The What & The Why: Small Business Social Web Strategy Adam Metz, presentation

1. The What & The Why
Small Business Social Web Strategy

3. Before we try to make
choices, let’s learn what
kinds of choices need to be
made...

4. The Scope
1. Consumer Social Web Tools
• What Are They?
• Who’s Doing This?

5. The Scope
2. Consumer-Facing Social Web Engagements
• What are the business objectives?
• How should we segment our customers’ behavior?
• What are differences between real small business (under $1M)
and big brands?
• Where does email fit in?

6. The Scope
3. Consumer Social Web Strategy
• How do we do it?
• How much is this gonna cost?
• How do we measure return-on-investment and other important metrics?
• How do we delegate the day-to-day?
• What are the next steps?

7. Your Customers & Prospects
Inactive
Active

8. Your Customers & Prospects (25-34)
Inactive
Active

9. Your Customers & Prospects (18-24)
Inactive
Active

10. 3 Reasons Social Web Will
Potentially Not Matter For Your Brand
• Most customers do not have Internet access (includes no
mobile)
• Most customers/prospects over the age of 65
• Pre-literate customer base

11. Part One
• Consumer social web tools
• What are they?

12. What Are Consumer Social Web Tools?
• These are the tools that your customers and prospects use on the social
Internet to create and share content
• We’re not talking about brands, we’re talking about types of technologies
• “Is it a social web tool?”
1. Can consumers talk to other consumers using it?
2. Can consumers submit original, uncensored content?
• This content can later generally be edited by consumers

13. Facebook is not a social web
tool. A social network
service is a social web tool.

14. “I can edit this anytime”
“anyone can comment here”

15. What Are Consumer Social Web Tools?
Tool Consumer-Editable C2C Conversation?
Yes Yes
Social Network Profile Page
Wiki Page Yes Yes
Blog Entry Yes Yes
Amazon Review Yes Yes
Review Site Review (e.g. Yelp,
Yes Yes
TripAdvisor)

16. The Eight Buckets of Consumer Social
Web Tools
Social Online
Online Discussion Reviews &
Blogs Wikis
Podcasts Network MicroBlogs
Forums
Video Ratings
Services

17. Why Aren’t Video Games Included Here?
It’s a $9.5B Industry!
• Consumers rarely create this type of content
• Content shared by consumers within these games cannot
typically be accessed by all game players
• “Is World Of Warcraft a social network service?”
• Yes, but it has limited functionality for your purposes, and
engagements scale poorly.

18. Part Two
• Consumer-facing social web engagements
• How should we examine our customers behavior?
• What is The Fork and why do we use behavioral targeting?
• What are the business objectives?
• What are differences between small business and big brands?

19. What are the communications objectives in
using social web strategies? Entry-level
Objectives
• Listening - “We’re figuring out what people are saying
about us and our space.”
• Talking - “We’re talking with our customers and
listening to them.”
• Energizing - “We’re working with our customer base to
create an army of raving fans who will evangelize our
brand.”
• Embracing - “We’re working with our customers to Late-STAGE
create new products and services by utilizing the social
Objectives
web.”

20. How Should We Examine
Our Customers Behavior?
• There are two types of customers/prospects:
• Talkers: These are people who go online and
say things. They’re the only people we’re
concerned with in our social web strategy.
• Everybody else: Don’t worry about them.
Some portion of them will eventually
become Talkers. The rest will just read/listen
to whatever the Talkers say, and make their
own decisions.

21. The Social Technographic Ladder
Publish a blog
Publish their own web pages
Creators Upload video they created
Upload audio/music they created
Write articles or stories and post them
1x monthly
Critics Post ratings/reviews of products/services
Comment on someone elseʼs blog
Contribute to online forums
You’re all a
Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki
Collectors bunch of
Use RSS Feeds
talkers!
Add “tags” to websites or pages (folksonomies)
“Vote” for websites online
Joiners
Maintain profile on social networking websites
Spectators and visit social networking sites
Read blogs
Inactives Watch video from other users
Listen to podcasts
Read online forums and customer ratings/reviews
None of the above
Source: Forrester Analytst Report, 02/08

23. Why do we use behavioral targeting?
• We don’t know who the person REALLY is on the other end of
the screen.
• People aren’t always who we say they are on the Internet.
• Online behaviors guide social web tool usage reliably, not age,
gender or locality.
• It’s way more accurate than demographic targeting.

24. The Fork

25. The Fork
• The brand has an important choice
• I call it The Fork
• Goal: To create a behavioral target, in order to develop a strategy
• Challenge: Can’t choose a tool (or two) until you’ve chosen a
strategy

26. The Fork
Brand may wish to choose:
A. Behaviorally target the current demographic set, at the “rungs”
that they’re most comfortable with
OR
B. Engage new base of prospectives with behaviorally high social
media aptitude/usage

27. What are the communications objectives in
using social web strategies? Entry-level
Objectives
• Listening - “We’re figuring out what people are saying
about us and our space.”
• Talking - “We’re talking with our customers and
listening to them.”
• Energizing - “We’re working with our customer base to
create an army of raving fans who will evangelize our
brand.”
• Embracing - “We’re working with our customers to
Late-STAGE
create new products and services by utilizing the social
Objectives
web.”

28. What Are The Business
Objectives?
• Listening: To find out what people are saying about the brand
so that we can develop a solid strategy to increase brand
awareness and sales and brand equity
• Talking: Increase brand awareness, brand equity and sales
• Energizing: Increase brand awareness, brand equity and sales
• Embracing: Create totally innovative, customer-centric products
or services

29. What Are Differences Between Small
Businesses and Big Brands?
• Less total collateral out there in the market and less content to monitor
• Less total tools needed
• Less time needed to make big wins over your current situation
• Much easier to “know your market” and know your customers

30. Social Email?
• Use email to draw older adults (45-75) into social media
• Include key social web property linkage on all corporate email
• Rebrand all company assets (letterhead, business cards) to
reflect social web collateral that’s important
• If email can’t be easily forwarded, fix it

31. Carrot & Stick
• Offer much deeper discounts on social web properties;
motivates users with carrot, pushes with stick
• When someone unsubscribes, it may be because they’re a
“friend”
• Read email analytics, all the time

32. There’s a reason this slide is red
Don’t do any of the following:
• Pay your customer evangelists after they’ve evangelized for you for free
• Use paid services to get people to write about your brand
• Use shills or buzz agents
• Market on your competitors sites unless you’d like them to return the favor
• Start a fight with a major content property (e.g. Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.)
unless you have an army of hundreds of customers who can back you up

33. Part Three
• Consumer Social Web Strategy
• How do we do it?
• How much is this gonna cost?
• How do we measure ROI/ROP?
• How do we delegate the day-to-day?
• What are the next steps?

34. How Do We Do The Strategy?
1. Spend a month or two listening
2. Bring in a pro to write the 90-day or 120-day strategy document
based on the results of your “market surveillance”
• Use the behavioral targeting based on The Fork when choosing
your tool
3. Execute against the document
4. Run monthly reports and a final report

35. What’s the methodology, again?
• POSTm Methodology
• People: We pick our stakeholder set first.
• Objectives: We then decide upon a communications and a business objective.
• Strategy: We write a strategic document, and execute against it, spelling out the
exact gains we wish to achieve in terms of metrics.
• Tools: We pick our tools last, using behavioral targeting.
• Measure: We measure the key metrics, and iterate the plan based on our
measurements.

36. How Much Is This Going To Cost?
• Use the 90/10 rule
• 90% of your investment should be in people
• This will cost 10-15% of the marketing budget
• If you spend an annual total of $300 on reputation monitoring and
blog software, spend $2700 on paying an intern to use this stuff
• If you up the tool spend, up the “people spend”
• If you’re spending over $500 on tools, something’s fishy

37. What is ROP?
• Return-on-participation
• It’s what we get for participating in the social web
• It’s the number of social web responses (reviews, comments,
sales, etc.) you get in return for your efforts
• You should see this rate increase over time, and eventually level
off
• A low engagement rate is 3x, and a high one is 15x

38. How do we measure this stuff?
• Analytics solution: Google Analytics (free); can also be used for
basic eCommerce.
• Buy one good book on Google Analytics: One-Hour-A-Day by
Avinash Kaushik
• Reputation Monitoring Solution: Trackur ($18)
• Plain old counting (review sites): ($0)

39. Can’t We Just Copy What Our
Competitors are Using?
• No. They might be doing it all wrong
• They might not have listened
• They’re maybe not as ethical as you are

40. How Do We Delegate The Day-to-Day?
• After doing the listening yourself, get assistance writing the
plan.
• Explain plan carefully to the staff and interns
• Check for comprehension
• Explain metrics to staff and interns
• Possibly bonus the staff for certain levels of improvement
• Read monthly reports with intern

41. What Are The Next Steps?
• Begin listening phase
• Get strategy written
• See how it impacted sales and the number of results that come
up in Trackur
• Look at where the hits are coming from - are they coming from
the right markets?

42. Digging Deeper
• My first strategy book, “There Is No Secret Sauce”
• www.adammetz.com
• adam@adammetz.com
• Available for consulting
• Read my blog to get up to speed, and other recommended
reading is for sale in my bookstore and on my blogroll

43. The Book
10 Social Media Mistakes
I’ve Got The Budget, How Do I Spend It
http://tinyurl.com/metzbook

44. Consulting
www.adammetz.com