golinharris insights: social media week chicago

Panel Discussions HighlightsSocial Media Week ChicagoSeptember 19-23, 2011

1 Headliner: Adam Bain of Twitter

2 Crisis Communication for the Social Age • Social Media to Social Business

3 Getting to Social ROI • My Facebook Page Needs a Strategy?

4 Questions, Complaints… Compliments! • WOMMA Talkable Brands Exchange

5 Interaction of Paid, Owned and Earned Media & Measurement

6 Google+

7 The Evolution of Breaking News in Social Media

Actively grow your Twitter base; they have power.

Twitter by the numbers

59%are more likely to recommend

100M active users

600K daily users

230M tweets a day

56%are more likely to purchase from your brand

Panel Discussions from Social Media Week Chicago Sep. 19-23, 2011

1

Headliner:Adam Bain of TwitterPresident of Global Revenue at Twitter, talks about Twitter’s future and its impact so far.

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2

Crisis Communication for the Social Age

How to use social media in preparation for and during a crisis:

• Construct a multi-faceted social media monitoring system

• Understand what conversations are potential crises and what is simply a business issue

• Determine your current reputation within social media and what equity you have with your audience

• Be quick, use the strengths of social media to your advantage

• Communicate across all platforms you have at your disposal (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)

• Identify third party allies within social media

• Create dynamic messaging that is understandable by each audience you are approaching

Social Media to Social Business

Business itself is a conversation.

In developing a “social” business, you need buy-in from the top down. Get the executives on board by illustrating deep analytics on opportunities and challenges in the marketplace. Turn your numbers into a story and let them do the talking.

How do you force or encourage change within an organization to be more “socially” minded? Here is where you start:

• Clear objective for what you would like to get out of social media and what business need(s) are you looking to fulfill

• Identify multiple units within a company that could benefit from being active on social media

• Develop a tone and brand voice for the company that can be defined by guardrails, but let individual employees communicate in their own voice (must be authentic)

• Create a social playbook (consult key people from all business units who may benefit from use of social media: HR, customer service, marketing, etc.)

• Educate, train and reinforce the objectives you would like to achieve

• Share and provide deep analysis for results to entire organization

“ It takes 20 years to build

a reputation and five minutes

to ruin it.”

Warren Buffett

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3

Getting to Social ROI: Black & White and Lots of Gray

What’s the ROI of marketing on Facebook? And how do we prove profitability through our YouTube presence?

These are questions that come at us every day, but just like during the dawn of the internet era thirteen years ago, the industry is still waffling, trying to “believe” in the return value of social media as a marketing tool, with no universally-accepted ‘black and white’ standards yet in place. So instead of claiming to have all the answers, let’s work together to share how each challenging gray area maps to distinct opportunities to prove your social program is moving the needle.

• “To get to ROI, an org must have a certain level of culture (of measurement and accountability)”

• Social ROI: Return comes from Activity, Advocacy, Affinity

• Social ROI: Investment comes from tools, staff, training & tech/creative

Secrets of ROI success

1. Develop social segments/personas - know your audience

2. Determine if you’re a “researched” industry or “referred” industry

3. Determine “return” measures

4. Define Approach/Measurement 1) Conversion, 2) Engagement, 3) Awareness/Affinity

5. Optimize 1) Social media content/engagement 2) Social and web integration

My Facebook Page Needs a Strategy?

This panel addressed strategic planning, tools, and tips for social channels to effectively engage your consumer online.

How to start that strategy

• To effectively engage, figure out what’s on the brain of your consumer

• Building Social Identity: people define themselves through functionality

• Social media is about passion...and passion cannot be faked

Facebook Strategy

• Posts on Thursday or Friday receive 18% higher engagement rates

• Engagement rates are 3 times higher for posts that use a full-length URL

• Posts 80 characters or less have 27% higher engagement rates

Want to drive the highest engagement rates?

Ask: Where? When? Would? Should? Avoid: Why? Social media allows you to break the barrier of communication with consumers and gain insights in real time.

11 BILLIONhours per month are spent on Facebook

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4

Questions, Complaints… Compliments!

Transforming Consumer Comments into Powerful Brand Conversations

• Personalize your brand’s Facebook “voice” (e.g. LaurenwithAXE) as a means to increase fan engagement

• Use your listening dashboards to help identify über fans – turning fans into advocates, and advocates into your word-of-mouth army

• Consider incorporating customer quotes in your advertising: Click through rates in digital banners increase by four or five times when copy includes a pull-out customer quote

• Pre-empt anticipated questions from your community by incorporating answers proactively into your conversation calendars

• Never under-estimate the power of the crowd to come to your brand’s defense and answer the tough question for you – they can often be your best advocates

• Host monthly Tweet-ups with brand, company or third-party experts; use content to not only answer immediate questions, but to inform future communication based on frequent questions

• Use consumer reviews as an opportunity to highlight your brand or company’s customer service (e.g. publically “right” a perceived poor experience) or offer suggestions on how to correct misperceptions about your product or offering

• Solicit product/service reviews directly via your social media real estate (e.g. Facebook, Twitter); 93% of consumers make their purchase decisions based on a recommendation

WOMMA Talkable Brands Exchange

Measuring Customer Conversations: Is WOM Worth it? And What Exactly is it Worth?

Measurement is always a hot topic when it comes to execution of social media for business.

• Business was social before social media

• Betty Crocker is a good example of how social relationships existed before social media -a brand put a face to the company image – similar to how consumers looks for a face to communicate with online (Facebook/Twitter)

• Fiscars case study – community about scrapbooking hit a passion point with consumers. Sharing became viral because topic was not about the blade on the scissors, but the emotional connection with scrapbooking.

• Start with a people strategy - where are they? What are they talking about? Audience insights should always be first step in planning.

• Aim to connect business objectives to social measurement.

• Set meaningful objectives that will tell a powerful story about business value vs. fluffy metrics.

• Look at numbers, but also look at the story the numbers tell – how do you tell it as a business story?

• KPIs should always relate back to business goals

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Interaction of Paid, Owned and Earned Media & Measurement

Have a strategy for how the two should interact.

• When planning your strategy, understand the unique strengths of each vertical (paid, owned and earned) and how they play out over time

• Speak a consistent language when communicating metrics. This is especially important if a brand is working with several different agencies. If you’re not speaking the same measurement language, how does your strategy tell a cohesive success story? Some examples of consistent measurement language include: reach, share of voice, effectiveness of voice, and tone/quality.

• Make measurement specific to your industry and speak the same language as the industry. If you’re in the food industry, for example, measure your efforts against competitors to set benchmarks for success.

• Build a framework for measurement for integration across brand and agencies

• Search brings Paid, Owned and Earned media together for the consumer. When doing a search, links to paid, owned and earned media are shown in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – consumers are then able to make the decision about what they will click on and so begins the cycle of how they learn more about your brand

• Search cycle: intent, authority/relevance, control and scale, results and insights

• “Amplified Earned” = search + social

• In SEO use social media to increase search visibility bypromoting social properties in paid search and optimizing digital assets to increase search-ability

How do you effectively measure paid, owned and earned?

• Consider a database management system - connecting all assets holistically to look at performance of your strategy from a larger perspective

• Unify reporting from different parts of organization into one dashboard, look for flexibility, customization, and integrating existing tools

• Create new metrics that support current social landscape

• The more dimensions of interaction you understand from a customer perspective, the better chance you have with improving the brand experience (online and offline)

• There are three parts of engagement: advocacy, feedback, support

• Each pillar should have their own set of metrics; content changes based on your decision tree.

• Make measurement tactics specific to your content, especially as it changes

• Weighing importance of each metric is helpful in telling a story for the index.

• Metrics can show winners and losers in your tactics and help optimize strategy moving forward.

• On the horizon: True ROI (cost of driving sales with social vs. traditional means of promotion) and value of a recommendation (preference of brand)

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Google+

In addition to what has come out already in news about Google Plus features, Ryan Stonehouse from Google stopped by for a Q&A session regarding the roll-out of brand pages on Google Plus, which he expects will be rolled out in a lightweight version in early November this year.

Here are a few highlights:

• Content and engagement shared through plus page creates visibility in natural search. The more social (or the more +1s a piece of content receives), the higher that piece of content will rank on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

• Huge difference between content in Facebook – which is a closed network and is therefore not able to be crawled for content. This will allow brands and fans the power to share and impact search

• Brands will be able to segment their fans into Circles, just like a user Google Plus page

• This opens up opportunities to make content highly relevant to a select group of fans. Stonehouse also remarked that this should also increase performance, given the insight that the more relevant content is to a fan, the likelihood for interaction is higher

• Brand pages will be free – Google has not looked into or considered any paid models just yet

• At launch, brand pages will be pretty lightweight in tools, similar to user pages

• Rollout of brand pages will be small and steady - not mass, to allow considerable feedback from marketers

• Overall goal of Google Plus is not to replace Facebook, but to have a better, more personalized web experience on the Internet

• In terms of consumer reception to the +1 button, consumers understand it much like a Facebook Like and it’s working thus far from what they can tell in their market research

• There will be an analytics platform for the brand Google Plus pages. Stonehouse remarked there will definitely be an upgrade for Google Analytics soon which will include more sharing functionality insights, but he also hinted for brand pages, there may be an overlay of Google analytics and Plus page analytics

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7golinharris.com

The Evolution of Breaking News in Social Media

Journalism and media companies have adapted quickly to the new truth that actually breaking the news is no longer their main objective. It is nearly impossible in this day and age with mobile technology and Twitter. They now are embracing a new role as a filter for reporting relevant news and providing depth and context to situations that are occurring around the globe.

What this means for journalism, news and global awareness:

• There is an opportunity now to reach more people quicker than ever before

• News is now reported in a conversation, dubbed conversation journalism. A two-way dialogue that creates and evolves the story as it unfolds

• Every citizen with a cell phone is now a journalist and can break and share news in an authentic and timely manner

• News companies that can take a breaking news story and then curate deep and insightful context on the back end will succeed

• Social media has created a resurgence of one-on-one/personal communication that connects people with media and brands like never before

• Brands that embrace this personal communication and allow experts to be a part of that conversation have the ability to create very personal and real connections with their customers

golinharris insights: social media week chicago

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