Social media, PBL Task 8

Social media, PBL Task 8

Open Task 8

Problem: How to use social media as a marketing channel?

Learning objectives:

LO1         What are the social media platforms and how to utilize (use) them?

LO2       How to create an identity on social media? 

LO3·         How to measure the impact of social media?

Personal Study:

LO1         What are the social media platforms and how to utilize (use) them?

http://www.fcfdu.org/Portals/0/ClubsAndCouncils/Forms%20&%20Manuals/Social%20Media%20Platforms%20-%20Overview.pdf

LO2       How to create an identity on social media?

Depending who you listen to or read in the social media space, the best reason to use social media for your brand varies. It can be for listening; resolving issues; lead generation; focus groups; recruitment; and much, much more.

All good reasons. All good value. And yet….

While these are all solid enough reasons to be on social media from a brand’s point-of-view, they mean nothing unless you have an audience. Not just an audience, but also one that actually trusts and supports you, and will listen when you speak. Without that, you’ll just be another tree in the forest that no-one hears fall.

So how do you build that most valued of commodities in social media (and business in general) – identity and trust? Especially in such a crowded space to start with? Thankfully, it’s not that hard – but it does take work and stamina. Let’s dig in.

Step 1: The Message is the Key

The big mistakes that brands make when jumping into social media is they see their competitors doing it, so think they need to as well. Wrong answer! (Insert buzzer noise here). For sure – social media can (and does) offer a fantastic additional tactic to add to your existing marketing mix. Yet only if it’s right for you – so make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons and not because of forced impressions.

Once you’ve gotten that out of the way, the most important part comes next – defining what your message is going to be, and how that is going to build the loyalty and brand identity that will define your success in this space.

The core points to consider here are:

• What’s our brand’s value proposition, and how do we convey that?

• Who will be our spokesperson/spokespeople, and in what capacity? How do we want to be perceived – thought leaders, the company that listens, educators, or something else?

• How will we ensure the message we’re sharing is consistent and built to last?

These are some of the initial questions to ask, and answers to provide. Without these, you’ll be floundering pretty quickly and people will move on to the next brand. Don’t let that be you. Think about the above questions, and make sure you have the answers (or know who the person is with the answers).

And, for the love of God, please make sure you actually know internally what your business stands for before you go outside!

Step 2: It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It

Once you have your goals defined, and know exactly what will be said and who will be saying it, you move on to the next most important part – building your brand identity with these components.

This, probably more than anything, will be the part of the puzzle that either builds your identity and success, or sees you crash and burn on takeoff (I watched Top Gun again the other night, so forgive the gung-ho analogies!).

While it’s crucial to have the right people and message defined, it’s just as crucial (if not more so) to take it to market properly. What you say, and how you say it, is going to be the difference between you and your competitors. And if there’s one thing social media has taught all brands, it’s that people are always waiting for you to slip up.

To ensure your message is understood in the way you want it to be seen, you need to be consistent across every touchpoint:

• If you’re setting up a blog, make the editorial guidelines clear, both for internal bloggers and guest authors, determine the message from the blog, and make that core across all posts.

• On social networks, the people that will be the “official” voice of your company need to share communications with each other regularly, and know whose role it is to reply to a certain question or issue.

• On social media-led promotions that carry over to the offline space, ensure the same people promoting and answering online are attached to any offline teams as well, to keep the message clear and integrated.

These are just some of the ways to ensure the messaging from your brand is consistent and clear. That’s one of the first steps to building a true identity online. On top of that, obviously you need to make sure that your brand’s look and feel ties into this identity too.

The last thing you want to do is confuse people when they visit one of your online outposts (blog, social network, Pinterest board, etc.) and find a different colour scheme or look and feel at each place (unless you’re building external resources as a separate part of your brand identity, for SEO or thought leadership reasons).

Get the message consistent; get the look consistent; the rest will start to fall into place.

Step 3: The Long and Winding Road

Of course, this is all pre-identity stuff. Or, at least, pre-social media identity (you have identified what your brand stands for internally, right?). That’s the (relatively) easy part – the hard part is making sure that message is seen and, more importantly, retained time and time again.

And that’s where many brands fail, by expecting social media to be the quick fix to all that ails them. It’s not. Social media is not a fire sale – it’s a long-term investment and tactic, strategy, campaign, call it what you wish.

If you’re expecting your brand to be immediately identifiable through your actions on social media, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Instead, it’s the consistency of the message and voice that will build your identity, not the speed in which you bring that to market.

Customer loyalty isn’t something that can be bought – and the brands that identify the most with their customers’ needs will be the ones that are rewarded with loyalty, referrals, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Social media can enhance the reach of these referring voices to the Nth degree – but you need to make sure you’re deserving of it to start with. Get your identity right by planning it and building it up the right way, and the world (social media or otherwise) can truly be your oyster.

http://dannybrown.me/2014/07/21/how-to-build-the-commodities-of-identity-and-trust-in-social-media/

PROTECT: Privacy, Ethics, and Legal Issues

• Examine copyright issues related to social media.
• Explain the characteristics of digital content including the life of information, the restrictions of the communication medium, and the ownership of the information.
• Point out the limitations of account and sharing policies in various social networking platforms and discuss the ethics of violating terms of use.
• Appraise the legal responsibilities of promoting products or organizations. Recognize when there may be liability related to participation in social media.
• Interpret the practical implications of the service agreements for social media tools in regards to privacy and legal policies. 
• Set up policies to manage a public social media account and the distribution of information.

LO3·         How to measure the impact of social media?

4 Ways to Measure Social Media and Its Impact on Your Brand

Do you know how social media is helping your business? Want to find out how Twitter, Facebook and other sites are impacting your brand awareness?

The good news is social media has finally made it to the grand stage of “accountability.” A place where there are lots of people who want to measure it. The bad news is there isn’t a single clear-cut answer.

However, with a few simple steps, you can build a measurement strategy that accomplishes your goals.

Defining Terms

To start, let’s agree that brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable your brand is to your target audience. For those looking to get ahead of the curve on social media measurement, the first step is to align your social media metrics with metrics your company is already comfortable with.

Also, let’s agree that the measurements for social media aren’t all that different from how you’ve been measuring traditional media. To put brand awareness measurement into the context of the sales funnel, the key areas to evaluate fall into three categories:  social media exposure, influence and engagement.

With that understanding, let’s look at how you can level the playing field between your traditional media metrics and your social media metrics.

#1:  Measuring Social Media Exposure

How many people could you have reached with your message?

In social media, this measurement is about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this post, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

• Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement isTweetReach.
• Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach.  Facebook Insights provides value here.
• YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.
• Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.
• Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

Exposure is the top of the brand awareness funnel and represents your potential sales lead pool.

#2:  Measuring Engagement

How many people actually did something with your message?

This is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people actually cared enough about what you had to say to result in some kind of action.

Fortunately engagement is fairly easy to measure with simple tools such as Radian 6,Biz360 and TweetEffect. These metrics highlight who you want to target to retain on social media channels.

For a starting list of key performance indicators for engagement, this post by Chris Lake is a great start.

• Twitter: Quantify the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and then look at how many people were responsible for the activity. You can also track @replies and direct messages if you can link them to campaign activity.
• Facebook: Determine the number of times your links were clicked and your messages were liked or commented on. Then break this down by how many people created this activity. You can also track wall posts and private messages if you can link them to activity that is directly tied to a specific social media campaign.
• YouTube: Assess the number of comments on your video, the number of times it was rated, the number of times it was shared and the number of new subscribers.
• Blog: Evaluate the number of comments, the number of subscribers generated and finally the number of times the posts were shared and “where” they were shared (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). Measure how many third-party blogs you commented on and the resulting referral traffic to your site.
• Email: Calculate how many people opened, clicked and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.

#3: Measuring Influence

This category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition. Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics listed above are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or did it create bad mojo?

A great application for influence is to look at the influence by those who engaged with your brand in the above categories. Do you have a nice mix of big players with large audiences engaging with your brand, as well as the average Joe with a modest following?You can also use automated tools like Twitalyzer,Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any sentiment results. Influence is generally displayed as a percentage of positive, neutral and negative sentiment, which is then applied in relation to the engagement metrics and to the metrics for reach where applicable.

If not, your influence pendulum may be about to tip over, because it’s important that you spend time engaging with both influential users and your average user.Note: many of the automated tools that track sentiment and influence are not free. And many times, you will need a combination of tools to measure all of the different social media channels.

#4:  The Lead Generation Funnel

After you’ve measured through the influence portion of the funnel, you’re now creeping into where too many companies are starting their measurement efforts: the lead generation funnel. This is where the brand awareness portion of the funnel ends and the traditional ROI-driven action begins.

Exposure, influence and engagement represent brand awareness in the measurement funnel.

Understanding your reach, engagement and influence through these primary social channels will allow you to define your presence and impact, which can then be applied as a model to other social networks.

Now that you’ve tracked all of this information, how do you make it meaningful? Excel is a great tool to help organize your data. Build yourself a standard dashboard in Excel that highlights the key metrics that matter to the organization. Create a tab for a high-level overview of multiple campaigns, and a tab for each campaign for the time period you’re reporting on. Ultimately, you should put the information into the same format that you’ve used to report on traditional brand awareness campaigns, with social media as just another vehicle in the overall marketing mix.

If you’re looking for tools to use for tracking, this post by Mani Karthik at Daily Bloggr gives a nice view of options.

To really understand the importance of measurement, here’s a great post on social media measurement from Social Media Examiner: Is Social Media Marketing Measurable? The Big Debate.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/4-ways-measure-social-media-and-its-impact-on-your-brand/