Turning Social Media Into Sales: It’s Just Like High School

Learning to master social media is a lot like learning to fit in during high school. The good news is that this time there will be a lot less acne.

I just love what Heidi Cohen has written via SmartBlog for Social Media – a short yet complete 10-point guide to getting along and thriving online in the social media world.  She calls it “10 Tips for Social Media Introverts.” It is definitely worth a few minutes to read.

She basically concludes that it’s important to learn the unspoken rules that govern online interactions, to be generous with your praise and recommendations, and to work your way into the in crowd by getting involved with the right activities and groups.

It will only take you a few minutes to read Heidi’s thorough explanation of all ten points but below is the outline just to whet you whistle:

1. Pick your playground.
2. Wear the uniform.
3. Realize that you’re not alone.
4. Mind your manners.
5. Learn the lingo. R
6. Join extracurricular activities.
7. Share your knowledge.
8. Pay it forward. .
9. Be the star of your social media story.
10. Make a date to get together.

Technology is the “How” Not the “What” – “What” Will Make Your Company “High Growth”

Don’t confuse How and What.

Clients ask us how to use technology to grow their companies quickly. They want to know how to leverage social media to get explosive sales growth. That is backwards thinking.

The key is to figure out what you can do to provide extraordinary value to a customer. When you have that model down, then ways to leverage technology in your marketing are relatively easy to uncover.

Diapers dot com was worth $450 million because of what problem the company solved. Groupon over $8 billion because of what it did for shoppers and small businesses. Facebook is revolutionary because of what it did to get people together.

To experience explosive high-growth, decide the What; then the How might be solved by technology.

Can Mommy Help Rapidly Increase Your Sales? Yes, If She Is Using Social Media

At least 26 million moms regularly use social media. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts; forums and message board discussions; and online ratings and reviews all provide a limitless platform for “mommy bloggers” to spread information faster than any other media – including the traditional media you are paying to use now.

A post in BrandWeek detailing the power of these connected moms is worth checking out.

Here is the big point of the whole BrandWeek article:

“The biggest mistake a brand can make is to underestimate the power of moms. Their domination of social media has even encouraged companies to embrace social responsibility.”

Are you underestimating the potential of “their domination of social media?”

Even if your social media program is weak, you should court those media savvy moms who could communicate for you? Meaning, even if you don’t have a robust social media program, they do.  They are going to talk; you can give them something to talk about.

So what could be your next steps for leveraging the power of “mommy blogging?” The following suggestions don’t work for every business, but they do for the vast majority:

1. Start searching for the influential (read: active) bloggers in your town.
2. Look at your Facebook page: are their any active-on-Facebook moms that have already “liked” you?
3. Start following the active moms: via an RSS feed to Google Reader (or however else you want to follow feeds), on Facebook, forums or anywhere they are active online.
4. After a few weeks, chose one or two and pitch them an idea: a charity to promote with you, perhaps, or a community program, children’s program or anything that might interest them.
5. Let them sample your products and/or participate for free in any of your charitable programs.

These “moms” should now be a regular part of a publicity program. They can spread an idea much faster than traditional media.

Jim Lefevere: Build Your External Crisis Plan

Jim Lefevere is an award-winning marketing and technology leader for the healthcare, medical device, and consumer goods industries. His breadth of expertise spans traditional marketing and pioneering initiatives that have increased profits, engaged customers, and promoted cohesive brand awareness for start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Named one of the Top Forty business professionals under 40 by the Indianapolis Business Journal, he has led marketing efforts for Fortune 100 organizations and fast-growth start-ups. The thoughts expressed here do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of his employer or associations. You can read his blog on digital strategy, interactive marketing, and connected health care at: http://www.jlefevere.com.

Over time, Social Media watchers have seen a few instances where a crisis plan is required as a part of a digital strategy and social media plan. Sanofi-Aventis ran into issues with their Facebook page and Nestle has had some negative feedback on their page as well.

Jeremiah Oywang provides his steps to take in the event of a crisis.

If You Fail to Plan then You Plan to Fail

1. A risk assessment is standard issue for any strategy, but should develop a SOP as a component of any social media plan–especially for health care marketers. You’re being risk averse as it is, so please make sure you have an assessment of your weak points, where an attack could come in the event that there is some negative feedback. Be creative in order to scenario a plan as much as possible. Think pricing, side effects, Sr. Management, labor, business practices, marketing practices, etc.

2. Create a response plan. This could include members of the internal response team, contact info, etc. Who are your major internal and external (customer) stakeholders? What do you want to communicate? What is the issue that needs to be addressed? If you’re a health care marketer, you want to do this well ahead of time to ensure you can respond in a timely manner. Build multiple scenarios and write multiple response plans. Yes, this sounds like a lot of work (and it is) but the last thing you want is to get hung up in Legal/Regulatory review when your Facebook page is blowing up.

3. Identify the “Hit by a Train” contingencies. You should cross-train multiple people who could implement the plan. Remove all single points of failure that could prevent a fast response, i.e. “John Doe, our community manager, is on vacation this week and I don’t know how to respond.” Identify back-up resources in the event someone is on vacation.

4. Test and Train your plan. Please prepare your primary contacts, their back-ups, and Sr. Management to care for negative feedback. It is inevitable.

5. Develop an internal Social Media Oath and Plan. Build relationships with your communities, and don’t do anything that can’t pass an “authentic” test.

Social media is a marathon and not a sprint. Social Media and your community should be treated like a garden: it needs to be cared for, watered and nurtured.  If the sun shines just right you can be rewarded in the form of advocates, defenders and company loyalists, but only if you’ve done the work necessary to cultivate trust. Tending takes time and needs to happen as a core component of any plan.

Fortunately for the rest of us, there are situations like Motrin, Sanofi-Aventis and Nestle that serve as all too clear examples of how proper planning can help mitigate (but not entirely prevent) some of the risks of social media for health care companies.

Be prepared, folks

Stay tuned for the remainder of Jim’s series on social media.

Jim Lefevere: How Does Your Social Media Garden Grow?

Jim Lefevere is an award-winning marketing and technology leader for the healthcare, medical device, and consumer goods industries. His breadth of expertise spans traditional marketing and pioneering initiatives that have increased profits, engaged customers, and promoted cohesive brand awareness for start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Named one of the Top Forty business professionals under 40 by the Indianapolis Business Journal, he has led marketing efforts for Fortune 100 organizations and fast-growth start-ups. The thoughts expressed here do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of his employer or associations. You can read his blog on digital strategy, interactive marketing, and connected health care at: http://www.jlefevere.com.

One of the things that I continually am on the hunt for is good info on how to explain social media to people who may not read as much as I do. From a marketing perspective, I think it completely changes marketing as we know it today. And when I say that, I think the shift is well underway but most people don’t realize it yet.

I like to think of Social Media as a garden. A garden that provides a bountiful harvest is something that needs to be started and nurtured over time in order to provide rich results. That is a great analogy to explain Social Media. My concern is that many health care companies will roll out social media initiatives and see no immediate return and kill the programs. My contention is that marketing today is a conversation and the conversation is online. It takes time to build, nurture and yield results–much like a garden.

This underscores a fundamental truth to social media that many organizations underestimate–being social means having real live people who actively participate in your initiatives. It’s difficult to automate and a challenge to scale, but it can also help move your business forward in ways that produce leveraged outcomes such as new/better products or services.

The economics of using social media in business require the participation of people to fuel it. It is not simply enabled by technology that maintains itself. One of the biggest lessons to be taken away from a social platform such as Twitter is that the ecosystem it’s a part of if, is itself built on people who keep it humming along with not only content, but a seemingly endless stream of third party applications. This phenomenon is not entirely new–it’s been referred to as end-user innovation (innovation by consumers and end users, rather than suppliers).

There are a few considerations every organization needs to consider when developing blueprints for their own unique social media design. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are few things you can plan for as you review the many options before you.

Here are three to consider:

Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take into account that you’ll have to invest to grow your effort into a healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas. People will be required in order to do this.

Feeding. Whether it’s a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution you’ve put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content. Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your participants–but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.

Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this–but in others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive. Weeding can also include creating a separate environment–for example, Nokia’s “blog hub” encourages employees to vent freely internally (using anonymous aliases).You can bet that someone is looking at the data and analyzing it. If not, they should be.

It’s worth noting that seeding, feeding, and weeding all take place after any social initiative has been launched. But not taking into account the manpower that’s involved in these as you develop your social business design strategy can lead to a lack of adoption or participation–essential elements to any social initiative. Ignoring these realities will continue to propagate the myth that Social Media is fast, cheap and easy. As organizations look to grow or scale their current initiatives, it’s proving to be anything but.

Stay tuned for the remainder of Jim’s series on social media.

Merry Christmas. Learn About Social Media From Some Wise Men

I normally wouldn’t do a Christmas post but this is special… Here’s a great holiday video from Portuguese digital shop Excentric that tells the story of the Nativity with the key players communicating via social media—Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.

It gives us an idea, in a three minute video, how the world is communicating today by using the example of a this 2000 year old story.

Season’s Greetings, John

Measure Social Media ROI

This article by Susan Appel was recently featured on Marketing By Deepak. Susan is a contributor to moveupandtotheright.com as well as yoursocialmove.com.

Social Media has the ability to drive inbound leads (people requesting information from you) into your business. These leads will transform the way you look at growing your business. But the question everyone is asking is, “How do we measure return on investment of social media?”

I was recently at a technology conference where one panelist stated, “The goal is not to be good at social media, but to use social media as a tool to be good at business.” This statement clearly defines that your social media priority should be to grow your business.

Let’s apply the idea of using social media to be good at business to how we look at return on investment (ROI). There is a lot of discussion about how much a “friend” is worth. While it is important to have friends and fans, that isn’t where the ROI comes from. Friends and fans allow you to gather a group of active listeners. Your challenge is to convert those listeners into advocates or people taking action, and this is where ROI comes into to play.

Monitoring Actions

The ROI for your program is going to come from the action you get your social network to take toward growing your business. So the real question is, “What should I be measuring and why?”

·         Growth over time: number of friends, followers, site traffic

o        I just said that this doesn’t translate into ROI, so why do I suggest measuring it? This will show you if your message is resonating with your target audience. If your message isn’t resonating, it is time to make some changes. You want to make sure your network is growing. Growth in your network creates a larger audience that can spread your message and take actions toward the growth of your business.

·         Conversion metrics

o        The first question you should ask when creating a social media program is, “What are the three to five actions that will affect the growth of my business?” These actions may include signing up for an event, downloading a white paper or requesting information. Your program should be created around driving people to take these actions. This means rather than concentrating on promoting your business, your key focus should be to lead your audience to take these three to five specific actions.

·         Funnel Metrics

o        Using a tool such as Google Analytics allows you to monitor where and when people are leaving your site. This enables you to make small changes to maximize the benefit for each person that visits your site.

Social Media ROI is about understanding the actions that grow your business and developing a dialogue with your audience that results in your network taking action.

Billionaire Entrepreneurs See A Fantastic Investment Opportunity “Tsunami” Coming

Like most entrepreneurs, we may think of “social media” as a Facebook page, tweeting, and occasionally updating our LinkedIn profile. But we are thinking way too small. We need to see a social media tsunami coming called “the third wave.”

The 800 pound gorilla of Venture Capitalists, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has announced a huge fund solely for the investment in “the third wave,” the most disruptive and potentially successful businesses of this generation: social media businesses

Some others also investing in the new Kleiner Perkins “sFund” are Amazon, Facebook, and Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media, and Allen & Company.

What do these billionaires know that we don’t?

Mega-successful-investor John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, said he created the fund because there is a “third wave” of “incredible and disruptive innovation” that is fundamentally changing the nature of the human communication.

• The “first wave” was the creation of the Internet itself.
• The “second wave” was was the invention of browsers, which made it possible for everyday people to use the internet.
• Now the “third wave” is changing “from an old Internet of documents and sites to a new one that’s all about people and places and relationships.”

Said another way, the “third wave” is about how social media immediately connects us all when we are gathering any kind of information.

We are talking about location-based, mobile-based, specific-interest-based immediate conversations with other like-minded people.

I have seen entrepreneurs transform themselves, their businesses, and their industry by grasping the power of this new connectivity.

It’s time we stop thinking about our Facebook page as social media, and start think about something that will change our lives, our businesses, and our world forever. At least, that’s what the smart money thinks.

Interview Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon Founder and Mega-Successful Entrepreneur

What can you learn from the founder of the fastest growing company in the history of the world? Groupon is that company, and the founder is ready to share ideas if entrepreneurs are ready to listen.

Eric Lefkofsky is a low profile billionaire, but over the last dozen years, he has started and cashed in on an impressive string of business wins.

First, StarBelly, made tools for building Web sites. Then he started two companies that have since gone public — InnerWorkings, which provides printing capabilities over the Web, and Echo Global Logistics, a transportation and logistics outsourcing business. He also started MediaBank, a company that faciltiates advertising buys.

Here is an interview with Lefkofsky in the New York Times that every entrepreneur should read. It is short (it will take you less than 10 minutes) but packed with practical insights.

For instance:

• The most successful company in history, Groupon, started out as a failure called ThePoint. The lesson: don’t get fooled by failure. Look at the positive, discard the negative, and turn your business into a big success regardless of the past
• A well-run business has great operational control and a metrics-driven culture. As a result you can expect growing revenue, profits and cash flow
• The most disruptive (read: successful) business models over the next 5 – 10 years will be taking advantage of social media – or the “social graph” as Lefkowski calls it
• Because of social media, Lefkofsky asks, “Why would you ever make a cold call again?”

Success leaves clues and Eric Lefkofsky has had a huge string of winners. Here he lays out the clues to his success so obviously that any listening entrepreneur can benefit.

Cost-Effective Marketing Ideas Any Business Can Copy

Why should you care about fried chicken restaurants KFC? Because of this Twitter contest and some of their other cost-effective marketing ideas to leverage the power of social media that any business can easily copy.

In my previous post about KFC, we observed how KFC was doing inexpensive guerrilla (and kinda tacky) marketing on campuses.

Here we see how to drive search-friendly internet traffic by having lots of people tweeting about you. Frequent, Recent, and Relevant will drive natural search.

KFC set up a contest for their target audience (teens) to tweet why they should get a college scholarship.

Do you want your business to have an immediate growth in online presence? How many tweets can you do by yourself? Not many – even if you are using automation programs like my clients do. Instead how many people tweeting could you get if you had a contest? Maybe thousands in a very short period of time.

If you find something your target really connects to emotionally, you’d be surprised how cheap this can be. It is shocking what thousands of people will do for less than a $1000.

What do you do next?

1. Create a specific profile of your target customer
2. Identify something emotionally very important to them that your company interacts with in some way. (For instance, KFC’s target is teens, and scholarships are very emotional to them)
3. Then set up a contest so your target tweets about something important to them… it ties the thing they value with you online.
4. Don’t forget to call the media. This also facilitates media coverage in the traditional trade press in your industry and consumer press

Being associated online with something important to your target drives inbound leads.

And driving inbound leads is the best reason to spend marketing money.