A Social Mindset – Revamped!

I was fortunate enough to hear Mitch Joel of twist image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation, speak at a lunch session in Burlington, Vermont this afternoon. The intriguing hour & a half opened up a lot more questions in my mind than I had anticipated. Here’s what my search marketer brain is trying to process currently:

1. Segmentation – Rich Nadworny of Digalicious raised a timely & relevant question – “ should all brands do social media”?  According to Mitch- ” All brands should share”. What remained unanswered was – What channels & audiences should these brands engage with? Should all brands share on every digital channel that they can lay their hands on while engaging their entire audience during all times?

If not , then how do the brands segregate the audience or the channel? How to determine if the Facebook audience for a brand  is tolerant of  higher interaction frequency  or more forgiving than perhaps the twitter audience? Somewhat similar to how we deal with direct traffic vs. search traffic in search marketing world. Or is there no such norm?  Will segmenting social media channels cannibalize any other medium? How does YouTube, which adds another layer of interactivity, fit into this engagement strategy? How do you draw the line between sharing too much vs. too little?

2. HIPPO factor– Discussions revolved around what should be the sharing “guidelines” vs. “policy” for employees at workplace. But who decides on those guidelines? What is the HIPPO’s role here? Unfortunately, still today, a lot of them have rigid unidirectional mental model.  How does the fluid social strategy accommodate a HIPPO?

3. Metrics and benchmark – Justin Cutroni, the author of Analytics Talk pointed out the need for establishing benchmarks and metrics in the social media arena. Sadly, a bulk of the brands and their digitized social strategy, still does not involve metrics or measurements. One might argue that there is an overload of data available for social media tracking but how about identifying and establishing key performance indicators? Is there any action on that front? Not much from what I hear.

4. Chris Brogran’s Math– In a post earlier today, Chris Brogan predicts “Social Crash”. According to him 100 small Twitter conversations+120 emails a day+10 phone calls=13 hours of work per day. It’s true that most of us are not as connected as Chris Brogan and have less than an average of 150 connections to engage with. I somehow tend to agree on his hyper-connectivity theory. Regardless of our volume of connection, some of us are seriously hyper-connected. Is that a problem? Are we heading towards a social crash?

I hope this post doesn’t exude any cynicism because that’s exactly what it’s not supposed to do. Some of my digital beliefs and thought process were overhauled during the lunch session this afternoon. Kudos to the #btvsmb team , Rich Nadworny and Mitch Joel . Mission Accomplished!

Strategy of a Circle Campaign

Often times we tend to run single focus campaigns. It could be just an email blast or a blog or a facebook post or just a print mailing. To me, it’s an incomplete attempt to engage your audience. I am a huge believer of what I call “campaigns in tandem”.

Let’s say you are thinking about a campaign where either you are promoting an event or sending out an offer or just talking about your business in general.

The first step is of course getting your messaging nailed. In other words, we start by attempting to answer the who, what, when, & why :

• Who’s my audience?
• Why should they be interested in this particular offer/ event/news?
• What message worked with them in the past?
• What channels should I be focusing on?
• What time line am I thinking of?
• What are my goals?
• How do I drive the above audience towards these goals?
• What’s my call to action?

Next we turn to the “ how”  . With the call to action in place  , we need to drive a multi-channel or as I like to call it, multi-touch-point campaign. Here’s  just a sample of channels we could use.

Now as I mentioned this is definitely not an exhaustive list of channels. You could additionally rope in videos , word of mouth and then there is of course the press. But not all campaigns and events are press worthy. So you might need to pitch selectively.

Whatever you do, how small or big your campaign is , always think about multi-touch-points and the impact of the collective reach of these channels.

Also, always.. always.. intertwine them !

Post your blog on your facebook and tweet your facebook link. That way you take care of 3 touch points at the same time. Do the same with any LinkedIn group you are part of .

Specific campaign email blasts should include your social media links, be tagged correctly for conversion attribution and be directed to a special landing page on your web site. The web site absolutely must have a full or a partial page dedicated for the campaign.

The print piece of the campaign should tie in seamlessly with your online marketing in terms of messaging and having the social media sites listed. However, due to the higher cost involvement with print, target it to your best performing list and leave the rest of the audience in the hands of web. Trust me, they’ll be well taken care of .

If you are running a paid campaign, make sure to include an adgroup with ads reflecting the campaign message. Have it land on the campaign page of your website. I wouldn’t worry too much about SEO at this point. All the cross links coming in from different channels and the rich quality of your content is taking care of your organic ranking in the background.

Running multi-touch campaigns of course has its own challenges. The  biggest one is the amount of logistics involved. It’s critical & imperative to tie them in a timely fashion. The other big one is the conversion attribution by channel for ROI purposes. But that’s a different discussion altogether.

At the end of the day , the ROI justifies all labor.

Now it’s your turn.. How much of this are you doing? What are the challenges? Are you going beyond? Tell us all about it.

We’ll also be talking about all of this and more at the 1^st Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit , right here in beautiful Burlington, amidst the dazzling fall colors in September.

Hope to see you all there.

Best,

Bibi