Marketingsherpa Blog

Yesterday’s blog post featured the thoughts of Larry Drebes, founder and CEO of Janrain, a social user Web management platform, on the social media channel and marketing over the next six to 12 months.

Today we have insight and advice from Loren McDonald, Vice President of Industry Relations, Silverpop, an email and marketing automation vendor.

Loren will be joining us next week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, and will participate in the innovation panel Wednesday afternoon, February 8^th.

Social media marketing is an important channel for both B2B and B2C marketers, and Loren offers up a valuable perspective on the topic and some actionable takeaways to maximize that channel over the rest of this year.

This chart illustrates Silverpop research on where all marketers are utilizing social media:

 

 

Here are Loren’s thoughts on social media marketing:

 

MarketingSherpa: What is going on in the social channel in terms of marketing?

Loren McDonald: 2012 is going to be the year where a lot of companies move from social media marketing being a hobby to being core to their business.

Where the C-suite and marketing management recognize that no matter what stage they are at in the social media marketing world — that it is not a fad and it requires significant attention and resources. This is a phenomenon that is really much deeper than marketing; however, it is now core to business success.

What social is about is if we build great products and provide great service, then our customers will actually do the marketing for us. Obviously, however, there are a lot of aspects of social media marketing that are truly campaign driven — such as creating a multi-channel Twitter, Facebook and website campaign. The reality is that what a lot of marketers are forgetting, and I think many of them will realize this year, is that enabling your customers, prospects and the influencers in the community that you operate in to actually do the marketing for you – is really the name of the game.

A lot of companies are used to trying to own and control their messages to the marketplace. They have to wake up and rethink their business and approach to marketing. It is not about controlling the message; it is about delivering great products, customer service and value. When you achieve this, then much of your marketing efforts will switch to facilitating your customers marketing your business and products for you.

 

MS: What are some of the different approaches for B2B and consumer marketers?

LM: I think one aspect of the difference is really just around the type of content. You know it is kind of stereotypical, but in the B2B world, because you have long sales cycles, and you have people who are looking for tips, best practices and guides and help and tools and things like that. B2B social media marketing is a match made in heaven for B2B marketers.

You can basically take content that you have been creating for years — everything from white papers and webinars and FAQs and calculators — and take those and repurpose the content  and engage your customers and prospects on channels like Twitter, LinkedIn communities, blogs and Q&A forums.

On the B2C side, I think we are still trying to figure out that sweet spot of how to engage customers in social channels. A camera manufacturer can use social channels to educate consumers on photography tips, photo sharing and enable hobbyists to share experiences. If you sell ketchup, you probably have to work a bit harder and be creative. In general, I think B2C social marketing at this stage is much more driven by typical brand multi-channel campaigns, whether it is doing things like sweepstakes or some sort of fun campaign on Facebook, and then tying it into a FourSquare check-in and a YouTube video.

I think there are clearly a lot of similarities (between B2B and B2C on social media) but the scale, tactics and platforms are different. Facebook is not necessarily a big B2B channel yet, although it certainly can work. But, I think we are going to see channels like LinkedIn and Google+ emerge as key B2B platforms.

 

MS: How do you see the intersection of social media and privacy?

LM: One of the things that is really interesting is the emergence of social sign-in registration capabilities – whether Facebook Connect or multi-network options. I actually don’t hear a lot of marketers talking about social registration, though a lot are deploying it. Even the Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann campaigns are using Facebook Connect.

While consumer adoption of social sign-in is growing, I think a lot of consumers haven’t woken up to realizing how much information about themselves is being passed over to a brand. So what is hard to predict is will consumers demand more control over the specific types of data they will share with individual brands, or will they simply be passive like we are with not reading privacy policies?

Consumers are willing to trade some of their privacy, and say, “I am okay with giving you a lot of information about myself in return for some value.” That value could be speed, it could be efficiency, and it could be more targeted marketing. I think we just don’t really know yet where that line is going to move.

If at some point when you check your Gmail account and it is clear to me that Google is serving ads that are tied to a post I made on Google+, or a video I liked on YouTube, are we going to see a backlash over that? It is presented as, “Hey, we are giving you more relevant content,” but the reality is in those cases the ads may be out of context.

 

MS: How about the impact, or maybe the integration, of social media and email marketing?

LM: I call this concept “mocial,” the idea of social, mobile and local working together in an integrated fashion with email. There are several things that I think are key for social and email marketing and how they work together.

Social — at this point in its stage of existence — what it does best is being an acquisition vehicle where people come and they follow you on Twitter and they like you on Facebook. It is a great way to bring people in, then engage them in dialogue and conversation, and actually market to them through content, tweets, posts, news feeds, sweepstakes, etc.

Email, however, is still the king of the conversion, so for now at least, social drives the conversation and email delivers the conversion.

These channels are not competing with each other. They actually work together and support each other.

For example, you have a customer that is not opted in to your email program, but they are a fan of your brand, and they like you on your Facebook brand page. By simply adding an email opt-in form on your Facebook brand pages, you can get some of them to opt in to your email program. What this allows you to do is touch that person across more channels, and we know the more channels that you touch a customer, the higher their ROI.

Social provides a great vehicle for dialog and conversation. Email’s advantage as a messaging platform is that it enables behavior-based triggered programs such as remarketing to abandoned shopping carts, or sending recommendations within purchase transaction messages. Try doing that in a 140-character Twitter DM message.

Another impact of social is that email has to become more human and more personal, and it has to incorporate that more “human side” of marketing. People are used to having dialogs with real people behind those tweets or the Facebook posts or blog post comments. That approach needs to spill over into email where the content is literally a face of the employee having this dialog and engagement. We are seeing a lot of companies doing this where they are using their employees as the mouthpiece, just like they do on Twitter and Facebook.

The other really obvious integration of social and email marketing is social sharing and enabling email subscribers to share email content out into their social media streams. Unfortunately to date, most marketers have not done a very good job of leveraging this opportunity. Many email marketers simply slap a link in their emails that say “Share on Facebook or Twitter,” but then in the email there is little to no content that is worth sharing. Marketers have to ask, why would a subscriber want to share this email with their friends and social connections?

But I’m hopeful that marketers are going to get smarter about this sharing aspect in 2012 and realize that they have to create and design emails from the ground up — if they want them to be shared in a meaningful way.

 

Two action items for social media marketing

To finish our conversation, I asked Loren for actionable advice for the social channel and he provided two interesting ideas.

He prefaced the answer with, “The speed of these new channels that are emerging is nothing like we have ever seen.”

 

Budget for the channel, not campaigns or platforms

With that in mind, Loren suggests marketing departments should earmark a certain amount of the budget for social media — not particular campaigns, efforts or even platforms, but just for the space in general to be able to react to new platforms as they deploy.

He added that making an investment in a platform that eventually fails, or just becomes a poor marketing vehicle, is not a sunk cost.

For an example, he mentioned any companies that invested in MySpace may no longer be marketing there, but what was learned at MySpace can now be applied more efficiently to Facebook. Or if for some reason FourSquare became no longer available, some new location-based platform will almost certainly take its place.

 

Spend time and money on social media training

Loren said another point marketers should address is training users across the company in using social media.

“I think that social media training across the organization is going to be something that really emerges this year,” he says. “A couple of our own sales reps have reached out to me this week asking for help asking, ‘Hey, should I blog?’ and, ‘Should I Tweet?’ and, ‘How should I do it?’”

Loren continues, “I think we all know that most employees probably do it wrong, and they get too promotional and they try to be sales-like and that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how good your social media team is if you have a thousand employees out there doing it wrong.”

 

Related Resources:

Location-Based Email Marketing: 6 tactics to leverage social check-in to grow email lists and improve engagement

Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

Lessons from a B2B Summit Coach: Five Steps to Cut through the Noise, Turn off the Hype and Create a B2B Social Media Program that Works

Social Media Optimization: Engineering contagious ideas

Social Media Marketing: Analytics are free and plentiful, so use them

 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a popular blog post on using social media profiles for login on third-party websites rather than the more traditional form field registration. The post featured research from Janrain, a social Web user management platform, and some additional commentary from Larry Drebes, founder and CEO of Janrain.

That topic was very specific and applies to one marketing issue — gathering data from website visitors.

Janrain’s research found that Facebook is the clear favorite for social login at 42%, followed by Google at 29% and Yahoo! at 11%.

 

 

In preparation for the innovation panel Wednesday afternoon, February 8^th, at next week’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, I also had the chance to speak with Larry about the social channel in more general terms, and to get his take on where it is heading and what marketers should be thinking about over the next six to 12 months.

Tomorrow’s blog post will feature the thoughts of panelist Loren McDonald, Vice President Industry Relations, Silverpop.

Here is the result of my conversation with Larry:

 

MarketingSherpa: Where is the social media channel heading for marketers over the next year?

Larry Drebes: I think it is going to be definitely an increasing part of the marketing mix. It just makes sense because more online activity is centered around knowing the user, knowing their social network and profile attributes. Social media is a large component of that, and I think it is becoming accepted both with the end users and the marketing audience, and it will be a healthy growing segment.

Certainly the popularity of the big social networks drive a lot of (social media acceptance) and you have seen their audience grow. And for our personal vantage point, where we supply websites with the tools to interact with social networks, our distribution has increased tremendously.

 

MS: What should marketers be watching for in the social channel?

LD: I think one aspect would be more of a divergence in the marketplace, so you have essentially new entrants like Google+, and I think location-based services, which have been around, but I think that is going to be an important aspect.

We have seen social players that have been centered around more sort of entertainment type sites and you might see that (being a focus) into e-commerce going forward.

I think the social sign-in is less about Facebook and Twitter and more an identifier, more of an identity that you use for a specific purpose. I think you will see a little division there where you might use Facebook or Twitter for more entertainment type sites and a LinkedIn account for something more professional. People will identify themselves in various personas depending on the context of how they are interacting with an online property.

 

MS: What are your views on privacy in the social channel?

LD: Certainly it is a big issue and there are lots of facets of privacy. Most people who put data into a social network understand that it is not private data, and if there is something that I really don’t want the world to know, Facebook is not the place for me to be typing that data into. We’re separating a social security number from attributes like, ‘I like this band’ and data about you that can help a website create a better experience and being useful for not only the websites, but you as a user to have a much better experience.

 

MS: What is the difference in the social channel for B2C and B2B marketers?

LD: The B2C is a very mass market, so you are dealing with larger numbers and you are catering to consumer preferences.

So, I think it is a traditional marketing mix where you are knowing more about the user, and what their likes and dislikes are, and who their friends are. It is essentially better intelligence with an improved medium and if you take it from radio to TV to Internet, and then Internet with a social channel. There may be a progression there.

And in the B2B market, I think it is hard to characterize that segment because a lot of B2Bs take on very application specific contexts.

It could be dealing with employees or behind the firewall or with different vendors, but again I think the same notion of knowing more about the end user (through social login) in a way that can better cater to them gives you more information intelligence and remove friction from a process that maybe would require someone to remember a password.

I think one of the areas that will be surprising in the next couple of years is the number of providers of identity will swell again.

There is this common belief that Facebook is everything and that everyone else is losing, and I think there is a valid case to be made that the number of providers of identity and social data will broaden and get more specific.

I think you will see banks and telcos and maybe healthcare providers, or even other companies, start becoming a social provider, or an identity provider, in their own right because they own a certain set of data attributes that may be unique, or they have relationships with a large number of users.

(For example) if you think about a bank or a cell phone provider that has a billing relationship and knows a lot about you, or using that maybe behind a firewall for a B2B case, where you know an employee wants to use their employee ID to access an insurance site or some vendor relationship that is specific to them.

 

Related Resources:

Social Media Marketing: Finding and winning hyper-social consumers

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

B2B Marketing: 5 privacy factors to consider when using marketing automation

Online Behavioral Advertising: How to benefit from targeted ads in a world concerned with privacy

Measuring Social Media’s Contribution to the Bottom Line: 5 Tactics

Social Media Marketing: Analytics are free and plentiful, so use them

Social Media Marketing: Should Facebook host your landing page?

Janrain, a social Web user management platform provider, recently released its Social Identity study with the research conducted by Blue Research.

The study involved a final sample size of 616, with respondents recruited by email and screened to ensure they either purchased a product online within the past 30 days, or read articles or watched video from major media outlets in the past 30 days.

A key element of the survey was finding out how respondents felt about using a social login — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. — instead of having to register individually at multiple websites.

Some of the results were very interesting:

• 86% of respondents reported being bothered by the need to create new accounts at websites and said they would actually change their behavior:

–        54% might leave the site and not return

–        26% would go to a different site if possible

–        6% would just simply leave or avoid the site

–        14% would not complete the registration

• 88% admitted to supplying incorrect information or leaving form fields incomplete (this result should come as no surprise to marketers). This figure is up from 76% in last year’s study
• 90% admitted to leaving a website if they couldn’t remember their login details rather than taking the time to recover their login information. This figure is up from 45% in 2010

The study also found that even though website visitors are becoming more frustrated with traditional marketing, they are becoming more open to using social identities for website registration.

In fact, 77% responded that social login is “a good solution that should be offered,” with 41% preferring social login over creating a new user account or using a guest account.

 

 

Among that 77%:

• 78% of social login fans have posted a comment or message to their social networks about a product or service they liked or thought others should know more about
• 83% reported being influenced to consider buying new products or services based on positive social media comments
• 69% report positive reviews might increase their likelihood to purchase a product or service
• 82% seek out, or avoid, companies based on social media reviews

 

That’s a lot of pretty numbers, but what do they mean for marketers?

To help put this research into a marketing context, I had the chance to interview Larry Drebes, CEO, Janrain. Here is the result of that interview:

  Read more…

The landing tab for the MarketingSherpa group on LinkedIn is called “Discussions.” Except, it was pretty much false advertising because there wasn’t a lot of discussion happening. It was mostly social spam … blatant self-promotion.

And this self-promotion went far beyond pushing products or special offers, it was promotion of blog posts, webinars, articles, etc … not quite as bad as promotional offers or the SEO phishing we get from comments here on the MarketingSherpa blog.

But still, it prevented conversation. So, Bethany Caudell, Customer Service, MECLABS, and I sat down to discuss the right approach forward. Beth manages the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn group, along with the MarketingExperiments Optimization group on LinkedIn.

 

Social media shades of gray

When it comes to managing social media communities, there are always shades of gray as to what, exactly, is appropriate. Then, once you set ground rules, the social media platform changes on you (ah, innovation).

For example, the challenge I’m talking about here only arose because LinkedIn did away with the “News” tab in its groups, leaving members with no dedicated place to post links they thought were newsworthy. So on the one hand, I did feel for them.

On the other hand, again, all of this “news” was killing the true point of the tab – discussions.

So at the end of the day we bit the bullet, sent out a warning letter about the new change, and Beth whipped out her virtual machete and started cleaning the groups of all that social spam. I expected some negative kickback, but I was extremely surprised when the feedback was overwhelming positive (in case you have to clean house yourself one day, you can see copy for the letter I sent using that link as well).

So the question arises … how do you combat social spam? How far should marketers go as policemen and women for their LinkedIn Groups, Facebook fan pages, and the like? These social media pages, originally meant for discussion, can be easily filled with junk thanks to a self-promoting audience … or simply inappropriate content.

Below you’ll find a very basic six-step process to help with your own efforts.

  Read more…

For years, the debate on social media marketing centered on ROI. Marketers asked themselves “How can we measure the impact of social media?” “What’s the ROI on Twitter?” “How do we know if LinkedIn is worthwhile?”

Thankfully, those days are behind us. Data is available from tools both paid and free. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, not every marketer has taken advantage, as you can see in the chart below from Adobe and Econsultancy, which we pulled from The Social Media Data Stacks e-book.

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Five of the six metrics listed above have a greater number of marketers saying they’re important than the number of marketers tracking them. This is like saying it’s important to eat right and exercise while eating chili cheese fries and canceling your gym membership. It just doesn’t make sense.

But don’t worry — we have you covered. Here is a list of free tools you can use to start measuring each social media metric.

- Read more…

Last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter article covered social media advertising. In gathering information for that story, I had the chance to interview three social media experts. One area that came up in each interview, but didn’t make it into the story, was Google+.

Obviously, that platform wasn’t included in the article because Google+ does not currently offer advertising.  But, since Google is such a major player in online advertising, and its struggles with social media are well-known (see: Wave, Orkut, Buzz), it was interesting to find out what our three practitioners thought about the latest splash in the social media world.

Google’s social track record is not great and the jury is very much still out on how effective Google+ will be in regard to making inroads into Facebook’s channel domination. Even Orkut, which was quite popular in specific countries such as India, Iran, Brazil and Estonia, has been steamrolled by Facebook in recent years.

With all this in mind, Google is still Google, and it is worth a few minutes of your time to think about how Google+ might fit into an overall digital marketing strategy. Read more…

Quick checklist, B2B marketers. Do you have:

• Customers?
• Prospective customers?
• Employees?
• Competitors?
• A story to tell?

Then, according to Jay Baer, “Congratulations, you have the raw materials for social media.” And he makes a good point. After all, some B2B marketers think of social media as more of a consumer marketing tactic, and many B2B marketers think they can’t learn anything from their B2C brethren.

But at last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in Boston, Jay made a very convincing argument for B2B social media. But he didn’t just aim to shift the audience’s paradigm; his keynote was replete with actionable advice, including ideas on how to tackle one of the most daunting tasks of all, measuring social media ROI.

He also talked about search and social going together like peanut butter and jelly. Jay gave the audience examples on how they could be a “digital dandelion,” spreading their content through the digital world like dandelion seeds on a windy day.

After his keynote (and once he was finished signing books for his marketing groupies), videographer Luke Thorpe and I cornered Jay on the expo floor and peppered him with a few questions about some of his more eye-opening ideas …

Read more…

My reporter antenna was humming during the presentation yesterday from Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert, at the MarketingSherpa B2B Summit in Boston. I could write a blog post everyday for two weeks based on Baer’s advice — and it encompassed only a single hour of the day packed with insights.

Baer methodically destroyed “the seven myths of B2B social media,” the first two of which directly addressed why B2B companies need to care about social media. Read more…

Like many marketers, I am not a lawyer. So when I see terms and conditions, my eyes glaze over and I shoot an email to our excellent in-house counsel.

However, if you conduct a campaign on a third-party site, you are at the mercy of their rules.

Take Facebook, for example. According to a recent whitepaper from Bulbstorm, “Run afoul of the guidelines, and your page could be shut down by Facebook at a moment’s notice … Facebook accepts reports of violations, and no one watches your page more closely than your competitors. They’d love nothing more than to see your campaign fail. So, follow the guidelines and don’t give Brand X a reason to tattle.”

But if you’re not a lawyer, following these guidelines to the letter is easier said than done. So, to help you avoid the LSAT, I grabbed Matt Simpson, Director, Interactive & Client Services at Bulbstorm, a developer of Facebook applications, and asked him a few questions that will keep you on the sunny side of Mark Zuckerberg and his team …

Read more…

To truly gain ROI from social media marketing, you need to take a strategic approach…as you would with any other marketing discipline.

So, at 1 p.m. EDT in today’s MarketingSherpa webinar (sponsored by Facebook) – Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach – I’ll be moderating an hour-long session with Todd Lebo and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe from MECLABS and Tamara Rosenbaum from Facebook, to arm you with some ideas as you embark on a strategic approach to social marketing.

But before we share our research, we asked your peers what advice they would give fellow marketers to help you transform your efforts from random acts of marketing to a strategic approach. Here are a few of our favorite responses…

Relationships are based on an open and honest conversation

The best advice I can offer is to look at social media as an extension to your Acquisition, Engagement, Retention, and Growth strategies. The majority of companies look at it as a function of PR – what about marketing, sales, and support? Isn’t a happy customer worth more than a random fan?

Don’t forget the most important part of social media: listening. Look at all the companies that pride themselves in having thousands of followers/fans but in turn only “listen” to a couple of hundred… that’s more of a monologue isn’t it? Don’t measure your success by the number of people listening to you.

Relationships are based on an open and honest conversation. Listen, and only then “talk” about things that are relevant to your audience. Do it in a timely way. Measure reactions to your conversations.

Using social media as just another channel to “get your message out” is not the way to build the dialog needed to create and nurture a close relationship with your prospects and customers.

– Roberto Lino, Skype Enterprise Global Head of Ecommerce, Skype

Research, strategize, and then get going

My top 3 tips for success in social media would be…

1. Do some research to find out where your customers are having the conversations before trying to join every single social site. Monitor what’s being said about you and your competition.

2. Go in with a strategy!!!

Who will be in charge of this effort? How many times a week will you tweet? What kinds of content will be useful for your audience?

3. Start small so you make sure you have time to keep it up. What we find is many companies have such limited resources to devote to social media marketing that time is wasted in the wrong groups, content is too weak, and schedules get too busy and the first thing to drop to the bottom of the priority list is the social stuff. Consistency is key when it comes to social media, so it’s important to find a way to keep it up.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s advice and joining the webinar!

– Michelle Etherton, Creative Director, Nurture Marketing

A dissenting opinion

My advice to marketers is to not transform your efforts from random acts of marketing to a strategic approach. Social media is all about being random and experimenting. Show up. Participate. Be random.

Social media marketing differs from traditional marketing in that you don’t just set it and forget it. Successful social media marketing requires interaction. It requires actively networking, meaning you are responding to others and your status updates are more than predetermined calculated scheduled posts.

By being random, you will find new and unique ways to gain ROI. I think you take all the fun out of social media marketing if you are rigid with strategy.

– Lara Nieberding, The Data Digger

Related Resources

Free webinar, Today June, 9th 1-2pm EDT — Intro to Strategic Social Media Marketing: Get your business or agency started with an ROI-based approach

Social Media Marketing: You value (and earn ROI on) what you pay for

Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook

Inbound Marketing newsletter – Free Case Studies and How To Articles from MarketingSherpa’s reporters