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

Mid Manager Level Community Management

Found a great post about the new type of community manager. The picture below shows how a community manager should be connected to different departments of a company.
On the top line are the the support activities where the CM should be involved but more importantly we see on the lower line the Primary activities.
We clearly see the educational part where a CM should be closely in touch with HR to coordinate possible workshops communicate social activities within the company.

Corporate Culture refers to the Social Media Policy and the tone of voice that the company should stick to.

The tech department clearly is involved with developing apps for Facebook or smart phones. This department is an important one and should also be involved with installing the right tracking tools so that the campaigns can be measured.

Then we have Inbound Logistic where a bit of crisis planning and just general Issue Management have been placed.

Operations could include communication according to this picture and communication is clearly one of the most important departments for everything social media related. How do we coordinate internal and external communication and are we all on the same page?

Marketing and Sales. Together with Comm this is the other extra important department. Everything from how to transfer traditional marketing campaigns to Twitter messages or Youtube videos to everything that has to do with online advertising.

Lastly we have Service where according to this picture we find the community management, engagement and creating important strategic relationships with influencers and trend-setters.

http://www.edelmandigital.com/2011/05/18/the-new-community-manager-profile/

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Shop Directly On Facebook

More and more retailers are letting their customers shop directly from a specific "Shopping-tab" on their Facebook page.
"We need to go where our customers are" says one very intelligent gentleman in this article.
Brand invests about 10.000 USD for a customized e-shop from their Facebook page and publish some great offers in the news-feed and Whoppa! Magic is made.

To read the full article Click here!

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Awesome Social Media Chart

...by our forever loved Hubspot. You can find the full report here.

My favorite slides below.

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The Art of ENGAGING Posts

The reason why I am so passionate about social media marketing is first and foremost because its something that feels so close to my own natural behavior.
I've always believed that to sell something to someone you always have to start with them, not with yourself. Now, I think how do brands get to ME? How do I find out about exclusive offers, events and interesting happenings? Well it's not in magazines, rarely on TV and even more rarely through advertising OFFline. Instead it's while I'm surfing, it's through the Facebook newsfeed and through interesting Tweets.
Of course it's through connections offline too, friends having a glass of wine on a friday afternoon talking about this or that, sure that works too. But it almost always start OR end online.

I read an interesting article about how to create the perfect posts and it struck me that I think I very rarely go back to brand pages after I like them. I simply trust that they will get my attention through the Facebook newsfeed. And then some of them go ahead and screw up so heavily that I just feel the urge to share this link so that brands can stop writing a NOVEL in each post. Brands TALK to much.
Seriously, community managers and social media managers need to write short, sweet and engaging posts.
It's like when you receive an email from someone and as soon as you open it you see it's gonna take you a day to read it, what do you do? Put it on hold right? With a star next to it hoping to read it when "you have some time later". Sure that emails stays in the "too read" folder forever. It's now or never people.

We live in a fast information society. Information flows faster than ever before and the long, complicated, asking-me-to-fill-something-out stuff doesn't interest me. I wanna be engaged in a powerful, exciting and fast way. Why should I register to comment on a blog when it's so simple to just post through Facebook through the social plug-in?
Worth noting here too is that social media management is a 24/7 job and should be handled by a person who doesn't mind posting outside normal business hours for example. By doing so you may very well increase the engagement rate.

Below I have listed some examples of good and bad posts in my personal opinion.
Pay attention to the length, language and interaction rate.


When we're talking about NASA it's probable that the PHD students out there actually prefer this type of posts and the blonde ladies like myself just skip it. But come on, 21 likes? I think they could definitely do better than that. To me this is just Zzzz....
What do I want from NASA? I want the Did you know-type of questions. Exciting information about planets that I could have never imagined, black hole information that makes me go Wow, that is fascinating!

 Red Bull Bedroom Jam. Is this information interesting? To 3 people it seems...

 Here we go! Guess gives me something valuable for me, not for them. Also they communicate this i just a few words. It catches my attention.
This is a fun video teaching me to tie my turband (scarf) in different ways. Fun information to have right at the beginning of the summer. 316 likes. Not bad.

Expedia. To me this post is way too long. I get bored. Yes it has achieved 308 likes but if you compare it with the next post which has a clear value. Win a trip! and in much less words, this first post fades away pretty quickly.

Pepsi uses 8 words to achieve over 2000 likes and over 400 comments. Short, sweet and in a speaking casual language even including a smiley face. We don't want brands to talk to us. We wanna them to talk WITH us.

Who doesn't like Nutella? Simple post that makes me go straight to the kitchen to get my favorite jar in the whole world. Almost 4000 likes in 6 words.

Last example. Carnival Cruise Lines. If you compare these two posts it's pretty clear what works best. An engaging post including a question (and a PERSONAL one even!) gets over 1000 comments while the less engaging post only got 57.

The article about the art of creating the perfect post can be found here! 

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Key Mk Trends

Hubspot is one of the worlds best companies, allowing us to read and share this report. Big thanks to them! Here are my 9 favorite slides.
To read and download the full report Click here

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