Throughout the history of advertising the goal has been to reach customers with a compelling message which will entice them to by an advertisers product. Until the advent of the internet this took the form of some sort of broadcasting, and broadcasters struggled to convince their advertisers that they could actually deliver the one thing that advertisers demanded for their advertising dollars… measurable results. The earliest form or advertising impact measurement were mass samplings of consumers, this was followed by representative samples, the initiation of “Nielsen Families” purported to portray viewing habits, people meters which used heat sensors to determine if people where actually in the room when a monitored TV set was on, and more recently Digital cable boxes and Tivo, which can better monitor viewing habits and ad skipping. Nonetheless, broadcasting is just that, an essentially one-way communication where the best that an advertiser can do is follow the supposed demographic popularity of a program, and hope that the viewer does not get hungry when their ad runs. Advertising agencies have always sold their services with creativity as the driving factor on what is a good ad, but recent research has shown the relevance, of the likely interests of the viewer is a much more important in effective broadcast advertising.

The internet began the paradigm shift in advertising by being able to embed ads in content that the viewer was able to chose for himself. In Television the wunderkinds were the programmers… Fred Silverman, Brandon Tartikoff, Bud Grant, Les Moonves. They produced a relatively few hours of commercial television from which the public was to choose. With few alternatives, we watched. The internet began to provide viewers with entertainment alternatives, where they could in fact become their own programmers. Advertisers flocked to internet advertising as it provided more specific interest/relevance based advertising opportunities. Web 2.0 technologies provide advertisers radically more information on viewers, and can finally begin to deliver targeted advertising with tangible and measurable results.

In Traditional Media 95% of the cost of a Media Campaign is the cost of delivering the message. The average Television commercial costs $100K to 350K to produce, and a 30 Second spot on “American Idol”, the number one rated show will cost $623,000. That is a cost of roughly $20 per CPM—thousands of impressions. A typical internet add will cost roughly $5. per CPM. Positive mention on a social networking site is free. While Evian has not released the production cost of their “Roller Babies” spot, it has had 10.1 million free views thus far. Internet delivery is not necessarily just cheaper, it is remarkably more effective.

Conversational Marketing

It is important to remember that the cornerstone of successful Social Media efforts is that they are and must be conversations, and that conversations are two way. This imperative requires more effort on the corporate side, as you are no longer broadcasters, and your audience expects you to listen to them as well, and they judge you on the basis of your follow-through. This need for follow through is the most common complaint of corporate skeptics, as they question how they will have time to engage en entire community in conversations. A properly researched Social Media Market profile will yield to a corporate client not an entire community of users, but rather a community of key influencers. Taking a few minutes to directly respond in an earnest and helpful way can in turn get your message, and their positive impression about you and your company to thousands of their followers. On the other hand, these influencers typically have little patience for or interest in broadcasters of messages that are not interested in hearing their listeners questions. Do this and you will quickly become a voice in the wilderness.

Key Influencers and Blogging

Key influencers in a particular community of users are usually bloggers. They will tweet about their blogs, and they will read other blogs, but their primary means of engagement is through their blog. Corporate blogging is essential in gaining ground in an online community in that it provides a means to grow brand reputation, establish the blogger’s own credibility and personality online. However blogging can be a time consuming effort, and requires focus, and writing skills beyond product knowledge. Perhaps the most difficult part in composing a blog, is anticipating the questions that it will raise, and the comments that will follow it. This is true for all authors of blogs, not just our internal blogs. Often is can be even more important to hear what is being said, than to say something ourselves. We are often too busy talking to spend time listening, but the community catches on very quickly to the “oracles” who do not bother to listen. It can also be an effective way of raising an issue to respond to a neutral or negative blog, in a positive and constructive way. We find is also often easier to do this than to compose an entire original work. A time honored principle of debating is that is much easier to prove an opponent’s argument as being wrong than to prove yours to be right… but by proving the opponent wrong, you can assume the mantle of victory in the discussion; if they are wrong, then you must be right.

We should track interested and interesting blogs in the community, and make sure that our people see those ones which provide opportunities to create a discussion or some buzz. There are far too many to expect everyone to read them all, but it may be of value to make sure that they are being read, and tagged as appropriate. There are a number of good automated tools to listen to the community in a general way, and to begin the process of identifying influencers. These tools can narrow down the work, which might be significant for a particular industry. As the tools begin to tell us what our customers are talking about, and narrow the field of voices, we find it best to inject a knowledgeable and experienced editor into the process, to select the best and most loyal of supporters, and the most vocal and often most reckless of opponents can be a valuable addition to the process. Once a blog list has been started, it is important to get the list to key voices in our client’s company so that they can begin to participate in the online discussions that are going on. The sooner this is done, the more credibility you will have should you ever need it.

Reaching out to the Blog community on a regular basis, making key product and program specialists available to them can get the message out with much more credibility that by writing the blog internally. Doing this invariably improves the relationship with the blogger, as their most crucial need is for fresh content, and they love exclusive, inside or even verifiable official and authoritative information.

Twitter

Twitter strategies are very similar to blog strategies, it is a micro-blogging site after all. The blogs are tweets… they are shorter, and much more plentiful. The same automated tools exist to gather opinion data on Twitter, and to note positive, neutral and negative mentions about a company, its products, or the competition. Many companies forget to profile their competition as well, and this can be a tremendous missed opportunity. The community may be unhappy with something you are doing, but they may HATE something that your competitor has just done. In a corporate setting, we recommend building an account which aggregates the followers and persons followed by your main or most visible team members. The sign-up process will automatically eliminate duplications and will yield a master list, which can then be vetted to eliminate weak contacts, bots, and get-rich-using-Twitter schemers. This list should them be distributed to the team, for them to add to the people that they are following, in hopes of being followed back. We have found that users are much more likely to follow people in a company they are interested in than those people are likely to follow them back. When you follow them, you usually get their attention. If They follow you back you should welcome them publicly, and send them a direct message asking if they have any specific questions or if there is one thing they would like for you to tweet about them to the larger community. This is generally a very effective strategy for beginning a positive relationship with a follower. As with blogs, it is just as important to follow negative influencers as it is to follow the ones who already love you.

Bringing Social Media to your Company

Getting Corporate users to adopt Social Media requires that we design an implementation strategy for them, that we vet the available tools to choose the suite which will best address their needs, and that we present them with the tools, and clear indications of what the payoffs will be for using them. The best way to engage them is to use the tools that they would naturally use to get information that they need, to use the tools that they would use to get information. Social media is an extension of the human process of communication. Our challenge is to make it that easy for them… to make it a process We need to put together a detailed primer for them based on best practices. The first thing would be to analyze their styles, and determine best practice paths for them. This tool to log in and maintain, this tool to sustain and use, this tool to monitor progress. A lasses-faire, libertarian sort of approach is great for people who have lots of time to waste. The unemployed and the under employed are probably the closest things to living wikipedias on social media networking that exists… our job is to deliver the best elements of social media, and those most suited to our users, on the assumption that we will get one chance to engage before being deemed a “fail.”

People who use Social Media as part of their jobs do so based on enlightened self-interest, and we need to continually monitor and enable that involvement in a corporate environment. This is by definition an invasive process as it will require monitoring and occasional prodding to get questions answered, and in some cases to get questions asked. The pay-off will be what APPEARS to be a self-sustaining community engagement. In their most effective and easily accepted form, our efforts will be as close as possible to invisible to all participants, and they will be using social Media because they perceive that it benefits them.

People who resist using Social Media often feel that it is just one more thing to do, and that it takes away from the time they have to do their “day job”, and they often feel that there are already programs in place to do the same things. In fact, many of there existing programs exist to support a broad base of users. In some cases more targeted, one-on-one solutions directly from the product experts can answer a question, solve a problem, or simply create a positive impression far more effectively than other means. Most of these contacts do not need to be cumbersome or time consuming, and the response can consist of a referral to a solution site or provider. The value is in establishing the perceived relationship on the part of the customer, leaving them with the impression that they made a real connection, to a highly placed person, who took an interest in their issue, and made an effort to help them. In an age where so much customer service is outsourced, your contact with the customer may be the only really valuable one they make all year, and this magnifies the effectiveness of the contact to an enormous degree. We believe that building these incredibly strong customer contacts is very much part of everyone’s “Day Job.”

I suggest that we adopt performance measurement techniques, and define specific goals and benchmarks. The first step will be to determine what our objectives and outcomes will be… to determine the measurement criteria before embarking on the task.

Measuring Results

Monitoring the effects of a Social Media campaign are often conceived of as being vague and hard to track. A monthly assessment timeline is very useful… because we want to set a series of achievable goals, and to retain the flexibility to adjust to flexible business needs without abandoning goals. The best practice is to set intermediate, milestone targets to aim for… think of it in terms of setting your team up to get a series of base hits. By setting incremental goals we can be very clear on what we are trying to improve, and adjust strategies as we track our success.

The criteria for measurement will be specific to what we are measuring. We will look at the number of Twitter followers we acquire, the quality of those followers, and the number of meaningful discussions that occur. We need to track hits on blogsites, either by web analysis tools, or by tracking hits through a URL shortening tool. We will want to reach out to our influencers… not by being so blatant as to ask “how are we doing?” but rather to ask for their opinions on a topic, or for their help in setting some of our goals. The quality of those responses, and the tone of them will go a long way to telling us how well we have been engaging them.

Set Achievable Goals

Reasonable, “Base Hit” goals have the added benefit of rewarding performance more regularly and of reinforcing positive efforts. By setting realizable goals, and providing success enablers we will grow participation on an organic level. There is no silver bullet for the kind of successes and participation we need, but the good news is that, properly enabled, the successes our participants will realize will be won with incrementally small efforts. The reward/effort ratio in a properly structured social media campaign is very high, and very inexpensive. Real gains can be made 140 letters at a time, and as our participants begin to realize this, they will begin to embrace this as a momentary distraction that can achieve easily quantifiable results.

We review the progress on all levels, we review our effectiveness in building evangelists in your organization. We review the tools, and explain why they work well together. We provide testimonials of the successes, and we provide instruction to our key adopters… and get feedback from them on how we did, and how we can do it better.

Social Media networks, and particularly Twitter we once described to us as having more rules than High School. One of the rules is that the community often looks down on companies that hire Social Media consultants (and virtually everyone is a Social Media consultant). Therefore, as with our Digital PR Services, we generally do not disclose the specifics of any particular campaigns, and can in some limited cases, provide references to interested prospective clients. This having been said, we are the real deal, and we can help your company with its social media efforts, and we can do so in a discrete yet effective manner.