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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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

New Facebook Insights

We Social Media Marketers are always looking for new, better and more efficient ways to measure our campaigns that we launch through platforms like Twitter, Youtube or Facebook to name a few.

Recently Facebook introduced a new version of Insights (Facebook’s own analytics package for fan pages). These are great news for us social marketers and just recently I attended a webinar hosted by Wildfireapp to get a better idea of what to expect from the new Insight.

The main goals with this update are to understand the performance of your page and learn what type of content really works.
The new dashboard is availible for all page admins, however if you’re more than one admin the one who accepted the first “test” may be the only one seing it. In my case I was the lucky one 

In the graph to the right you can first see the“Total number of fans” which is nothing new. But right next to this you will likely smile. “Friends of fans” represents the potential reach of your fan page. It’s the number of fans of the page AND the friends of your fans. In our case we have a potential reach of more than 2 million people.

Obviously it’s going to be hard to reach all of them unless you know the perfect formula to end up in the news feed for each one of your fans AND create such compelling content that all of them decide to interact with your page.

We move further to the right and see “People Talking About This” and this is a true engagement metric. This gives you the number of people who have interacted with your page, liked, commented, shared, checked in e.t.c in the last 7 days.
Last we see “Weekly total reach” which means the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with the page in the last 7 days.

If we scroll down a bit we´ll come to my favourite part. Here is the place to really see what resonates with your audience. Does a post that ends with a question generate more engagement than a post with a statement? Does your audience prefer videos or pictures?

The first metric I have highlighted here is “Reach”. It’s the number of unique people who’ve seen the post. So even if we have 10.000 fans it doesn’t mean that all of them are going to see our posts.
Secondly is the one I would pick as my absolute personal favourite, “Engaged users”. It’s the number of unique people who’ve engaged (clicked) on your post.
At the end of the day, this is what we should try increase as much as possible.
The number of fans means nothing if they just ignore our posts!

“Virality” is also interesting. Here we see the number of unique people who’ve created a story about the post as a percentage of the number of unique people who’ve seen it. This is a great place to compare different posts.

Let’s craft better posts!

My opinion is that this should help marketers to know better what works and what doesn’t work with their fans. This will help us craft more relevant and engaging content that will spark more activity and at the end hopefully we will manage to turn that activity into real business.

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The Essence Of Social Media

I was accused of not understanding the "essence" of social media the other day. Yepp that's right and I have never been so happy and proud of what should have been a negative comment in my life!
Why? Because it means I'm not the intern posting the flavor of the day cupcakes to a company blog anymore. I'm not anymore limited to explaining Social Media as something JUST intangible.
I'm also now capable of thinking in business, back-office and reality.

The person referred to me as thinking too much in business and not enough in the intangible form.

I don't know math really well, I kind of suck at Excel and I'm not a great swimmer. But I do understand social media.

What is social media really? The word implies it's something social and it's media, what's that really? Photos? Web? Music? "Media" could be a lot of stuff.

So here is my take on it and I'll round up with a conclusion of why I think social media can't just be flower power love and peace.

Social Media to me is a new (well not really anymore!) environment where the customer rules.
It's a new way of doing business in a BETTER way.
It makes companies improve, in everything from the way they treat their customers and the quality control of their products, to the experience offered to the customer and the way we let them consume our product (on their terms).
Social Media is boring made fun. It's bad made good.
Social Media is feelings and emotions.
Social media is responsibility and attention. Social media is technology but it's even more humanizing.

Now, bearing all of this in mind, social media is not free and it takes man-power to handle.
It takes qualified manpower and qualified manpower is not cheap.
I sometimes see these job offers of companies looking for a community manager and offering 20-30K/month and it's so obvious the company doesn't get it yet.
Qualified manpower take their job seriously and they know the company is investing and that usually means the company expects to see some type of return of investment...at least AT SOME POINT.
Social media is NOT just posting on Facebook and tweeting. A social media job implies making carefully thought-through strategies, having very clear goals and objectives and being able to report on those.

Crafting engaging blog posts about the best place to buy mozzarella cheese or why visit the Eiffel tower all in it's honor, but always with awareness of what this post, this campaign, this investment brings to the company.
YES if the goal is to create good-will, great positive sentiment and positioning the company as THE hub for information then let's focus on these things but keep in mind it may take a long time to see those monthly salaries, application costs, contest budgets make their way back into the company.

Here is the thing. The general budget for social media is still not huge. In fact it's pretty small.
And unless you're Starbucks with 40 people full time doing ONLY social media, the resources may not allow you to only bear in mind good-will.
Even more, the boss may ask you to report where those dollars for that Facebook contest or Blog design are entering back into the company. Sorry to break it to you, but the fact of the matter is that most of them won't understand your beautiful explanation of how amazing this is for the online climate and how the brand is being perceived in a positive way.

Folks, let's never turn social media into something that it's not. Let's never forget that the customer is and should be in the center. Let's understand it is an organic channel and should take time and effort to nurse, grow and expand.
But let's also be professional. Let's invest money in the right people to handle social media, then let's give them the right tools to create the greatest experiences for the customer, but then let's also make them accountable for their actions and ask for tangible results.

Do I or do I not understand Social Media?Tweet

Social Media is 24-7

Logical things are logical in different countries and they depend on the perception of each individual. I have encountered more than one interesting situation where the term "Culture Shock" has made it´s definition very clear. But this post isn't about that.

One thing that for sure is universally logical is the fact that a Social media or Community Managers job is not a 8-5 job.
This article published by Mashable including a study by Buddy Media came out a couple of months ago and I just returned to it today. Sometimes I like doing that, return to the articles that made an impression on me.
Now I have to be honest and say that this time schedule is not 100% correct for every brand in the world. You have to try out (and document) when your fans respond best to your content, maybe it´s not thursdays or weekends at all.
But there is some good info here that you can try out. Some makes a lot of sense and is extremely logical to me.
A person working with social media is a profile should be located in between the company and the customer. Knowing the companies goals, campaigns and assets, but communicating this on the customers terms and conditions, using their language and entering their territory. Obviously being prepared to be available off regular business hours. Even more obvious a person that truly enjoys being in front of a computer and has a genuine interest in the world of Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. A person that doesn't mind stepping away from the dinner to reply to a comment on the FB page or re-tweeting something good. Sounds harsh? Well it takes some planning, and discipline that´s for sure.

I read another article the other day that were about the simple fact that just by responding to every single comment and doing so within a short period of time, a brand is not just showing they care but they are also encouraging the behavior of interaction. Spark conversations by leading the way.
http://mashable.com/2011/04/06/facebook-engagement-data

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Social Media KPI´s

Brian Solis did some of the best sessions on this years Social Media Success summit and today I was browsing his website and found this article.
You Cant Measure What It Is You Do Not Value

Let´s talk about KPI´s today. Key Performance Indicators.
"Design outcomes and returns and integrate KPIs that capture progress, performance, and opportunities for optimization" Brian writes.
Progress, Performance and Opportunities - Increased brand awareness, Leads Sales and Loyalty I would interpret.

Return of investment could be Increase sales, Share of voice, Brand sentiment and many other things but how do we get there? How do we establish goals on the journey? What should we look for, measure, document and use to adjust or change our content and strategy so that we end up where we originally planned to?
The ROI itself is not having 150 comments per post instead of 35, that´s just an action, a result of great content but when the CEO asks you about the ROI that´s not going to be enough. But the number of comments is in fact one of many possible KPI.

Let´s lists some up here:

1. CTR (Click through Rate), Subscription rate, Unique visitors and Page views on blog. Google analytics can measure how well your blog is resonating within the community. Document each week or month the traffic. If it´s increasing - good. If not, maybe the content needs to be changed, maybe the design of the blog should be considered to change too? Lot´s of Page views but not an over whelming number of uniques? Means the content is good and people stick around to read for a while, but maybe you´re not promoting the blog well?

2. Number of comments on blog, retweets and mentions on Twitter, comments and likes on Facebook (Daily feedback in Facebook Insights), comments on discussion posts/news and groups on Linked In. Number of fans and followers, number of times people use your hashtags, fan generated posts, reviews and downloads. This is what I call engagement rates. This is also a good sign to know if you´re content is appreciated and if you´re on the right track.

3. Email subscription, registered users to group or forum and social media sharing

4. Influence. Through SocialMention or Google Alerts, measure the share of voice once per month. Share of voice in my book can be a KPI and sometimes part of the over all ROI too. If in fact one of the objective from the beginning was to Increase Brand Awareness then Share of voice is in fact not only a KPI but also a part of your ROI presentation.

"But my boss wants pure hard leads" you may think. Ok no problem but then some tracking tools will be necessary.
Google analytics and Bit.ly can help you with that. Specific campaign forms posted on blog or in the community, shorten the FB and TW links through Bit.ly and go back to track how many clicked on the links, put Google analytics on your FB Fan page, or simply ask those who contact you how they found you. Maybe add a Social Media button on the contact form?
I´m not a fan of over-selling or bombarding people with Buy-Our-Stuff messages but I would say that in at least 30% of your messages there should be a call-to-action. That´s 1 out of 3 weekly Facebook posts for example. The second post should be about something really valuable for your customer, something that can HELP him or her decide. It could be something that doesn´t even have anything to do with your company or your product but is helpful to your target customer. The third post should be FUN, fun and engaging. Hey, who doesn´t like to have a bit of fun?!

Hopefully these KPI´s can get you going in your quest to measure your social media efforts and if you do it right, tweek the content so that the KPI´s show you a positive result you should be on your way to glorious ROI too :-)

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16 Important Tips For Bloggers

Use a blog to attract new customers, generate web traffic, open up new markets, lead generation, create and establish thought leadership or any other reason that is beneficial for your business.

First of all you need to decide the format. Is it going to be a corporate blog? What are the objectives with this blog? Increase sales? Be a story forum where people can leave their ideas (Like the My Starbucks Idea for example), is it to communicate press releases or stories?

Content is the main issue for many people. What do I blog about?

Important things to remember is to be a solution provider and do it in an easy and fun way/language.

Great content is:

Unique, useful, fun, well executed and it matches the media channel.

Also, from one piece of content you can pull out various posts. From 1 podcast you can for example make 1 tweet, one print article, 1 Facebook post, one blog post and one guest blog.

You can measure your blog with Google Analytics or Hubspot for example...

Here are some important bullet points to keep in mind.

• Create Valuable Content
• Leverage employees. Are there bloggers in the company?
• Create a "backoffice marketing team" with people inside the company commenting on the blog, retweeting certain posts e.t.c.
• Where are your customers online? GO to the customers and spread word. Pick the top 10-15 blogs in your niche. Read the blogs and start comment and provide info and links to your blog.
• Be the Linked In or Yahoo Answers expert.
• Use killer headlines!
• Focus on the customers pain point and deliver solutions
• Focus on keyword search (use Google external search)
• Use numbers in the title (Like I am doing here! People love "10 ways to blablabla"...
• Be specific. Find your niche.
• Use bullets and use short sentences as well as short paragraphs. Get to the point fast.
• Edit and use an experienced copywriter
• Guest blog and invite guest bloggers
• Promote key influencers
• Explore video blogging and embed on your website
• Create a Content Media Calender
  Ex:
  1/day -Twitter, FB, Blog
  1/week - newsletter
  1/month - Webinar 2/year Event

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My Social Media Tools

There are so many tools for social media and community managers. Tools to track, count, manipulate and shorten or lengthen tweets, automatic updates, know who follows you, follow back automatically e.t.c...
I have tried a million but can argue these tools are the most important tools for me. This is highly personal.

Hootsuite (schedule tweets, see influencers, check keywords)
Exportly (map influencers)
SocialMention (Share of voice)
Bit.ly (url shortener that gives you stats on how many have clicked on your link)
Blogpule and technorati (blog info)
http://twitterfeed.com (Feed your blog to Twitter)
Twitter advance search (highly underestimated!)
Instagram (makes amazing photos)
http://forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html (check the tech profile of your target group)

Tools and sites that I dont necesarely use on a regular basis but like are:
http://tweetmeme.com (makes it easy for your visitors to share your content with their Twitter followers)
http://www.hashtracking.com (tracks hashtags)
Netvibes (great dashboard similar to Google Reader)
http://inboxq.com (Find people asking questions about things you know)Tweet

YouTube Marketing

Facebook and Twitter in all honor but the third giant should not be forgotten. The majority of the people out there don't know the details of Youtube though, me included. But I have spent some time listening to a session on the Social Media Success Summit by Greg Jarboe and I learned a thing or two that I will share here.

Some facts!
Youtube accounts for 84% of online video.
Hulu gets 3,5% of online video visits.
Google video doesnt let you upload videos.
Conclusion: Focus on Youtube.

The typical video on Youtube gets 100 views. Keep this in mind and use the tools and tips to optimize your video for Youtube search which is different than Google search.
The typical video is watched for 60 seconds and then people tune out. This means your video needs to be extremely engaging and you need to include important info in the beginning.

USE the description and title field well and describe as much as you can. All words will help you get found.
Also use the Youtube keyword tool and make sure you include the suggested keywords in the tags, description or title.
https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

Let people embed the video on their their sites.
Use the Insight section well, especially take a look at the HOTSPOT section which lets you see how a certain video is resonating with your audience.
Promote your video on other outposts such as on your website e.t.c.
Check out the Youtube blog for news and inspiration! http://youtube-global.blogspot.com and also Creators Corner: http://www.youtube.com/t/creators_corner

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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