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Six Principles of Social Media Marketing

Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

Six Principles of Social Media Marketing

IntroductIon 1. SocIal lIStenIng 2. SocIal content 3. engageMent 4. SocIal adS 5. MeaSureMent 6. WorkfloW and autoMatIon concluSIon

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

Introduction
We are in an era where all business is social. Even the most staid institutions and regulated businesses are being pulled into the social sphere by their customers, clients and patients. Up until now, social media marketing has seemed complex. The management of social business and marketing integration has been scattered - too time consuming or seemingly difficult to scale for the average business to consider. Enter the socially connected business. By embedding social into every part of your business and marketing practice, being a social business becomes much easier to manage and scale. This has a direct positive impact on your bottom line, shareholder and customer happiness, customer service capabilities, lead generation, analytics across departments and the internet, product development, and much more. Imagine a business where the interaction between your departments, your customers, your potential customers, your suppliers and your shareholders was seamless and fluid, with no barriers to success. If you understand these six principles of social media marketing, you can be on your way to becoming a social business.

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

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Chapter 1 / Social Listening

The importance of present and active social listening can not be overstated. Listening is one of the primary principles of social business and great social media marketing - it brings the world to your doorstep, allowing you to respond and take action in an agile way that hasnt been done before. Listening lends an unprecedented agility and reach to businesses that fosters the kind of dialogue needed to create a feeling of loyalty and trust.
This loyalty and trust is the very foundation of your social business culture. Its the mystery ingredient that keeps customers coming back to companies like Apple, Inc., that allows Citi to respond to potentially sticky situations in a way that is fluid and transparent, and allows companies like Ford Motor Company to have a brilliant success story in an economy where other automotive companies still struggle.

Scott Monty discussing Fords social business model at Dreamforce 12

In fact, this social business culture has at its core the ability not just to listen, but to listen in a way that allows you to take action on the intel that you gather and to use the data that pours in. The data is useful not just for your direct advantage, but also for your employees and your customers advantage as well. Having the kind of culture that actively listens and understands the customers, potential customers and shareholders who are also listening means you can cast a wider net and achieve the kind of buoyant success in business and marketing that feeds itself.

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

Social listening has a variety of potential uses. Broad social listening works to help you stop a crisis, often before it has a chance to escalate. It helps you find new customers, see what your competition is doing, compete better, find new markets and save money and time on product development and market research. By learning to read and make use of the data flow that listening brings in, you create a path to a better social business experience for you and for your customers.

Kimberly-Clark Social, for Kimberly-Clark, is just amazing, explains Mike McCranie, Global Director, Information Technology. With a social network, we can have teams working in Buenos Aires, Argentina collaborate with teams in Sydney, Australia; Bangkok, Thailand with Dallas, Texas. Social makes this huge world we live in much, much smaller. Kimberly-Clark is using an embedded social ecosystem to bring social business concepts and practices to its team internally, then roll those successes out into enhanced social benefits for its customer base. By bringing the internal social concepts outside the company, KimberlyClark is able to track what people are saying to and about their brand (at over 30,000 mentions a month on Twitter alone, there is plenty of useful data coming in). In addition to social listening and engagement outside its walls, the brand uses the data to create reports that are useful for its R&D department.

Adaptu.com With social listening ...we can stay on top of what people are saying about Adaptu.com as a brand with real time alerts, giving us a competitive advantage on helping us assist our users as

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

well as engaging with current and potential users by talking about financial matters that relate to them by directing them to Adaptu.com resources, explains Jenna Forstrom, Community Manager for Adaptu.com. Financial institutions like Adaptu.com sometimes struggle to keep up with the demand for responsive business engagement and problem solving. The consumer can often end up finding information and resources on their own if their financial institution is not a socially savvy business. Adaptu.com decided to use social listening to turn this on its head, giving them the kind of information and connection they needed to empower their customer to regain control of their finances. That decision has given Adaptu.com strong gains in customer base and in customer satisfaction.

Chapter 2 / Social Content

Social content is the key that unlocks your social business. Social listening feeds the social business and social media marketing ecosystem with constant, useful data. Social engagement makes you human and accessible. Social content puts your core values, knowledge, talents, products, advice and services into a format that can be used, referenced and shared.
The tenets of great, compelling social content are value, relevance, action and truth. Since many of your leads will come from content sources, its important to produce the kind of content that people trust -- that they cant wait to read and share. Social content can also help with engagement (participating in a meme, for example, can certainly achieve instant shareability and increase fan engagement on a page), but the more relevant, actionable, valuable and less noisy your content is, the more quality it will deliver to you and to your customer. Compelling content allows your business to level-up in a competitive business world. Think of your social content as an extension of you that is a teacher, a salesperson, a researcher and a storyteller. Fantastic content will help you develop brand thought leadership, educate your customers, tell your story as a brand and give people who dont know you yet a reason to come back. It is a powerful lead generation tool, especially if your content has a high level of sharability. Content is infinitely scalable - its much easier to scale out from good content than to scale from old-fashioned ads -- and each bit of content you create has the potential to shape shift and become more useful as part of your overall content engine.

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

Some of the most compelling content in the summer of 2012 came, surprisingly, from a cookie. Oreo came out swinging with an image a day for 100 days in their Daily Twist campaign. What made this campaign compelling was the quality of, and thought behind, the content, even more than the refreshing lack of push marketing. In fact, other than coming from the Oreo social media accounts and using an Oreo cookie for each image, there was no traditional marketing used at all. In addition to customers embracing the campaign for originality, marketers marveled at it for being a campaign done responsively, in real time, by multiple agencies. What is the ROI on such an expensive campaign? On the surface, a 110% increase in engagement and a rapid rise in fans and followers. Deeper, a sense of customer loyalty was fostered as fans of Oreo rallied around the brand for some of the more potentially controversial ideas. That kind of voluntary customer support is hard to find and cant be bought, and has a direct correlation to a healthy bottom line.

Oreo (Kraft Foods)

Chapter 3/ Engagement
Engagement is the bridge between listening and content for the social business. Connecting everything your company does with embedded social practices and tools is important to a true social business ecosystem. By using engagement to reach beyond the walls of your brand, you enrich your other social efforts with value and authenticity, giving you an agile platform to make business decisions, solve problems, share ideas, and have a two-way dialogue with your community. Engagement lets you reach your customer and potential customers wherever they are.
Engagement goes hand in hand with social listening to handle any conversations about your brand or potential crises as well. In a true social business, bolstering your engagement and social listening with measurement data will help you address any issue with pinpoint accuracy. Utilizing a CRM system to keep track of your customer engagement and activities, the ebb and flow of your content and its reach enables your social business ecosystem to work. This is what it looks like when social is truly embedded into your business framework.

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

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You can use genuine, consistent engagement by your cross-departmental team to solve internal and external challenges, make customers feel special, enhance your social media marketing, and tell compelling stories from others. Engagement allows brands to humanize themselves by reaching out to help customers before youre asked. Making new connections and customers and supporting your community will make your brand resonate. There is no shortage of examples to call out that show companies are using social engagement well. TELUS, The University of Adelaide and eHarmony all come to mind. However, Outback Steakhouse kicked their engagement up a notch by encouraging their customers to pay the engagement forward. Their engagement campaign is a winner on many levels. First, because it was inspired by a YouTube video 30 gifts to 30 strangers in Sydney - demonstrating that the brand is socially aware and has good listening tools in place. Second, they used their social business tools to identify a loyal Outback Steakhouse customer -- Dave Parsons - and give him a gift (well, 40 gifts, to be exact). He was then encouraged to give the gifts away to strangers and friends.

Outback Steakhouse

Parsons was thrilled, blogging his adventure and creating video content around it. More importantly, it reaped unexpected benefits for Outback, allowing them to reach a diverse audience that not only included Parsons friends and family, but his Mayor and celebrity animal trainer Jack Hanna! As a nice touch, Parsons also gave one of the gifts to the video blogger that inspired it all, Lucas Jatoba.

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

Chapter 4/ Social Ads

Long gone are your typical broadcast, push ads. These ads are falling by the wayside because they just arent effective. Sure, banner ads and other ad formats still exist and still convert, but customers expect more. The ad has evolved, becoming social, interactive, entertaining or informative, and much more pull than push.
Your social ad needs to entice the customer to do two things: take action with your brand, and pass on your message. Peer-to-peer recommendations are one of the most powerful tools in your advertising arsenal. Creating and sharing compelling content is at the heart of achieving your ad campaign goals. Dont forget: many social sites empower you to promote well-performing ad content to increase its reach and longevity. Engaging social ads leverage friend-to-friend connections and sharing to broaden your reach, capitalize on holidays and user data on social sites to drive action, gather more info about potential customers. These ads also promote users to opt in to your message, participate in contests, promotions, and sales, visit your online store, extend their engagement with you, and broaden your reach with likes and other actions. Social ads that leverage the 90-9-1 rule for conversions and leads do very well for your brand (1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing at all).

Ford Escape Routes Television Show on NBC Ford used social advertising, listening and engagement tools to advertise their new Escape Routes show on NBC. By leveraging this Escape Routes Facebook advertising campaign, Ford saw an overall reduction in the cost of people going to the website to sign up to participate in the

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

show of 88% (cost per conversion) when compared to the cost of the same result at the start of the campaign. By the final day of the campaign, their social business ecosystem and embedded tools helped reduced the cost per sign-up and cost per click significantly. The entire campaign was presented over the course of five weekends, and over 420 million impressions were delivered. That shows the power of embedding social into your business for a responsive social business ecosystem.

Chapter 5/ Measurement
It is no longer plausible (or possible) to claim social media marketing and social business are too esoteric or ethereal to measure. You can indeed track the metrics that drive social media for your business. In fact the true social business follows a policy of measure everything, leverage your data, inside and out, for maximum success and accountability.
Excellent social business measurement requires thinking differently about how and what you measure. Measure traditional web analytics, SEO, shares, social media marketing campaigns, employee performance and collaboration, ideas, leads generated, sales data as tied to social content and engagement, content traction and reach, listening data points, ad conversions, costs and more. Create social measurement dashboards using spreadsheets, hashtags, keywords, landing pages and specific URL callouts. Learn how to filter your data! You will get a treasure trove of information you can use for everything from lead generation to product development to improving content to spying on the competition. Your data dashboards will help you find the gold nuggets hidden in the ocean of information and quickly put them to effective use for your social business. Remember, social businesses see four times their return on investment!

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

House Party has built a business around sponsored parties for everyday influencers. Participants can host a party in their own home featuring products by participating brands like Kraft Foods, Sony Playstation or Ford Motor Company. The point of House Party is not to push product on consumers, but instead to gather feedback for the brands involved from the participants in a low-pressure, fun environment of actual use. Using social business measurement tools House Party is able to determine influencers, match them to brands, then track the data they generate over the course of months. This results in deep reporting data being relayed to the brands for their use in future product development and current product marketing.

House Party

Chapter 6/ Workflow and Automation

Workflow and automation is the cornerstone of the socially embedded, completely agile social business. The key to great social media marketing is to keep your data and insights open and available to all team members in every department. This is the first step to the social business utopia of being able to anticipate changes in markets, to understand and meet customer needs, to iterate product development, to manage cost savings and to discover new customers.
Now that 57% of social businesses outperform their competitors, becoming a social business is no longer an option its a must. This is where workflow and automation comes in, bringing together your social listening, social content, engagement, measurement, and social ad reach into one manageable system that your entire company can use to meet their needs. These processes are about bridging gaps and connecting the dots in a way that becomes part of the fabric and culture of your social business. A social business depends on a rock-solid CRM solution to be truly effective. By putting the information of the entire social web at your fingertips and combining it with real time metrics, engagement, content and solid customer data built over time, you develop the kind of relationship with a customer that makes them a customer for life. A customer for life becomes your best brand advocate.

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Six PrinciPleS of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012

Two common outcomes of creating advanced social workflows, including the addition of logical automation, are solving company problems effectively and quickly, and fielding customer service issues. The added benefit to market research, product development, sales and marketing and overall agility and response improvements cant be overstated. Using a CRM effectively can change the way you do business and give you the kind of staying power that businesses avoiding social simply dont have. Virgin America

Virgin America attributes its rapid growth to its company culture. Key to ensuring that the entire staff of the airline is part of the culture and kept in the loop is the company-wide use of social business tools that are both internal and customer facing. By using the tools to involve both employees and customers in the success of the airline and in an improved, smoother flying experience, Virgin America is building a loyal employee and customer base and a stronger bottom line - by making flying about more than just profits. They want to be a true experience that you treasure. Their vision for a truly social business, as shown in the link above, is one that comes from the very top of the organization. By focusing on the experience as a whole, from beginning to end, and using the right social tools to make it happen across departments, Virgin America is making each customer feel special. This kind of customer contentment is difficult to achieve for an airline, and requires full integration and adoption of the corporate culture and social business ideals, as well as real-time listening, engagement and measurement to keep the flow fluid and things running smoothly.

Conclusion
Virgin America and Ford Motor Company are some of the leaders of social business and social media marketing. They have embraced the social business ecosystem from the top down, building a new business culture that other businesses now aspire to. The gains from adopting social business practices are immense, and include a reduction in email, in meetings and an increase in customer and employee satisfaction and profit margins. There is a social business evolution going on. There are 1.5 billion social users and 70% of businesses use social to -- at a minimum -- connect with customers. According to a McKinsey report estimate there is $1.3 trillion waiting to be gained from more effective and embedded use of social media by business. The IDC estimates that the yearly growth of social media is as much as 47% with a 123% growth in engagement between customers and brands. This is huge news for a social business, and effective social business is the key to thriving in the new social future.

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