Tag Archives: social networks

Social Media Marketing: social media is about BEING social, not about DOING social.

Social media and social media marketing are the talks of the town. Still, not all companies, including those who declare they have a social media strategy or a social media marketing strategy, got it completely right. Yet some great initiatives demonstrate some companies are getting it right.

I got inspired to write this blog post mainly thanks to a few articles (you’ll find links to those articles, as usual, at the bottom of this blog post) and thanks to an incredibly good initiative I got invited to participate into. But let’s go step by step.

While the majority of companies today get how important is to have a presence on social media, just a few of them got they need a social media strategy, fully integrated with both their marketing strategy and their company culture.

What does this mean?

I am sure you found a lot of numbers and figures before defining your social media budget and by now you know that also:

about half of the biggest companies’ websites have a link to their Facebook fan page on their homepage. So – you think- half of the biggest companies have a social media strategy, right?

Wrong.

This is the most common mistake. Not that different from the one I often do when I buy a new pair of shoes, forgetting that having them in my closet is not the same as wearing them- but the thing is, I cannot wear stilettos all the time.

So a Facebook page works exactly the same way: if you cannot be there all the time (or at least a good amount of time, enough to talk to your audience), it’s useless.

Why?

Because – not sure you heard-  about 800 million people are there too, which means surely the largest portion of your audience – regardless of your business bring B2B or B2C. And this means they may find it way more convenient to talk to you through your Facebook page than calling you on the phone (and wait for 5 minutes dialing even more numbers to go through your automated call center).

They will surely prefer to drop you a line on your Facebook page rather than sending you an email to an email address that sends them an automated reply from a noreply@companyname.com email address.

Especially if you proudly put your nice white F on a blue button to show how cool your company is- you also have a Facebook page.

And 27 fans, 3 pictures (your logos in low resolution being 2 of them) and 5 wall posts.

Each of them with one Like: yours.

And next to that Facebook button you likely have a Twitter button too, to witness your business is really social. You probably have that on your email signature and on your PPTs. Then you client clicks on it and reads “15 tweets sent, last tweet April 2009”. Nice.

And -still thinking you are really cool and social- you added your Twitter handle and a link to your Facebook all over the places.

So I follow you, I mention you, and I get you have not got the whole social media thing: I never got a reply, or a thank you for RT. ‘cause you do not monitor your mentions or your company mentions, and you have no idea who is tweeting about you, who is tweeting to you and how good comments tweeted about you are. You were told Twitter is like just having a Facebook status without the whole Facebook. (I recently got a #FF from someone that is not even following me on Twitter, and it was not a RT, of course. Can you believe that?)

The thing is, there is a huge difference between doing social (media) and being social.

Doing social (too bad) means mainly having a Facebook page or a Twitter handle, and a maybe also a LinkedIn group, private (to show how social you are).

Being social means: interact, listen, answer, accept critics, improve your business thanks to those critics, build trust, be reachable by your audience – for the first time they can talk to your brand. They could not talk to your brand when your commercials were on TV, or on magazines, or a banner the only way they could touch was with a click.

They have been waiting for decades for this chance to talk to your brand and they now deserve to be listened. Especially since they talk to each other all the time, and referrals are the new selling channel in the social media era.

A great example of social media marketing campaign that demonstrates a social media approach: Quality Hunters, by Finnair and Helsinki Airport.

I recently came across an incredibly good, social and clever initiative, that synthetizes many concepts I already wrote about in this post. Not sure you heard about it before, it’s a really cool initiative and it’s called “Quality Hunters”, now at its second year, which makes it “Quality Hunters 2”.

“Quality Hunters 2 is an initiative by Finnair and Helsinki Airport. Together they will hire 7 Quality Hunters to travel the world and seek out fresh ideas on quality and how to improve air travel and the airport experience. “ this is what their website says about this project.

First of all, what I liked the most is their approach is fully social and depicts a truly social company culture: they sent personalized messaged through LinkedIn (social), then they followed applicants and engaged in conversations on twitter, they invited everyone to spread the word about this initiative and of course- they do know this- they offer the most incredibly exciting job ever, if you love travels and writing: you get paid to travel the world, and write about your journeys.

I have to admit when I got their message via LinkedIn I thought it was a joke. It was too good to be true for someone like me who is passionate about travels and writing!

“Finnair and Helsinki airport strive to offer services tailored to fit people’s individual needs. This cannot be achieved without offering everyone a chance to have their say and engage in dialogue on what makes air travel just click” they continue on their website.

“Once the Quality Hunters have been selected, this site will also be their digital home: they will produce texts, photos and video of their adventures and their ideas on how to make air travel better.”

At Finnair and Helsinki, they were looking for 7 Quality Hunters, and got over 1,900 applications. Winners will be announced in the coming days. Applications for this season closed on October 6th.

This is just the most incredibly social initiative I have ever seen, so far. It’s not about winning an iPad, by inviting your friends to a new website, nor about exchanging follows on a Facebook or Twitter.It’s not one of those social actions purely aimed at spreading ads all over the places.

They show they listen, they show they understand the importance of referrals and feedback, and they understand that, combined, referrals and feedbacks are the most powerful weapon to win the marketing battle.

They understand quality is the most precious element of their product/service, combined with an excellent customer service, which is, in case you forgot, the ability of being responsive to customers enquiries, needs, comments, feedback, requests.

Where do you stand? Are you DOING social or are you BEING social?

Related reading:

Social Media is Marketers’ El Dorado: Hype or Reality?

I am sure you noticed that also: it seems that with this economy (check the recently published World Economic Report 2011 by Financial Times), while worldwide financial markets suggest to pursue a modern “gold rush”, it looks like companies are rather pursuing some kind of “social rush”. Never like in these months businesses are talking about social media, using them, investing in them, hiring people to manage them and launching new ones. And funny enough, social media are the most frequent news on the traditional press.

The debate is still open: some say social media are a tremendous business and an incredibly effective channel for marketing and invest more and more on them (revenues are expected to double for Facebook and go from $45M to $400M for Twitter) , hire people, web agencies, buy platforms and reinvent their business.

Some others consider social media just a waste of time, a hype on its way to a decline and proudly tell they are not on social networks and they don’t need to be there. Maybe they did not notice their audience is there. I wonder why struggle with sending marketing messages all over places where your clients may just walk by, instead of those where they spend their time.

I am currently running a Social Media survey (please take it here, it’s just 10 questions) and my results say it clearly: more than half the interviewed companies are planning to increase their marketing dollars on social media for 2012. Final results to be published soon on this blog.

So I am sure many still wonder: will social media last?

Breath and relief: according to a recently published study by InSites Consulting, with a population of over 7Billion and 2Billions today already connected to social networks, only half of them (about 1B) are already on social networks. So there is definitely room for an improvement!

Social media adoption is uneven across the globe: In Europe, people join on average 1,9 social networks. In USA it’s 2,1; Brazil 3,1 and India 3,9. Uneven is also the social media awareness: while Social Insites estimates that Facebook awareness is about 100% of total connected population, and about 75% used it (with over half connecting every day), Twitter is used by only 16% of those who are aware of it.

With Facebook being at around 750M and remembering about that other analysis I posted back in July about the social media adoption curve, drawing from the Rogers’ model on technology adoption, this is an additional confirmation of my thoughts: we are almost half the way on the social media technology adoption curve. And with 2B connected out of the 7B, the more time goes, the situation should not change that quickly.

So, to answer our question: are social media the new El Dorado? The short answer seems Yes.

Yes, because according to this study, people join more than 1 social network, with Asia driving the truck to up to 4 social networks per person (I wonder how much this may be influenced by languages). See this image to learn more:

Please don’t jump yet for your happyness: “No” could still be a possible answer. The study also reports – sorry Google+, bad news- that about 60% declare they don’t want any additional social network, and about 93% are either not planning to leave the SNs they are in, or not entering new ones.

Surely, results leave some room for all those startups launching new social networks in these months. And creative ideas or social networks around shared passions (shopping, travel, sports, food, business, etc) are still likely to attract members- you don’t need to abandon your favorite social network and join a new one. You can stay on both.

Nevertheless, with these numbers in mind, and the current penetration of existing social networks, the message is crystal clear: big existing social networks will get bigger; small social networks will get smaller. After all, it seems this rule applies to the entire economy in this global financial cycle.

You may had an idea of how big Facebook is willing to become if you remember Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at the f8 conference, where Facebook presented the latest news and future developments about the most crowded social networks. When talking about the apps and developers of Facebook apps, he said Facebook has been working with “over a thousand companies to develop new things on Facebook”.

To all those who are still quite sceptical about Social Media and Social Media marketing (according to the preliminary results from my survey, lack of support from execs is one of the top reasons for not having a social media strategy), I suggest they have a look at this image and see that not only their clients are on social media, their clients are also waiting for them and asking for something! Also those whose social media strategy equals to having banners placed on social networks or a facebook page with zero interaction should consider a proper social media strategy. Need help?

Lessons learned:

  • Social Media are today what IT has been in the past: not just a tool, but a nessessary component of every business strategy
  • Your clients are on social media. Why are you wasting your marketing budget somewhere else?
  • Your clients are on social media and are willing to talk to you.
  • Social media are the easiest and highest potenial for word of moouth: have your sales on social media and have them listen to your clients needs.
  • Different geographies have different social media penetration and potential. That potential also applies to your business.
  • Never underestimate the importance of the word “social” in social media / social networks.

Related posts and resources:

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

Customer centricity and social networks: why one cannot exclude the other.

As it may have happened to many of you in these days, I came across a video featuring Steve Jobs on stage during one of his speeches.

This one was from 1997, when Steve Jobs went back to Apple as CEO to re-launch the Apple computer business.  One of the guys in the audience asked him – not that politely- how he was planning to revamp a tech company if he did not understand about technology.


I believe Job’s statement was way bigger than how big Apple’s evolution has been since then. He said having a technology and then finding a way to sell it and make people use it it’s pointless. Having a technology that does what people want it’s what we need. Start with the customer and then have the technology department figure out how to deliver what customers want.

Steve Jobs- a genial mix of passion, usability and attention to detail (did you read that other story about the yellow tone of the second O in the Google brand not displaying correctly on the iPhone and Job’s call on a Sunday morning to discuss about that urgently? You can find it here)- got ahead of the usability for its products with that statement.

Customer centricity is what a lot of C-level  presentations have been talking about for over a decade in any industry.  A customer centric approach assists an organisation in building important relationships with internal and external customers. Wow- this is social network- We knew the recipe since over a decade!

Yet, today, while people on social networks keep showing they are desperately looking for a bigger interaction with brands, asking for that customer centricity that everybody used to talk about, only half the companies have implemented some kind of social networks strategy. Preliminary results from a survey I am currently running (take it here, it’s just 10 questions and I will share results on this blog) show that only less than 15% of companies with a Facebook page – which is by far the only social media strategy for a large majority of companies- got excellent results from it.  The reason is simple: they are not doing it right.

Social media are built to listen to customers first, and answer then.

Not sure you recall, but call centers (and the cheap Indian call centers) were the biggest talk of the town before the social networks became “the” news. The boom of call centers  was a clear signal that clients do want a direct contact with companies, regardless of where we are- B2B or B2C. B2C should learn from B2B how important this is today.

Why? Time has changed, information are more available and understandable by users, media diffusion has intensified the need for communicating two-ways. And companies cannot be deaf.

Not sure you noticed, but when social media started rising, call centers declined: there was a new way to let clients interact with brands.

Being customer centric means – with no exception- being easily reachable by clients. If traditional marketing channels were looking at providing the right message through the right channel (think about TV commercials), nowadays the keyword is still delivering these messages through the media where the audience is- but the audience has moved to social networks, and the rules have changed. Clients now have a keyboard and they write to you if they are not happy, they won’t just use their remote control and watch another TV channel.

And delivering a message through a network that is “social” means brands must be social too. I’ve seen so many companies using social networks like they used other 1-to-many channels in the past.

I have seen many companies keep placing banners on communities and using their Facebook page or heir twitter handle or their LinkedIn group like they used TV commercials in the past. They do no interact with their clients. Social media management is in marketing’s hands today- which is fine-, but it actually also requires an effort that is typical of customer service and sales (for their account management role). Social media management and a social media strategy cannot stay only in marketing’s hands. And most of all, it cannot be in the intern’s hands or with an agency – which will surely give your brand (along with its reputation) in an intern’s hands.

Think about what has recently happened to Versace with their Facebook page or to Chrysler with their Twitter handle, to name a couple: they had to sither shut down comments on Facebook or fire the media agency serving them, respectively. When I read these stories, I keep reminding a Latin sentence: scripta manent, verba volant, which means “what is written stays, words fly away”. This is why social media should be in experts’ hands and it should be part of a formal strategy.

We must remember we are constantly listened (read) by our audience, and also they are willing to talk back to us. They want to interact. This is what social networks are about: being social.  So social media marketing is not just marketing on a new channel  but it’s building a relation with clients, hat same relation that is usually built with meetings with clients, with sales calling them  and asking if everything is OK to keep the client “warm”.

And, of course, since numbers show the reason why people follow brands on social networks (see the 4Rs in the “related posts” section at the bottom of this post), companies should give them what they want. This is customer centricity. It’s not what we think they want. It’s what they ask for. And clients are surely not deaf!

Related posts:

Has The Job Market War on Social Networks Started?

One of the most interesting changes in the business world that all of us have experienced recently, with the booming of social networks, it’s surely the job market.

I had my first experience of how the job market was changing back in 1998 when I had my first job interview on a chat (it was for an internship in the first Italian online community and I ended up getting the job)- well before Facebook and LinkedIn changed the rules of the game!

Let’s see what’s new on the Job Market.

Raise your hand if you have a LinkedIn profile. Mine is here, in case you are curious to learn more about me. LinkedIn announced this year they surpassed 100 million users.

Incresingly, Headhunters and companies rely on LinkedIn to find their next talents. And having worked in the US for a while, I have to admit it’s quite surprising how often I got emails and messages with job offers while my location was “New York” (this doesn’t really happen that often in Europe, and now that my location is Milan, Italy).

Now, raise your hand if you have a professional profile (I mean like the one you have on LinkedIn) on Facebook.

Facebook's BranchOutNot many of you, I am sure, have the Facebook job App. Facebook’s Job app is called BranchOut and it recently went viral on the popular social network, as you can see from the figure above (Source: Inside Facebook). Nice work (allow me the expression) Facebook decided to have the app importing your LinkedIn data to have your profile ready in just a few clicks. A lot less work than the one required to fill in some job applications on some companies’ websites.

One of the things that I like the most of BranchOut is the ability to let you know who in your network is “closer” to a specific job post. And this is done in a much much nicer way than LinkedIn.

So, what happened to Monster.com? Before the job market moved to LinkedIn and (more recently and yet just a little) Facebook, Monster was “the” place for the job market.

Well: Monster is back! The company today announced through a press release they just launched a new Facebook app. BeKnown. If you can’t beat them, join them. This must have been the thought of Darko Dejanovic, global CIO and head of product at Monster Worldwide, who proudly spoke about the Monster-developed Social Referral Program (SRP) embedded in the facebook app, which encourages BeKnown users to pass along specific jobs through their BeKnown network. The Social Referral Program amplifies a company’s employee referral network and extends reach to passive candidates. Currently in beta, the referral program will be rolled out to select Monster customers.

We’ll see if BeKnown will go viral as BranchOut. And we’ll see if this app will really work well as Monster did in the past ;-)

Is the US Economy impacted by Facebook fans?

Yesterday FED cut its forecasts for U.S. economic growth. It’s been just a few days after ComScore, echoed by Mashable, reported some figures about the time spent online in the US.

A question came across my mind: is Facebook impacting the US Economy?

Surely, Facebook is the last, more powerful B2C marketing resource of the last two years. Surely, Facebook is helping a huge number of companies getting more clients and making profits.

However, partially as a joke and partially because I was curious to see if I could find a link between the most recent economic crisis (did you realize we are in mid 2011 and regardless of all the governments efforts it’s still on?) and the impact of Social Networks, I decided to investigate a bit more and compare Facebook’s success and gross domestic product (GDP) drop.

I started this analysis for the US, since more data are available for this region. Mind the font color red and green to find similarities.

According to ComScore, time spent online on top websites (US data) is overall growing if we analyze the period going from December 2009 and December 2010. During that period,time spent on Facebook went from about 7% to about 12.3%, according to ComScore.

In a more recent analysis ComScore stated that Facebook counts about 160M monthly visitors. Added to the 40M of MySpace, they represent over 1/3rd of the US population. Enough to influence the economy.

The highest growth in Facebook traffic in the US happened between September 2008 and November 09, when it went from about 40M visitors/month to about 120M. And then again between February and August 2010, with another 30% increase.

Unique visitors on Facebook and MySpace

What happened to the US economy during the same time?

There’s been a huge fall in the US ISM manufacturing index in the second half of 2008 and then again (yet smaller) at the beginning of 2010. Maybe just a coincidence.

More interesting is the GDP change over the previous quarter, based on official data by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

Starting from the second half of 2008, there has been an marked drop in the US GDP, taking from 14,470 billions of dollars to about 14,035 billions of dollars in the second quarter of 2009. The US GDP got back to over 14,470 billions of dollars only in the first quarter of 2010.

Another small decline appears in the second quarter of 2010.

Is this again just a coincidence?

The importance of being Social.

Do we really need to measure how “social” we are? Can we trust those measuring our “Online Sociability”?

It seems the more social we are on the web, the better for our pockets: from discounts to jobs, the social media score can help us in many ways.

Two interesting articles have been published today around this topic: the first one on TechCrunch and the second one on Mashable.

These articles reminded me of another article that I read a couple of years ago, when Facebook started to become the most modern, inoffensive and aggregating phenomenon that we all know today. At that time, in fact, like it still happens today, a good number of journalists, economists, universities and governments were analyzing Facebook. I am sure many of you will remember a few articles mentioning the Dunbar’s number, coming from a study saying that our brain cannot handle more than 150 friends (applicable to Facebook friends as well). Too bad I have over 500 on Facebook. And some of my friends are still amongst those who don’t want to be on Facebook because “they don’t do what all others do”- I still think 600M people cannot be wrong.

TechCrunch published an article - a few hours ago – about a new startup, Labels.io, that combines what – allow me to summarize it this way- Klout (or PeerIndex) and recruitment websites do. This way recruiters know if you are really a good match for that social media position you just applied to or you can have a preview of available jobs that match your online score. (For the record, no jobs available in Italy yet).

The article continued with a quick profile of those social score measurers.

Later on today, Mashable published an article about a new Facebook-gating system based on Klout scores, which unveils discounts and perks to Facebook users, depending on their Klout score.

The interesting thing is that websites such as Klout, PeerIndex and Labels.io are all at their early stages and they are all based on algorithms and scores that we (or at least those who made them “famous”) cannot verify. Yet a few respected news sources and blogs often refer to klout scores or PeerIndex numbers.

A while ago I tested Klout and connected my 500+ Facebook friends to my twitter handle. Well, guess what? those friends “lifted” my Klout score by 5 points!

How does your Klout score look like? Is this just a new way companies have found to get some of those data about users, profiles and buying habits that Facebook has collected over the past few years? Is this a new way to get more spam?

I still remember the days when your sociability was measured by your attitude to play sports and work in a team, and we all made sure we had sports and team playing on your CV. It was just yesterday.