We talked a little bit today at SMB15 about getting over legal hurdles within a company in order to use social media, and how to convince decision-makers – the legal department – that it’s worth it.
A lot of great points were made, however there’s one piece of the conversation they left out, and one that I feel is really important (and should be considered first) when approaching this process internally.
You first have to have a legal structure that has considered social media before you talk about jumping over hurdles.
We work with a few clients in the higher ed space, which, in case you didn’t know, has legal walls and red tape up the wazoo. We’re often confronted with the “legal department” problem, and if it doesn’t completely stop the process, it’s a cause for major hesitation.
What I continually say to these clients and anyone in this position is:
Your current legal system has not considered social media as part of the business, therefore, it hasn’t considered it as something that needs stipulations.
The first reaction to something that is not currently built into the legal framework of an organization is to say no to it.
It usually follows that the way it is handled is on a case-by-case basis with the attempt to fit it somewhere into this system that was not built to support it.
Therefore, your first order of business is to sit down as a team to decide on how social media fits into your organization, and what legal framework needs to put into place to support that effort.
Blog posts should not have a 2-week approval process just because legal is trying to determine how those blog posts should be considered with a system that has, until then, only support traditional pieces of marketing content or media. It should have a 2-week approval process (which, by the way, makes your blog posting obsolete, but that’s another issue) only after legal has set out rules and regulations that govern the use of social media within the organization.
Social media needs to be accepted as a business process, and built into the legal system before you can begin to have the right conversations about what’s legally working and what’s not.
Don’t just try to cram a social media program into your existing legal structure. Push legal to update that legal structure to support your social media program. If it means making a separate argument for social media just for legal, so be it.
The important thing is to make legal an important part of the social media integration process of your organization from the get-go. Don’t wait until you reach your first hurdle.
It’s a different world out there as more people are tweeting, meeting and friending left and right. The explosion of social media has brought a lot of light to the online community for purposes beyond practical use. However, some people are very hesitant to get involved because they are wary of sharing personal information.
Any internet user should definitely be smart about what information they are displaying, but to cite a great point from a fellow social media user, Mattan Ingram, there is a difference between privacy and security. Before you put up the paranoia guard, there are a few things to keep in mind:
You get what you put into social media
If new media is being used solely for purposes that the general public is not interested in, then it’s not as much of a concern that you will be “discovered” and “passed on”.
Viral marketing is only really successful if many links on the communication chain are interested in passing the information on. If someone is too paranoid to be followed by or chat with a stranger on Twitter, then it will be impossible for them to really understand and utilize social media effectively because that is the beauty of social media. The rise of social media increases open two-way communication. As Mattan said,
“The more transparent society is, the better and healthier it will be. We just have to get through the adjustment period. Transparency is not just top down, Big Brother style. It goes both ways.”
This applies to many areas, from consumer-business relationships to government-citizen relationships. The paranoid resisters are actually the ones that could benefit the most from social media; yes by putting up a profile on Facebook, you allow others a snapshot into your life, but in turn you’re also allowed access to theirs. Again, this can apply to individuals, businesses, or government.
We are not lost behind the computer screen. You still have your identity and it is an extension of your being
In a different vein, some people use social media interactions to hide behind a computer screen and act in a completely inappropriate fashion…Ever read YouTube video comments? It’s best not to if you want to keep faith in mankind. To be honest, many of these people probably would never say those things face-to-face, but for some reason have a really nasty internet alter ego.
Be it comments on other peoples’ blogs, YouTube videos, or other opinions, some people really take their comments to the level of just blatantly offensive. This deters a lot of people from using social media because they just don’t want to deal with arrogant rude people, or are afraid then of voicing their own valuable opinions.
Now with more streamlining, such as Facebook Connect, where a Facebook user can use their account to log in to other 3rd party websites, instead of making a separate one for that site, our identities are following us online. This may again strike a note of paranoia in some, but if you think about it, it could actually make the internet community closer and safer.
Of course there will always be weirdos, people who make multiple fake accounts, hackers, etc, but isn’t that say the same for face to face interactions? There will always be people who cut you in line, people with road rage, criminals, etc., but as long as you are smart with what information is put online, just the same way you lock your car door, then we can continue to be comfortable in the online community. For example, if you are reading a review on Citysearch, it has more merit when you can see their Facebook profile and know there is a real person behind it, even if it is a stranger. It eliminates the internet unknown, which is what strikes fear in some.
Where does this leave social media?
While not everyone is on board, there are plenty of people who see new media and internet services as an opportunity for information and positive communication. I consider E-mail, Instant Messaging, and other internet based communication as an opportunity to think about what you say before you open your mouth, instead of saying something completely distasteful, and not having to deal with repercussions, or anyone seeing who the person behind the screen is.
I must say that opinions are great. I like when people don’t agree with me because that is the basis of a good conversation (read: conversation, not a YouTube comment battle). However, when people take disagreements out of context and make personal insults, they are not going to get anything of value from their social media presence, and will also deter others from interacting.
Even though social media is being stunted by two angles, paranoia and terrorizing others, by nature, social media is working on breaking down these barriers. Paranoia is being resolved as more people begin to see that these platforms are used for listening to others, gaining insight/opinions, and communicating with people they normally wouldn’t. Online bullying is being battled inadvertently by creating more ties between different internet platforms. There will always be some resistance, but ironically it could be that as social media grows, it has the potential to resolve some of the current oppositions.
How do you feel about social media? Have you embraced it yet? How can we help make the online community more constructive? Please feel free to share thoughts, comments, ideas.
I was talking to someone last week about the focus of her firm, and she said to me “We don’t really do word-of-mouth marketing, right now we’re into viral marketing.” It was one of those moments where you stop and think you missed something huge somewhere along the lines.
Word of mouth: The act of consumers providing information to other consumers.
Word of mouth marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications.
Viral Marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.
The key word here is “exponential.” The uptake of the marketing message is large and fast. But it is still done by creating enough of a reason for people to spread that message themselves via consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communication.
For some reading this, it may seem mundane. But when you’re a professional in the field, out talking about what your company does, these distinctions are important. I should have heard from the woman talking about her firm “We do WOM marketing, specifically viral marketing.” Not one or the other.
While definitions may sometimes be tedious, they are still useful, if not necessary, to make distinctions, define functions and set industry standards.
Since we’re on the topic of WOM, the image above is WOMMA’s new logo, which I think is really great, so I figured I’d spread the word
What are some definitions you’re confused about? Some you think need more refining? Ones you see misused often?
I was having a Twitter conversation late last week with Conner McCall about the definition of Twitter. Is it social networking? Is it a social network? I had asked:
“Twitter – Social Network? Still just microblogging? Somewhere in between?”
Conner wrote a follow-up post on the topic, in which he brought up some good points about why defining Twitter just shouldn’t happen.
Under most circumstances, I too shy away from defining and corralling social media tools into categories. Honestly, what’s the point sometimes?
However, I’m involved in some research through DigiActive concerning the use of digital tools in activism efforts around the world. When it came time to coding qualitative data on how people use their mobile phones for their advocacy work, I had separated out Twitter from all of the other social networks such as Facebook.
While going over the survey coding with the research team, someone suggested that several of the responses get combined in some way, and one of those ways was to lump Twitter in with the social networks. In fact, it was more like “Twitter is a social network so let’s put it in there.”
I really needed to push back on this because I see some key differences between the two, at least in terms of this project. Firstly though, some important similarities:
One-to-many communication
Everything is public within your “network”
Information/data sharing
Aside from those major similarities, there are some differences that are too important to overlook for the purposes of trying to define how people use these tools to disseminate information and communicate with people.
In Conner’s thought process came one of the very reasons I needed to have a definition of Twitter. He said:
“It’s a free eco-system that allows you to talk about what you want, but by limiting you to 140 characters it keeps conversations clean and neat. E-mail, instant message, and social networks will all be around for a long time, but you get messages that take minutes to read where Twitter’s messages take seconds. This enforced brevity let’s you interact with a lot more people on a daily basis. Twitter just takes online communication and adds what events like Ignite add to presentations.”
It’s this quick, one-time communication aspect of Twitter that makes it very different than some of the longer-standing ways in which people interact on places like Facebook. You can have months-long campaigns on Facebook, where you gather fans and advocates for your cause. Or you can share photos or videos that can still be top-of-mind (read: in the first two pages of your friends’ Stream) the next day or several days. The interaction with information on a platform like Facebook is much more dynamic than it is on a platform like Twitter.
Twitter, on the other hand, is done-and-done. Information is disseminated real time, and often forgotten after that. This comes into play in any sort of activism effort because the length of time that Twitter is really useful is often much shorter than on social networks, and the reason that Twitter is used is usually much different than the reasons that Facebook is used.
Additionally, “this forced brevity [that] let’s you interact with a lot more people on a daily [or hourly] basis” is one of the reasons why people will use Twitter over social networks to mobilize efforts. Such was (sort of) the case in the Moldovan protests last month (note: the Twitter aspect of these protests was, in my opinion, overblown by much of the media).
The one tough thing about this question is that I’m not necessarily in disagreement with calling Twitter a social network. It is a network of people that you interact with socially, through social media (whatever that means), which is, at a high-level, what happens on Facebook and other “social networks.” I have a problem bunching them together when you get into the specifics of how those social networks work at a functional level.
In closing, while I like to also leave thing undefined a lot of the times and agree, for the most part, with Conner when he says that Twitter has no rules, there are times when the distinctions between these tools, like any set of tools, need to be highlighted. And usually these functional distinctions translate into at least small conceptual distinctions as well.
I would love to know your thoughts on how you might define social networks, or how you would make the distinction between Twitter and what everyone else considers social networks, or what you think about the whole definition thing in general!
Shoestring Magazine has had a fair amount of success using social media while they bootstrap their business. They ask the panelists a few questions about maximizing their resources (mainly people) and how to best expand into other geographies. They also get some feedback on their Facebook page.
Please feel free to give Shoestring further advice in the comments section!
Specific Question from Shoestring:
“We know how to best use social media, and are often asked to consult other companies / give tutorials, but the main thing we haven’t been able to figure out is how to maximize our bandwith as a two-person operation. We know social media works, but it can be a full-time job, and to do it really well takes us away from our mission critical day-to-day operations. How can we best streamline or lifehack our social media tasks without losing the genuine, human side of social media interaction, other than using our freelance base?”
Amy is dedicated to supporting and educating nonprofits and the progressive social change sector about evolving technologies that cultivate and engage communities. Her passion is in connecting nonprofits with new media technologies, watching the field of nptech evolve, and having conversations about where we can go next while still getting everyone on board with what we have already. Much of her work in the US was based out of Portland, OR. She’s currently located in London, UK, and finding it a great opportunity to continue engaging with the US but look at social change projects and the work of nonprofit organizations on a more global scale.
Julie Soforenko, Marketing and Outreach Coordinator of ACCION USA
Our panelists give Julie some valuable feedback on the social media strategy for ACCION. Please add your own advice for her if you’d like!
Julie’s general questions:
Starting the Conversation
1. How do we know what resonates with our audience?
2. How do we start engaging our clients and the public in an online dialogue?
a. Nobody is discussing us online
3. How do we differentiate ourselves amidst so many organizations vying for attention online?
Choosing the Tools
4. What are the top 3 most effective social media marketing tools?
5. How do we stay current on new web-based marketing tools?
6. How can we decide which tools are best-suited to our organization and its goals?
7. How can we effectively market to Hispanic populations on the internet? What are some examples of Web 2.0 marketing within the Spanish-speaking community?
Analytics
8. What are the best analytics tools?
9. What are the best tools to track where we are being talked about online?
10. Are there easy methods to track social media ROI?
Tying It Together
11. How do we align web 2.0 strategies with our basic web marketing strategies?
12. Is our website eye-catching?
13. How do we build worth-while social media relationships?
a. With our potential clients
b. With the leaders in the industry active in social media
Panelist responses:
Joe: You have money for small businesses and no one’s talking about you? … For low and moderate income business owners, you might be better off with an SMS campaign. In other countries, the low income cohorts respond most strongly to SMS campaigns.
Gradon: The photo contest idea, by having people take photos in front of their favorite small businesses, is a great idea, but you want to have an audience first – asking them to upload to Flickr and tag it with XYZ. Flickr is better suited to that than your own site would be.
Raj Melville: If someone opening a small business isn’t on Twitter, you may wish to look elsewhere.
Julie: We know a lot of the people who get loans from us are online because they apply through our online lending platform.
Gradon: If they’re online and looking for a service, they’re on Google. And the reason to build compelling remarkable content on your blog is that it raises your prominence on search results, which helps customers find you.
Brian: Your website is good, but it’s lacking compelling remarkable content. … I’m not hot on podcasting; I’m hot on video.
Julie: The production values don’t have to be too high, right? Doesn’t have to be shiny?
Ken: Definitely not. At WBUR, we prioritize getting the content out there.
Our panelists give Sam some valuable feedback on the social media strategy for MCN. Please add your own advice for them if you’d like!
1) Facebook bridges many youth, but does it reach older generations as well and create bridges between generations? Are there more effective networks for doing this?
2) What are the parameters/limits of social media? When it comes to organizing for social and political change, what can’t social media do or replace? Will these parameters change in the next 5 to 10 years?
3) How can social media best be used to organize offline social action?
4) What makes Facebook and Twitter so popular? What traits from these sites can we utilize in making our own websites gain a lot of traffic and interactive participation?
5) How do we cross generational divides? I want to reach potential donors and mentors who are not students. How do we get out there?
6) How can we make MCNpartners.org addictive like Facebook and Twitter?
Panel Responses:
Ken: I think you want to make sure your blog is as good as it can be, with images, audio, video.
Joe: Don’t worry as much on the quality of the website, work on the blog.
Brian: Getting really good on the RSS, start commenting aggressively on their blogs with thoughtful comments.
Joe: We have the same issue, that people are one step removed from the people are affected. At Boston Medical Center, we talk about women, kids, and cancer. That’s the way into their hearts.
Brian: Facebook is going to solve your generational gap. More and more 30-to-50 somethings are jumping on.
Sam: How do we make a kick-ass blog?
Gradon: Social media itself can’t do anything. It’s just a tool.
Joe: Look at the blogs you go to, the ones you love. Check out problogger.net.
Brian: As Seth Godin says, you want your blog to be remarkable. Remark-able. Something people are remarking on, talking about.
Do you have any suggestions for Sam and Millenium Campus Network?
This past Thursday, the New Marketing Special Interest Group of TiE Boston put on an event that focused on how to think about and handle your marketing in a down economy. I’ve offered below a summary of the panel talk.
As I mentioned at the end of the event, I encourage anyone with questions left unanswered to start a discussion in the comments section.
Anything [in brackets] are either additions by myself (I tried to keep them very limited, and most of them are to keep you on track) and anything in italics are some key points that came through in the comments.
Key take aways:
It isn’t all about new media. It’s about creating the most effective marketing program which will involve components of new media alongside components of digital media and traditional media.
There was a large emphasis on doing your research. Find out where your customers are, how you solve their problems, and how to communicate that to them. You’ll get the most effective marketing campaigns if you do that process right.
New media allows you to use many inexpensive tools to reach your customer. You don’t need to have a huge budget to accomplish a lot using Web2.0 tools. It’s applicable in both the B2C and the B2B space.
The new form of marketing encourages engaging with your customer, and much of this is done online. Start conversations and join in discussions. At the very least, know where your brand is online and how it’s being portrayed.
Nurturing current customers is very helpful in an economy like this, and can be leveraged to your benefit.
Measurement of any any marketing program is not only incredibly important, but also very helpful when thinking about future marketing campaigns.
Discussion [Please note, this is not verbatim, and has been shortened to provide you with the up-front value]
Question: What are just a few words of wisdom that you have for looking at the current economy?
Altaf: Realize you’re in a down economy and face it. Look at your marketing spend and move forward.
Bob: There’s been a fundamental reset in the economy, but it’s also social and cultural. The way in which people are engaging in conversations is online. Develop content that attracts people to the brand. Remember that people don’t want to be marketed to.
Question: Customer and clients are probably flattening spending or spending less. As marketers, how do you adjust your message or engage customers when that’s an issue?
Ameeta: We’ve adjusted our marketing spend, it’s going to be higher, and we’ve got new hires. Now’s the time to gain mind-share and market-share. We certainly do new media, but we also do a lot of everything else.
Altaf: Try to understand what’s hurting your customers and clients, and adjust your services appropriately. This isn’t the time to cut spending. Marketing is muscle. To build a relationship over time, and then reduce your communications when times are tough is not the right mentality. Stay top of mind so when they’re ready to buy, you’re there. Look at your spend, see where you can best nurture these relationships. 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of customers, go for them.
Bob: You don’t need to be everywhere, just where your customers are and your prospects are. Figure out where are your customers gathering at, and focus there. Is what you’re offering useful to my potential customer? What’s the value to the end customer? Budgets come back, be accommodating and flexible, but do it in a way that you’re adjusting your scope, identifying what’s the most valuable immediately and focusing on that. Also, remember there are many different inexpensive tools out there.
Praveen: Your best customers will come from the ones you nurture the most. In any industry, it’s always more difficult to go out and find new customers, rather than nurturing your current ones… where can your marketing spend be most useful? Leverage existing relationships. You can control this through your marketing mix (new programs vs existing programs, offline vs digital, etc). It’s not just about new media, look at the entire picture, and the whole span of marketing program.
Ameeta: Lead nurturing works very well. There are some very good marketing automation systems that you can use to get the right content figured out. Track what your marketing programs are doing and really figure out how to allocate your resources on the most successful programs.
Bob: The closer you can get to the executive team, the stronger the relatinoship will be.
Altaf: Marketing automation system does very well.. you can track programs fully with a good CRM program.
Praveen: How do you invest? It’s about finding the appropriate individual and contacting them directly. Don’t downplay the value and effect of offline channels.
Bob: Where your customers are, what value-add can you provide. What’s resonating and what’s not?
Altaf: There are a variety of software solutions out there for all sorts of companies, big and small.
Question: What about product portfolios? Cutting products? Adjusting pricing? What are you hearing about? Something’s getting cut, what’s it going to be?
Bob: Expand your offering to fit the immediate business problems of your customers, diversify your portfolio and focus minimally on the long-term. Developing partnerships is also a way to go for some people.
Praveen: Figure out what your differentation strategy is. Look at your product mix, find where your customers are, and figure out how to channel your marketing to align with those needs. What do you customers want? Understand their voice and the process they go through to select a product. Target that.
Ameeta: Continually revisit your assumptions every six months or a year… where do you need to tweek or shift?
Altad: Diversification is a Catch 22. Some sectors are doing well, some are not. Luckily we were diversified: retail needs us, but we’re also not letting the financial sector go away. Who do you want to stick with? But diversification may take a lot of resources and expertise.
Bob: [On diversification] You can’t just go after the new shiny object and showcase an expertise you don’t have. Look at what your capabilities are and what can you offer that you haven’t shown your current or potential clients.
Praveen: In B2B, you really focus on an industry that’s not so mass market, so the way you structure your marketing plans can be very different. [Case study for B2B] One of our clients offered a collaboration tools to all of its Tier One customers to really develop that relationship. They can share information on new products that haven’t even been produced. That will pay itself off in leaps and bounds in this economy because you’re providing them access to info that they can use to build next generation of products [while developing stronger, long-lasting relationships.]
Bob: That process is also invaluable to you because you understand better what’s important on the ground floor.
Ameeta: Partnerships can really help. New markets take time and effort, so look for complimentary marketing.
Question: Branding and market share. When you have a down economy, you can be a turtle, or you can buy yourself market share. We all know you should do the latter, but how? Do you identify new partners and markets? What are some new strategies?
Ameeta: Just as you go back to customers first, and similarly partners, check who you’ve engaged with in the last year or so and gotten traction from, and decide if you can approach them first. Can you introduce new product or get into a new market together. Find out what you can do more easily.
Altaf: The common philosophy is t just try to keep the lights on and get through 2009… but for others, this is the time to do more prospecting. There are great data modelling tools you can use to look at your customers and identify what makes them great, then see if you can find more like them. Develop a strategy to go after these folks. Branding isn’t enough. You can’t expect your message is going to stick in such an economy. When your list [of prospects] is wrong, nothing else matters. So identify customer segment well.
Ameta: Go after your customers in the most inexpensive and creative ways. Using things like guerrilla marketing and new media can give small companies a great presence on the web.
Bob: Develop education [content] for your client base and potential client base. Do a series on interviewing an expert in field to showcase the benefit of your product. Do it with a regular camera, get it up, get it out there. Develop content. Find experts in your company to develop that expertise. It doesn’t need to be an eBook, but make sure it’s spreadable and sharable.
Altaf: A lot of companies think branding means spending a lot of money. [Case study for inexpensive branding programs] Disney was given a huge budget, and instead hired seven bloggers, gave them exclusive access to behind-the-scenes information to blog about before “launch” and then let them spread the information along. [If anyone has any direct links to this case study, please pass them along]. You don’t need a huge budget for this type of marketing.
Bob: Yes, they spent their time creating valuable content.
Praveen: New media can play a really good part in this process. One thing new media does is levels the playing field. It doesn’t matter if you’re huge or teensy. It gives you a leg up if you do it correctly within a small company.
Bob: Even print editions are getting online, sometimes more of the value is coming from comments section, which allows for conversation.
Q: Even within small companies there may be different views. Give a two sentence description and what value you provide, be as clear as possibile, for when your describing. In an entrepreneurial environment, with some people seeing things differently, is it that they’re defining the problems differently? How can you manage the different veiwpoints in-house? Assuming the brand is strong external, what if internal brand isn’t so strong? [Combination of moderator question and question from the audience]
Praveen: We’re all in the business of providing value: you define the need, and how you fulfill it. It’s such a fundamental question to answer. When you communicate that externally, it needs to come from a very defined set of people. Twitter is a prime example of this… many companies have dedicated professionals. This is more of a business strategy discussion.
Bob: IBM is a good example of this: there are so many services, but they do a really good job of keeping the same brand across this.
Praveen: What new media does is it creates the challenge of “guerilla marketing”…. other individuals can take your brand name into channels and do what they will with it. Understand who those people are outside the company [whether they're users, ex-users, competitors etc] and how they’re communicating the brand.
Bob: It’s not a broadcast. You can get an amazing amount done without having a blog or website or anything, just by engaging in conversation online.
Ak: If you’re small, and lucky enough to have a customer or two, ask them why they worked with you. Take that information and use it.
Ameeta: Your customers can sell for you.
Question: Your customers ask about ROI, prove it to us. What do you say?
Bob: Sales, at the end of the day, is the ultimate ROI, but along the way, you evaluate what you need to measure. Make your goals, and determine how to measure them in the beginnging.
Altaf: Analytics and ROI are very useful and important. What do you attribute the sale to? Matchback analysis [simply put, figuring out where the end sale "came from"] is a tricky subject. What can help you or go a long way? If you can cookie your prospects (1st or 3rd party), and you know where they’re going, you can get a lot of information. That’s the type of ROI that I would take back to C-level executives: “These are channels that are helping towards the sale.”
Praveen: Think about it as entire marketing channel advertising. How can you build compaigns that cut across these tools? Which tool is required for particular campaign?
Bob: Get access to clients analytics. Not necessarily about where you think you want to go.
Praveen: You want to be careful, attribution across different channels is almost a pipedream. Connecting the activities in your campaign across a given period of time is great, but it’s difficult to do over the long-term.
Ameeta: Sometime time gets stretched over 6-9 months. Profile your ideal customera and figure our how you’re going to reach them. If you get that down, you’re going to get better ROI because you’re reaching the right people.
Bob: What’s the big critical barrier to get into the B2B space? Your customers are not asking questions about you. [Client case study] We recommended that every quarter, their client company round-up their customers, and they have conversations every quarter with them. All they did in their reports was tell the story about the engagement with the customer and what the critical factors were to reaching them.
Question: I want to hit new media, digital media (email marketing, webmarketing) and traditional media. How are can these be used most efficiently?
Altaf: When people think of email marketing, they think of batch and blast. What this means is that it’s on your timetable, not their timetable. There are many missed opportunities in this approach. We like to think of “drip marketing automation“. When someone signs up, do you have a process that goes out, and engages them with a further “nurture series” to follow up on what they’ve proved to be interested in [instead of simply hitting them with the next "batch"]. If you give them a 30-day trial, nurture that 30-days! It gives you much better open rates, an d great ROI.
Ameeta: Email marketing needs to be part of a concerted portfolio and broken out to what people are interested in. Webinars work well…. for initial interest. You need to break it out to get real, lasting interest. We don’t just do something that’s pure new media or digital…. it’s a mix. If we do a direct mailing, we spend a lot of time developing the right list and we’ve had huge success rates by doing that.
Praveen: I like to think of Social Media Optimization. It’s a channel in it’s own right. Create your brand in various social media channels, connect the information across the board with their partners. Look beyond personal networking, and think about company networking. Build link pages. These pages can drive traffic to your site. Invest the time to build branded pages across platforms and increase the number of linked pages coming into your site. Use new media as a platform to humanize your product so consumers can connect with you.
Bob: Have an opportunity to have a real engagement and conversation around issues. 1) Listen! Do searches, read converastions, then engage. 2) Anything you’re doing from a traditional standpoint, see if you can socialize it. Get it out there.. It’s not about broadcasting! It’s about honest conversation.
Altaf: A lot of companies put their best material behind lock and key. Realize what you can give away for free. [reference to World Wide Rave, by David Meerman Scott]
Question from audience: What do you do if the decision-makers don’t embrace the new media technology?
Bob: Tell them that their buyers are online. Google likes Web2.0, influence it.
Praveen: [BU Case Study] BU was finding their normal marketing channels (radio, newspaper) saturated with every other business school in the area. So they took out an ad that directed readers to their online services, and offered there a series of testimonials from several prominent BU MBA graduates as a “discussion.” It was wildly successful.
Kate: Connect the concept to marketing. Many people think of new media as a separate, new thing and that scares them. When you relate it directly to marketing (it is marketing!) and communicate as a new tool set to enhance marketing, people start to get it more.
What were some of your takeaways? Was anything left unanswered for you? How does your company deal with marketing in a down economy?
We talked a little bit today at SMB15 about getting over legal hurdles within a company in order to use social media, and how to convince decision-makers – the legal department – that it’s worth it.![[Bloglines]](http://www.othersidegroup.com/adcomments/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
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It’s a different world out there as more people are tweeting, meeting and friending left and right. The explosion of social media has brought a lot of light to the online community for purposes beyond practical use. However, some people are very hesitant to get involved because they are wary of sharing personal information.
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