The document discusses how social media marketing technology can help brands harness the power of scale. It explains that technology allows brands to do more with their social media efforts faster and at a lower cost while also providing better results and insights. Specifically, technology helps with strategic planning, increasing organizational efficiency, and improving social media results measurement. It provides examples of how brands like Mountain Dew and Annie's Homegrown have used technology to better manage their social media campaigns at scale.
3. executive summary
A healthy and growing fanbase is a social marketer’s dream come true. But, keeping all your fans
happy can quickly become a nightmare. Attention spans in the social space are short, and the
impact of any single interaction is fleeting at best. There’s simply no way around it, ongoing social
success demands a constant churn of unique and engaging content. How do leading social brands
keep it up day after day?
The solution is technology. And in the world of social marketing, technology is all about
the power of scale.
Marketing automation is finally catching up to the business technology curve, and some of the
most exciting and valuable advances are in social marketing software. As a marketer, it’s critical
for you to sit up and take notice, not only because technology can make your job easier and more
productive, but also because your influence over the technology you use is growing dramatically.
According to Gartner, 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were
almost three times as high as IT budgets, and the gap was expected to grow in 2012. Marketing
already makes 30% of its own technology purchases and influences almost 50% overall. What’s
more, by 2017 Gartner expects that CMOs will be spending more on IT than CIOs do.1
By 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs do.
Because your role as a technology influencer and decision maker is growing, it’s more important
than ever that you understand exactly how different technology choices can affect your resources
and your results. To that end, this paper explains how social marketing technology allows you to
do more faster, at a lower cost, with better results, and greater insight. We explore the top three
ways you can use technology to empower social marketing managers and bolster a growing brand.
And we look at specific examples of how four leading brands use technology to help their social
marketing fly.
1 Gartner, “By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO,” January 2012
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4. Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
INTRODUCTION
A post, a tweet, a pin, or an update are all simple and speedy
enough tasks to complete. But the social audience is a hungry
beast, and once you start feeding it you can’t afford to stop. Wildfire clients get:
When you’re just getting started with social marketing, it may be • A Wildfire strategist as part of your contract
simple enough to log onto the separate social networks and create • A quarterly review
every interaction by hand. But, if you’re doing social right, your • 3–6 white papers per quarter
brand will soon gain traction, your fans will multiply, engagement • 3–6 webinars per quarter
will increase, and the demand for content will take off.
Active social brands quickly learn that content demand always them? How can you use your planning tools most effectively?
outpaces content resources, which means you need to make How do you measure your results and benefit from what
your processes more efficient and enable your team to work you’ve learned?
faster. You need systems in place that seamlessly expand your
brand into new networks, regions and markets. You want to be A pricey proposition
able to work quickly and efficiently with other departments or If you turn to third-party consultants for their expertise, all
sub-brands and with outside partners. And when employees are that strategizing becomes a pricey proposition. Social media
busy with other projects, take a vacation, or move on to other consulting fees can run up to $500 per hour, and monthly reports
positions, you have to be sure new people can step in without and advisement can result in an annual fee upwards of $90,000.2
skipping a beat. And keep in mind; those expenses are in addition to any
There are an incredible number of moving parts in almost any development and on-going management fees for social channels.
social marketing initiative. But, to successfully grow a brand, The right social marketing software will include the same or
social media managers must be able to focus most of their better strategic consulting services at little or no extra cost.
energy on the bigger social strategy instead of on the processes Remember, a third-party consultant is happiest when you’re
and logistics of individual executions. This paper is organized paying for their help on a repeat basis. Having customers who
around the three key areas where technology can make that are satisfied all the time, on the other hand, motivates a good
happen: strategic planning, organizational efficiency and social software-as-a-service business. When you’re using a social
social media results. technology to its full potential and growing your business as
a result, you’re more likely to expand your use of the product
and recommend it to others. Your success is a win/win for you
and the software vendor, so it’s in the vendor’s best interest to
provide efficient, high-quality strategic resources and advice.
Wildfire supports all leading social networks,
including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, An eye to the future
LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.
When choosing your social technology keep in mind that the
social media landscape is changing daily. That means your social
software should be forward-looking and strategic by its very
STRATEGIC PLANNING nature. Your vendor should have more than a great product
With time and resources at a premium, every significant right now; it should also have a compelling vision of where
social marketing effort should be planned carefully. Not just social marketing is headed and a plan to get you there. The best
to maximize its own results, but also to further the brand’s social software:
overarching social strategy.
• Quickly adapts to incorporate important new social networks
The questions you should ask are many, and the answers • Always complies with current social network formats and
are constantly changing: What campaign concepts are most requirements
compelling? What best practices should you use to implement
2 Mack Collier, “Cost of Social Media in 2012,” January 2012
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5. • Gives you timely social best practices resources like webinars Localizing a single campaign by hand is essentially the
and white papers same as launching multiple campaigns at once, which is a
• Provides strategists who are well versed in developing social time-consuming and tedious task. But localization is easily
trends and how you can capitalize on them manageable with the proper technology. Instead of launching
five campaigns in five different languages, you can launch one
Strategic advantages built right in campaign, with all of the relevant creative assets stored, that
Some aspects of strategy are more technical than analytical, and automatically and dynamically adjusts itself to the relevant
the best social technologies handle such issues automatically. language. Automated scheduling also allows you to post content
Two areas in particular where strategic functionality should be at the most ideal time anywhere in the world.
built right into your technology are localization and compliance. Compliance and regulation
Localization If you’re like most people, you’ve signed up for so many online
Every social marketer should be thinking about the future, accounts that you click right through the terms of agreement
about expanding their brand into new markets or regions on without even realizing they’re there. When it comes to your
the way to becoming a 24/7 global brand. brand’s social properties, though, you need to pay attention.
You never know where you might find your next great customer Facebook’s terms provide a prime example of what’s at stake
or market, and social media can give you efficient low-cost access and how complex the rules can be. To protect the reputation
to people you might not be able to reach any other way. For and integrity of its social network, Facebook’s regulations
example, Argentina, Brazil and India may be beyond your physical consist of thousands of words of legalese, all of which have
reach, but they also have the highest penetration of social direct impact on the governance of your page and its social
network usage plus the highest usage frequency and intensity. 3 activities. Items covered include everything from who may
access your pages to page naming conventions to how you
But, to go global you need to localize your content. For starters,
design your cover photos.
you should speak your audience’s language—in Europe, for
instance, nine out of ten Internet users prefer browsing in their
own language.4 For maximum relevancy, you also want to be
sure you’re targeting the right audience at the right time with
the right message.
Social marketing software ensures that pages and applications stay in
compliance with constantly changing social network requirements.
Every social network that your brand uses has its own set of
rules and regulations, and they all change constantly to keep
up with government requirements, product updates and other
developments. If you fall out of compliance, the pages that you’ve
Qatar ran a global social media campaign with Wildfire in five languages and labored on building up for months (and longer) can be removed
grew its community by 150,000 new fans in 30 days.
3 InSites Consulting, “Social Media Around the World 2012,” September 2012
4 EuroBarometer, “User Language Preferences Online,” May 2011
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6. Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
in an instant, and the communities you’ve grown around them You could tackle your campaigns one at a time using an agency
can disappear. The best way to avoid this disastrous scenario is or in-house resources, but that’s an extremely time-consuming
to use social software that stays on top of the latest requirements and expensive approach. One Industry survey showed that the
for you and has compliance built right in. typical agency cost of a short-term (1-3 month) social media
campaign in 2012 was between $1,500 and $20,000. A long-term
The best social software vendors constantly monitor social
(3–6 month) campaign averaged between $25,000 and $75,000.6
network requirements and update their products accordingly.
To the extent that it’s possible, they prevent you from making The right technology not only makes it incredibly faster and
mistakes that put your social campaigns and communities at easier to create a campaign, it also allows you to run as many
risk. On the other end of the spectrum, they optimize templates campaigns as you want at a lower cost. Better still, the value you
and functionality so you can quickly and easily exploit any receive goes far beyond just the value of the digital assets that
activities that are permitted. are created for a given campaign. The best social software helps
minimize or eliminate development costs, agency fees, strategy
ORGANIZATIONAL EFFICIENCY consultation fees, and maintenance and management fees. And
Any marketer who tests the social waters realizes quickly it allows you to simplify processes, replicate procedures, and
that there’s much more to social marketing than posting a easily create workflows.
pithy comment whenever inspiration strikes. In fact, 59% of
marketers work on social more than 6 hours every week,
33% spend over 11 hours weekly, and 15% dedicate a full
Cost of social campaigns without the
20 hours or more to social efforts every week.5
scale of social software:
Short-term campaign: $1,500 to $20,000
Long-term campaign: $25,000 to $75,000
With full functionality software, you can efficiently create
integrated campaigns across social networks by building pages,
scheduling and sending messages, running ads and viewing
results from a single interface. You’ll be able to deploy the same
content across multiple networks or create custom content
targeted to individual networks. And you can create custom
workflows that automatically notify team members when their
input and approval is needed to keep a project moving.
59% of marketers work on social for 6 hours or more every week.
Even if you’re part of the 59% right now, you’ll need to commit Mountain Dew
more attention to your social initiatives to keep them healthy
Mountain Dew, the popular soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo,
and on track as they begin to gain traction. And the more
learned about the power of scalability when it wanted to launch
successful your efforts, the more complex the challenges you’ll
what it expected to be a simple promotion. Mountain Dew
face. For example:
had 80 Diet Dew bean bag chairs it wanted to give away to
• What content will be most effective and where will you get it? customers, but was surprised to find out it was going to cost
• How should you schedule your messaging? tens of thousands of dollars to run a single contest.
• Who’s going to have editorial oversight? Then Mountain Dew discovered that Wildfire’s technology
• How long is it going to take to get everything created, could help its social team do far more while spending less.
approved and ready to go? Wildfire gave them unlimited access to create multiple pages
5 Social Media Examiner, “2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,” April 2012
6 Mack Collier, “Cost of Social Media in 2012” January 2012
4
7. and promotions across all the most popular social networks. Applications let your users interact with your content and let
Plus, Wildfire’s technology came with unlimited user accounts you capture user data so you can follow up with participants,
and built-in creative and technical services. Mountain Dew identify influencers, and gather information to build more-
also gained powerful analytics and the ability to free up brand profitable relationships.
managers by letting them schedule posts ahead of time.
Annie’s Homegrown
Annie’s Homegrown is an organic and all natural foods company
based in Berkeley, California and is best known for its bunny-
shaped macaroni and cheese. To celebrate its new Rising Crust
Pizza, Annie’s sent a fully equipped pizza truck on a cross-country
Mountain Dew used Wildfire to run a sweepstakes that took users from Twitter
to Facebook. Slice of Happiness Tour and promoted the event on Facebook.
Harness the full power of scale To create its Facebook promotion, Annie’s combined two of
Wildfire’s 90+ page and app templates. When users clicked on
When it comes to organizational efficiency, social software adds the “Request a Stop” tab on Annie’s main Facebook page they
value in more ways than we can list here. To identify the greatest were taken to a customized landing page where an entertaining
benefits in simplest terms, though, we say that technology helps YouTube video explained what the tour was all about and
you scale your content and scale your resources. encouraged them to participate.
The one thing that can’t be stressed enough is this: The key to Beneath the video viewers could enter their information and
social success is a constant churn of fresh and original content. request a special detour of the pizza tour. If you were one of the
To maximize engagement, you need to create, launch and lucky winners, Annie’s rerouted its pizza truck to your town and
maintain lots of great content all the time. served up a pizza party for 120 people. The tour was a big hit,
Basic communications like posts and tweets are an important generating over 325,000 likes.
part of any ongoing social conversation. But, if you’re going to
grow and engage fans and followers and encourage sharing,
it’s essential to up the ante with a regular stream of fun and
rewarding interactive experiences such as polls, surveys,
contests and giveaways.
Creating a rich interactive experience from scratch is extremely
time and resource intensive, but social software makes it easy to:
• Launch a variety of campaigns on a variety of channels
• Keep the content visually appealing and on brand
• Create unique and memorable experiences
• Capture user data
Social software provides all the templates you need to create
customized tabs and applications for your social properties.
And these templates are already fine-tuned to optimize the
placement and impact of your interactive content.
Tabs allow you to add depth to your existing social channels by
including multiple landing pages and experiences on each site.
Annie’s Homegrown used Wildfire templates to promote a cross-
country pizza party contest on Facebook.
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8. Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
Stretch your editorial resources Use access control to increase your resources. Social software
allows you to give different team members different roles
Once you’ve figured out how to keep your inspired content
and permissions, so you can maximize your resources while
coming, you’re well armed for social success. But the battle is
protecting your brand. In other words, you can assign specific
far from over. In fact, it never ends. Every piece of content you
responsibilities without providing unlimited access to your social
create is simply an invitation for engagement, just one step in
properties. For instance, you don’t want an intern responding
what you hope to be an ongoing relationship that’s rewarding
directly to customer comments or questions. But, you can use
for both you and your customers.
that same intern to sort through the messages and queue
Your goal is to spark relationships and then keep them going them up, making it easier for a senior member of your team to
strong, but the sheer volume of content it takes just to get respond quickly and appropriately.
things started can make it nearly impossible to keep up with
the responses. Here’s what you’re up against: Scale your messages. With the right software, you can create
content once and then post it simultaneously across multiple
• On average, every enterprise brand of 1,000+ employees has
pages and networks. A single person can add fresh content
178 corporate-owned social media accounts.7
to numerous accounts as quickly and easily as updating a
• Businesses with over 40 different landing pages generate 10X single account. And creating and maintaining multiple landing
more leads than those with only 1–5 landing pages.8 pages requires a fraction of the work it would take if they were
• 70% of all fan questions posted to social media channels are developed one at a time. Flexible templates allow you to quickly
not responded to by brands. 9 customize and go live after adding just your logos, images and
text—or they let you access the code and get more creative if
These numbers raise three key issues that technology can help
you have the time and need.
you address:
1. Most brands have very few people responsible for managing Filter conversations for specialized attention. Not all
an overwhelming number of social accounts. conversations are created equal. You’d like to answer every
question and acknowledge every comment, but some you’ll
2. The payoff for creating numerous landing pages can be never get to. Others, you simply can’t afford to ignore. Software
huge, even if the pages vary only slightly in messaging or filters let you use keyword or moderation checklists to flag the
other elements. messages that absolutely demand your attention. You can put
3. A staggering potential for social return on investment (ROI) is out fires like unhappy customers, or snap to attention if a hot
being wasted, because social teams don’t have the resources lead comes along.
to follow up on the majority of conversations they initiate.
Social software can help you address these issues by making the The Washington Redskins
most of every resource available to your social team.
The National Football League’s Washington Redskins have some
of the most faithful fans you could wish for. The team has sold
out every home game since 1968 and has broken the NFL’s
attendance record for the last nine years running.
Wildfire clients:
In a football season with new games and plenty of surprises
• Save hours per day using geo-target presets
every week, the Redskins often need to turn on a new promotion
• Can schedule a month’s worth of content in
in a matter of days to stay relevant to their fans and provide the
just a few planning sessions
excitement and sense of community fans are looking for. “If we
• Receive unlimited access to Pages and
didn’t have a platform like Wildfire,” says the Redskins top social
Promotions as part of a monthly fee
strategist, “we’d have to spend a lot of lead time to build out
these pages, and that could take a month or more.”
7 Altimeter, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” January 2012
8 Econsultancy, “The Inbound Marketing Explosion,” March 2012
9 Simply Zesty, “70% Of Brand Fan Questions On Social Media Aren’t Responded To – Live at Le Web ’12,” June 2012
6
9. Prior to using Wildfire, the Redskins were also impacted by an
artificial resource crunch. Because Administrator was the only Increase lead generation, reach
role available to access the social accounts, the social team had and advocacy.
to be very careful about who could do hands-on work. Now
Adjust your strategy to improve success.
that Wildfire provides different levels of permission, the social
team can open up different roles to interns, designers, staff,
and even partners. With more people on the job, the Redskins
can respond to opportunities faster and make the best use of
all their resources.
Keep a constant eye on industry benchmarks, property and page
data, tab and promotion metrics, and referral sources.
Get optimal results with optimized technology
When you work with an internal team or a third-party agency
to build complicated and customized one-use applications,
you may end up with a social campaign that looks great on
your desktop but falls apart online. There’s simply no way to
thoroughly test one-off applications and optimize them for
Improved access control helps the Redskins get more staff
involved with their social. the best user experience. When they go live, these pages or
applications may even break due to unforeseen code changes
SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS made by the social platforms themselves.
By efficiently scaling your efforts, social software provides The result can be an awkward and inconsistent user experience
the immediate reward of reaching a larger audience. But it also that causes users to abandon a campaign before they even
delivers better results in two additional ways that are equally enter. Many custom applications also lack an optimized viral
important. First, it helps increase lead generation, brand reach, functionality, and that means participants can’t easily share
and brand advocacy by optimizing the technology that you use the campaign with their friends and followers. Either one of
to run your campaigns. Second, it provides comprehensive these issues can seriously slow the momentum of an otherwise
and integrated measurement and analysis tools that give you brilliant campaign—combined, these problems can stop a
insight into your results, so you can continually adjust your campaign in its tracks.
strategy and increase your success.
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10. Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
When you build a campaign using social software, you keep the
ability to create something unique, innovative and on brand. But
you eliminate the risk that your end product will not function as
intended or that it will be incompatible with the social platforms
it was intended for.
The tab, page and application templates that come with
your social software have been used and tested hundreds or
thousands of times in live campaigns. They incorporate best
practices for all of the most popular and effective promotion
types. Their results are constantly analyzed and their coding is
continually updated and optimized to work perfectly with the
social networks they’re intended for. And, because sharing is the
key to social success, the latest and greatest viral functionality is Poor tools are one of the top three obstacles to measuring social success.
seamlessly built into the templates as a basic component.
Six methods for measuring social
In its “Social Media ROI Cookbook,” Altimeter Group identifies
the six methods that organizations use to measure their
social results on a day-to-day basis. Three of the methods are
Compared to Wildfire’s top competitors’ categorized as “top down” methods and three as “bottom up.” 12
clients, Wildfire’s clients see:
Top down
• 25% more people sharing their posts The top down methods, which rely on the user to draw
• 21% more engagement with their content conclusions based on their own observations, are:
Anecdote: Specific examples where it is known that social media
influenced a sale or had some other identifiable effect.
You can’t fix what you can’t measure Correlation: Comparing two data sets to see if there may be a
relationship between them, for example the number of Likes
In a recent survey by the Association of National Advertisers,
versus revenue.
90% of U.S. marketers say they’re using social networks for their
marketing efforts. Five years ago that figure was only 20%.10 Multivariate testing: Comparing a group exposed to social
Despite this steady increase in adoption, 75% of organizations media content with another group exposed to different content
lack a holistic measurement strategy for their social media work.11 or no content.
Why is there such a huge divide between the number of While top down measurements have their place, they are time
marketers using social media and the number successfully and labor intensive and fall far short of being able to provide
measuring their results? An Altimeter Group survey sheds some reliable and comprehensive data on a regular basis.
light on the subject by asking those responsible for measuring Bottom up
social media results to identify the three biggest challenges Bottom up measurements are technology driven and can
they face: 56% of respondents indicate the inability to tie social provide metrics that are instant, comprehensive and exact.
media to business outcomes; 39% say there is a lack of analytics These methods are:
expertise and/or resources; and 38% say they have poor tools.12
Links and tagging: Shortlinks, tags, custom URLs and cookies
identify when a user buys something from your site and where
they came from.
10 Association of National Advertisers, “2012 Digital/Social Media Survey,” July, 2012
11 Altimeter Group, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” January 2012
12 Altimeter Group, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” January 2012
13 Altimeter Group, “Social Media ROI Cookbook,” July 2012
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11. Direct commerce: Social commerce apps allow users to make a When it comes to service, Esurance takes advantage of the
purchase from you on Facebook, from links on Twitter, and via personal assistance that’s built right into its contract. For up-
other social properties. front strategic guidance or last-minute technical tweaking,
Esurance always knows exactly where to turn for help.
Integrated: Specific apps that you purchase run in the
background and measure conversions, identify where leads
come from, score leads, and so on.
Measure, monitor and analyze
Integrated technology includes the measurement, monitoring and
analysis tools that come as part of your primary social software
product. Because these tools are designed from the start to work
with your pages and applications, they’re often able to give you
the most powerful, insightful and actionable measurements and
analytics available. Social software can provide:
• Property and page data for each of your social pages,
allowing you to analyze trends over time and across multiple
variables
• Tab and promotion metrics that let you quickly pinpoint
what’s working, so you can repeat successful strategies and
optimize results Esurance chose Wildfire because it needed deeper analytical
capabilities and high-end service.
• Referral sources, so you can identify demographic data
for campaigns and develop content that matches audience
preferences CONCLUSION
• Audience engagement metrics for specific messages, so you By its very nature, social is a medium that requires a higher
can fine-tune future messaging for maximum impact frequency of interaction than any other form of marketing. The
challenge may be daunting, but the payoff in terms of engaged
• Industry benchmarks that help you understand your
and loyal fans, followers, customers and advocates can’t be
performance in comparison to competitors
beat. The good news for marketers is that recent advancements
in social marketing technology are making it easier and more
affordable to build, grow, engage, and monetize audiences
Esurance
using innovative content that’s optimized for the most popular
As an insurance company, Esurance fully appreciates the value social networks.
of meaningful data and great customer service. So, it’s no
surprise the Esurance social team was looking for those two The key to success is social software that scales both your
things in its social software. content and your resources allowing you to:
Esurance was able to get some data directly from the social • Create content once, then launch it everywhere
networks it was using, but that data wasn’t providing the deeper • Segment promotions, target content by region and language,
insights necessary to understand what its fans and followers and schedule posts
really wanted. With Wildfire, Esurance easily gets up-to-the- • Control user permissions and access to make the most
minute data on all of its social properties at any time, and the efficient use of your social team and partners
social team is able to run the analysis it needs to continually
• Test, measure, and analyze campaigns and competitors in real
optimize its pages, promotions and messages for better results.
time to adjust your strategy and ensure success
Better yet, Esurance can now compare its social performance
with its competitors and adjust its strategy accordingly.
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12. Mountain View Wildfire is a powerful, easy-to-use social marketing platform that enables brands
Chicago
London to grow, engage, and monetize their audience across social networks.
Los Angeles
Munich
New York City
Paris
Singapore Learn how we can help you today! 888.274.0929 ext. 2 www.wildfireapp.com
Wildfire, a division of Google | 323 Fairchild Drive, Mountain View, CA 94043 | 888.274.0929 | www.wildfireapp.com | wildfire@google.com 01/13