Six Principles of Social Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012 / www.radian6.com / 1 888 672 3426

Six Principles of Social
Media Marketing

Community Ebook / October 2012
Six Principles of Social Media Marketing

Six Principles of Social
Media Marketing
Introduction
1. Social Listening
2. Social Content
3. Engagement
4. Social Ads
5. Measurement
6. Workflow and Automation
Conclusion

www.radian6.com
1 888 6RADIAN (1 888 672 3426) Copyright © 2012 Marketing Cloud [2]


Introduction
We are in an era where all business is social. Even the most staid institutions and regulated
businesses are being pulled into the social sphere by their customers, clients and patients. Up
until now, social media marketing has seemed complex. The management of social business and
marketing integration has been scattered - too time consuming or seemingly difficult to scale for the
average business to consider.

Enter the socially connected business. By embedding social into every part of your business and
marketing practice, being a social business becomes much easier to manage and scale. This has a
direct positive impact on your bottom line, shareholder and customer happiness, customer service
capabilities, lead generation, analytics across departments and the internet, product development,
and much more.

Imagine a business where the interaction between your departments, your customers, your potential
customers, your suppliers and your shareholders was seamless and fluid, with no barriers to
success. If you understand these six principles of social media marketing, you can be on your way
to becoming a social business.

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Chapter 1 /
Social Listening
The importance of present and active social listening can not be
overstated. Listening is one of the primary principles of social
business and great social media marketing - it brings the world to
your doorstep, allowing you to respond and take action in an agile
way that hasn’t been done before. Listening lends an unprecedented
agility and reach to businesses that fosters the kind of dialogue
needed to create a feeling of loyalty and trust.
This loyalty and trust is the very foundation of your social business culture. It’s the mystery ingredient
that keeps customers coming back to companies like Apple, Inc., that allows Citi to respond to
potentially sticky situations in a way that is fluid and transparent, and allows companies like Ford
Motor Company to have a brilliant success story in an economy where other automotive companies
still struggle.

Scott Monty discussing Ford’s social business model at Dreamforce ‘12

In fact, this social business culture has — at its core — the ability not just to listen, but to listen in a
way that allows you to take action on the intel that you gather and to use the data that pours in. The
data is useful not just for your direct advantage, but also for your employees and your customers’
advantage as well. Having the kind of culture that actively listens and understands the customers,
potential customers and shareholders who are also listening means you can cast a wider net and
achieve the kind of buoyant success in business and marketing that feeds itself.

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Social listening has a variety of potential uses. Broad
social listening works to help you stop a crisis, often
before it has a chance to escalate. It helps you find
new customers, see what your competition is doing,
compete better, find new markets and save money
and time on product development and market
research. By learning to read and make use of the
data flow that listening brings in, you create a path
to a better social business experience for you and
for your customers.

Kimberly-Clark

“Social, for Kimberly-Clark, is just amazing,” explains Mike McCranie, Global Director,
Information Technology. “With a social network, we can have teams working in Buenos Aires,
Argentina collaborate with teams in Sydney, Australia; Bangkok, Thailand with Dallas, Texas.
Social makes this huge world we live in much, much smaller.”

Kimberly-Clark is using an embedded social ecosystem to bring social business concepts and
practices to its team internally, then roll those successes out into enhanced social benefits for
its customer base. By bringing the internal social concepts outside the company, Kimberly-
Clark is able to track what people are saying to and about their brand (at over 30,000 mentions
a month on Twitter alone, there is plenty of useful data coming in). In addition to social listening
and engagement outside its walls, the brand uses the data to create reports that are useful for
its R&D department.

Adaptu.com

With social listening “...we can stay on top of what people are saying about Adaptu.com as a
brand with real time alerts, giving us a competitive advantage on helping us assist our users as

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well as engaging with current and potential users by talking about financial matters that relate to
them by directing them to Adaptu.com resources,” explains Jenna Forstrom, Community Manager
for Adaptu.com.

Financial institutions like Adaptu.com sometimes struggle to keep up with the demand for responsive
business engagement and problem solving. The consumer can often end up finding information and
resources on their own if their financial institution is not a socially savvy business. Adaptu.com
decided to use social listening to turn this on its head, giving them the kind of information and
connection they needed to empower their customer to regain control of their finances. That decision
has given Adaptu.com strong gains in customer base and in customer satisfaction.

Chapter 2 /
Social Content
Social content is the key that unlocks your social business. Social
listening feeds the social business and social media marketing
ecosystem with constant, useful data. Social engagement makes
you human and accessible. Social content puts your core values,
knowledge, talents, products, advice and services into a format that
can be used, referenced and shared.
The tenets of great, compelling social content are value, relevance, action and truth. Since many
of your leads will come from content sources, it’s important to produce the kind of content that
people trust -- that they can’t wait to read and share. Social content can also help with engagement
(participating in a meme, for example, can certainly achieve instant shareability and increase fan
engagement on a page), but the more relevant, actionable, valuable and less noisy your content is,
the more quality it will deliver to you and to your customer. Compelling content allows your business
to level-up in a competitive business world.

Think of your social content as an extension of you that is a teacher, a salesperson, a researcher
and a storyteller. Fantastic content will help you develop brand thought leadership, educate your
customers, tell your story as a brand and give people who don’t know you yet a reason to come
back. It is a powerful lead generation tool, especially if your content has a high level of sharability.
Content is infinitely scalable - it’s much easier to scale out from good content than to scale from
old-fashioned ads -- and each bit of content you create has the potential to shape shift and become
more useful as part of your overall content engine.

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Some of the most compelling content in the summer of
2012 came, surprisingly, from a cookie. Oreo came out
swinging with an image a day for 100 days in their Daily
Twist campaign. What made this campaign compelling
was the quality of, and thought behind, the content,
even more than the refreshing lack of push marketing.
In fact, other than coming from the Oreo social media
accounts and using an Oreo cookie for each image,
there was no traditional “marketing” used at all.

In addition to customers embracing the campaign for
originality, marketers marveled at it for being a campaign
done responsively, in real time, by multiple agencies.
What is the ROI on such an expensive campaign? On
the surface, a 110% increase in engagement and a rapid
rise in fans and followers. Deeper, a sense of customer
loyalty was fostered as fans of Oreo rallied around the
brand for some of the more potentially controversial
Oreo (Kraft Foods) ideas. That kind of voluntary customer support is hard to
find and can’t be bought, and has a direct correlation to
a healthy bottom line.

Chapter 3/
Engagement
Engagement is the bridge between listening and content for the
social business. Connecting everything your company does with
embedded social practices and tools is important to a true social
business ecosystem. By using engagement to reach beyond the
walls of your brand, you enrich your other social efforts with value
and authenticity, giving you an agile platform to make business
decisions, solve problems, share ideas, and have a two-way dialogue
with your community. Engagement lets you reach your customer
and potential customers wherever they are.
Engagement goes hand in hand with social listening to handle any conversations about your brand
or potential crises as well. In a true social business, bolstering your engagement and social listening
with measurement data will help you address any issue with pinpoint accuracy. Utilizing a CRM
system to keep track of your customer engagement and activities, the ebb and flow of your content
and its reach enables your social business ecosystem to work. This is what it looks like when social
is truly embedded into your business framework.

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You can use genuine, consistent engagement by your cross-departmental team to solve internal
and external challenges, make customers feel special, enhance your social media marketing, and
tell compelling stories from others. Engagement allows brands to humanize themselves by reaching
out to help customers before you’re asked. Making new connections and customers and supporting
your community will make your brand resonate.

There is no shortage of examples to call out that show
companies are using social engagement well. TELUS,
The University of Adelaide and eHarmony all come to
mind. However, Outback Steakhouse kicked their
engagement up a notch by encouraging their
customers to pay the engagement forward.

Their engagement campaign is a winner on many levels.
First, because it was inspired by a YouTube video “30
gifts to 30 strangers in Sydney” - demonstrating that the
brand is socially aware and has good listening tools in
place. Second, they used their social business tools to
identify a loyal Outback Steakhouse customer -- Dave
Outback Steakhouse Parsons - and give him a gift (well, 40 gifts, to be exact).
He was then encouraged to give the gifts away to
strangers and friends.

Parsons was thrilled, blogging his adventure and creating video content around it. More importantly,
it reaped unexpected benefits for Outback, allowing them to reach a diverse audience that not only
included Parsons’ friends and family, but his Mayor and celebrity animal trainer Jack Hanna! As a
nice touch, Parsons also gave one of the gifts to the video blogger that inspired it all, Lucas Jatoba.

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Chapter 4/
Social Ads
Long gone are your typical broadcast, push ads. These ads are falling
by the wayside because they just aren’t effective. Sure, banner ads
and other ad formats still exist and still convert, but customers expect
more. The ad has evolved, becoming social, interactive, entertaining
or informative, and much more pull than push.
Your social ad needs to entice the customer to do two things: take action with your brand, and
pass on your message. Peer-to-peer recommendations are one of the most powerful tools in your
advertising arsenal. Creating and sharing compelling content is at the heart of achieving your ad
campaign goals. Don’t forget: many social sites empower you to promote well-performing ad content
to increase its reach and longevity.

Engaging social ads leverage friend-to-friend connections and sharing to broaden your reach,
capitalize on holidays and user data on social sites to drive action, gather more info about potential
customers. These ads also promote users to opt in to your message, participate in contests,
promotions, and sales, visit your online store, extend their engagement with you, and broaden your
reach with likes and other actions. Social ads that leverage the 90-9-1 rule for conversions and leads
do very well for your brand (1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90%
view the content without contributing at all).

Ford “Escape Routes” Television Show on NBC

Ford used social advertising, listening and engagement tools to advertise their new “Escape
Routes” show on NBC. By leveraging this “Escape Routes” Facebook advertising campaign, Ford
saw an overall reduction in the cost of people going to the website to sign up to participate in the

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show of 88% (cost per conversion) when compared to the cost of the same result at the start of the
campaign. By the final day of the campaign, their social business ecosystem and embedded tools
helped reduced the cost per sign-up and cost per click significantly.

The entire campaign was presented over the course of five weekends, and over 420 million
impressions were delivered. That shows the power of embedding social into your business for a
responsive social business ecosystem.

Chapter 5/
Measurement
It is no longer plausible (or possible) to claim social media
marketing and social business are too esoteric or ethereal to
measure. You can indeed track the metrics that drive social media
for your business. In fact the true social business follows a policy
of “measure everything, leverage your data,” inside and out, for
maximum success and accountability.
Excellent social business measurement requires thinking differently about how and what you
measure. Measure traditional web analytics, SEO, shares, social media marketing campaigns,
employee performance and collaboration, ideas, leads generated, sales data as tied to social
content and engagement, content traction and reach, listening data points, ad conversions, costs
and more. Create social measurement dashboards using spreadsheets, hashtags, keywords,
landing pages and specific URL callouts.

Learn how to filter your data! You will get a treasure trove of information you can use for everything
from lead generation to product development to improving content to spying on the competition.
Your data dashboards will help you find the gold nuggets hidden in the ocean of information and
quickly put them to effective use for your social business. Remember, social businesses see four
times their return on investment!

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1 888 6RADIAN (1 888 672 3426) Copyright © 2012 Marketing Cloud [ 10 ]


House Party has built a business around
sponsored parties for everyday influencers.
Participants can host a party in their own
home featuring products by participating
brands like Kraft Foods, Sony Playstation or
Ford Motor Company. The point of House
Party is not to push product on consumers,
but instead to gather feedback for the
brands involved from the participants in a
low-pressure, fun environment of actual use.

Using social business measurement
tools House Party is able to determine
influencers, match them to brands, then
track the data they generate over the course
House Party of months. This results in deep reporting
data being relayed to the brands for their
use in future product development and
current product marketing.

Chapter 6/
Workflow and Automation
Workflow and automation is the cornerstone of the socially
embedded, completely agile social business. The key to great social
media marketing is to keep your data and insights open and available
to all team members in every department. This is the first step to
the social business utopia of being able to anticipate changes in
markets, to understand and meet customer needs, to iterate product
development, to manage cost savings and to discover new customers.
Now that 57% of social businesses outperform their competitors, becoming a social business is no
longer an option – it’s a must. This is where workflow and automation comes in, bringing together
your social listening, social content, engagement, measurement, and social ad reach into one
manageable system that your entire company can use to meet their needs.

These processes are about bridging gaps and connecting the dots in a way that becomes part
of the fabric and culture of your social business. A social business depends on a rock-solid CRM
solution to be truly effective. By putting the information of the entire social web at your fingertips and
combining it with real time metrics, engagement, content and solid customer data built over time,
you develop the kind of relationship with a customer that makes them a customer for life. A customer
for life becomes your best brand advocate.

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Two common outcomes of creating advanced social workflows, including the addition of logical
automation, are solving company problems effectively and quickly, and fielding customer service
issues. The added benefit to market research, product development, sales and marketing and
overall agility and response improvements can’t be overstated. Using a CRM effectively can change
the way you do business and give you the kind of staying power that businesses avoiding social
simply don’t have.

Virgin America

Virgin America attributes its rapid growth to its company culture. Key to ensuring that the entire staff
of the airline is part of the culture and kept in the loop is the company-wide use of social business
tools that are both internal and customer facing.

By using the tools to involve both employees and customers in the success of the airline and in an
improved, smoother flying experience, Virgin America is building a loyal employee and customer
base and a stronger bottom line - by making flying about more than just profits. They want to be a
true experience that you treasure.

Their vision for a truly social business, as shown in the link above, is one that comes from the very top of
the organization. By focusing on the experience as a whole, from beginning to end, and using the right
social tools to make it happen across departments, Virgin America is making each customer feel special.
This kind of customer contentment is difficult to achieve for an airline, and requires full integration
and adoption of the corporate culture and social business ideals, as well as real-time listening,
engagement and measurement to keep the flow fluid and things running smoothly.

Conclusion
Virgin America and Ford Motor Company are some of the leaders of social business and social
media marketing. They have embraced the social business ecosystem from the top down, building a
new business culture that other businesses now aspire to. The gains from adopting social business
practices are immense, and include a reduction in email, in meetings and an increase in customer
and employee satisfaction and profit margins.

There is a social business evolution going on. There are 1.5 billion social users and 70% of
businesses use social to -- at a minimum -- connect with customers. According to a McKinsey report
estimate there is $1.3 trillion waiting to be gained from more effective and embedded use of social
media by business. The IDC estimates that the yearly growth of social media is as much as 47%
with a 123% growth in engagement between customers and brands. This is huge news for a social
business, and effective social business is the key to thriving in the new social future.

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Six Principles of Social Media Marketing

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