I just attended an AWESOME Webinar from HubSpot that covered how to make a business case to senior management for adopting social media marketing. The Webinar was led by social media rock star Chris Brogan. Here I share the love by giving you as much of the useful information I learned as possible.
Students of my social media seminar series: Notice how similar much of this information is to what I’ve been telling you for the past 3 weeks? *wink*
How to Demonstrate the Value of Social Media to Your Boss
with Chris Brogan and the HubSpot team
The boss’s question: Don’t you have something better to do??
We’re trained to ignore content on a huge scale. It’s really important for companies humanize the Web, to get people to “un-ignore” content and turn off the mental filter that keeps us from being distracted by the 1000000 or so ads with which we are bombarded every day.
The Landscape of Possibilities
Blogs
A blog is a digital content source that provides solutions, in which you can thread in (useful!) marketing messages.
Selling points:
- Great for search, easy to manage, just plain swell
- You can create a communication bridge with readers (e.g., rss, email subscribe, links to social places)
- You can target a niche audience (that share specific interests) instead of blasting generic information to everyone in the whole world
Twitter (or, What Seems to be the Stupidest Idea Ever
Yes, the Twitter feed seen in its entirety looks random and chock-full of useless information. the trick is to put it in context:
- Show the boss applications such as TweetDeck to demonstrate specific conversations instead of the unfiltered Twitter stream
- Harness the power of Twitter Search (listening to conversations of needs to identify areas of opportunities for the company to make offers)
- Listening tool: What do Tweeple say they need? What can you offer?
Community Platforms (If You Build It, Will They Come?)
Should you build your own community space for your company?
- Dell IdeaStorm is a compelling example of collecting, listening to, and responding to customer input.
- Dell also launching specialized versions of IdeaStorm to vertical markets (Healthcare)
- Starbucks has its own flavor of IdeaStorm now.
Social Networks (Outposts)
Alternately, you can establish “outposts” on existing social networks such as Facebook.
- Make your social space about your customers, not your product.
- It’s not about you; it’s about how you empower your users.
- Facebook Ads are worth a look; can be highly targeted to interest groups.
- Facebook is adding 700,000 new people a day (35-65 yr old range).
- LinkedIn Groups are also gaining traction as a useful social space.
Video (and by That, We Often Mean YouTube)
- YouTube releases 100 million videos a day, making a place companies definitely want to be.. BlendTec (of “Will It Blend?” fame) increased online sales 500% (most requested item to blend? another Blendtec blender)
- iPhone apps, especially location-based apps (what if you could brand an experience of location-based fun? )
How to Argue Effectively (How to Best Position the Work)
- http://delicious.com/chrisbrogan/casestudy
- Explain how social media aligns with sales needs and reduces customer acquisition costs
- Avoid justifying social media because “it’s cool”–stay focused on business value
- Address strategy alignment (sales leads, branding/awareness/organic SEO (blogs,customer service, product marketing)
HR needs
- Which departments will own social media strategy?
- How many people needed to run SM campaigns
Implementation
- Use the “bridges and islands” strategy (Separatize the pilot effort to reduce risk and limit investment resources and then show how the process moves backwards into the organization)
- Make measurements (tricky)
- Demonstrate small victories to justify future efforts and expense
What to Do with Listening
- Get unguarded, unfettered customer feedback for PR, marketing, product research, customer service, what else?
- free tools for search: http://search.twitter.com, http://blogsearch.google.com, http://technorati.com, http://alltop.com
- Bucket all this information into Google Reader.
- Google the phrase “grow bigger ears” and hopefully Chris Brogan will appear as the #1 result
Equip and Empower (Give Your Ideas Handles)
- Giving your ideas handles means giving other people the ability to take the idea and do something with it
- Give someone flip video campera
- Give them sense of participation
- encourage uploading, tagged photos/videos
- Curate such content (don’t have to share every single wart along the way, for once it’s okay not to be 100% transparent
- Produce a best-of, giving credits to others
- Develop slideshows (animato, slideshare)
- Provide promo materials to bloggers ; must be pertinent to their respective audiences
- Use hashtags #####
Whose Job Is This?
It can be a combination of marketing, PR, sales, and internal (HR/training). the responsibilities can shift over time.
The New Presence (What All These Tools Mean)
- Creating a Home Base: your Web site isn’t “the site” anymore, but rather a home base for your entire social presence.
- Ouposts are the social places where you can establish a presence
- Outposts to start with: Twitter, LinkedIn or Xing, Facebook, Yelp, upcoming.org
- Realize that there are tons of places to go to find your audience, and you don’t have to be on all of them. in fact, spreading yourself thin is bad
- Pick a few outposts depending on the interests of your audience.
Some Useful Passports
A “passport” is a location where you can be standing by in order to jump into the online conversation quickly if you need to.
- WP.com, flickr, gmail 9Google Groups), yahoo, discuss, delicious, twitter, facebook, openid.org, brightkite, yelp
- Be available and ready to jump into conversations.
Whew! that’s a lot of information, and I’m not done yet. Stay tuned for Part II, coming soon!
