Here are the results of our research in social media, and our attempt to move closer towards a tangible monetizing strategy in social media marketing.
Hi Folks.
GoJeeno SocialHarvest, the twitter based referral management tool for ecommerce stores is now out in public Beta.
SocialHarvest lets ecommerce store owners tie the social media activity about their business with actual sales. That way, stores can now identify who is spreading the word about their products and which conversations actually lead to sales.
SocialHarvest also lets store owners reward their good customers by awarding credit points for each purchase they or their referrals make, and create reward schemes to incentivize customers.
In short, this is pretty much the kind of robust CRM suite that small and medium ecommerce players have always needed but could never afford it.
The Beta supports out-of-the-box integration with Shopify stores. If you are not using the Shopify platform, you can still sign up and give us a brief overview of your store’s format and we’ll custom build the integration for you totally free!
Content is good. But content is good only if we understand it. The same way religion, war, school or tonka trucks are useful. In the social media perspective, content can make sense only if it leads to an actionable point. Specifically (1) a direct purchase, (2) a referral to make someone else purchase, or (3) a long term purchase by fostering a brand association.
The idea is, tracing out where the content comes from, and what tangible outcome it results in. Of course, superficially, content comes from the customer. But looking deeper, information flows across numerous channels, pathways and people before it finally comes back in. An innocent wikipedia entry inspires a blog post. The title there becomes a tweet. The tweet, retweeted, through the metamorphosis of ideas, flows from individual to individual, landing at a point where we see it.
And this point is neither the beginning nor the end. Content may have numerous ends, right from directly affecting the brand perspective, to overnight tipping sales, an unforseen load on the support desk, or the formation or earth shattering findings.
The point is, just analyzing content from the current context is not sufficient. In order to leverage on the power of social networks and information flow, you need to figure out where it comes from and where it flows. And then you will be able to manage where it ends.
Whoever you are, in whatever business, you already know the importance of social media marketing. But, like the bigger chunk of traditional marketing, the definitions here are broad and often times overwhelming. Here is a little write up on how you should tackle your entire social media strategy- piece by piece.
The most important question is what do you want to achieve?
Awareness:
Who: If your product does not already have an overflowing amount of conversations, and is not a common tongue for over three quarters of your target audience, this is a good place to start.
How: First, identify your evangelists and empower them to spread the word better. Then seek out influencers who are most likely to advocate your products, and convert them to be your evangelists. Give them a freebie, get into their conversations, and rope them in. As long as you don’t sound intrusive…
Klout is a good place to look for influencers
Brand Management:
Who: If you already enjoy significant brand awareness with your product you might look in here. You don’t have to be trending, but if you don’t have more Tweets than a hundred a day, you don’t need to really worry here yet.
How: Study who is talking about you and what their possible influence is- you might be really worried that someone is throwing dirtballs at you. But if nobody is listening, it may not even matter. Analyze across conversations to see if you are going really wrong somewhere and try to get your support team in place if it is a product issue. If you still are worried, check out Online Reputation Management tools. Be sure that the issue is not transient or obvious before investing on sentiment analysis. Most people don’t really need it!
Radian6 is a good investment for ORM is you have the money.
Real-time Support:
Who: If you have the time and long term resources to spare, this is an excellent use of social media. Once you get in, you are going to have your staff on constant alert with nothing much else to do, so be doubly sure you can afford it in the long term.
How: If the load is nothing that a social media team of five can’t handle, use a good real-time search and content aggregation tool. If it gets heavier, you might need a better automated helpdesk management tool. If it integrates with your existing support desk environment, all the better!
Zendesk is one of the best players here- and they offer a free trial too.
Customer Management:
Who: If you are running a consumer focused business, this would be your social media sweet spot- using social media to provide your best customers with better service, and creating a social environment to generate new leads and referrals.
How: Identify how customer conversations are affecting your business. Our way is integrating social media activities with actual sales. Then you can reward customers for the business they generate through their referrals.
A little self-hooting, but this is what we do at GoJeeno. Sign up and start using GoJeeno SocialHarvest -completely free for now.
Micro-financiers provide a set of financial services with a deep social impact in emerging markets. There is clearly a growing need for micro credits that cannot be met by multinational banks or the government. The industry in itself clearly plays in a sector dominated by people and personal relationships.
I had the opportunity to talk to a micro-financier last week at Interop, Mumbai. Our conversations ended prematurely due to the lack of time, hanging on the inherent inabilities of the sector to leverage on social media.
It is not paradox that the concept of ‘Hype’ has historically been hyped a bit too much in the marketing world. As social media marketers, we learn the nuances of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. We float around, with a handful of tools, and set about a mammoth mission of turning our marketing budgets into Buzz. But most often, we forget to take a step back and learn the basics- what is Social Media, and why do we care as much about it? Every social media platform is based on a fundamental concept that we have been exposed to all our lives- Social Networks. A social network is simply a bunch of individuals (or nodes) connected by a certain ‘relationship’ between them. At the work place, we have ‘colleague’ and ‘boss’ networks. At school, we had our friends. And, as marketers, we balance the delicate ‘client-vendor-customer’ relationship.Twitter has users connected together based on who ‘follows’ whom, while in Facebook you may have a friend. Business schools and self proclaimed Social Media experts are mushrooming a plethora of ‘Social Media’ courses. And yet social media marketing today leaves us with pitiably little information. Pretty basic stuff! But are we not forgetting to do our bit of reading on something far more important?
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I attended a start-up camp a few weeks ago- a pretty interesting place filled with ideas and innovation. But the most agonizing thing was the absolute lack of marketing knowledge that most entrepreneurs have- not the skill, or the know-how, but the basic knowledge of the importance of an integrated marketing focus.
As usual, a good deal of inventions did a lot of things that made very little sense, spoke to absolutely no body, and answered an extremely ‘today’ problem that probably won’t even exist by the time their products came out. But even that wasn’t the worst. Nor was the disregard they had for analytics.
The sad part is the lack of logical thought that goes into the pricing model. A number of ideas involved social content sharing as the primary service offered. Real estate owners and consultants and potential buyers; sophisticated craigslists and mini eBays…
One of the things that makes user generated content services really different from the old school ones is that these services have two types of customers- the Makers and the Eaters.
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So you want to get your marketing geared towards social media?
Every marketing pundit has an opinion. Tweet, blog, post up a video, create something remarkable enough for people to talk about… And most of this advice is really important from a philosophical point of view, but let’s get to the brass tacks first- Why?
Why do you really want to get on with a social media campaign?
If your answer is
(1) “because that’s where everybody is”,
(2) “it is cheap, so I don’t have anything to lose”
or (3) “my daughter told me that’s the future”,
I extend my deepest congratulations to you. Social media to you is the same as putting up a hot dog stand in Times Square, and there ends any intelligent discussion I would like to have with you.
As a marketer, and especially as an analytics guy, there are a few simple questions you need to answer before you shape up your social campaign:
Increase leads generated from product downloads.
Generate 30% more weekly leads in three weeks and sustaining this for two months.
Send out ‘coupon codes’ with special offers in each medium and track the spread of these codes.
Monthly and yearly trends extrapolated to obtain expected figures of “If I did not run this campaign”.
Reach steady-state in three weeks, and sustain the efforts for two months.
Cost of infrastructure and resources through the period,lost opportunity cost in keeping them occupied in the campaign and the cost of analysis and tuning throughout the effort.
‘Pulling the plug’ on the campaign when it has done its due course.
**The nature of social media may make a clean exit strategy more difficult without in some way disturbing the reputation.
The core here is- running a social media campaign is not much different from running a campaign elsewhere. It begins with a simple rhetoric- Why?
Second- once in, getting out of social media is difficult from both marketing and finance perspectives.
Moving social is an ongoing effort. Remember- Buzz today, gone tomorrow. Investing all your efforts to get a fraction’s worth of the trending list is not a strategy, let alone a smart one.
Social Media is a data goldmine. And you get to observe all this, except that there is no psychological control factor that makes Focus groups futile. This is one place where your customers are who they are, with the type of people they like.
And that pushes us back to the importance of Socializing CRM- understanding customer behavior based on their neighbors. If your non-customers are having an effect on the bottomline- direct or indirect- it is only imperative that you know!
So that, IMHO, is where your social media strategy should he headed. To collect, organize and understand data to manage and harvest relationships. To invite your super fan customers to that neutral party and turn them into evangelists. To keep the new converts surrounded by the type of people who love you.