social media strategy

What is Your Social ID?

Brand identification is changing right along with the other shifts social media has brought about.  It is no longer as much about  the company logo, the colors or whether we use our middle initial in visual materials or not; it is now about “Social I.D.” – our voice and the way we socially present ourselves online.

What is your Social I.D.?  What identifies your brand (personal or corporate) throughout your social media interactions and offerings? If your answer includes the colors of your website, you need to think very carefully about where you are focusing your brand identity efforts.  I am not suggesting that colors and logos and graphical elements are not important, but I am suggesting that the way you interact with others online is the identification that will catch the most attention… and hold it the longest.

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Recommendations Are the New Advertising

Visa gets it – that the marketing world has changed significantly, and even the big players need to change along with it.  In fact, Visa’s head of marketing, Antonio Lucia, reported that Visa has increased their digital media investment from about 11% to at least 36%.

But Visa not just putting their money into digital media, they are also changing their approach to marketing.  Lucia said last month in his keynote at ad:tech San Francisco that Visa is now guided by three principles of social media, with one of them being “recommendations are the new advertising.”

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Face-to-face Customer Service Still Matters

I recently wrote about the dangers of disparity between the customer experience in the social media channel and the customer experience in the traditional channel … and the importance of INTEGRATING your brand messages across all channels.

We also need to make sure that we integrate our brand messages across platforms – both face-to-face and online.

Real-life example:  I have been involved with my bank for years – I’m an Advocate, and I go to this bank all the time.  This week after visiting my bank in their physical location, I walked out realizing that more often than not, I leave their “store” not feeling good.

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Social Media Strategy: What doesn’t work

You know what doesn’t work for a social media strategy? Not being social. It might sound like common sense, but all too often, being social is overlooked in a social media strategy.  It’s not enough to just start accounts with all the most popular social media tools and community sites, even when you include professionally-designed graphics and a big bold display of your logo and a few text lines about your brilliant mission.  First and foremost, you absolutely must BE SOCIAL!

When you are not being social, even if you think there is no message, you ARE sending a message to your consumers and potential consumers –  and it is not a message you want to have associated with your brand.  That message is… we don’t want to socialize.

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No more mixed messages: Integrate Social Media Marketing!

Social media marketing to most in the C-suite is still a campaign-based tactic, viewed and managed separately, but it really should be integrated.  Social media marketing needs to be woven into the fabric of all marketing channels and strategically managed from a 360-degree perspective.

This integration is especially important around Customer Service, where the disparity between the customer experience in the social media channel and the customer experience in the traditional channel is a dangerous chasm.   The result is a mixed message around Customer Service – an area where none of us can afford to be unclear or inconsistent!

Think of it from the customer perspective (as you always should):  they get a quick response and dedicated attention in the social media channel, and then are subjected to the “same-old, same-old” via traditional customer service channel.  Long waits (phone or in person) and inattention in one channel will immediately cancel out any gains from your social media marketing channel.

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Influencers Want to be Influenced

Let’s face it… customers don’t become influencers in order to champion brands out of the goodness of their hearts, or because of a brilliantly-designed logo or a couple coupons they can download from the internet.

Customers become influencers because something about their experience with a brand influenced them first… and they want to continue that experience.

Influencers don’t want to be told what to do or what to buy, they want to have an experience so amazing that they are compelled to share it with their networks.   It can be a product that proves to be everything it was advertised to be PLUS MORE, or impeccable and genuinely friendly customer service, or any other experience that was so out of the ordinary that it influenced the customer to form a solid opinion about the experience and then take action to encourage others toward that same experience.

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Make Your Customers Feel at Home

In the physical world, when our trusted and valued friends come to visit our house, we often welcome them by saying, “Come in…make yourselves at home!”   In the virtual world, do you do the same thing?  When customers and prospects visit your online site, do they feel at home there?

Think about retailers that offer snacks, coffee, samples, valuable information, and sometimes even entertainment in their shops.  They create a welcoming atmosphere for their customers because they know it will encourage them to stay around the shop, browsing the products and learning more about the brand…and greatly increasing the chances of a sale.

Your online site needs to do the same thing.  What do you do to make your current and prospective customers feel comfortable?   What are you doing to add value to their day?  What experience are you giving them? In other words, how are you inspiring them to stick around now and return later…with their friends?

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Advocacy Drives “Social Sampling”

Kleenex made waves with its recent “Softness Worth Sharing campaign,” which encouraged people to have FREE Kleenex sample packs sent to friends and family.  Earlier this month, a reported 1 million Kleenex packs had been sent on behalf of Kleenex consumers!

What made this innovative campaign so successful?  Kleenex gave consumers the chance to not only interact with their product, but to also easily give their friends/family the same experience. In other words, Kleenex identified Advocates, who in turn sent more samples and encouraged their networks to do the same… they were energized and mobilized.  Social sampling at its best!

One important part of this campaign was providing a way for people to track the campaign online – including their own “chain of sharing,”  where a consumer can see if their sample-sending inspired someone else to send sample(s).  When consumers can see the impact of their action, it can easily inspire them to act again and spread the word to their friends about this “cool thing you have to check out!”  Again, it energizes and mobilizes Advocates.

We know how important it is to give our Brand Advocates the tools to market our products for us, and now Kleenex has taken this concept one step further by giving consumers the tools AND THE PRODUCT (samples) to share with their networks.  They have made it easy and fun for Advocates to create a buzz around a specific product and to share theexperience of the product.

Successful social sampling campaigns rely on consumer-to-consumer connection, and your Advocates are the most powerful way to create those ties.

Ted Rubin

Originally posted at Zuberance

Long-term Advocacy Enhanced by Emotional Connection

One of the most valuable returns of the social media proliferation is the renewed fervor around Brand Advocacy. The truly remarkable thing about Brand Advocates is that they proactively recommend brands and products without getting paid…but if they are not getting paid, then what is their motivator for advocacy?

The #1 reason Brand Advocates recommend brands and products is that they want to help others (source: “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media,”comScore, Yahoo!, Dec. 2006).   In other words, there is an emotional component to their advocacy.  The emotional component is not just important for Brand Advocates and their social graph, it is also key to the marketer and brand relationship with their Brand Advocates. If you can make an emotional connection with your consumer, that will go far in building long-term advocacy.

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Brand Advocates are People Too… Nurture that Relationship!

It is true that Brand Advocates have value in part due to the reach of their relationships within and across their social networks.  When they encourage their friends and colleagues to buy our products, our brand’s buying power increases exponentially, and it simply makes good business sense to leverage those opportunities.

The risk here is that we can become so focused on our Brand Advocates’ social reach that we see them only as a means to an end (sales) and stop seeing them as people.  We might get greedy and start looking right past them to market directly to their networks, ignoring our Advocates themselves.  While that marketing method can still be somewhat teffective, it costs more, it is more difficult to implement and maintain, and it is dangerous to our brand.  We cannot de-value our Advocates and expect our brands to thrive!

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