1. The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing The Stories Behind The Book Erik Deckers Siouxland Social Media Conference Sioux City, Iowa nobullshitsocialmedia.com
14. The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing You can sell, advertise, and measure But you need a strategy Synthmaniac on Shutterstock.com
27. The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing What about ROI? What do I get in return? Customer Satisfaction Scores Higher Search Engine Results New Product Ideas Lower Cost-Per Lead Lower Call Center Costs More Online Media Coverage More Subscribers Faster Response Times Faster Response Times Website Traffic Higher Retention Rate
28. The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing Being Social... Lasse Kristensen on Shutterstock.com
29. The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing ...is about relationships City of Pikeville
30. The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing NoBullshitSocialMedia.com Jason Falls @JasonFalls Erik Deckers @edeckers There’s more where this came from!
Editor's Notes
You've heard a lot of people talk about social media. May believe it's a great way to reach customers. May be skeptical. Or you may be thinking, that's nice, but it's not for MY business. If you're like a lot of business people we talk to, they're wondering, How does playing on the Tweeter sell my product? How are a bunch of kids on FaceSpace going to help me? I don't want people to know what I'm doing. Our customers aren't on social media. People will say bad things about us. How does engaging, listening, and having conversations help us?
This is what they don’t. We’ve heard purists say you can’t or shouldn’t sell things on social media. But we've got news for them, and you. When you add the word “Marketing” to “Social Media” ... now you’re talking about business. You have to be able to drive business metrics and produce outcomes that matter to your business using social media marketing or you it WILL be a big waste. Our book has a lot of details on how to "do social media" — five mindset shifts to make to be successful, kick-starter ideas to make those shifts, even some tactics and strategies. Most importantly, we tell stories. Stories of people who are using social media marketing for business, using it strategically ... targeting audiences, establishing goals, delivering messages and measuring outcomes. So to give you an idea of how you can use social media marketing, let us tell you some stories ...
Sara George lives in Pikeville, KY. Last year for Christmas, she told Jason she wanted a remote car starter. He sent her the money to buy it so she could find an auto aftermarket shop close to home. One morning on Facebook, she sees a post in her stream from <CHANGE>
Greg Tackett. Greg owns an auto body and after market shop. Installs stereos, rims and other add-ons. Greg & Sara are connected on Facebook but not close friends. Greg’s message that cold, January morning was this: “Stay warm and get your remote starter today at Greg’s Custom Audio, Video and Car Stereo!” Purists wold have freaked. But Sara said she was going to make an appointment and spent about $350 to install her remote car starter. One of her co-workers saw the thread and wanted one, too. Another friend needed three, one for each car. At the end of the week, Greg cleared about $3000, because he broke the rules. You can’t sell using social media? <CHANGE>
Greg Tackett. Greg owns an auto body and after market shop. Installs stereos, rims and other add-ons. Greg & Sara are connected on Facebook but not close friends. Greg’s message that cold, January morning was this: “Stay warm and get your remote starter today at Greg’s Custom Audio, Video and Car Stereo!” Purists wold have freaked. But Sara said she was going to make an appointment and spent about $350 to install her remote car starter. One of her co-workers saw the thread and wanted one, too. Another friend needed three, one for each car. At the end of the week, Greg cleared about $3000, because he broke the rules. You can’t sell using social media? <CHANGE>
DON’T SAY BULLSHIT ... JUST INTIMATE IT ... OR GET THE CROWD TO SAY IT. (And change to B.S. for finer taste crowds.)
Another example we talk about in the book is Jim Olenbush. Jim is a realtor in Austin, Texas. He told us that he’s just not going to sit on Facebook and talk with people. He’s a business man. He wants to perform marketing activities that produce results. But he does understand that Facebook advertising provides a unique platform to hyper target advertising. So when the newspaper’s business page in Austin has a big story about a company relocating to town, Jim places Facebook ads for houses for sale in Austin and targets them to employees of that company. He also read a story in the paper one day that said the drug violence in Mexico was so bad, affluent Mexicans were considering relocating to the U.S. He targeted Facebook ads for houses in Austin at affluent families in Mexico City and Monterrey. He spent $400 over four months. He sold one house for $1.1 million?! And he doesn’t have time for engagement ... chit-chat. You have to engage! You have to join the conversation!
Greg Tackett. Greg owns an auto body and after market shop. Installs stereos, rims and other add-ons. Greg & Sara are connected on Facebook but not close friends. Greg’s message that cold, January morning was this: “Stay warm and get your remote starter today at Greg’s Custom Audio, Video and Car Stereo!” Purists wold have freaked. But Sara said she was going to make an appointment and spent about $350 to install her remote car starter. One of her co-workers saw the thread and wanted one, too. Another friend needed three, one for each car. At the end of the week, Greg cleared about $3000, because he broke the rules. You can’t sell using social media? <CHANGE>
DON’T SAY BULLSHIT ... JUST INTIMATE IT ... OR GET THE CROWD TO SAY IT. (And change to B.S. for finer taste crowds.)
Fiskars has a word-of-mouth marketing effort which includes a social media element ... website called Fiskateers. They make scissors. They built an online networking and collaboration site for scrapbookers because they are the most engaged customer set for scissors. When company started in 2006, their R&D efforts were conducted in a room that included white butcher paper taped over windows. Once they launched the Fiskateers site, where over 8,000 members share patterns, designs and ideas ... their R&D team now routinely sends PROTOTYPES to members asking them to use them, video tape their ideas and POST FEEDBACK so everyone can see it! Cut out focus group and market research costs because they have an 8,000-member focus group.PR budget is lower because the influencers they need to reach are members of their community! Geno Church with Brains on Fire — word-of-mouth agency who helped engineer Fiskateers — told us they have a 500% ROI on Fiskateers. You can’t measure social media or ROI?
Greg Tackett. Greg owns an auto body and after market shop. Installs stereos, rims and other add-ons. Greg & Sara are connected on Facebook but not close friends. Greg’s message that cold, January morning was this: “Stay warm and get your remote starter today at Greg’s Custom Audio, Video and Car Stereo!” Purists wold have freaked. But Sara said she was going to make an appointment and spent about $350 to install her remote car starter. One of her co-workers saw the thread and wanted one, too. Another friend needed three, one for each car. At the end of the week, Greg cleared about $3000, because he broke the rules. You can’t sell using social media? <CHANGE>
The truth is that you can sell ... you can even sell and not engage ... and you can measure return on investment. The purists have been telling us some good things about social media. We agree that your best practices as a social media marketer generally include listening, engaging and being more human as a company. But you can’t stop there. You need to look at social media marketing as a strategic communications channel. You need to set goals. You need to establish expectations so you have something to benchmark and measure against. But first, you have to know what social media marketing can do for your business. <CHANGE>
These are the seven business drivers of social media marketing. We promise this is the only slide that requires much reading! That thing has more bullet points than a redneck’s pick up truck. The 7 are: (READ THEM FROM THE SLIDE QUICKLY) We’re going to talk about each of these briefly, and continue the theme of telling stories that show how people are accomplishing them. Then we’ll open the room up for some questions because if we can answer your questions rather than assume our presentation will, everyone goes home happy, right?
In 2007, Greenpeace had a contest to name a humpback whale it was tracking as part of its Great Whale Expedition. One of the early name entries was “Mister Splashy Pants.” Greenpeace’s traditional audience thought the name wasn’t beautiful enough, or perhaps even juvenile and early voting had the name getting about 5 percent of the public vote. But then someone posted the contest to the social media site Reddit.com where users see news of the day submitted by other users. The Reddit community caught fire around the Mister Splashy Pants name and drive 20,000 votes in a day, pushing Mister Splashy Pants to 75% of the votes. The name eventually won the contest, getting 78% of the total votes. Now, Greenpeace was an accidental beneficiary here, but they embraced the attention because they new it was helping their brand reach more new audience members. The organization said they had never seen web traffic at such levels. They’ve since built a whole, Save Splashy campaign that helps drive awareness and fund-raising around whale related causes.
Do you want to be Chi Chi’s or do you want to be Domino’s Pizza? In 2003, a Pittsburgh location of Chi-Chi’s was hit with a Hepatitis A outbreak. Four people died and hundreds others got sick. Public was outraged, wanted answers. Execs hid behind lawyers and brief, corporate communications statements. Public responded... with lawsuits. Chi-Chi’s later went bankrupt and closed all of its U.S. locations. Domino's had a worse problem. A 2010 video of two NC Domino’s employees desecrating a pizza they were allegedly sending to customers, could have been a major blow to company. Video went viral. CEO Patrick Doyle got on YouTube right away and said he would fix it. The NC store closed down this summer, but Domino's survived.
Public relations includes a lot of different fingers, but the primary discipline that makes up PR is media relations. Social media marketing and the tools and technology that support it actually allow your company to produce and become its own media. How many of you have heard of or read the Southwest Airlines blog? Do you think they would ever get one-one thousandth of the coverage in a traditional media outlet? But social media marketing also allows you to connect with more media members on a more personal level as many journalists, producers and bloggers are plugged in as well.
FAIT ICI. Urban general store in Montreal. Name means “Made Here.” They sell mostly local and organic products that promote an environmentally friendly and healthy food lifestyle. Had unprecedented media coverage when they launched in 2010, as well as local buzz. Why? Because several months before they even opened, they engaged the local community on blogs, Twitter and other social media channels. They invited bloggers from around Montreal to contribute to their own healthy living blog and even created a 52-week, 52-person group blog around food in Montreal. They had connected people in Montreal with a common thread that led an entire audience of customers right to their doorstep. They spend next to nothing on advertising or traditional methods of marketing, yet had, on scale, arguably one of the most successful business launches in the history of Canada.
Everyone knows the stories of Comcast and Dell, right? Simply seeing customers complaining and responding with, “How can I help,” is a social media marketing tactic that has almost single-handedly turned both of those companies around in public perception and customer satisfaction. This business driver is behind one of the three key business metrics: how much money did we make how much money did we save and *are our customers happy* Just start searching for mentions of your company, find unhappy people and reach out to them. Twitter ... blogs ... forums ... It doesn’t matter where, just find them and fix the problem. Even if you do it just one customer at a time, those customers will be more loyal and spend more money with you in the long term.
In 2010 Papa John’s Pizza wanted to develop a new specialty pizza. Instead of turning to their executive chef, they turned to their Facebook fans. Held a contest where people could submit ideas for an original pizza recipe. The winning recipe was a cheesy chicken cordon blue recipe, and it was in stores being sold and making money by the end of the year. They also used other entries which made it to the stores as well. But more importantly, Papa John’s got customer insight from people as to why they were mixing and matching certain ingredients. They captured all the stories and reasons behind the suggestions and used the exercise to gain lots of intelligence about their customers. And those insights wouldn’t have been possible in a traditional focus group.
Miss Shirley's is a popular Baltimore spot for Sunday brunch, and there’s often a lengthy wait. Last year, they decided to reward customers using Foursquare. Check in enough times, and you become the Mayor, an imaginary title from Foursquare, not the business. But Miss Shirley's ran a promotion where the Mayor of either of Miss Shirley's two locations could skip the sometimes two-hour wait and be seated immediately on Sunday mornings! After educating customers on Foursquare, they saw a 427% increase in check-ins. So what? Those check-ins meant people were there. They were buying something. In fact, they saw about an 18 percent increase in sales!
So those are the seven business drivers of social media marketing. But what do I do now? The answer is simple, the actions are a bit more involved: • Decide which of those you want to focus on for your business. • Establish some goals and expectations. • Execute strategies to help you accomplish those goals. • Measure, adjust and keep getting better at it. It’s taking social media marketing through the strategic planning process. Knowing what it can do helps you decide what you want it to do. Then you have to set some goals and objectives for those areas that you can measure.
On the question of ROI, understand that ROI stands for return on investment. It is a financial metric, a mathematic formula. Subtract what you spent from what you made, and hopefully you have a positive number. In order to calculate ROI, your goal needs to be producing revenue . But think about the seven business drivers <CHANGE>
How many of these are measured in dollars? The first five are valid business goals, but not measured in monetary value. They are intangible or intrinsic business drivers. You want more people aware of you, you want good public relations, you need to keep your customers happy. But when someone says, “Social media marketing report, Bob. What’s the status of the community building project?” you don’t say, “$56,789.45!”
The problem is that “What is the ROI” is the wrong question. The right question is ... <CHANGE>
What do I get in return? Can it be money? Certainly. Sell more products, capture more leads, drive new product features which can be tracked. You can also measure the value of customers and community, who reach out to you on social media and compare that to traditionally-acquired customers to see if there is a difference in value. You can also track metrics in each of the seven business drivers. We go into a fair amount of detail on each of the seven and how to measure them in the book. But they're not all about money. However, you get some amazing VALUE out of each of them.
We talk a lot in the book about how the hippies and tree huggers got it wrong. Or at least haven’t told you the other half — that social media makes money. But I don’t want you to think the purists are wrong about everything. &quot;Join the conversation,&quot; &quot;engage your customers,&quot; &quot;listen” etc. are absolutely imperative to be successful. And while our book is essentially a strategic planning checklist and how-to manual for being a good social media marketer, checking off the to-dos and following the instruction manual doesn’t make you social. And it doesn’t make your business social. <CHANGE>
What does is creating relationships with customers who know, like and trust you. This is Pikeville, Ky. Jason’s hometown. Here, Jason’s family didn’t buy cars from Ford or Chevy, insurance from Nationwide or All-State, clothes from JC Penney or Target. And they didn’t bank with PNC or Wells Fargo. Jason’s family bought cars from Terry. Insurance from Sharon. Clothes from Jerry. Banked with Danny. They all sat within four rows of Jason’s family at Pikeville United Methodist Church (LEFT). Becoming a social business means plugging into the greater community as a participant and stake holder. All it requires is that you provide value to the community. Whether its through your actions or your content, giving to get works here, so long as the intent is genuine. Make it so. Build relationships and trust. And you’ll not only be social, you’ll be successful at social media marketing.
CALL FOR QUESTIONS Some topics we cover in the book to hit on (Ad-Lib if you need to get people started): We’ll be asked how to measure each of the 7. Have a canned answer or examples ready. Traditional media metrics have lied to us for years. Who should be responsible for social media within the organization? Social media doesn’t violate policies. PEOPLE violate policies. Educate - Hire smarter. B2B Examples: ShipServe (increased sales-ready leads by 400% through blogging) 5 Mindset Shifts To Be A Better Social Media Marketer 1. If you want people to trust you, you need to trust them 2. It's not about the sale, it's about the lifetime value of the customer. 3. Online is no different than offline. 4. There's an audience for everything, but bigger audiences are available beyond the spray. 5. Measure what matters. 5 Kick Starters To Think Like A Social Business 1. Hear, Then Listen 2. Share, Then Solve 3. Launch, Then Learn 4. Trust, Then Adjust 5. Give, Then Get Six steps for dealing with detractors. 1. Acknowledge their right to complain 2. Apologize for their situation (or your mistake, if warranted) 3. Assert clarity in your policy or reasons, if warranted 4. Assess what will help them feel better. 5. Act accordingly. 6. Abdicate.
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