Social media can represent a foreign world to many companies. These simple tips can offer some general guidelines to follow when engaging in social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing Tips: Don’t Build Barriers
Lead generation is the enemy of customer engagement. Yes, it’s a necessary evil to some degree, but if you let it guide your thinking when you’re building a community, you will drive away the people you’re trying to reach. Marketers obsessed with lead gen put too many barriers between the customer and the information the customer wants. As a rule of thumb, every additional click you impose doubles attrition. Do you really need a street address or a departmental budget? If the prospect is really interested, he’ll give you that information when the time is right.
Learn from the social network model: in most cases, all a person needs to create an account is a name and an e-mail address. If they like what you find there, they volunteer more and more information because they want to become part of the community. The model works beautifully. More marketers should adopt it.
Social Media Marketing Tips: Humanize the Interaction
People relate better to other people than they do to organizations. Practitioners say it’s crucial to expose people in your organization as facilitators to respond to comments and initiate new discussions. Over time, these people become the face of the company, so choose wisely. Make sure they’re committed to participating in social media marketing on a regular basis, at least every other day.
This isn’t easy to do. When working on company blogs and customer communities, recruiting internal talent is one of the most difficult tasks. This is particularly true with senior employees, who often don’t believe they have the time to commit. Forcing people to participate is never a solution. You may get a few months of halfhearted compliance, but people will duck out at the first opportunity.
A better tactic is to recognize and celebrate the competence of the few employees who are really committed to the effort. It’s also important to stress the career benefits of engaging in public conversations. Although you don’t always want to say it explicitly, the visibility enhances people’s marketability both inside and outside the company.
Additionally, the prospect of interacting with the chief officer of a company that community members care about is a powerful incentive to drive participation. If you’re fortunate enough to have a top executive who believes in the value of these networks, convince her to log on once a quarter for a chat and promote that event to the community. For many CEOs, the opportunity to hear such unvarnished customer feedback is invigorating.
Social Media Marketing Tips: Remember the “99:1” Rule
Whether statistically valid or not, the accepted rule of thumb is that only about one percent of visitors to public forums contribute 99% of the content. Forrester Research has estimated that only about a quarter of U.S. online adults are what the firm calls “creators” or “critics;” in other words, people who actively author or comment upon online information. Nearly half are characterized as “spectators” or “lurkers,” meaning that they rarely or never contribute. Author Clay Shirky has observed this in wiki environments, where he notes that the number-one contributor is about twice as active as the number two contributor, three times as active and number three and so on. Don’t be rattled by this. Most people come to open forums through search queries and only stay long enough to get their questions answered. The one percent who do contribute actively are your MVPs, and they deserve as many favors as you can throw at them.
Avoid the urge to dominate the discussion. If participants believe they can’t talk freely, they’ll run away. Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang cited control issues as the greatest obstacle businesses have to building successful communities. However, not being a control freak doesn’t mean giving up control entirely. Online communities are fragile things, and they can easily be co-opted by spammers and bullies. Many investment-oriented message boards, for example, are now dominated by loudmouths who beat their chests and pick fights with others. Ordinary customers can be easily scared away. Many groups become little more than spam buckets. If you sense that extremists are trying to take over your community, step in and admonish them. If they do it again, block them. This is your turf, after all.
Social Media Marketing Tips: Involve Employees Responsible for Products
Online discussions are just as useful for feedback on existing products as they are for identifying new opportunities. Developers and engineers should tune in. Engineers often believe that they know better than customers what the market needs.
Once developers start listening to feedback, though, the result can be impressive. It’s thrilling to hear customers rave about a product, but there’s nothing like negative feedback to motivate developers to fix a problem. Companies can’t respond effectively to feedback if marketers are the only people listening.
Customers can often be valuable sources of ideas for new products and markets. Acknowledge their contributions by citing them in press releases and advertising. Some companies have actually staged contests to come up with new product ideas, with the winners getting their contributions.
Developer Serena Software institutionalized a practice it calls Facebook Fridays. The company’s 900 employees are encouraged to go to its group profile on Facebook and talk with customers. Serena also uses Facebook for hiring. “Students aren’t going to go to a company where there is a huge wall where they can’t communicate with anyone,” a senior vice president told Network World magazine.
Social Media Marketing Tips: Be Inventive with Questions
Professional researchers know that people don’t always say what they really think, even on anonymous surveys. Focus groups tend to be influenced by one or two outspoken members. Quantitative surveys force respondents to choose responses that may not reflect their real opinions. These tools are valuable, but imperfect.
Sometimes you can get better response by asking indirect questions. GlaxoSmithKline used that approach when it was trying to get at self-image issues with overweight people, according to Communispace’s Schlack. Community members were asked open-ended questions like, “When you talk to yourself, how do you refer to yourself?” and were prompted to post photos showing what they most regretted about their obesity. Their choices indicated that people were frustrated about being excluded from everyday activities, a sentiment that Schlack believes would not have turned up so vividly on questionnaires.
On the other hand, sometimes it pays to be direct. When one Communispace client wanted to understand why African-Americans weren’t using its products, the moderators recommended they just ask the question flat out. It worked. The difference? People often have trouble responding to abstract concepts and so need to use pictures or stories to relay their feelings. However, members of private communities in particular can be quite forthcoming when they believe their remarks will have an impact.
Final Thoughts on Social Media Marketing
The fastest way to put the damper on community interaction is to let ideas go unacknowledged. When a company representative requests feedback, she needs to respond to comments and promise action, even if that action is only to take the recommendations under consideration. This doesn’t mean committing to implement ideas. People don’t expect that. They do expect that their contributions will be taken seriously.
If you’re building a private network or a community of elite customers, small enticements like t-shirts, tchotchkes or even badges to display on their blogs can help make members feel like they’re truly part of an inner circle. You don’t need to go overboard. In fact, being too generous with incentives can make members feel pressured to contribute when they don’t have much to say.
Good social networks use all the tools that are available to them: discussion, chat, webcast, video, photos, animation, podcasts, polls, games and virtual worlds. People interact in different ways, so give them as many tools as you can. This stuff isn’t all that expensive to develop any more. Much of it can be delivered by software-as-a-service providers.
