Why I Love StumbleUpon

A part from the fact that StumbleUpon is by far hands down the number one most important source to find quality content online right now, it is a GREAT traffic referral tool.
In fact, it drives more traffic referrals than any other social media site.

As an online marketer we all know that a Facebook post or needless to say a Tweet has an extremely short life span. A tweet lives for a few minutes, Twitter is fast, and I keep repeating the phrase that my ex-boss once told me "Twitter should be what CNN uses in their tag line, Be The First To Know".
Facebook have their own lovely alogithm that is supported by several likes, your interaction history with each user, time of posting e.t.c. A Facebook post may live for a few hours.
But after 24 hours your post is far down on any users newsfeed.
On StumbleUpon it keeps travelling.
A page shared on StumbleUpon has after 400 hours just gained half of the engagement it will ever get. A Facebook post reaches that point after about 3 hours.
2,5 million webpages are added each month to StumbleUpon. I personally added 15 in the last hour. That's the effect SU has on you, it makes you stick around, it's sticky, it's good.
Check out the infographic for yourself and install the browser toolbar and start adding your favourite webpages and blog posts!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/blog/the-lifecycle-of-a-web-page-on-stumbleupon

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How To Become Your Customers Friend

It has to make sense. We can't run around trying to track every single Key Performance Indicator that we can extract from Social Media, in a desperate attempt to justify it's use. It's already justified.
When social media blew up a couple of years ago, everyone thought it was free. Now I think it's safe to say that most executives have realized it's NOT free.
Qualified manpower, applications for your fan page, blog tools, prizes for contests and monitoring tools all ads up.

It's a swift of doing business. It shouldn't be treated as normal business, cus it's simply not.
In traditional business you pay 10 euros for marketing and plan on getting 20 back within a short period of time.
Social media is first of all a complete change of mentality that very few have yet understood. Almost a type of friendship. Like us, belong to us, follow us, check in with us...For what?
The easy way would say, for building a base of people to blast your marketing at.
The different way of doing business model would say - To create a bond. To be human. To get into their lives and have them let you be a part of theirs.

When we make friends we are humble. We listen to our friends, we don't yell. We invite them for a coffee, and in return they invite us back next time. If they treat us well we invite them for dinner at our house and when they need our help, we are by their side.
Friendship is not about exploiting eachother, trying to get the best and most out of the other person.
And friendship IS a win-win deal at the end.
This is what you want to ashieve as a brand doing business in a new and innovative way. You want to get invited to your customers home (their Facebook wall or Twitter feed), you want them to have your back and be loyal when a competitor offers them a better price. You want them to genuinely like you. Not change you for the first best option.
How do you do that? Be genuin, be nice, don't rush for the sale, be human, always over perform and happily surprise your customer, apologize if you mess up...

A KPI should be Online Reputation Management. How are people talking about us online?
A KPI should be engagement metrics, how are people sharing our content online?
A KPI should be referal traffic to your hub (website)
A KPI should be returning customers.

The sales come later, and maybe they´re not even direct sales. People are 71% more likely to purchase based on social media referrals. Maybe a person checks you out on twitter and 3 days later makes a sale because they had you in the back of your head, they were familiare with you already.

So do you engagement, be a brand evangelist, create a champion persona of your brand online, and the rest will come...Tweet

Create A Facebook Strategy

Just finished another great bonus session from Social Media Success Summit. This one was called "Picking the right Facebook Strategy".
I just absolutely loved this session. A part of the reason why I keep consuming these sessions like I consume water every day is because it just makes so much sense. I'm all for sense making stuff, practical useful current things.
Jay Baer is the author of one of the best Social Media books I have ever read, The Now Revolution

I keep raving about this book and if I had to say one single reason it'd be the constant repetition throughout the book about creating the strategy BEFORE focusing on the tools.

That makes so much sense for me. Facebook and Twitter is what Jay calls "Rented Land". Do you as a company have any control if Facebook disappears for whatever reason? This is another reason why I always say the HOME base of your digital campaigns should be your website.

By the way, Jay also has a great blog http://www.convinceandconvert.com.

Anyway, lets get down to business here and talk Facebook strategy.

The biggest misconception of the world is that Facebook is free. Social Media is free, let's put an intern on handling our online property (because that's what it is, company property, although on rented land).
Is not free. It takes time. Time is money.
It takes time to plan, build and execute. It takes money to hire 3rd party consultants, create customized apps, responding to people and analyze the results.
How often do you update your company website? Not so often right? Now think about how often you are (or should) update and interact on Facebook.

So let's create a strategy!

Top 5 Tips from Jay:

• Know why you are on FB!
• Decide on a scoreboard. What is success to us?
• Focus first on "Likes" and custom tabs
• Create more content and more often
• Activate fans, don't collect them. Give people assignments, vote, buy, do a market research, answer a question...

Further more we should ask ourselves the following questions:

• Why are we doing this? How is having a Facebook page helping our company?

• Who is our audience? Who do we want to talk to? Is it customers, media, prospective or previous customers, competitors?

• What do we want them to do? What action are we trying to cause and how does that benefit the organization?

• How will we know if its working? If the CEO of your company asks you "So Jenny, how is this Facebook thing going?" What should I answer him?  What numbers do we use to make the case? THIS is something we need to establish BEFORE we get started. Because if not, how can we compare the results?

There are different strategies. Like I've mentioned in previous blog posts usually Sales, Awareness or Loyalty are the main points for your over all social media strategy.
When we look at creating a Facebook strategy we look at the following options:

1. Create awareness


Important:


- Newsfeed
-Ads

To create awareness on Facebook is to be in the Social Public Relations-business. The Like button is the most important thing simply because of the massive viral effect it gives you.
Creating a custom landing tab can double like rate according to many social media professionals.

Keep in mind that 95% of Facebook users use the Top New, not the Recent Post option.
The Top News is decided by the edge rank which takes in consideration things like:
Recency, The weight of the post, if someone comments or like on it, and then the score between you and the creator (how much have you interacted with the creator).
Your goal is to win the newsfeed. How? By the frequency of your publications, by thinking about the timing, spreading the posts out on nights and weekends, and most importantly create CONTENT that engages.
If you wanna post on weekends you can use tools like Hootsuite, SocialOomph, Objective Marketer. I have tried all three and personally prefer Hootsuite.

Use the like button on your webpage. For individual posts as well as on the top of the main page.

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook awareness strategy?

* How many monthly or daily active users do we have
* New likes
* Daily story feedback
* Daily Page activity (number of people interacting with your tabs and content)
* Visits from Facebook to your website/blog (use Google analytics)


2. Increase Sales

Important:

- Mix up calls to action and special offers into your newsfeed updates
- Use Fan-Only Offers ( one program you can use is Fanreveal look here to see how to use this program: How To Install Fan Reveal
- Add Direct Response and E-commerce options to your page (program Shoptab.net)
- Create a tab with signing up to newsletter This site provides you apps to do just that: http://northsocial.com

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook Sales Success Metric strategy?

* Sales and redemptions of offers
* Leads (how many filled out a form...)
* Conversation Rate (total fans divided in number of fans that took action)


3. Market research and Insight Generation

Almost all people on your fan page have already experienced your brand so this is a focused group of people that are already interested in your brand. Also keep in mind people love to share their opinion. Use this for your benefit.

You need to mix research with promotion. Don't over sell.
Remember that only 30% of consumers believe clicking the like button means "this company is allowed to market to me." Don't miss-use peoples newsfeed, it's very easy to Unlike your brand.

Important:
- Exclusive content and feedback.
- Engagement and Insight Apps
- Idea factory. Let your fans suggest ideas to the company for example.
- Gather feedback elsewhere and promote it on Facebook.

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook Market Research Success strategy?

* Daily story feedback for research questions
* Participation rate for polls/ apps
* Quality of ideas and insights
* Market research cost savings

4. Customer Service

Twitter is more well-known for CS but that doesnt mean you can't use Facebook for the same purpose.
Important here is to set customer service expectations. Tell them what hours you are there to answer, create possible discussion boards, Q&A tabs e.t.c
You can listen proactively. Kurrently is a tool that combines Facebook and Twitter listening, it's free and easy to use.

Something that not many companies do is to plan for worst-case scenario BEFORE the scenario actually takes place. Let's discuss openly about what we consider "The Crisis Of The Day" before it happens and what do we do when it happens, cus it will happen sooner or later. Maybe people gang up on your page and trash your content or a specific action for example.
Be clear about ground rules and communicate them on your Facebook page. Tell people what is OK and what is not. Then you can always go back and refer to the rules.
Provide a discussion outlet, maybe a specific tab. Then you can take angry wall-conversations off the wall and deal with them in the discussion tab instead.
If you delete posts, say so and explain why. Facebook has an option under edit page and moderation block-list where you can black list certain words and posts including those automatically get moved to the spam filter.

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook Customer Service strategy?

* Questions Answered/Resolved. How many problems did we solve?
* Customer Satisfaction Surveys. By phone or by email create a survey-follow up, what do people prefer?
* Customer Service Cost Savings

5. Increase Context & Relevancy

This is a bit more complicated and needs a bit of programming but it's totally do-able and will probably be done more and more.
Use Facebook's Rich Open Graph API to improve Experience on your other content
This is what we call: Influence Mining, Data Mining and Customization.
Amazon is a great example. You can actually connect your Facebook page with your amazon account and then get great birthday present tips for your friends based on what they have bought on Amazon.

Another interesting website is Likebutton.me which shows you your friends on Facebook and what content these friends have liked.

How can you use Facebook Data to Improve your content?
Here are some ideas. Blog Post Recommendations. If someone comes to your blog, can you program that based on what that person like on Facebook it automatically recommends 2 posts?
can we send out more relevant emails by using the same principle? Can we suggest How-To-Videos based on the specific interests of one client?

This sums up the session today and what I've gathered from it.
Have a good Tuesday folks!


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The GREAT Power of Twitter Search

Another world-class bonus session today with Guy Kawasaki. 

How To use Twitter As A Marketing Weapon


I knew about Twitter search long ago, but there are some fascinating tips and small magic things you can do to use it really really well.

Twitter Advance Search. A powerfool tool. Let's show some examples that I did by myself imagining myself working at different companies.

Let's say you are a coffee chain brand, let's say your name is Starbucks just for the sake of everyone being familiar with the name. Let's say you have your office in Barcelona and you want to find out what people are ASKING about your brand to be able to answer them and engage. Only in Barcelona though because lets invent you are launching a new product just in Bcn for one week. I know I know, not likely being Starbucks but hey, let's just pretend for a few minutes.

Or lets say you are IESE, one of the biggest business schools in Spain and you wanna know what people are asking you in Madrid.

Lets say you have a company that sells soap-operas in the afternoons on a special channel and you only wanna target housewives. This is done by Google Boolean Search which Guy also explains but I have yet to try it more to be able to talk and write about it.
Voila!









Or a language portal focusing on language classes in Germany! Remember the question mark if you are specifically looking for people asking a question.

Or lets say your name is Sephora and you wanna find out the questions surfacing in Madrid to be able to answer them. Simply pur Sephora near:Madrid within:50mi ? and voila!

What should I tweet about? This is a question many new Twitters are asking themselves. At a first glance Twitter makes sence for just very few people. For most of us it seems meaningless reading about your neighbor who bought a new car.

Tweet about interesting stuff for your audience. Sure, if your name is Madonna, it's highy interesting to tweet that you got a new BMW yesterday but if you're a normal person you probably wont get many retweets on that one.
Guy tells us that what is interesting for normal people are good, useful and fun links.
If you are lets say Sephora you first need to decide what's the over all objective. Is it Sales, Loyalty or Awareness. Maybe it's loyalty and you wanna place Twitter within Customer Service, that would make sense.  Or maybe you wanna use it as a channel to communicate the latest hot tips and advices regarding makeup, perfumes, celebrities wearing Sephora mascara e.t.c.
Basically stuff that interests your target group. Let's say women 25-34 years old.
What we could further do as a marketer of Sephora is to use Forrester's tool to calculate our audiences social tech profile. Let's say we are Sephora in the U.K and our target group are women 25-34 years old. This lets us see that most of them are joiners and spectators. Joiners are fairly active people so here you could consider social media contests where you ask a person to like your page or leave your email address. Since you seem to have lots of spectators too, it'd probably be a good idea to include nice visual content that engages the potential client.

If you are a famous business school you may post links about students who have graduated and succeeded or about the latest government grants that future students could take advantage of.

People, Important note. This takes practice! Try Try Test and test again.

Cheers and Happy Monday!Tweet

How To Build A Successful Social Media Strategy

I've attended several sessions of the Social Media Success Summit 2011 and I have many take-aways, a note-book full of notes as well as lists of new tools to try out and people to contact on Twitter.

I also recently read an amazing book, The Now Revolution and one of the 2 writers, Jay Baer did a bonus session for the #SMSS2011 that was pretty much a summary of the book.
The session was called "8 steps to creating a winning social media strategy" and the points and slides are so straight on, 100% true and valuable that to literally remember every single word I need to write down my bullet points from this presentation.

First of all, it's what you do with social media that counts, not whether you have a FB page or Twitter account. Maybe in Spain this is extra interesting considering so many brands now are in panick mood "WE NEED TO BE ON FACEBOOK".
Important to remember too is that the tools ALWAYS change. We have no idea what will be the biggest social media platform in 3 years from now. Better not focus our strategy on Facebook or Twitter but instead how to create a scalable and sustainable social media plan.

Build an good team. A cross functional team from every corner of your company. Involve the most passionate people, to know and do social media well you need to genuinely love it.

Listen
Find the conversations taking place about your brand. What's being said about you AND your competitors? What's the sentiment? Do people love or hate your brand? What's the share of voice? Do we find 100 conversations about yoghurt where 43 of them are about our yoghurt company and 57 are about YoPlait, well then we have a 43% share of voice.
How? Google search or Social Mention are two ways I have personally used this.
Who is talking? Does Mr X who talk bad about us have 4 or 4 million followers? This makes a big change.
How? I use Exportly and I'm planning on trying out 1Influence soon too.
Where are people talking? Forums? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs?
How, millions of tools, everything from expensive professional tools like Radian6 and Meltwater Buzz to medium size tools like Trendrr or Exportly or many of the free tools like technorati, blogpulse, socialmention or icerocket.

What's the point?

I have written about this before but I will repeat. Are we trying to create Awarness for our company or product?
Are we trying to increase Sales?
Or, are we trying to increase the orders of our existing customers and make people come back to us? Then Loyalty is our point.

Jay tells us to pick ONE and focus on that point.

Now, who is our audience?
If we are trying to increase awareness then we should probably focus on the people who may have heard of our brand or maybe not even that. People who have yet to make a purchase. These people need to be influenced, informed and we need to wake up the curiosity within them to check us out more.
If Sales is what we are going after then we should try to find the audience who have possibly made a purchase or two and introduce more products to them.
And if Loyalty is what we are interested in here then we should find the brand advocates and contact with them.
The secret is to move the unaware people to the awareness and those to sales and then make them into loyal customers.

How do our audience use SM?
Are they creators? Bloggers, status updaters, critics, collectors, joiners and spectators (largest groups) or inactive people?
This helps us know where we should look on the web.
This tool is great to learn What's The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?
http://forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html
Why is this important to know? Well if you live in Japan and you wanna market to 55 year old women, then this too can tell you they are probably NOT creators which means it will make ZERO sence to launch a video contest asking the customers to create a video.
We have to give our audience the appropriate social media assignment.



Next thing Jay talks about is another thing I have mentioned many times and I will be happy to repeat this.
Don't talk about your product all the time. Brands talk way too much about themselves and my newsfeed and yours is being bombarded with mk messages.
Instead find a way to communicate the soul of the company, humanity, storytelling and bring some type of extra value to your customers.
The fight for attention on SM is fierce already, imagine what it will be like in 2 years from now when every company will have a social media presence...

Select Outposts
WHERE are you going to participate. Facebook? Blog? Youtube? Twitter? Linked In?
Select a home base, usually this is the website.
The goal should be to move people from outposts to home base.

Success metrics
If Awareness is our point then total mentions, Facebook fans or search volume could be some metrics.
if Loyalty is what we're looking for then we could see how customer service service through twitter is functioning and we will be measuring how many customers return to us.
If Sales would be the objective then metrics such as redemptions from exclusive offers through Twitter could be interesting to measure.Tweet

Social Media ROI

People keep discussing this subject, yes or no, is there a measurable ROI on your social media activities.
Can you measure the effect? Yes.
Is there a concrete ROI? Sometimes yes, most of the time (RIGHT NOW!) no. But I have no doubt in the world that within a year or two most businesses will see a clear ROI on their SM efforts.
The main problem at the moment I think is that most companies don´t really know what they´re doing, and why they´re doing it. Their competitor is in SM so they should be too, and so the friend of the cousin of the owner has a FB page so he can do it right?

Lets be frank, with this approach, it will be almost impossible to have any ROI, simply because you don´t know what you´re measuring and what to benchmark against.

A clear example of Social Media resulting in cost savings is when it´s used as customer service. Reduction in call center activity is absolutely a proven fact.
Media impressions (Burger King), increased product awareness (Ford Fiesta), physical sales through Twitter or through F-Commerce (DELL) are some other examples of Social Media ROI.
Sure these are big businesses with a large existing community. If you are a smaller company you will need to have lots of patience and think long term.

But still the situation is what it is. Most companies are not investing appropriately and by no means should they - when they don´t know where, how and why.

Education is one important part of this. Try and fail is another.
Companies looking for 10 years of experience in their social media person will have a hard time finding that person, simply because we are all relatively new in this area. But make no mistake, there is a HUGE difference in hiring a "community manager" who knows or do doesn´t know.
First thing ALWAYS have to be about listening. Companies talk to much. Find influensers, people who have a large following and who represents trust. If you can manage to enter into the Trustosphere you have a huge advantage.
Credible people within your area might wanna guest blog for you? That creates an added value for the client which is the ultimate goal here. We have to offer something extra, some reason for a person to come back to our Facebook page or website. More than 80% of the people never return to a fan page after they have pushed the like button.

Evaluating where is the customer. On Facebook? Blogs? Twitter? Is he/she a video consumer? Then comes the Goals. How much money can we save on customer service? How much can we increase sales through online activities? Can we increase the average size order or build more loyalty among our customers? Can we build awareness about our product through a cool application on Facebook or create momentum around an event through a live Twitter chat?
Then comes the planning... Much much later comes the actual posts on Facebook, Blogs or Twitter...
No ONE strategy fits every company. The ROI has to be evaluated case by case.

A lot of the information in this video is not new anymore but I found it good anyway.

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