You can’t manage social media

Social media can’t be managed, but you can participate. And Social CRM it is often a misused term – meaning using social media to sell more stuff. It will not work!

Social media is about:

• Cross functional collaboration – making people from HR, PR to sales and marketing work together in ways they have never done before.


• Integration of communication channels across all the touchpoints you use to connect customer including email, social, mobile and web.

Meaningful dialogues
Many struggle defining what Social CRM means to their organization, as well as how to get started. Clearly there is a business discipline that needs to be developed, whatever you call it, it has to do with how to participate in social settings with customers in ways that are productive for the business.

Start with being a good listener
One good advice ist to apply analytical tools to access the numbers of mentions about your brand or products and to what degree they are positive or negative.

Here are some interesting views on how to look at social media:
Morgan Johnston, Manager of Corporate Communications at JetBlue:

"Social media is like an information booth. We are there to
serve, we are listening and we are there when people reach out, when they have
questions. And sometimes those questions turn into sales."

Jesse Engle, CEO, Co Tweet by Exact Target:

"One of the most important thing companies can do is to learn how to
become adept at the art of conversation."

What is the ROI of social media?
The answer is what is the ROI of a hug? A lot of what social media is about is to embrace people and make them feel as if they are valuable wheather that is ti get increased amplification and exposure from fans or to engage people who have had a negative experience resolved and now like you. But seriously, here is what to measure:

Short term: Your ability to read and react in real time to your
customers (impact of campaigns and how they drive conversion)

Long term: Building ongoing loyalty and customer retention .

TIP! Who is in dialogue with the customer, the company or the company employee?
Humanize your brand online. Comcast found that people began to see the company as a collection of human beings rather than a faceless, monolithic organization. And saw the tenor of the conversations change when they introduced Frank.

Souce:
Co Tweet by Exact Target, the “go-to” social media platform for the worlds most admired brands

Mobil and Loyalty

At the International CTIA convention an Express executive stressed that retailers need to use mobile to take their loyalty efforts to the next level.

I quote him:

“I can tell you our mobile site users are on our mobile site just as long as they’re on our Web site,” “And they’re on our app a little more than half as long.

“They’re very engaged – they have the phone in their hand and wherever they are, whatever they’re doing, when the thought to buy something comes, I want to sell it to them.”

It is all about loyalty!
When brands and retailers tie in loyalty to their mobile component, it becomes an incredible tool that lets them market one-to-one with their customer.

The name of the game is to:

1. Get hold of your marketing group. The more channels they use to connect with you the more money they’re going to spend.
2. The more engaged you have your customer in your brand, the more you’re going to build value that’s going to flow throughout your brand.
3. Your executive staff must get passed the view of a single channel.
   

What do you do with these people who are doing product comparisons?

When consumers began scanning products in-store, it created fear in the retail industry. It forces retailers to do that active process to find out what their competitor’s prices are and make sure they’re competitive.

Here is what to do:

1. Make the in-store experience seamless for customers.
2. Make sure that there are not a lot of steps that it will take for consumers to complete a transaction.
3. Make sure that the technology that they’re using reduces the amount of steps.
4. Encourage interaction with the products.
   

Also:

• Retailer applications and mobile sites enable consumers to make much more educated purchases.
• Mobile creates another opportunity for retailers to engage with people.

What not to do:

• Cut and paste from the Web site to the mobile site.
  

What to do:

• The customer knows what he wants, you have to give them the opportunity to purchase something in 60-seconds.
• Make elegant and simple solutions.
• Retailers have an opportunity to make a two-way conversation with customers and it all comes back to your brand and the user experience.

And a few points about bar codes:

• Currently, more companies are using mobile bar codes to drive consumers in-store.
• Mobile bar codes provided additional content for users – whether it’s a video they can watch to learn more about the product or a coupon that they receive when they scan it.

Think about it!

It used to be that consumers were empowered by a talk to the salesperson. Now you got 3 billion people on this planet with a camera phone and they can take a photo or scan a bar code and find out all kinds of relevant information about your product.

Social Media Strategy

The key to social media success lies in a clear social media strategy.

So, in order to use social media for long-term business benefits you have to address the needs and wants of the users while simultaneously ensuring that key business goals are being met.

This is never straightforward, especially as social media and online communities can affect many areas of your business, from product development through to PR and advertising.

Make therefore sure that you secure buy-in from all relevant employees across all teams.

Steps to define the strategy:
1. Define the process.
2. Conduct workshops with the stakeholders to take a unified approach to social media.
3. Identify a social media strategy that's based on your brand values and strategic goals, giving you results that are measurable, accurate and useful.

Do it yourself or with the help of a consultancy.

What does true multichannel mean?

Many companies send messages via direct mail, email, mobile and social – but that does not make them multichannel. True multichannel means using all channels seamlessly in one platform to create a multithreaded dialogue that matches customers’ behavior across channels.

Customers are empowered – engaging with each other to give opinions on brands, so brands have lost the control of the message. If you want to stay in business, you have to take customer centric strategies seriously. NO CHOICE!

Here I am listing 2 basic requirements for multichannel conversations with the customer:
1. TRUST – the customer must trust that you act in their interest and don’t abuse him or her privacy.
2. CONFIDENT THAT YOU ARE COMPETENT – the customer must believe that you are competent to recognize me when I am online as the same person who’s ID number was in use at the call center yesterday.

3 Necessarry steps toward true multichannel
1. System integration – system that communicate with each other
2. Information integration
3. Break down organizational silos – people that communicate with each other

But the most important attitude is:

Delight your customers – that must be what we WANT to do every day!

Remember:

A customer don’t care how we organize our data og technology, they care about how they are communicated with. To be someone that goes that extra mile to deliver exactly what they want – and that probably means you have to be supported by a single platform capability to deliver htat dialogue and service.

What is your customer’s impression of the conversation?
Does he think the the the conversation is integrated, then it is.

The single most important issue
Put youself in the place of the customer, try to see all the interactions that a customer will have through the eyes of the customer themselves. The more customer insight you have, the better prepared you’ll be to adopt the customer oreiented perspective

Companies to look to for best practice:
Dell and American Express (Forrester ‘s 2010 Voice of Customer Award cited for their active use of customer data collecting and act to drive that real-time customer experience)

Sources:

http://www.thunderhead.com/ and http://www.peppersandrogersgroup.com/

Tactics for developing content

I need marketing content and messaging. Where do I find it? What is the cost, how do I define my quality requirements, who can write, where do I recruit writers, can I seek them out internally, who can write for me outside the organization? Can I use a consultant or agency?

What do other marketers do?

On my pursuit of answering all these questions, I found that Marketing Sherpa had asked nearly 1 000 B2B marketers what was their most effective tactics helping them to develop marketing content and messaging.

Their top 5 was:
1. Repurposing and reformatting existing content from press releases, blog posts and white papers
2. Encourage customers to submit testimonials and case studies
3. Recruit internal authors from other departments
4. Outsource – use agency or freelancer with in depth knowledge and understanding of the brand
5. Use social media to encourage brand advocates to produce content

Good to know! This has become my most important source list.