Читать книгу The Social Media Advantage - Holly Berkley - Страница 8

By the time you finish reading this sentence, there will be 700 new posts on Facebook. By the time you finish reading this chapter, there will be more than 1 million new tweets. With more than 1.9 billion Internet users world wide (RoyalPingdom.com, June 2010), watching millions of videos, creating millions of blogs and updating posts, status updates, and comments on a daily basis, finding your target audience in the sea of social media can feel overwhelming.

Stop. Take a deep breath. Realize that in order to be successful on the social web, you do not have to be everything to everyone—or everywhere for that matter. In fact, no one can conquer every online social network. There is simply too much information flowing every second. Therefore rather than trying to tackle every social network at once, focus on the handful of social spaces where your target audience is most active.

As you start using social media to find and communicate with different audiences, you will quickly discover that some social networks provide more immediate benefits to your overall goals than others do. You may also discover that it can take a combination of many social networks to promote your message most efficiently. Because online communications are more measurable and trackable than traditional forms of communication, the more you listen and engage on different social networks, the more you will be able to refine your efforts to maximize efficiency and attain your desired goals. (You’ll learn how to track, measure and evaluate your social media efforts more in Chapter 7.)

PlaceMakers, LLC, is a small company made up of independent consultants primarily focused on the reformation of municipal zoning codes, as well as master planning and urban design for private developers. Through social media use and engagement, they have discovered that it takes a combination of social tools and messaging to reach their audiences and goals.

Scott Doyon, Atlanta, Georgia-based principal and director of marketing of PlaceMakers, LLC, (http://placemakers.com) describes effective social media outreach as a delicate balance of several tools. He advises that small business owners look at their social media profiles and fan bases as a tool box. The more you engage on the sites and understand how they work and help the lives of your audiences, the better you will understand which tool to use, and when.

On any social networking site, such as Twitter and LinkedIn you can easily search by keyword, topic, job function or company name and you’ll be presented with a list of tweets, profiles, pages, groups and so on. Once you identify where your target audience is, take some time to listen.

This is a strategy that Christine Morris, communications and special projects coordinator of Construction Specialties, Inc. (http://www.c-sgroup.com), in Muncy, Pa. has found success doing. “Our target audience is made up of customers, potential customers and other influencers,” explains Morris. “Our first step in deciding which networks to use was to spend some time watching, listening and researching to see where this target audience was spending their time and where they were posting* on a consistent basis. We simply met them where they are.”

Think of joining a new social networking group as stepping into a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone. You wouldn’t start loudly announcing your business and latest offerings the second you stepped foot in the door. Not only would this be rude, but it would be a complete turn off to all the other guests. Instead, take smaller steps. See figure 2.1. Listen. Ask questions. Find out who the key influencers are in that group and get in their good graces. Also, pay attention to how the group talks, the lingo they use and how they interact with each other. You want to fit in.

Figure 2.1

Never directly push your business. Instead, contribute meaningful information that your target audience is seeking. Don’t be afraid to give it away for free. Encourage dialogue that helps position you as a knowledgeable person in your industry and as someone who cares about others’ thoughts, problems, concerns and opinions. Spend more of your time on social sites talking to people, building relationships, sharing resources that aren’t your own products or services than you spend promoting yourself and your company. Through this type of engagement and understanding of the audiences, you will be more likely to capture the right kind of attention, along with trust and loyalty.

Once you are an accepted member of the group, test out new approaches and dialogues. Have fun with it. After all, social networking is still in its infancy as a field of interest and study. Best practices and tactics in the field are continuing to evolve. Many small businesses are benefiting from a combination of traditional and social marketing. While social media helps open doors to new leads, many small businesses have found that more traditional follow up tactics help them to actually close the deal. Read the side bar from TKO Graphix to learn how they used a combination of social networks and traditional sales to help them land a 2 million dollar project.

Case Study

Combining Social Media outreach with traditional sales strategies helps land $2 Million Dollar Sale from Flickr lead

Company Overview

TKO Graphix is a full-service graphics provider in Plainfield, Indiana, established in 1985. We design, manufacture, and install graphics for fleets, vehicles, retail, events, and trade shows. We also offer signage services nationally. Our customers include Target Stores, Celadon, HH Gregg, Interstate Distributing, and Knight Transportation, among others.

Marketing Goals, History

Our goal in using social media has been to better connect with our current customers, while finding new prospective customers and associates to work with. We also wish to maximize our web presence and engage our demographic through a more personalized experience.

In 2009, we launched our social media presence, and have since established accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google’s G+ and LinkedIn, along with our Brandwire Blog. As with all our networks, we expanded our Flickr presence daily by publishing new photographs of our work, searching for current customers and prospects (Flickr search), and searching via common keywords respective of our industry. New contacts were emailed a brief, personalized note to welcome them, which led to my (Josh Humble) connecting with a print broker in St. Louis, IL. I then introduced him to Glenn Burris, one of TKO’s national account representatives. Glenn drove to St. Louis, where they talked about how we could help each other. The broker was contacted by an ad agency that needed a large format graphics company with traveling installation crews. This led to TKO presenting to a large national company. After meeting with the national company for a second time, TKO provided a proposal and was awarded the contract.

A Multi-Faceted Marketing Plan

• Social Media: Publishing our portfolio to Flickr, while adhering to best practices for titles, description tags.

• Social Networking: Proactively seeking prospects and engaging with target audience via the network.

• Traditional Networking: Meeting face to face with prospectives.

• Sales Presentation: Presenting in-person to the prospective customer.

In the middle of a very challenging recession, 2009 was our best year yet, thanks to the power of social media and engaged marketing.

We re-branded over 4,000 vehicles at 221 locations in North America for the national company. We also manufactured all decals and wraps, de-identified their vehicles, and installed new graphics, while creating an online fulfillment program for easy ordering.

Understanding and using all traditional forms of applicable marketing, in conjunction with new media marketing, has been one of our biggest lessons learned. Social media works - however, we always need to be where our audience is.

Considering our markets are composed of both traditional AND new media demographics, keeping a balance of mediums and tools used has been greatly beneficial.

—Josh Humble

Interaction Designer, Photographer, and Social Media Strategist for TKO Graphix

www.tkographix.com

Focus on relevant, quality messaging, not quantity, to attract your audience.

When local plumber, Tim McKenna of McKenna Plumbing canceled his newspaper and Yellow Page ads to save money, he eventually turned to Twitter to drum up business. He quickly learned that a subtle, more conversational approach won out over direct, hard selling. Although his Twitter handle @itstheplumber, identifies his profession, his bio is friendly, sharing that he “loves tango, yoga, rowing, endurance sports.”

“Forget about the number of followers,” said Mckenna, “It’s most important to connect with the people who do follow you.”

McKenna learned this first hand when a follower with a plumbing issue reached out to him on Twitter. The follower’s kitchen sink lost water pressure and she was hoping to find a quick fix online. McKenna ended up resolving her issue via a phone call, however the expert advice resulted in a quality Twitter testimonial for everyone to see.

In specialized fields or niche industries especially, quality trumps quantity every time. In other words, it’s better to have a few hundred Twitter users who subscribe to your tweets (“followers”) who are your core audience and care about what you have to say, than to have thousands of followers that will never notice you or become your online advocates by retweeting and responding to what you have to say. The same idea holds true with blogging*. Its best to have well-crafted, thought out blog posts that convey your brand messaging while providing insightful opinions and information than to post mindless chatter every day. It’s the quality posts that will get forwarded, linked to, picked up by various RSS feeds* and help your online presence grow.

Figure 2.2: Building a focused social presence and crafting quality content will generate a targeted following that is more likely to engage and help share your messages.

Understanding not only who your target audience is, but why they are engaged on a specific social network, is important. You want to understand what kind of information they are seeking in a particular social space and be able to provide that to them. For example, your Facebook friends* may want to see different types of information than those who subscribe to your blog. Through testing and tracking which types of posts and information gain the most feedback in the form of comments, likes* or shares*, you will be able to optimize each social communication channel to benefit each audience, and therefore get closer to reaching your specific business goals.

A 2011 study by Razorfish found that among all social networks, friends, followers and fans cited “feeling valued” as the most important element of engaging with a company online. Therefore it isn’t just about providing your audience with the type of information they seek; “companies should worry less about building out numerous channels and touch points and more about ensuring each customer interaction communicates value,” Razorfish says.

Ensuring value and quality posts is something PlaceMakers, LLC seems to weave effortlessly into their communications. The principals of PlaceMakers create well-thought-out blog posts that generate emotion and response, while they also fit powerful observations into 140 characters or less on Twitter. Creating a message that generates emotion and response is what social media is all about. After all, social media is designed to spark dialogue between individuals to create a feeling of community. It is not a successful tool for simply pushing company announcements and press releases. Those types of posts and tweets will probably not succeed in the social media space.

“We see ourselves less as individual planners, designers, marketers, etc. and more as cultivators of community,” said PlaceMaker’s Doyon. “Instead of just writing for other planners, we’re building relationships with environmentalists, developers, city boosters, bike and pedestrian advocates and all kinds of other folks who care about community improvement.”

PlaceMakers has cast a pretty wide net to cover their target audiences. But they don’t do this by having one marketer or sales person doing all the tweeting, posting and chatting. Instead, PlaceMakers is able to reach many different types of audiences with valuable, thoughtful information, because they allow each team member to blog, tweet and post about subjects that are most important to them. This approach helps pave the way for each team member to begin establishing themselves as potential thought leaders in their specific areas of interest and expertise.

Deborah Reale, community manager and marketing specialist at Reed Construction Data of Norcross, Georgia (http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/), has developed a similar social media strategy for Twitter. Rather than trying to push messages out and listen to all the feedback and chatter at once, she recommends segmenting Twitter followers by area of expertise, to keep better track of feedback as well as provide useful information in a more organized and powerful way.

“I’m a doctoral candidate in business, so to me, Twitter is similar to a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) chart,” explains Reale of her Twitter strategy. “If a firm has its ’following’ organized and lists them properly, management should be able to discern the SWOT for products, the organization, competitors, customers, prospects; even the industry itself.”

By using social media sites like Twitter as a listening tool rather than just blasting promotional messages, Reale discovered that Twitter can help her company reach goals beyond marketing and sales and aide in customer service management as well as product creation and improvement.

“I believe that in business-to-business (B2B), people respond to people. Most companies segment by product or customer base. I thought it might be a good idea to segment by our people in their area of expertise. I wanted to put a human face on the RCD segments,” said Reale.

Twitter allows users to easily segment followers and the people they follow through the creation of lists. Some organizations even develop completely different Twitter accounts for each content area of their company to allow for strategic development of different types of customer leads and distribution of more targeted information. By creating different Twitter accounts and dividing followers into specific lists, Reed Construction Data is able to have different individuals within Reed Construction Data share information that is most valuable to each target audience and therefore create more loyal followings.

How a Targeted Facebook ad Helped Orabrush get on the shelves at Walmart

We were already in contact with Walmart Corporate Offices through traditional sales channels. Their local vendor program allowed individual Walmart managers to pick up local products for local stores shelves. We’d had a manager here in Utah request Orabrush to carry for the holidays, and from that introduction, many other local Walmarts picked us up as well. Sales were robust, and the prospect for an expanded Walmart launch beyond our area seemed very good, but we wanted to speed up the process.

We made a DVD with a personalized introduction for the sales rep we’d been in contact with at Walmart HQ. When the DVD starts, The Orabrush Guy and Morgan the Orabrush Tongue (our two spokesman of YouTube fame) address the rep by name and discussed all the sales figures we’d seen in our test market in UT. We included samples of our videos, user reviews, and the press coverage we’d gotten. It was unique and thorough, and we were confident it would have their attention.

Part of our strategy was to come from as many angles as we could, through the traditional sales channels, and then with the DVD. But we’re a social media company as much as we’re a consumer goods company. Our world is web advertising.

I had the idea to use Facebook ads in a very targeted way. In college, I’d used Facebook to target a single girl to ask out. It was narrowed down to only girls with this name who went to this college who are from this hometown with these interests. Now I promise this isn’t as creepy as it sounds; we already knew each other and it was a fun way to surprise her. Facebook won’t allow that narrow of targeting anymore, probably to prevent potential creepiness like I’d done, but the technique still works, even with an audience broader than one. I suppose the girls of Provo UT (home ofOrabrush HQ) can be glad I’m now happily married. No more Facebook pro stalking.

We created a Facebook ad targeted only to Walmart employees in Bentonville Arkansas who have a college degree. The only people who meet those qualification are employees at Walmart HQ. We were reaching the executives. The ad said “Walmart Employees have bad breath! Walmart needs to carry Orabrush! It will sell better than anything in your store!”

Two days and $28 in ad spend later, we got an email from a Walmart VP, letting us know that they’d seen our ad, and would we please take it down. They seem to have gotten the impression that we were broadcasting this to the country, not realizing it was targeted to their office.

They’d already heard we were good at reaching our desired audience online. Now they knew it firsthand.

—Submitted by Jeffrey Harmon, CMO of Orabrush

www.orabrush.com