PR Communications

What Type Of Social Media Engagement Is Right For Your Brand?

Ice Cream Flavors
Originally uploaded by Chiot's Run

In a post that addresses the communications professionals' new understanding that there is a need to engage customers within social media, Clark Fredricksen of the eMarketer blog asks "What type of social media engagement is right for your brand?"

If you look at Intuit's efforts with social media, the company's preference is to build forum communities where customers and accountants support one another, conversation between Intuit and customers does exist, but the costs for engagement are lowered by managing the community and Intuit advocates effectively.

Instead of assuming everyone needs to be engaged, I think companies can carefully plan out how they will deploy their resources for relationship building or community management.

1) Understand the scope of your community

Time is a critical factor in social media marketing, by understanding how often people write, and who is in the community you'll have a better understanding of what resources need to be deployed.

2) Develop a process for triage and response

You may not need to engage everyone, or for that matter building community may be more about supporting advocates. Develop a simple but effective way to triage and respond to social media conversation opportunities and threats.

3) Understand the value of online community engagement

If you are Dell, the value of each consumer is considerably less than a company like Emerson Process Management where each lead may be worth $1 million. While the potential value from engagement comes not just from new sales but also higher customer satisfaction, and more ideas to fuel innovation.

John Cleese Funny Video From LiveVault

Last night I attended the #wingup tweetup in a pub in Newton, MA. Frank Days, the Director of New and Social Media at Novell organized the event, and I had a great time talking with many old friends and meeting new.

Frank made a joke about videos going viral and his comment reminded me of the super video produced by LiveVault. The video features John Cleese from Monty Python and was a lot of fun.






When I was at Backbone Media I conducted an interview with Bob Cramer the CEO of LiveVault. Subsequently LiveVault was sold to Iron Mountain, I always wondered how big a part the video had in the sale.

Outreach Fuels Corporate Blogging Success

Instead of thinking of your blog as a publishing tool, think of your corporate blog as a communications device.

Even better imagine that your blog is part of a large disconnected forum or bulletin board.

I think everyone can easily understand the value of community management when it comes to working within a forum. You can identify every community member and their level of participation within a single website community, and companies can understand who to encourage members within a community because everyone is easily found within a forum.

In blogging communities, the members of that community are not all located on one website; instead the community is made up of many individual blogs. Just as you use a forum to converse with community members in a blogging community bloggers use their blogs to conduct conversations with blogging community members either on their blog or between blogs. 

To be successful in blogging you have to have a plan for outreach to other bloggers, read their blogs, comment or write posts that focus on their ideas and opinions. If you do, you will have a good conversation, and the quality of the conversation is important to building relationships with other community blog members. Those relationships are important because then blog community members will start to read your blog, engage you on a more regular basis when you do comment on their blog, or even reference your ideas in their blog posts.

If you want your blog posts shared with the rest of the community, the path to success is not purely good content, rather you have to build and maintain relationships with members of your blogging community. Develop an outreach program to keep you on track to becoming part of the community and see the results from that investment.

2009 Social Media Trends Reviewed

Jeremiah Owyang, a former colleague of mine at Forrester, writes a great post about social marketing trends for 2009.

The Recession Spurred Consumers to Adopt Social Technologies.
Some Brands Followed Suit With Social Marketing.
Social Networks Share Data, Spreading Social Influence.
Consumers Move Faster By Sharing Real-Time Data.
Takeaway: This year, consumers are more connected, and moving faster than brands.

You can read more on Jeremiah's blog.

What caught my eye about the trends were two issues.

1) Few companies are really actively engaged. Jeremiah cited the excellent engagement report by his colleague Charlene Li and Wetpaint. I've long discussed the issue of engagement over participation. I wanted to ask Jeremiah what questions arise from thinking on the issue of the lack of engagement amongst brands? Why aren't brands engaging more? And what will it take to get them to engage more?

I think I have a few answers, but I also think we should be querying major brands these questions:

Answers:

1) Lack of understanding of how engagement works.
2) Lack of infrastructure to engage. No listening, triage or response process in place.
3) Still in early days.
4) People don't choose to engage, see the process as too expensive or too political.

2) I thought the issue of consumers sharing real time data is very important. Really what's happening is that social search is starting to supplement, and even sometimes replace real search engines. Instead of getting an automated result from Google, you can use your social network to get reviews and opinions on products and ideas. I wonder where social search will lead us? I also think life streaming services like Twitter are very important to social search and the big reasons why are; the 140 characters, and mobile, it’s easy for people to respond in 140 characters, and smart phone adoption is increasing the adoption of life streaming.

Top Ten PR Communications Blog Posts For 2009

Inspired by my friend and colleague, Aaron Strout, from his post about the top 10 posts for 2009, I decided to look at my traffic numbers and discover PR Communications top ten blog posts by traffic in 2009. Interestingly, two of the top ten posts are from 2005 and 2003.

Not surprisingly, my top post is the online community and social media conferences post for 2009, more surprisingly is that my post for 2010 is already a steady favorite. Though I've been retweeting the post a lot looking for more conferences. Perhaps a lesson in revisiting posts.

I think the high traffic numbers on several controversial posts is not surprising; my post about Gary Vaynerchuk’s bad pitch letter generated a lot of traffic, I believe mainly because of Gary’s response to the post. It probably would have died quietly if he hadn’t responded, though good for him for responding and arguing his side. I’ve got a lot of respect for his work with his wine library business, great stuff. I still disagree with his techniques for PR pitching. My post about lessons learned from the Cisco/WebEx communications crisis picked up a lot of traffic, thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for the advice on the post and the retweet. My former boss Byron White President at ideaLaunch was fond of reminiscing about his undergraduate thesis on highly contested ideas, the idea that you’ll get the most discussion out of contested arguments. I agree with him, while I don’t look for a fight, I think it’s a good thing not to be afraid to conduct an active dialogue with peers and colleagues in the industry.

1. Online Community & Social Media Conferences In 2009

2. Gary Vaynerchuk's Bad Pitch Letter

3. Social Media & Online Community Conferences In 2010

4. Ethics in PR

5. Measurement Strategies For 5 Social Media Goals

6. Listening Platforms Are Evolving Into Engagement Platforms

7. What is a PR Situation analysis?

8. Defining Public Relations For Social Media

9. Five Social Media Lessons Learned From The Cisco/WebEx/Dimdim Crisis

10. Designing A Creative Brief

2010 Engagement Marketing Predictions

I want your top engagement marketing predictions for 2010.

₪ Cobija: Corporativa al atardecer - Flickr Meeting at Tusk ₪
Originally uploaded by ►Voj►.

Engagement marketing is the marketing process where communicators understand the biggest opportunities lie in creating a word of mouth campaign with their social contacts. In both private communities and open communications such as twitter and blogging a company develops a community management process for building relationships with their customers, evangelists and advocates. As a result of those social media relationships companies can get the word out about products, their brand, and services when individuals share information in their owned media.

I'm convinced content marketing and inbound marketing are merely stepping stones to engagement marketing. You might develop really good content, but without relationships in the wider community you will not succeed in getting your ideas and content into the multitude of personal media available on the web. Yes, you can pitch bloggers and social media citizens, but the efficiency of pitching an entire market does not produce the ROI it once did when there were a few traditional media outlets. Instead being part of a wider community where you are engaged with your peers’ content, will get your content read and discussed. Companies will have to hire the people, develop the processes for listening, triaging and response to ensure effective community management. Look at Dell, Starbucks and Comcast for good examples of effective engagement marketing.

Do you agree? Do you disagree? How do you think the industry will develop in terms of using engagement marketing in 2010? And what will social CRM do for engagement marketing? What are the opportunities and the impediments for engagement marketing crossing the chasm in 2010?

Email me or better yet write a post and I’ll include a quote or link in my forthcoming post as I develop a list of predictions and perspectives on the evolving nature of engagement marketing.

Boston Tweetup In Davis Square At The Burren Today

Need a break from snow shoveling and the chaos of the holiday season, join me, John Cass for a good Irish meal at the Burren in Somerville. We'll chat about lessons learned from 2009 and what's happening in 2010 for social media.  Here's the menu to the Burren Here's the eventbrite page to register.

Judith Hurwitz is my honored guest, she will be chatting about the future of cloud computing at our informal lunch get together. 

Judith is the author of Cloud Computing for Dummies, Service Oriented Architectures for Dummies, Information on Demand for Dummies, Service Management for Dummies (2009), and Collaboration for Dummies.

Social Media Releases Marketing Prisoners From The Dungeon Of Death!

Doug Haslam writes a great post "Social Media Top 5: Faces of Death," where he asks if various technologies and ideas are dead, including: RSS, Twitter making money, Blogging! Technorati Tags and Marketing.

I cannot let the last one go.

No, no, no, marketing is not dead; it’s only just starting to live.


You see despite many zealots’ efforts at explaining to everyone that traditional marketers are an evil bunch of spam pushers, the ivory tower folks never completely subscribed to the concept of promotional pushing, and the reason is it’s all a matter of semantics.

When I say marketing, images of slimy sales people and spam email arise; marketing is seen as the process of selling more stuff. But in an alternative universe inhabited by marketing graduates and professional marketing directors who aren’t afraid to fight the good fight with business executives, they know that marketing really means listening to customers to make a better product, so we can sell more stuff! A subtle difference I know, but an important one, yes I hate to break it to the zealots, but marketing really is about listening.

Hey, guess what, the web has come along, and its interactive, marketers can now listen and chat with customers easily, and really that's what marketing does best if executed well. So instead of social media sounding the death knell of marketing, social media will breath new life into the concept, and marketing enthusiasts  will be able to break out of the dungeon and finally get to practice all of the four Ps not just the P of promotion.

As For The Rest: RSS, Twitter, Blogging & Technorati

RSS is definitely not dead; maybe experienced users should start a using an RSS feed reader month! But I agree with Doug RSS provides some great tools for widgets and syndication.

As for twitter, we shall see, I think twitter search ads make sense, I’d love to see Twitter develop an ad server, if they did Twitter would have a real time ad server, something even Google cannot do, have you noticed there are no ads next to the twitter steams on Google real time, the reason Google’s ad servers are several hours out of sync. If Twitter can develop a better Adwords server they will make money, lots. Plus, I look at Twitter search more than I do Google now, though through my clients, if Twitter can partner with the big Twitter clients to share revenue, even better.

Blogging has been knocked a little because of other social networking technologies, but as my post earlier this summer about the PR blog week 2004 crowd reveals, long time PR bloggers continue to blog. Blogging works within how the eco-system of the web works, if many bloggers have conversations about a topic they can easily swamp the Google search results and influence an entire community through their own audiences.

Don’t think of individual bloggers when you think of blogs, rather think of the all the bloggers who make up the community, and the conversations between them, those ideas and the dialogue is what drives innovation, product recommendations and civic discourse.

Doug, I did see a study recently that indicated Technorati's traffic volume had increased recently against other popular blog search engines in the last year, but don't recall the chart, it did give me a double take on the search engine.

The Business Value Of Engagement Marketing

George Dearing and I had a twitter discussion yesterday about whether business people understand the value of building relationships. I made the point that many business people don't understand the value of building relationships within the realm of social media. I come to that conclusion from spending seven years in blogging communities and explaining to colleagues and clients exactly how social relationships work in influencer networks.

Success in social media is not just a matter of creating great content, though certainly important. Rather, my point to George was about understanding the importance of dialogue and engagement. The value of building a relationship in social media comes from a reciprocal relationship, you read other people's content and share their content with your community, and as a result of conversation and support you build trust and a relationship with people in your social network. You may not even comment on posts that are directly related to your products or company's services. The reason why you do that is because you are building a relationship with colleagues in the industry. The ROI to a company is that you've built a network of friends and colleagues who are willing to evangelize for you because you have good content and you are committed to supporting them.

George suggests that most business people understand the value of measuring influence; I think that makes sense, though we then get into a wider discussion on what's important in terms of influence, lots of followers, or a small group of contacts of the right people!

I've seen a direct business value from building social media relationships, both from the many corporate blogs I've run over the years, consulted on, or watched in the industry. Take a look at a great case study with Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid, Jim's leadership in his twitter and blogging community put him at the center of the professional organizers community because he spent time on supporting the community.

Content is important, and companies like Junta42 and HubSpot are taking business people to the next level, but what’s after inbound marketing and content marketing once you’ve developed the infrastructure for content development? The next level has to be engagement marketing. Engagement includes content, measurement, and lead management, and engagement marketing goes beyond content marketing in that it includes outreach and dialogue with the view to managing and building community management. What’s ironic about engagement marketing is that dialogue and conversation is where much of the thinking about social media started with books like the Cluetrain Manifesto, or the PR Blogging Week 2004, or dare I say my book on Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging.

Good content has always been important, that’s why traditional media was so successful for so long, but today, if you can use social media, its not just about good content, you also have to have the social networks to take that content to a wider audience spread through word of mouth through your extended social networks. And building social networks is all about engagement marketing not content marketing.

Earned Media Is Fueled By Engagement Marketing

Sean Corcoran from Forrester writes a helpful post seeking to categorize the types of media available to communicators in today's marketing tool kit.

Owned media is media owned by a company where they control the means for creation and publication, websites, blogs and twitter are included.

Paid media is traditional advertising and sponsorship, this type of media is still what drives most of marketing.

Earned media includes traditional PR efforts but also word of mouth methods, Sean suggests this is the media where customers become the channel.

What I find interesting about this definition of the types of media is that we see the evolution of marketing in the last few years in the description. Paid media is obviously traditional marketing, owned media is content marketing and inbound marketing, where as earned media is still in flux for a term. I'd suggest the new term of engagement marketing for how earned media is facilitated.

Engagement marketing is the marketing process where communicators understand the biggest opportunities lie in creating a word of mouth campaign with their social contacts. Here both in private communities and open communications like twitter and blogging a company develops a community management process for building relationships with their customers, evangelists and advocates and as a result of those relationships through each individuals owned media companies can get the word out about products, their brand, and services.

Engagement marketing includes all those activities of content marketing and inbound marketing but takes marketing to the next step in building a formal process for managing relations with influencers, customers and advocates.