social marketing

12 Most Important Ways to Build Relationships and Get ROR

If you want to continue to reach your market in this social media age, the marketing focus needs to be on building relationships, and metrics need to expand beyond ROI (Return on Investment) to include ROR: Return on Relationship. So how do you build and strengthen relationships with your audience (as a whole, and as individuals) to increase your ROR? Here are 12 ways to do so:

1. Listen

If you want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to first listen to your consumers so when you do speak, you get it right.  What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?

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Brand Survival for 2011: The socially-focused organization

It’s a whole new year – literally and figuratively.

Social media is quickly changing the way we need to think about our brands and marketing.  We can no longer expect to be successful if we just focus our marketing efforts on telling our target market how great our own brand is.  What we – the brand – say about ourselves is no longer what matters.  It’s what OTHER people say about our brand and their experience of our brand.

Brands have a challenge having effective external conversations with consumers and then truly activating them as Advocates unless they evolve internally into a socially-focused organization.

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“Google’s Groupon Bid Rejected” BIG mistake?

Groupon is getting way ahead of themselves and I think their rejection of Google’s bid is a Big mistake. My 2011 prediction… Google buys Twitter!

Richard Bashara says: Ted I’m going to agree with a “but,” look at Facebook. Zuck’s had how many chances to sell FB? You can’t deny that Groupon has set a trend. Perhaps trying to stay on top of the wave could pay off.

And if Google doesn’t buy Twitter, I’d be quite surprised. Who knows, maybe Twitter will try to stay independent though. As a publishing tool, it’s clearly becoming more active than Digg or Reddit.

Ted Rubin replies: Twitter is incredibly concerned, as they should be, about how to sustain and monetize what they have. Google is incredibly worried about Facebook and how to penetrate and participate in Social Media/Marketing. Solves a critical problem for both.

As far as comparing Groupon to Facebook, I think the projectory of their growth is where it ends. Facebook competitors have many more barriers to entry than competitors to Groupon, and they control the hearts and minds of their members. Groupon exists only as long as they can provide such unsustainable discounts. With Google… the value of their local search and local relationships/workforce came in to play and made them much more valuable than as a stand-alone. IMHO

Ted Rubin

What is Experiential Marketing and is it Social?

What does experiential marketing entail? It entails allowing a customer/prospect to engage & interact with a brand, product, and service in sensory ways that provides an additional intimate level of experience and information.

Personal experiences help people connect to a brand & make intelligent & informed purchasing decisions. “Experiential Marketing” refers to actual customer experiences with the brand/product/service that drive sales and increase brand image and awareness.It is the difference between telling people about features of a product or service and letting them experience the benefits for themselves.

Many think of this as a totally separate form of marketing from social, but to me it is the ultimate in social marketing. It is all about experiencing a product or brand… and what could be more social. In addition the power of social is not the initial reach, but the engagement and more importantly the sharing that follows and enables a brand to reach into each individual’s social graph. How better to do that than to give a consumer an “experiential” experience to share.

Ted Rubin

Takeaways from Altimeter’s “Rise of Social Commerce”

Altimeter Group hosted The Rise of Social Commerce event on October 6th and 7th at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto. Theme for the conference was: The push for customer advocacy. Reinvent your brand through the Rise of Social Commerce

Shoppers want to belong. They want to be heard. They crave a better buying experience. Power is shifting from the retailer to the shopper. Social commerce is filling the void between clicks and bricks to deliver this personalized experience.

Technologies are emerging answer the challenge. Point of Presence (POP) is combining with Point of Sale (POS) to influence, persuade, and guide shopping. Artificial reality and virtualization is enhancing interaction. Social media is evolving to social commerce to improve the in-store experience. Attend this event to understand how companies are capitalizing on these trends to influence shopping on mobile devices, automate check-out and link the voice of the customer to the value chain.

The following points represent my takeaways from this landmark session:

  • Social commerce was defined as “the use of social technologies to connect, listen, understand and engage to help improve the shopping experience.”
  • In 2010, 20% of 200 companies had a social commerce strategy; in 2011 86% plan to have one.
  • 90% of companies will increase funding for social commerce by 8% in 20011
  • It seems that the Social Commerce world is fixated on what they refer to as “frictionless commerce” vs. the value of relationships.
  • The vast majority of discussion centered around how to create direct sales by leveraging the social graph.
  • Although most examples reflected that the companies making the biggest inroads to increased sales are those that allow the most interaction/relationship building it seems most etailers have not been able to let go to that degree.
  • Brands, not etailers, are the ones doing the best job of nurturing/leveraging relationships. Seems it may be because they do not have the pressure of next quarter performance, and the need to show direct sales to senior mgmt, so have more leeway to nurture relationships and plan for the future.
  • “Birds of a feather flock together” clearly points to peers influence more within their personality/behavior groups, therefore a very positive element for OpenSky developing strong sales around taste-makers and affinity groups.
  • According to many presenters the Social Media/Commerce journey starts with curiosity (OpenSky’s discovery factor) and leads to Advocacy… sharing their great experiences (a key to OpenSky success).
  • Influencers, when/if they see the value, can create group habit by including the group in the before, during, and after. What seems clear is that it is important that OpenSky provide the tools for Sellers to allow/encourage their audience to share the fact that they are buying… via input, reviews, forums… which in turn will enable the “group effect’ to help them grow, build their brand and foster the purchasing behavior.
  • The Social Consumer is empowered and has influence of her own. Be certain to provide the tools that allow this consumer to leverage the new found power. She wants a dialogue and wants to be heard and recognized.
  • Influencers do not equal simple amplification of an offer/product value… but add depth and breadth to the relationship.
  • Facebook is not a channel for commerce, but a platform that can enable commerce. Many are mistakenly looking at FB as a channel.

It seems to me the view/perspective I keep hearing is all about leveraging consumer’s social graph to sell more product. But when I hear the case studies, and see where true progress is being made, I hear more about interaction, engagement, and sharing… i.e. relationships.

When I think about social commerce what seems to be the greatest opportunity is growing/nurturing the connection, participation and loyalty of a consumer, which in turn will build ROR… Return on Relationship. This is the first step required to make all this social integration sustainable and long lasting. Relationships are what will lead to the ability to sell more, not using customers to sell more product, but by facilitating/enabling feedback, sharing, reviews, and therefore build dynamic advocates who openly sell product they love and are passionate about.

Ted Rubin

Editors Note: Agenda for event & complete presentations are available at http://bit.ly/RiseOfSocialCommerce

The Relationship Commerce Revolution

We’re hearing more and more about “Relationship Commerce” these days – but how many of us actually understand its implications? I’ve spent years in the midst of the evolution of commerce: As traditional commerce shifted into a digital world, through it’s evolution into Social Commerce, and now as we come upon the brass ring – Relationship Commerce.

There are some guiding principals to Relationship Commerce. None seem drastically different on their own; though they seem radically new when applied to the realm of commerce:

Relationships matter. Discovering something you love is great, learning about it from someone you trust is even better.

Buying from someone you like is way more fun than buying from a BIG-BOX robot.

Shopping can be better.

Relationship Commerce is simple yet novel, it’s buying from people you know and trust.

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Mistakes being made trying to measure Social Engagement

The mistakes I see being made is trying to measure Social engagement with the same tools we measure every other digital touch point. In my view email, search, even banner ads, have spoiled marketers into thinking everything can be and must be measured with the metrics used to gauge success in other mediums. I am not sue of what the next stage will be but right now as we are building our Social Media audiences, and testing. I have three stages with which I measure… #1 is Audience growth, #2 is Reactivity… getting them to take an action, and #3 Stickiness… keeping them coming back, engaged and interacting.

In addition setting expectations is important. Setting goals for number of follows/fans and how you interact and engage with them and them with you, can be very useful. Growth of your audience is very important and as clearly outlined in the study by CMB, consumers engaged via social media are more likely to buy and recommend.

Five reasons corporations are not using Social Media effectively… 1. They don’t talk about anything broader than their own products, 2. They listen to customers but don’t take any action (which means they aren’t really hearing), 3. Companies can’t expect to have a strong social media presence when social sites are blocked internally to employees, 4. There is a fear that exists about jumping in, but while there have certainly been some hiccups and miscues along the way, social media has yet to be the undoing of any company, 5. When employees are more concerned with what’s in or out of their job description than doing the right thing to help the customer, that’s not a culture that’s likely to build trust and advocacy for a brand and there is no way social media efforts can be effective.

Ted Rubin

Long Tail death knell… I think not!

Some in the digital media world are declaring the death of the long tail due to digital ADD, the exponential growth of and time spent on Social Media platforms and the time taken up by gaming. I have to strongly disagree. The long tail is alive and well, and if anything, experiencing a re-birth of sorts with regard to media and independence.

As stated so well by Chris Anderson, even if he is changing his mind now… “One of the most frequent mistakes people make about the long tail is to assume that things that are not viewed by a very large audience are ‘not as good’ as things that do have vast distribution. A given niche has both quality content and a lot of junk across a broad spectrum. Sturgeon’s Revelation states that the percentage of crud (junk) is in the range of 90 percent. On a store shelf, or in any other limited means of distribution, the ratio of good to bad matters because it’s a zero sum game: Space for one eliminates space for the other. Prominence for one obscures the other. Long tails in the online world are not pre-filtered by the requirement of factors such as shelf space, bandwidth, or the biases of purchasing managers.” Companies are popping up every day to serve and offer valuable services to the long tail at very affordable rates and the desire for people to communicate, build audiences and relationships, is not only growing, but a very basic part of human nature and something that is gaining momentum, not the other way around.

As long as publishing is low-cost and easy, and people have an easily accessible means to access that content, the long tail will not only live on, but thrive.

Ted Rubin

Social Media Power – Don’t Give It Away! Unless…

Social media’s incredible power is in allowing us to instantaneously connect to, interact with, and build relationships with our audience of thousands… and it’s exactly that power that makes it risky to turn your social media campaigns over to an outside agency.

The “social” part of social media campaigns makes them quite different than traditional ad campaigns. Instead of a brand presence relying on catching attention through the initial “look and feel” (of a website, brochure, television ad, etc.), it now includes a broader and deeper ongoing connection based on personality and relationship, both of which are tough to have someone “outside” successfully convey for your brand.

Also unlike traditional ad campaigns and their weeks/months-to-market brochures and television ads, social media has the power of immediacy with seconds/minutes-to-market Tweets, Facebook postings, YouTube video clips, etc. In other words, with social media we do not have the luxury of time for multiple review cycles and sharp perfection of every public brand message.

However…

I’m not suggesting that you should never consider using outside resources for your social media campaign. If you are still trying to figure out how your brand can use social media for relationship commerce, or you simply have run out of hours in your day to use social media effectively, you may need an outside agency’s help. Just be very careful with your hiring, and deliberate with your integration of outside resources.

Specifically, you need to make absolutely certain that:

1. The key players of your outside agency team are attached at the hip to senior management. When your brand shifts in any way, your social media messages need to immediately reflect those shifts. If your brand’s social media presence isn’t nimble, trust and therefore relationships and influence will falter.

2. Someone with a direct line to the c-suite (top management) and a clear understanding of the brand voice and long-term objectives is keeping track of, managing, and observing the process daily. The brand voice, or “personality” is the heart of your social media campaign, so someone needs to make sure the personality stays true to the c-suite message and consistent throughout the campaign.

3. If you don’t have someone on staff to oversee the social media strategy, you hire a consultant for this role. This consultant must have the requisite experience with social media, and take personal charge of the strategy. Again, you can’t afford the time for information to trickle down from senior management, so the consultant must have access to communicate directly with senior management and be someone who really “gets” how social marketing works and how to execute.

Bottom line: Who can you trust with your brand’s relationships? Make that decision wisely.

Ted Rubin

Dog Days of Social Media… I Don’t Think So!

In his recent must-read post, “The Dog Days of Social Media,” Drew Neisser reminds us that just because Facebook has lost some fans, and Forrester “recommends a cautious approach to Foursquare,” we shouldn’t panic and jump off the social media ship.

I agree wholeheartedly with Drew and appreciate his addressing such a timely topic. “Dog Days,” my ass! We are only scratching the surface here of social media potential! And even if your audience does abandon a platform “en masse”… so what? Scalable social platforms are not going away, migrations will happen — they always do eventually — but if it is not Facebook or Twitter it will be somewhere else you can still reach out, engage your audience, and interact with them.

So we need to keep in mind that, going forward, long-term brand success will not be dependent on a specific social media tool; it will be relative to the depth and breadth of the relationships built using the tool. Building relationships and interacting with consumers is where the commerce of the future is heading. Yes, real relationships = brand interest & loyalty = success (money). In fact, at OpenSky, we believe so strongly in the power of relationships as commerce that we have built an entire platform and business model around it.

Remember, though, that social media is a facilitator of relationships, but it is not the relationship itself. Use whatever combination of ways to interact works best for you and your brand. In other words, experiment! Use Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and YouTube (don’t forget YouTube!), and use them each in several different ways. Notice what tactics engage your audience so much that they interact not only with you/your brand but with other people loyal to your brand. That’s where the magic happens!

Once you find what works for your audience, drive a truck through that opening. It’s not enough to drive that truck through and keep on going. You need to park that truck, and get out to interact with your audience. “Listen” to your market and you will be able to relate to and engage your customers, evolving with them as they evolve and change. Remember… relationships are never static, so your brand must be able to move along with the relationship or be left behind.

Bottom line: the more responsive you are to your audience, the more responsive they will be to you. Don’t wait for them to make the first move.

Ted Rubin