On October 29, 2009, at the at the Texas e-Marketing Summit, Bryan Rhoads outlined Intel’s social media marketing roadmap and provided advice for companies that want to integrate emerging media into their own marketing programs. Rhoads, a Digital Strategist who pioneered Intel’s new media marketing strategy, is the curriculum architect for Intel’s Digital IQ digital education program and a founding member of the Intel Social Media Center of Excellence.

Rhoads identified four distinct phases of adoption: Grassroots adoption, Results testing, Operationalize, and Widespread adoption. Careful planning at every phase, as the acronym suggests, will help you GROW your social media marketing program in a smart, profitable direction.

Phase 1: Grassroots Adoption

Before Intel began using any kind of social media, its employees were already blogging independently. In launching its pilot IT blog in 2006, Intel leveraged the enthusiasm and knowledge of these trail-blazers. Rhoads characterizes the grassroots phase as the foundation of a formalized marketing plan:

• Led by the passionate few
• Fed by hype
• Feared by Legal and IT
• Efforts are not tied to a formal strategy or ROI
• Limited barrier to entry
• Personal brands often trump company brands

By observing and analyzing the efforts of the independent bloggers, Intel collected enough data about technique and the potential for audience engagement to make an informed decision about moving forward with a pilot program.

Phase 2: Results Testing

Grassroots activity gets the ball rolling. The pilot program is a testing and organization phase. It’s the ideal time to make mistakes and then use what you learn to build a compelling case for adoption and to allay the “what-if” fears of reluctant stakeholders.

• Pilot your ideas with a focus on business results
• Prime your business case
• Do it all wrong quickly
• Mitigate risks to placate Legal and IT fears
• Get ROI and measurement standards in place
• POST exercise
  • People: Assess your customers’ social activities
  • Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish
  • Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers will change
  • Technology: Decide which social platforms to use

Phase 3: Operationalize

The pilot program lays the groundwork for further formalization of a social media program. This is the time to get all stakeholders on board and build infrastructure for scalable, repeatable business processes.

• Be absolute on the business case—proof testing is over
• Establish governance and guidance
• Provide infrastructure
• Invest in tools and training
• Define metrics and tracking
• Establish clear roles and responsibilities within the organization
• Scale participation (what level of knowledge and active participation is required of which employees?)

Intel developed numerous programs to communicate its objectives, educate and align employees, and set goals and guidelines for its new media marketing program.

• The Social Media Center of Excellence is a team headed by Rhoads to create guidelines, processes, strategies, and skill-building programs.
• Intel’s Social Media Guidelines provide a framework for increased participation—easing management concerns, getting everyone on the same page about expectations, and ensuring transparency.
• The Digital IQ training program is an online university aimed at creating a vast digital marketing force. Employees take 100 through 400 level classes based on their roles and responsibilities. Digital IQ also helps the Social Media Center of Excellence identify and place new voices in Intel’s social spaces.
• Digital IQ 500 is a further level of training that licenses anyone to practice social media on behalf of Intel. These 30-minute online courses were developed by key SMEs and the Social Media Center of Excellence. They include company strategy, legal and security cautions, moderation policy, and recommended best practices.

Phase 4: Widespread Adoption

Widespread adoption occurs only after the entire company has been primed and a scalable, sustainable plan for implementation has been established.

• Social media is integrated into campaigns
• Social media is included in the strategy phase
• Practicing social media becomes second nature
• Easily replicated processes are in place
• Dedicated roles have been established
• Executive support is cemented

Key Take-aways

Most companies do not have the vast resources of a global company like Intel, but we can all benefit from lessons Intel learned as it adopted social media marketing:

• Learn which way the wind is blowing from your resident enthusiasts.
• Don’t feel pressured to act immediately. Take the time to figure out where your audience is before jumping into a new venue.
• Define success and find a way to measure it.
• Use the proof-testing phase to demonstrate the potential value of social media and to examine and head off potential pitfalls—all of which will help get reluctant stakeholders on board.
• Further reduce anxieties and ambiguity for everyone by establishing comprehensive training and guidelines.
• Find your social media marketing “sweet spot:” where along your business’s marketing funnel can you use social media tools for the most impact?

On May 21, 2009, marketers from all over Austin converged on the Hilton for the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) where the Austin AMA and the OMS jointly hosted the luncheon as a part of the Power Lunch Series. The speaker was Paula Berg, who shared her successes and failures in Social Media for Southwest Airlines.

Through my recent adventures into Social Media I have found chests full of theory and only a few hidden nuggets of practical usable knowledge. At least that was the case until Paula Berg took the stage last week at the Austin AMA - OMS luncheon. As our barbecue lunch began to settle, Paula walked us through her ups and downs in Social Media for Southwest Airlines. Like most companies, Southwest started their foray into Social Media with a blog, but Paul and her team have since utilized everything from Twitter to YouTube.

Southwest Airlines Emerging Media Presentation

I’m sure that Paula didn’t have a top ten list in mind while she was presenting, but in the spirit of Social Media here are the 10 things Paul taught us about Social Media:

1. It can help you reach a new demographic. The Nuts About Southwest blog started as a replacement for A&E’s Airline. The show allowed Southwest to reach a different demographic by giving customers an inside look at their culture. All you need to know is who you want to target and where they hang out.
2. It’s OK to not have a strategy as long as you have a strategy?!? Paula mentioned she didn’t have a strategy when they started the blog, but I think she was just being modest. The strategy, or maybe we should call it a goal, was to give customers an inside look at Southwest. What they didn’t anticipate was all the things the blog would become. Social Media is so new, don’t try and put too narrow a scope on your strategy. It’s very much like a box of chocolates…
3. It’s good to have a presence in Social Media before you have a crisis. Blogs in response to bad press are not seen as authentic. You need to create conversations using Social Media before it’s too late.
4. Immediate, passionate feedback exists at no cost. Southwest was able to avoid using too much ink when customers print boarding passes, and discovered the real reason people don’t like their open seating policy. Paula has been able to create an open relationship with customers where they offer feedback because they know they will be heard.
5. You need thick skin. Criticism, warranted or not, hurts. The lesson is to be prepared to take the good with the bad.
6. When the media won’t listen, take your message directly to the people. Paula and her team “fought fire with fire” when responding to a couple of young ladies claiming they were treated unfairly because of their good looks. Since the media was only interested in one side of the story, Southwest created a video response that went viral. The only videos viewed more that week were of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
7. Listen. Some of the most valuable information Paula received was from listening to what people where saying- especially on Twitter. Southwest first discovered their “rapping flight attendant” through a twitter post. It’s amazing to think you might learn something about your own company reading your Twitter feed!
8. Never stop the conversation. When people comment on your blog posts, respond. This goes right along with listening. Social Media is a two way street. Don’t ignore people when they talk to you.
9. Social Media causes sleeplessness. Someone asked Paula what the ROI is for Southwest’s Social Media efforts. From Southwest’s point of view, it is huge. The only cost for them was paying Paula, and, over the past three years, she has worked many hours of free overtime. Social Media never sleeps, and neither does Paula. If you decide to immerse yourself this world, be ready with a case of red bull and a trusty mobile device.
10. Southwest will be flying to Hawaii and Mexico in the near future. Paula was kind enough to slip us this insider information after her presentation. This doesn’t really have any Social Media implications, but twitter probably works better on the beach.

- Josh

From Nick Wenand, President & Strategy Director, Trademark Media. Nick will speak at the AMA Marketing Jam on Tuesday, May 12^th.

I’m excited about the opportunity to share the knowledge I have with people in the marketing profession. I hope I’ll be able to deliver an impactful presentation with some real takeaways that everyone will be able to go back to the office and start using right away.

The title of my presentation is Stop Tweeting and Start Thinking: Developing your Interactive Marketing Strategy. I chose this topic because the landscape of interactive marketing has evolved so much since the advent of the Internet 20 years ago. Now there are so many platforms to make yourself heard: Web sites, blogs, social media, search engines, etc. The list goes on and on.

I believe that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to choose the best tools from this complex web of possibilities and really do a great job marketing online.

In order to do this, it’s my argument that you need a very solid interactive marketing strategy, one that consolidates the most useful platforms for your audience and product and sets forth a clear plan of action that will meet your end goals.

In my talk I’ll discuss how to go about developing this strategy, and we’ll touch on some of the latest tools that marketers are using to make themselves heard online.

If you have ideas about how I can make my presentation even better, please send them my way by commenting here.

I’m really looking forward to May 12^th.

Join us for Marketing Jam ’09 as we rock out and share new ways to grow your business and make the most of your marketing dollars. Attendees will learn from Austin’s leading marketing experts, including: Pierpont Communications ; TradeMark Media; and Emma Email Marketing. Following the presentations, attendees will enjoy networking, appetizers, cocktails and live music from Austin’s own Lip Service. Let’s rock!

Nick Weynand is the founder, president and strategy director for TradeMark Media, an award-winning interactive agency located here in Austin. Nick started the company in 1999 shortly after earning his degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1999, Nick has dedicated his time at TradeMark Media to building a company that supports the highest Web standards in the industry.

Has your organization recently decided to join the Social Media train before it pulls out, leaving you behind?

Great, so your marketing team or your PR team or perhaps your Sales team has persuaded someone to allow the organization to have a Social Media presence, now what. Whether its Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog or some other platform, now you are out there what are you going to do with the opportunity and how do you communicate with the rest of your organization why you are there and what you are doing?

Sooner or later, and given the current economic climate, most likely sooner, someone is going to start asking you those difficult questions, like “How do we know this is working?”.

Telling the CFO that you are now able to “Throw Sheep, Pass Drinks or Send Plants to 10 more people than yesterday” is probably not going to win them over. Like any communications program there has to be something more measurable.

But measuring your presence on a Social Media platform is not so easy. If you run a commercial on TV with, say an 800 number you can measure call volumes around the times the commercial is aired. You can measure conversions from those calls; you can even break the data down by media regions – all useful metrics. But how do you do that with a platform that has a global audience and that isn’t really interested in hearing your sales pitch?

One of the first things to do is obtain a baseline. How much of a conversation are you currently having with your customers and potential customers before you start the Social Media effort? If you are honest this might be a very low number. The amount that increases is an easy number to track and measure across your Social Media users.

Measuring how many of the interactions you are having that are originated by customers or potential customers is a good way to see the reception that your organization is receiving on a given SM platform.

Depending on the size of your organization and your budget for Social Media, you are probably going to want to invest in some tracking tools. Some of these are free and will certainly give you a reasonable indication of how your SM campaign is doing. However, the downside of these tools is that they tend to be specific to a particular platform or method of communicating or provide only the broadest of statistics. Because of this you may find that you are experiencing increased costs in human resources, because in addition to interacting through the various SM platforms someone will have to obtain the data from all of these tools. It maybe that you find yourself investing in true SM monitoring tools and as such it is best to factor this cost into your original budget.

In the final analysis, all organizations by now should have realized that Social Media is not going away, it is not a fad. True the platforms we use may come into and go out of fashion but the act of engaging with our customers and potential customers in conversations that go far beyond those we have had before will not go away and will only increase. So the best tip for an organization thinking of a Social Media campaign? – Take FDR’s advice – “Do Something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else. - If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

How do you measure your Social Media efforts?

Simon Salt

Simon Salt is CEO & Co-Founder of IncSlingers an Integrated Marketing Communication company. Writer, blogger at his own blog, mashable.com & dad-o-matic. Social Media addict. He can be found on Twitter as @incslinger