Social Media and Online Communities

Social Media Communities
To Build or To Join?
Andrew Abend
M is for Marketing

The Answer
Should you join an existing community or build your own?
YES

Your Questions
How can online communities benefit our clients?
Is it worth the time to build a presence in an online community?
Where to get started? Does a directory exist?
Legal issues regarding privacy and ownership of content

How Are you using social media?

Social Media Channels Used

Using Social Media

Measuring Social Media

How Social Media Helps Business
Generate Leads/Sales
Change Perception
Brand Management
Provide Transparency
Network
Gain Insight
Corporate Promotion

How Social Media Helps Business
Active Social Media
Passive Social Media

Active Usage
Actively promoting your company through:
Direct promotion
Education
Pay Per Click content ads
Behavioral targeting
Encouraging third party endorsement via blogs with strong followings
Active usage allows you to control your message and reach an interested or related audience

Purposes of Active Social Media
Generate Leads/Sales
Brand Management/Changes Perception
Broadcast News Releases
Networking
Corporate Promotion

Challenges with Active
Your audience must actually use social media on a regular basis
Need to create an environment in which consumers want to receive your self-promotion
Requires right balance of updates so people are not inundated with information yet still receive your message
Requires commitment to provide information on a consistent basis
Expectations that anything put on the web will become “viral”

Passive Social Media
Using audience insight gleaned from social media to change your brand and/or business
Tools include:
Forums
Review Sites (Yelp, Rip-Off Report, Kudzu, etc)
Fan Pages
YouTube Videos
Twitter

Passive Usage
Monitoring online activity to understand what consumers are saying about your product
Interaction with customers creates a stronger bond with them
Information gathered can be used to improve products and customer service
Makes sure your product and brands are being represented correctly

Challenges with Passive
Information overload - companies often react to every comment instead of identifying trends
The opposite of information overload is dismissing what your customers are saying because they “don’t understand what we are trying to do”
Requires time to monitor online activities

Strategy
Using Social Media Effectively

Strategies
Deploy a combination of active and passive strategies utilizing social media
Active
To build a strong following of evangelists
Use for promotions, special offers and announcements to loyal fans
To educate people on brand/products
Passive
Understand what audience is saying about your brand
Gain ideas for new products and uses
Provide transparency and accessibility to the brand

Active Strategy

Blogs
First Person
Blog directly from your brand
To build strong following content needs to be beneficial to your audience
Can not be solely self-promotion
Ensure posts have the ability to be linked to interest sites like Digg, De.li.cious, and StumbleUpon
Benefits
Let’s you provide useful information to an interested audience
Good information tends to be disseminated by readers to their friends

Blogs
Third Party Endorsement
Reach out to bloggers who are relevant to your target audience with information regarding the services you provide
Use Technorati or BlogSearch to find blogs
Benefits
Taps into established audience to which your brand can receive exposure
Bloggers have credibility with their audience and an endorsement goes a long way

Social Networking Sites
Facebook is the dominant social networking site with over 300 million users
It is the only consumer focused social networking site worth the time to manage
Create a “fan” page in which people can become fans of your brand
Fan pages allows:
People to interact with your brand
The opportunity to learn about new products, contests and events before they become public
Provide online specials to fans
Fans to easily recommend your brand to friends
Link to relevant fan pages
Received blog and Twitter feeds

Facebook
Growing a fan base
Include Facebook button on website
Promote via microblogging (to be discussed later)
Tap into employees who are on Facebook promote to their friends
Public Relations
Use Facebook’s audience targeted ads to drive traffic
Benefits:
Creates evangelists by giving “fans” access to something the general public does not receive
Provides inexpensive venue for marketing

MicroBlogs
Twitter is the dominant MicroBlog at this time
Use of Twitter should be for three things:
Drive traffic to website by promoting new blog topics
Drive traffic to Facebook by promoting contests, events, promotions
Create evangelists by announcing offers for Twitter-followers only
Promotion of Twitter presence will come through:
Facebook fan page
Twitter button on web site and blogs
Employee emails/networks
Benefits:
Inexpensive way to drive traffic to website/Facebook
Creates loyal followers and customers

Sharing
Sharing sites like YouTube andFlickr will be good tools for contests and promotions
Your brand should set up company pages for future promotions and, on YouTube,
Employees should promote any video or photos to their friends via Facebook, Twitter and email

Additional Active Activities
Cost per click search ads can be purchased two ways – by search terms or by content
Search terms bring up your ads when people search your specific terms
Content ads are delivered in blogs, news, etc when people are reading about a topic that is related to your product
Cost per click ads to drive people directly to your client’s site

Passive strategy

Passive Strategy
The ongoing monitoring of all social media channels
Understand what is being said about your brand and responding when necessary
Monitor blogs and comment when appropriate
All responses must be positive and grateful, not defensive
When a trend is noticed that your brand chooses to respond to, reach out to the channel(s) that made you aware of it, acknowledging them and the result of their feedback

Tracking
Measuring Your Effort

Web Analytics
Google web analytics allow you to see which social marketing activities are driving people to your web site and what people are doing on the site when they get there
Google Analytics is a free tool that should be programmed into your website regardless of your social media activity

Social Media Tracking
ViTrue or Techrigy
Track mentions across various social media like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc
Both have a limited free service
Techrigy allows you to track by demographics, geography and positive/negative comments
ViTrue allows you to compare social media activity versus a competitor

Fans and Followers
Simplest measure is the number of “fans” and “followers” that your brand gains on Facebook and Twitter respectively

Online Communities
Active and Passive Communications

Community Measurement
Key to either online community is setting up measurable metrics
Increased visits to your client’s web site
Especially direct links from online community
Change in tenor of comments
Online Mentions
Fans & Followers
Special codes & coupons

Online Communities
User-Generated – Created by people to connect with others with like interests and share ideas
Self-Generated – Created by a company to create dialogue, provide transparency, share ideas in an effort to create evangelists

User Generated
Pros
Already established
Group protocol exists
Easy to learn about the group make-up through existing discussions
Will gain objectivity regarding topics in which you are interested
Potential source for great customer insight
Provides platform to address negative comments in a productive manner
Cons
View corporate participants skeptically
Will “flame” your brand if your purpose is disguised
No control over content
Time consuming

Self-Generated
Pros
Ability to lead conversations
Attracts fans of the brand
Provides transparency
Platform to move fans to zealots
Platform to award fans for their support
Learn what questions your best fans have knowing others will have them as well
Invites corporate promotion
Cons
Takes time to establish large, active following
Requires ongoing nurturing
Lose objectivity by regularly speaking to the converted
Will be held accountable for promises and comments

Are You Ready To Create A Community?
A Simple Test:
Do you have a Facebook page for your client?
How many fans does it have?
Does the page encourage conversation?
What percentage of page communications is press announcements?
Are fans creating their own discussions?
Are fans responding to discussions you post?
Do people regularly comment on your blog or tweets?

Join or Create?
Yes - Join
Find a few highly targeted user generated communities and begin to monitor
Participate when appropriate
Always identify yourself
Track efforts
Measure ROI
Yes – Create
Start simply with Facebook Fan page
Follow Test
If it proves successful, expand to a private community
Track efforts
Measure ROI

Questions?

Your Questions
How can online communities benefit our clients?
Is it worth the time to build a presence in an online community?
Where to get started? Does a directory exist?
Legal issues regarding privacy and ownership of content

Andy Abend
M is for Marketing
aabend@MarketSmarter.biz
Twitter:@MarketSmarter
http://MarketSmarter.biz
http://SmarterMarketing.Wordpress.com
404.316.4820

Social Media and Online Communities

by Andy Abend on Nov 17, 2009

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Social Media and Online Communities — Presentation Transcript