Social media promises to be the new frontier for marketers (we’re pretty sure, anyway—as Brian demonstrated, there aren’t hard numbers for social media’s ROI yet), and we’re all eager to get online and just tweet/post/blog/tag ourselves blue in the face. But without a plan we can’t know if our efforts are worthwhile. In fact, without a plan, we can’t even pinpoint what we consider to be a worthwhile outcome. So in lieu of hard data, Brian recommended starting out with quantifiable goals and educated guesses. We can continually refine and optimize our plan by measuring and evaluating the results we get.

5 Steps to Ensure Social Media ROI

1. Identify your goal.
2. Establish a metric (quantify your goal).
3. Get real about your current situation: what’s working, what’s not, what are your capabilities, do you need help, what is your risk tolerance? Make educated guesses at this point.
4. Plan your strategy and resources before jumping in with both feet.
5. Let results guide progress: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

4 Phases of Social Media Campaign Development

Most companies skip phase one of the four-phase campaign development process Brian outlined. By jumping into a social media presence without planning what you’re going to do once you’ve begun engaging your audience, you may wind up unable to keep their interest for long or turn that interest into action (and profit).

1. Strategy and brand planning. Project your brand into social media. Plan your viral campaigns—games, contests, hooks, attention grabbers, excitement builders.
2. Establishing a presence on social media sites/increasing brand awareness. Set up your social networking profiles.
3. Engaging customers/developing brand affinity. Monitor the conversation, including mentions of your brand, your competitors’ brands, and relevant topics. Reply with information, offers, friendliness, and humor.
4. Engaging customers/pushing offers for ROI. This is where not skipping phase one really comes in handy. You need a steady stream of attention-grabbing, compelling incentives to lead your audience down the path to purchase.

The Golden Ticket to Social Media Success: Keeping Customers Motivated

Every step of the way, you have to give your audience sufficient incentive to keep paying attention and moving to the next step of your marketing plan. The Golden Ticket campaign shows how to create irresistible motivations that turn into purchasing momentum.

To qualify, customers will book a vacation and fan the Visit Myrtle Beach Facebook page.

Then customers will post a message to their wall (”I booked a vacation at X hotel in Myrtle Beach because I want to win a Golden Ticket”) referencing their golden ticket number.

Five lucky winners will find a Golden Ticket in their hotel room upon arrival entitling them to free show passes, VISA gift cards, and other prizes.

Specific benefits are defined for each step in the contest. By requiring a purchase just to qualify, this campaign ensures cash revenue from the outset. The Facebook posts generate positive word of mouth advertising for the hotels. The campaign will also build contacts for future email campaigns.

What’s the Verdict?

Social media campaign planning is more labor-intensive and expensive than search or email marketing, and its benefits have not been established. Your best bet? To move forward with a plan, learning from your data as you continually get closer to your social media marketing sweet spot.

Other Tips and Takeaways

1. Don’t be a victim of brand theft. Use knowem.com to check for and secure your personal, brand, or product name on over 350 social media sites.
2. In addition to your “2.0″ social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc, establish a presence on “3.0″ aggregator sites such as Friendfeed and Tumblr to add assets automatically via RSS, thus building links for SEO.
3. Use tools like CoTweet and Whos Talkin? to monitor and reply to social media chatter.
4. Make sure that your marketing is not only getting attention but inciting action—what are you doing to motivate your audience to do something?

It’s all about building trust with people so that they will listen when you have something to say. Brogan and Smith provided helpful tips from their own experience for breaking through the white noise of everyday life and getting attention.

1. Make a Habit out of Breaking Habits.

When you interrupt the patterns that govern people’s lives by saying and doing the unexpected in a manner that is helpful or insightful to others, you wake them up, you jolt them out of their mental auto-pilot mode, and you become visible.

With social media, you have the opportunity to become visible through many channels and to be seen as a whole person rather than a flat corporate entity. Brogan and Smith encourage companies to put a face to their marketing. Also, when you have a habit of breaking habits, you become more creative and more open to new ideas, which in turn fuels your ability to develop new angles and opportunities for yourself.

2. Stand Out, Start Something.

If you’re competing against others, you’ve already lost, say Brogan and Smith. Citing Cirque du Soleil and the iPhone as examples of game changers in their respective industries, they noted the importance of carving out more profitable spaces in which your company can operate.

For instance, PodCamp, a Barcamp-style “unconference” for new media enthusiasts and professionals co-founded by Brogan and Christopher Penn in 2006, was a way of standing out and starting something. By creating a community around a shared passion, they created the Next Big Thing without quite realizing it. That flood of attention and enthusiasm benefited them even as it created momentum for everyone involved.

“The only difference between a community and an audience is which way you point the chairs.”
—Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan on the evolution of PodCamp (interview with Adele McAlear)

(Toward the end of the presentation, an audience member amended this advice as “listen and then start something.” Don’t forget to check out what’s already going on and start participating before starting something new. Perhaps your Next Big Thing has already begun and is waiting for you to join.)

3. Build Your Network Ahead of Need.

Just as the worst time to find a job is right after you’ve lost one, the worst time to find a customer is right when you need one. If you have built relationships with people before you need the sale, it’s that much easier to get them to be receptive to your offer.

4. Create a Culture of Giving.

Chris Brogan describes his call-to-action as “Come back—I’ll give you more.” He says that by creating a culture in which he makes a habit of doing things to help people, he’s “training people to be nice” to him. Indeed, by setting the example of giving value to people without asking for something in return, you train others to pay it forward in a similar fashion. It’s no wonder that eventually you would become the beneficiary of that goodwill. As with collaborative efforts like PodCamp, generosity and inclusion build conversation and engagement, which is a recipe for trust and attention.

And speaking of recipes…

5. Give your customers recipes in which you are the ingredient.

You won’t find a can of cream of mushroom soup that doesn’t have a recipe on the label that requires cream of mushroom soup. Likewise, you should frame yourself as a necessary ingredient in your customers’ success. I found this piece of advice to be one of the most concrete of the presentation, and one that many of us could run with, when we decide how it applies to us.

What would a recipe for your business look like? If you sell widgets, could you suggest projects on your Web site that use that widget? If you sell expertise, could you create an event around that area of knowledge? AMA members, write in with your ideas and get some collaboration going!

The following is a recap of Rohit Bhargava’s presentation at the March 18^th AMA Power Lunch Series luncheon. This post includes a podcast and a slide cast of the presentation, which you can play together.

Standing out from the crowd is the chief challenge for any brand.  To communicate brand identity in the new world of social media, companies must adopt a clear personality.  Sensing the underlying implications of the rise of social media, Rohit Bhargava wrote Personality Not Included, a book about the end of the faceless company and the need to build a brand with personality.

He brought his extensive knowledge and exprience to share with AMA members in a power lunch presentation entitled Why Personality Matters: The Untold Secret of Marketing in the Social Media Era.

During the lunch, Rohit explained that

“The story of the rise of social media is not about the tools that are out there…. it’s about a cultural shift, and that is that people want to see businesses with humanity.”

His presentation took the group through the definition of personality, dos and don’ts of social media marketing, and the ultimate importance of building personality “when you need to give people a reason to believe in something.”

Why Personality Matters

View more presentations from Austin ama Chapter.

Listen to Rohit’s presentation

Image by ogilvyprworldwide via Flickr

The fight for survival begins early for a tadpole; few make it to frog. Compass Learning needed to re-brand, re-price, plus re-launch. Three years ago, as the new vice president for marketing, Mark Hammer moved quickly to change Compass Learning’s presence.

At the lunch, Mark shared that he began making those changes by reviewing Compass Learning’s website in conjunction with competitors’ websites. Mark’s talk, entitled “From Tadpole to Frog: Evolving into a Brand with Legs” began with this show of competitors’ home pages - all blue.

Compass Learning, a division of Reader’s Digest corporation, provides learning materials for specialized instruction, tailored to learner’s abilities. Five years ago, I worked for a competitor in product management, Harcourt Achieve. That company is now integrated into Houghton Mifflin. Yes, it’s website color is blue.

Mark’s group changed the website color to bright green, plus the children used in photos are singled out, expressing the A-Ha moment of learning something new. Meanwhile, the “blue” competitors continue using stock photos of kids crowded around a computer screen.

Supplemental education is a competitive space. Publishers are pushed and pulled by federal mandates. During my time at Harcourt, we were responding to the No Child Left Behind mandate. Now, the Obama administration has earmarked funding of educational initiatives in the Stimulus Plan. What does all this mean? For us marketers, it means there’s lots of noise and its corollary, the need to differentiate.

As Mark said, the first thing he did when he came to Compass Learning was pitch management for a redesign of the blue website. Austin based, Milkshake Media went to work.

Following a new corporate mission statement, product and pricing reviews were conducted by Mark and his team. Product pricing followed industry practice to charge school districts for “seats”. In other words, a per student price. This practice, I can tell you from my experience, evolved from the paper booklet, pre-computer, pre-server age.

“We price now by solutions, not seats,” Hammer said. “Plus, we used subscriptions to bring in a regular stream of revenue. The result was improved margins and simplified pricing.”

My key takeaway from Mark’s experience at Compass Learning is that e-mail response rates went down 29 percent in the second half of 2008. This field data shows me that this marketing tool has become so overused it’s delete-happy to our targets.

However, Compass Learning’s use of webinars with non-company experts, such as a Harvard professor speaking on new research into educational methods, reaches the high-level leads that can generate sales. When an entire school district adopts your supplemental materials, it’s a big win in this segment of the publishing industry. Those purchases can last years with refreshed materials, meaning more sales.

Listen to Mark Hammer’s presentation. It takes you through the ABCs of marketing management: differentiation, mission, pricing, lead generation, and effective use of marketing tools.

podcasts sponsored by The IncSlingers

Please share your thoughts on Mark’s talk, and your own experiences with evolving your company’s brand.

~ Brenda

About Brenda Hessney

Brenda Hessney

Brenda is an Austin marketing specialist with a knack for quickly analyzing, planning, and implementing effective, cost efficient sales campaigns for small to medium sized high-tech companies.