren’t printed.

Businesses are already using MobileCoupons.com including brands like Arby’s, RotoRooter and Little Caesar.  Businesses like using MobileCoupons.com because they can run tests in the high growth mobile space without blowing their marketing budgets.

We’ve worked with a few small businesses to get them set up on MobileCoupons.com and the feedback has been great.  Between the SEO benefits, the social spread and the opportunity to reach new customers, businesses using MobileCoupons.com have been thrilled.

Get Mobile

With all of the growth projected in mobile, 2010 is the year to get your business in the mobile marketing game.  Dedicate a portion of your marketing time and budget to experiment with mobile marketing.  Many small businesses are already seeing results from mobile marketing – what are you waiting for?

Internet Marketing – Get the Most with a Solid Strategy

Over the last 10 years almost every business has either built some form of a web presence – a website, social media profile, online display ad campaign – or their customers have built one for them – online review sites, comments on twitter, review sites, online directory submissions, social media comments, blog reviews, etc.

The problem is that many companies don’t approach their internet presence with a solid strategy.  They may start with building a website and then invest in a variety of other areas – pay-per-click ads, social media, search engine optimization, adding e-commerce, creating a facebook page, display based adds, etc.  This results in a variety of internet marketing activities but no solid strategy.

Often times this results in a suboptimal investment strategy and suboptimal results.

To correct this there are a number of steps that can be taken:

1) Invest in Analytics

This is typically an investment of time vs. dollars (unless you want to outsource it).  Learn how well your site is currently working, where your traffic comes from and where you might have problems.  Understand if people are taking your “call to action” or where people are abandoning your cart.  Spend some time understanding how well different traffic sources are working for you.

2) Evaluate your Call to Action

Your site (and every single page on your site) should include a clear call to action.  This means that you have a specific action that you are driving a web visitor to take.  Do all of the pages on your site clearly encourage visit

ors to take some sort of action?  Evaluate your site and the action that you are encouraging visitors to take.  Prior to optimizing for search or using social media to get traffic you want to be sure that your website it effectively converting visitors.

3) Landing Page Optimization

What are the most important pages on your site (if you have an analytics program you should be able to measure this).  How effective are these pages in driving action?  Are they effective?  Spend some time optimizing the most important pages on your site and leverage them to drive your users to take action.  You can get complex and do A/B split testing or simply look to implement best practices.

Either way, be sure that your landing pages are optimized so that when you do get traffic you are getting the most from it.

4) Evaluate Quality of Traffic Sources

Look at your current traffic sources and evaluate which ones are providing you with the best “quality”.  Depending on your site there are a number of ways that you may evaluate this – time on site, bounce rates, page views, sales, clicks, email signup, etc.  The key here is to know how effective your different traffic sources are.  This will help you prioritize your marketing spending.  For example, if you notice that people who get to your site from search are more likely to buy than people who get to your site from twitter, you may choose to adjust your investment.

5) Strategically Invest

After assessing all of the above you will be in a good position to make strategic investments.  Rather than investing randomly in various areas you’ll know that your site is working for you and how valuable different traffic sources are.  This will allow you to invest strategically on the areas that really matter.