Social Media Logos Offline Make No Sense Without a CTA!

A few days ago I was on the bus, sitting by the window, contemplating about the fact that I kept seeing Facebook, Twitter and Youtube logos in every other store window.
Then I thought to myself, isn´t it by now OBVIOUS that every store is on Facebook? Then why post the sign in the window? More importantly, why post a sign without any call to action?

Why would I surf over to your Bershka or Mango page, unless I have any incentive to do so? Are you really that cool and impressive making it worth the effort?

I´m tired of brands who expect people to be searching for them on Facebook because to follow them should be the dream of every persons life.
I'd rather say it's annoying these days to follow brands considering the massive amount of spam that I receive. I un-follow more brands than ever now days. In fact, it reminds me a little bit about 10 years ago when I started opting out on email lists. Now, the few email lists that I'm on, they are carefully sorted into lists and some of them go straight to Spam.

I read a kick ass article yesterday that I encourage all of you to read: Can you name 3 reasons I should give rip about your facebook business page

Can you? Because to me it seems the vast majority of Facebook pages don't give me any specific reason that makes it imperative to follow their updates.

I can find the new Mango collection on their website, I get the fashion news in my Google reader, I got a discount coupon from the newspaper last week...

The same thing goes for the TV ads, big street posters or any type of ad that is not on the web.
Keep in mind it's not a small but rather a HUGE step for me to go from that store, home, keeping in mind the ad, turning on my computer, and searching for your brand on Facebook.
You need to give me a tease to do that.
It's completely different in my opinion, the fact of whether or not to place a Like button or a Twitter symbol on your website, in your newsletter or in your email signature. That's a no-brainer because it's such a small and simple step to the user. It's ONE CLICK versus me sitting on that bus and actively entering a browser typing in your brand name, probably finding 10 pages with your name on it and entering into the right one. Makes me tired just thinking about it...

I'm not going to be all negative here and would like to mention the great surprise that I found at the exit of sports store Decathlon:

This QR code leads me directly to their Facebook page, doesn't really give me anything exclusive, but I do give them credit for at least jumping into the water, doing SOMETHING out of the ordinary plain thumbs-up sign at the exit.

Like Pam is telling us in her article, marketers should take a look at how their social media presence really ads something to it´s potential fans day-to-day life's.

This may seem easy at first but it's really not. Especially in today's integrated marketing campaigns where everything is everywhere.
I encourage you to try to get 3 answers on Pam's list.

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8 Keys For A Successful Social Media Strategy

People talk a lot about social media strategy these days.
It's not enough anymore to just have a community manager answering posts, uploading photos and tweeting. We need a plan, we need stability, we need a roadmap of where we want to end up.

Internal/External

The most common type of social media engagement is the external one. Facebook fans, Twitter followers and Blog posts all in its honor, but to build a house you need a steady base to build on.
Investing in social media should be a long term project and internal support is imperative.
Make sure your company understands social media before diving into it. Further more, make sure you have a commitment from people to treat social media as a priority.

Resources

This point is very related to my first point.
While finding out what support you have in your company, don't forget to see what internal resources you have.
Do you have access to a programmer who can help you make changes to your company blog? Do you have a designer that can once in a while help you out with transforming a photo in Photoshop and make it 10 times more sharable? Do you have people working in customer service that can help  out with your Twitter support? Is there any writer savvy team members who would love to contribute to the blog?
Make a list of what resources you have in-house to later see what you need to go and find elsewhere.

Goals and objectives

I may be repetitive but the goals are a fundamental part of your strategy.
Is Twitter really right for your company? Does it make more sense to be on Pinterest?
What are you trying to achieve? Brand awareness, increase sales, loyalty campaigns, cost savings the list can be as long as you decide it to be.
I have been at companies where the main goal was brand awareness. Then a great content strategy, continuous engagement and contests online were important parts.
I have also been at companies who's sole objective was to increase sales. Then exclusive social media offers, a steady blog post with various integrated sales pitches and actively reaching out to potential customers were all parts of our day to day actions.
Goals are also necessary to establish KPI's. How are you going to measure your efforts? What is social media success to your company?

Learn from others

Social media is not new any more. There are thousands of case studys out there, so take some time to check out your competitors, benchmark well and read, try, learn, adapt and try again.

Location

Is your company a local store, a national enterprise or does it have an international presence?
Do you have representatives in other countries?
Do you have CUSTOMERS all over the world?
How many "hubs" do you have (places to drive traffic to).
Sit down and consolidate the already existing material out there. Do you have several Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that need to be merged? What's going to be your communication language? Do you have access to local content that can support a local Facebook page?
It's important to understand that one model does not fit every company and think long and hard about what online presence you should have in different locations.
If you have a worldwide audience you may need to do some research on what the most popular networks and platforms are at your other locations. Although Facebook and Twitter are big platforms in most countries there are many niche communities in different countries that could be much better for your business.

Communications

The core of social media is communications. It's about a two-way communication with your customer, making that fan into a brand evangelist. But it all starts with a connection and some type of communication.
Social media can belong to your marketing department if you want but whether you want it or not, the communications department will (and should!) be involved. Now, when forming your social media strategy, make sure you find out how the flow of communication works in your company.
Social media should make communications easier, not harder. Yet many companies struggle with finding a smooth flow of communications in between departments. Social media is fast. If you take 1 hour longer to answer your customer than your competitor does, you may loose that customer. This means you can't go through 3 people to get an answer when a customer is calling. You need to have access to the express line to the responsible person who can help you get an answer.
Your responsible person should be a centric role in your company, not isolated into one department. He or she should have direct access to the heads of each department.


Relationships

Social media is also about creating relationships. Once you start working in a company with social media you should make a digital rollerdex and take note on important Twitter followers, interesting blogs and contact information. Fill up your excel sheet or google docs spread sheet as you go, file important tags so that you later can go and export a list of contacts from a certain segment when you need to get your brand new infographic, viral video project or press release out to the digital world.

Content strategy

If you are an IT company selling printers, maybe photos may not be the sexiest type of content. However, videos may be a perfect match considering the opportunity to make tutorials and create helful and meaningful content.
If you are a bakery making cupcakes, photos may be the ideal type of content and platforms such as Instagram may be great places to showcase your beautiful cupcakes, while LinkedIn may not fulfill that many objectives.
Think long about this point. Don't waste resources, time and money pushing out all types of content to all platforms just for the sake of it. Pinpoint where your customer is and what he/she appreciates.  How can you help your customer? How can you entertain him? How can you impress her?Tweet

Social Media Check List

I have my "Social Media Check-List". A list that I have handy whenever I talk to a company who's thinking about stepping into the world of social media. I use it in the beginning of a project, to get all the info I need to be able to execute the job as great as possible.

Without answers to these questions, social media is simply something a company wanna join just because the think they need to. Not really understanding why or how.

So lets start with the more strategical list that was posted in this article Social Media Measurement: Moving forward with the data and tools at hand

Is my organization and my executive management team ready for social media marketing and branding?
Does everyone treat social media as a strategic effort or as an offshoot of marketing or PR/communications?
Where in the organization will social media reside?
Will I be able to allocate sufficient budget to social media efforts in our company?
How will social media discipline be aligned with HR, Technology, Customer Service, Sales, etc.?
What tools and technologies will I need to implement social media campaigns?
Will ‘social’ also include ‘mobile’?
How will we integrated SoMe marketing campaigns with existing, more ‘traditional’ marketing efforts?
How much organizational training will we need to implement in integrating ‘social’ within our enterprise?
Are we going to use ‘social’ for advertising and PR/Communications? What about ‘disaster recovery’ and ‘reputation management’?

My list falls under the different categories: Goals, Policies, Products, Platforms, Content, Content Flow, Promotions and Legal.

Goals is a pretty obvious one, don't need to go into details there. Under policies fall for example Time limits to response and company tone.


Under Product falls Product priority, product managers and new launches.


Platforms include things like who's admin for what platform, how to create a post-schedule and how to differentiate content for different platforms.


Under Content and Content flow I've put what content is available, what department owns what content, contact people and who approves what type of content.


Legal includes all those aspects that touch the legal issues, client confidentiality, how to treat personal information such as email databases e.t.c...

These are must-have's for any company who's serious about growing a profitable good working social media organization.Tweet

The Actual Costs Of Social Media

18% of TV campaigns produce a positive return on investment. That just doesn't taste so well does it?
Social Media Cost and ROI

I remember when I briefly worked at Live Nation about 2 years ago. A scary experience that I haven´t even included on my CV since I ran away from there like a terrified cat just after 3 months.
I´m not gonna get into the details but basically I found myself in a company where thousands and thousands of euros were going to magazine ads while ZERO euros were going to social media campaigns.
It just didn´t fit me, a surprise to anyone? Didn´t think so.

This post is about what all of this stuff really costs. There are some very different opinions about this depending on who you ask.
Some people say it free, gratis, zero cost and a questionable ROI. They are mistaken.

A social media campaign CAN be exactly as expensive as an Audi TV commercial in prime time Superbowl channel 1. Or it can be extremely cheap and you can end up in the anti-prime-spot 5am on a tuesday on channel 754. It´s up to you!

If you look at This example of social media campaign costs you could easily be scared away. BUT keep in mind this is just for you to get an idea. Then you can pick whatever parts that fit your campaign best. All of this is definitely not necessary.

I just read an amazing book called The Now Revolution (already read it twice!) and an important chapter speaks about where you are on the Humanization Highway as a company entering into social media activities.





The first stop on the road is to start listening to what the people are saying about your brand. You can do that with various tools (free or paid-for tools) and that´s a whole other blog post speaking about that. Secondly is the interaction part. You decide you want to join the conversations, influence and steer some of the subjects that are being spoken about. Facilitate for people to do business with you.
Then comes the third step and thats when you are actually participating in an active, professional and social way. Creating a firm team to provide and create content, create stories, map out a social media marketing plan e.t.c.
The two first stops can be pretty cheap. The costs would basically be the time of a person to dedicate to the job and some basic tools to be able to pull the information you want.
The third step is far from free, but will undoubtedly bring you some type of ROI. Whether that be turning bad sentiment into good, selling a new product or creating a loyalty program and having customers return to you over and over again you will see something good coming out of it, and isn't that why we´re in business in the first place?

The biggest costs will probably be your own or employees time and graphic design/application costs. Oh and advertising of course. A Wildfire or Strutta campaign can easily cost you thousands of dollars but they also have free basic polls that can be a good start.
Start small and watch it grow. There is no reason to jump into the big swimming pool if you don´t know how to swim. Take it step by step.

Below is a link to an article talking more about this subject that I found interesting.
The cost of a Social Media CampaignTweet