Social Media Toolbox

Business Risks of Ignoring Social Media

Stephanie: At this point in the Web's evolution, it would be folly to ignore social media marketing if you run an online business.   What's at risk?—a relationship with your customers.  Customers can now find items at the click of a mouse.  Their expectations for service and a custom experience are high and growing exponentially.  The 'ME Generation' has brought their attitude to online buying and have brought all their kids and grandkids whose expectations are higher, still.

Can you sit on the sidelines and hope social media marketing peeters out ?   Not likely.  Social media impacts the culture of society as well as the individual.   Check out the 10 major cultural implications of the growth in popularity of social software brings written by David Teten and Scott Allen.

Re-defining the customer

Bob:  I think we’d all agree that knowing your customer is pretty basic to traditional marketing. It’s also critical to Social Media marketing, but with a twist. The twist is that the more granular view of your customer the more you can identify the best key words and tags for blogs, websites, and documents. This, in turn, affects who receives your information, and, how broadly.

One way to re-think who your customer comes from a great book targeted at small businesses—but applicable to all sizes of companies—by John Warrillow, called Drilling for Gold (see Book list). In essence he says we should forget about there being a small business market, it doesn’t exist. However, regardless of the size of your customer, a great way to rethink which customers count is to slice and dice them based on potential and value.

For example, Warrillow relates the story of credit card marketer MBNA -Maryland Bank of North America-whose most profitable customers in the credit card business have three characteristics in common: they charge a lot on the card, carry the occasional balance, and rarely default on their loans. MBNA discovered that this profile happens to be consistent with that of certain professions such as dentists, lawyers, and doctors. What key words and tags are going to appeal to your newly re-defined customer in the Social Media arena?

Social Networks: Making the invisible visible

Martin:  When I worked as a marcom manager for a Fortune 500 company years ago, we often had to sit through publishers’ self-serving presentations about how influential their magazine was. Usually they droned on about pass along readership and blah, blah, blah. But one publisher came and tossed up a slide of interconnected dots all of different sizes that looked something like a spider web. This was my first exposure to a social networks and how they work.

The bigger dots, dubbed superstars and stars, connected to other dots more often. The smaller the dots the fewer its connections. According to him, the bigger the dot the greater influence that certain individuals had on business-to-business buying decisions. Guess what. The superstars and stars rarely coincided with the important titles that everyone in the room believed we were targeting with our advertising and PR.

I got the point. We weren’t doing our job. And while he mumbled on about how his weekly solved this problem because it got to those “invisible influencers,” my brain was flashing red alerts that shattered my beliefs about marketing. My question was: “How can we tap into that word of mouth?”

The fact was we couldn’t. At the time, it was too expensive and time consuming to even find these guys. We simply lacked a medium that could overlay this network of influencers.

Fast-forward to today. Word of mouth is still just as influential. But when it moves the Web, we have an answer now. Social media.

Social media is simply a toolkit for helping marketers see once invisible conversations for the first time and even engage in them. In the past, unseen influencers whispered into the ears of the social network in their companies and something happened, but no one understood how.

The Web gives influencers a megaphone and a soapbox. It creates new audiences and communities that listen to them, and listen closely. And by using same tools, marketers, PR specialists and activists now can find these elusive “invisible influencers,” jump into conversations and shape them.

Sure the marketing toolkit we use for social media is different and it makes us think about influencers in new ways, but needing to know who influences our business and how, really hasn’t changed.

Crashes and clashes on your blog may give you a boost

Bob: A major concern I’ve heard corporate folks express about getting more engaged with a plethora of social media voices is about negative comments…particularly customers that yell at the company. How fun is that?

However, maybe the clashes with customers can give you a boost? For mindless entertainment, I sometimes play a video game called Burnout! Hot cars speeding through city streets. It’s the electronic equivalent of a punching bag for overwrought executives. The premise is simple, the more crashes you have with other cars, the more boost you get and the faster you go. It’s dumb, but exhilarating.

Creating a conduit for customer communication using social media marketing tools—regardless of the crashes and clashes—provide a unique opportunity to engage in the conversation. Again, the conversation is happening no matter how we might wish otherwise. Social media marketing tools give you the power to participate in and influence the conversation like never before.

In a great blogging book, 'Naked Conversations' Shel Israel and Robert Scoble (see reading list) address negative comments. First, since people are saying negative things about you anyway and can say them anywhere online, wouldn’t you prefer it was your own blog rather than another? Second, they point out that sometimes a company’s evangelists (blog readers) will jump in and defend you.

The authors use an example where Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman, was slammed by a negative auto reviewer’s comments. Something like 30 supporters responded with postings defending Lutz although remained quiet. So, there’s often great value disguised within the clashes and crashes of negative feedback. It can actually give your company a boost in terms of better product features, addressing market acceptance issues, solving distribution problems, understanding pricing concerns, filling in support holes, or a host of other factors that make up a comprehensive marketing mix.

Welcome to our blog!

We'd like to welcome you to our collaborative blog.  Check out our bios (top right) to learn more about us.  The reason we chose to write this blog together, was to take our collective experience and apply it to the changing nature of the 'customer conversation' on the Web.

We each come from a different background online— marketing, PR, writing and we believe that this gives us a unique way of looking at how social media is changing the face of online marketing.  Please take this evolving journey with us and let us know what you think.

Stephanie Diamond, Bob Morse, Martin Middlewood