Social Media Buyer’s Guide
@ Web 2.0 Expo
http://socialmediaclub.pbwiki.com/
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PREPARED BY
William Gaultier, CEO - e-Storm International
Chris Heuer AdHocnium • Founder of Social Media Club
Short Description
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What We Are Doing Today
• Discussing the responses from organizational
buyers to our survey and our podcasts
• We will be providing a sneak peak of an ebook
we will be releasing at the end of next week.
• Earlier this week we launched
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http://socialmediabuyersguide.com/ where we
will continue the discussion
• This presentation is available for download at
http://slideshare.net/socialmedia/
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Our Panel of Organizational Buyers
• Isabelle Christensen, REC Solar
• Jeanette Gibson, Cisco
• Michael Walsh, Social Media Club Seattle
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Project Background
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Why are we here?
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It’s time to stop selling and
start helping people buy
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What We Did?
• Survey Monkey
• Podcasts
• Wiki
• Blog http://socialmediaclub.pbwiki.com/
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– http://bit.ly/buyersguide for links to everything
– Tag for project is #SMBG
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Total Survey Size
• From March 4 – March 26, 2009
• 145 Total Respondents
– 67 completed survey
• 46 Organizational Buyers
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– 27 completed survey
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Geographical Location of Respondents
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n=45 of 46 org buyers
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Our Preliminary Findings
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It’s Real. Social Media is Here to Stay.
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Does your company have a defined
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n=21of 46 org buyers
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People in your organization who \"get\"
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n=21of 46 org buyers
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Does Senior Management Support
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n=21of 46 org buyers
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Does Senior Leadership Listen to Social
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n=21of 46 org buyers
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Do Corporate Buyers have an annual
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n=21of 46 org buyers
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Percentage of your total budget
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N=19 of 46 org buyers
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so lets stop presenting
and start talking…
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The Buying Process
• Discovery of Need
• Definition of Need
• Survey the Land
• Identify Potential Vendors
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• Proposals and Negotiations
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• Decision Making
• Follow Through
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What are the top 3 Questions you
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n=21of 46 org buyers
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What are the top 3 Questions you
should ask social media vendors?
• “What is your commitment to our brand to make sure it works?”
– Paula Drum. H&R Block
• “Do you understand the business I am in well enough to be a strategic partner
in my communications efforts? How will you help me achieve my business
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objectives? How will you measure the results you have promised?”
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– Joel Postman, Intridea
• “What needs does your tool/service specifically meet? What training will my
users require to be able to use this effectively? Where would your tool work
best, and in which situations would not be the best choice?”
– Jeff Moriarty
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So what are your top questions to ask?
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Key Finding:
ROI is Everyone’s Favorite Acronym
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Top Social Media Objectives
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Do you currently produce reports?
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N=16 of 46 org buyers
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What type of metrics do you use to
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What's the ROI?
It depends on what the tactic is that you are
using online. It can be very difficult
ROI means a few things to us. We track how
much content we’re growing, how much traffic
we’re getting. We try as hard as possible to
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drive it back to some metric we can measure on,
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especially from a goal-setting perspective.
• Luc Levesque, from Travelpod
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What's the ROI?
What I do internally is for the type of business
that we do, we track two things for all of our
marketing efforts. Number one is the cost per
lead. That is something we can track.
Secondly, is the payback for this investment to
launch this campaign? We don’t have any fancy
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tool at this moment to track the lead generation
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and the payback. Basically, we use Google
Analytics and Excel spreadsheet to track that
information.
– Isabelle Christensen from RECsolar
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What's the ROI?
It’s on more of a brand and even vehicle level
than the entire experience somebody has with
General Motors from end to end. [...There are...]
multiple kinds of measures of success
– Christopher Barger,
Directorhttp://socialmediaclub.pbwiki.com/ GM
of Social Media Communications,
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So how you look at ROI?
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Key Finding:
The Foundation for Social Media Strategy
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Are you focused on the short term
bottom line or building brand
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preference over time?
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Is it an impulse buy
or a considered purchase?
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Short Term Revenue Driving
For 2009, the marketing objective for the company really is
more short term than long term. It’s mostly for lead
generation; therefore, based on those criteria, the social
media advertising really doesn’t support our objective.
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I would use social media advertising when my marketing
objective is for long term demand generation and branding.
– Isabelle Christensen from RECsolar
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Long Term Brand Preference
How do you impact the consideration of your products?
Are there people who, prior to their interaction with you,
weren’t even going to be willing to consider an American
vehicle or a GM vehicle, who are now looking differently at
it. Have you shifted the tonality of their conversations on
their sites? Have you shifted the tonality of the
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conversations in whatever platform you’re engaging? Are
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you increasing the consideration? Are you increasing the
brand affinity? Are you increasing the number people who
are just willing to say, “I’ll give you a chance, where I
wouldn’t have before the engagement”?
– Christopher Barger,
Director of Social Media Communications, GM
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Long Term Brand Preference
One of my big measurements is how do I increase
consideration in my brand. You might have to look at
different ways to get to a bigger brand building measure,
such as changing consideration. Definitely, the micro
measurements of ‘did I increase search rankings, how
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many people, and what activity has happened’ is one of
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them. PR mentions would be another one, but then you
might have to put something in or alter your brand tracking
studies or your product tracking studies to be able to get to
something that might be a higher level metric.
– Paula Drum VP of Marketing
Digital Division H&R Block
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So which approach is best suited for
Social Media with your strategy? Why?
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What is the Most Important Advice for
Other’s Buying Social Media Services,
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Technologies and Advertising?
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Further Advice From Your Peers
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beware of firms that
• use fear of not being out there to try to motivate
you
• use an excessive amount of bells and whistles
• only focus on what they do
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– Christopher Barger, GM
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flexibility
Again, something unexpectedly good or bad happens;
how willing are they to help change directions, to
accommodate your goals?
You have to adjust to things on the fly that you just have
no ability to see into the future what might come up
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every project is a little bit different
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– Paula Drum, H&R Block
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inefficient silos
There is the Digital Marketing Group that literally sits in
one tower and there’s the communications social media
group that sits in another tower. Unfortunately, we’ve
kind of been experimenting in separate and often
different directions without really coordinating with each
other.
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As we are going about the kind of reorganization that
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we’re doing right now, one of the big things that we’re
trying to figure out is how to better connect these. These
are not things that can happen separately, any longer.
– Christopher Barger, GM
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seek out vendors demonstrating
native like familiarity
measured objectives they have accomplished
for others
familiarity with KPIs/benchmarks
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– Isabellef/logo_smc-1.gif
Christensen from RECsolar
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With Special Thanks To:
• Isabelle Christensen, REC Solar
• Jeannette Gibson, Cisco
• Michael Walsh, Social Media Club Seattle
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There is so much more to discuss...
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So join the conversation at http://
socialmediabuyersguide.com/
Chris Heuer
chis@adhocnium.com
http://socialmediaclub.pbwiki.com/
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William
william@e-storm.com
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