Mediaboss Marketing

For the past four years, myself and three other marketers have met frequently to talk shop. Weve celebrated a variety of milestones together -- promotions, an engagement, our childrens birthdays. What had originally begun as an opportunity to learn from other professionals, has grown into a valuable friendship.

While were all marketers, we each come from different industries. In the winter of 2014, I worked at a B2B software company. At the time, the other men and woman were involved in manufacturing, recruiting and higher education. On paper, our backgrounds were similar. As senior leaders, each of us had experience in recruiting and building cross-functional teams, implementing strategy, growing and retaining markets. One of the only significant differences we encountered was how each of our organizations approached social media marketing.

Related: 10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

One week, over a drink, hummus and chips, Maureen began to tell us about a new initiative that was being proposed at the university where she worked. They had planned to launch a specific Twitter handle targeted at freshmen and transfer students. The goal was to help new students become more acclimated and increase involvement in extracurricular activities during their first semester. Through personalized blog content, a weekly Twitter chat and contests the marketing team hoped to both inform and retain students.

Are you guys doing anything to educate your customers? Maureen asked.

The table grew silent. Myself and the men in manufacturing and recruiting shook our heads.

No.

At the time, the B2B software company I worked at saw social as one of two things: an extension of its existing customer care efforts or an advertising channel. Whether it was a response to a negative inquiry or an announcement about an offer, everything we published was reactive or promotional. We werent proactively doing enough to retain customers or encourage brand loyalty. Looking back, this was a huge oversight that caused our ROI to suffer.

Shortly after that meeting, I left the software company I was at and became the chief marketing officer at Sprout Social. Still, Maureens question stuck with me. One of the first questions I asked our marketing team was, What are we doing to educate our customers? Unlike myself and the three other marketers from my meetup, the team had an answer. I knew I had a lot to learn.

Related: Why Every Marketing Channel Won't Work for Your Business

Working at a social media company taught me that social doesnt have an ROI problem; it has an attribution problem.Rather than a direct pipeline to profits, marketers need to think of social as a building block that has the power to support, inform and accelerate nearly every aspect of your business.

To help uncover ROI, we focus on three analytics that illustrate socials impact beyond marketingproduct development, customer retention and referrals. So, how do we do that?

Social democratizes and diversifies the feedback loop for brands. It widens your focus group from a small subset of people who have the time and willingness to give feedback to a large group of engaged customers who are invested in your brand.

While social is a scalable, cost-effective way to collect demographic data, that feedback is wasted unless brands learn to apply that insight to their business. A Kalypso study onSocial Media and Product Innovationrevealed that while 70 percent of brands surveyed intend to use social for research and development, only 33 percent have a plan in place that allows them to apply those learnings. Furthermore, if there isnt a solidified feedback funnel, the social media team loses its opportunity for attribution. Which makes it even harder for them to prove socials organizational value.

Quantifying socials impact on R&D isnt as difficult as you might think. AtSprout Social,our team tags all inbound social messages that contain product ideas or feedback. Were then able to run a report that aggregates those tagged messages and provides meaningful and actionable customer data to our product team. From there, our engineers can develop a product that is tailored for our users needs and addresses their pain points. And we all know that a better product leads to larger profits.

Related: How to Target the Right Audience in 5 Simple Steps

Maureens question reiterated that CMOs arent paying enough attention to retention. A recent study from Duke University corroborated that CMOs are more likely tofocus their resourceson customer acquisition vs. retention. Proving these efforts are misguided, Harvard Business Review has cited that itsfive to 25 times more costlyto acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.

Throughout my time at Sprout, Ive learned that social is a front line to customer retention. It provides a personality to a faceless brand. The two-way conversation that social provides allows even moderately engaged customers to feel like they have a direct line of contact to your business. As a result, brands that use social media to interact with existing customers generate a higher Net Promoter scoreby an average of 33 points and increase customer spending by20 percent to 40 percent.

But how can you translate that value into a measurable impact on your business? Frankly, it requires breaking down departmental silos and encouraging collaboration across internal teams -- two actions that are proven to be extremely difficult for even the most agile companies.

Your sales and marketing teams should work to collaborate and track increased retention among customers who engage with your brand on social. Sure, its not easy, but strategizing and mapping out a cross-functional plan with your digital marketing, email, database and sales team will allow you to correlate data and accurately attribute retention to social. From there, you can start to understand the full picture of your efforts and compare those customers with your average retention rates.

Related: Are Your Employees on Social Media? Here Are 4 Reasons They Should Be

Referrals are one of the oldest forms of marketing, and social casts a wider net on the act of simply telling your friends about a cool new product. Now you can turn on your smartphone and immediately send a Tweet to Virgin America that shares your thoughts with over 700,000 Twitter followers. Social is one of the most frictionless means of referral. It is scalable for a business and requires minimal work for the consumer. What other medium provides that?

One positive customer experience on social, amplified, could trump your million-dollar ad buy for the Super Bowl.Its a real-time, human-driven platform that can invoke the interest of a global audience or international media outlet in a matter of minutes. Its the best medium weve ever had for engaging with customers and, in many ways, its still in its infancy stages.Thats why organizations that are still using social as an extension of their traditional advertising tactics come across as stale and, quite frankly, lazy.

With the simple additions of UTM codes and by taking advantage of advanced tracking, your brand can quickly and easily launch and measure a social referral program that benefits your business and its customers. Unlike email, phone or direct mail marketing, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram enable a brands consumer base to become a massive word of mouth machine. And, sinceword-of-mouthis the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions, business shouldnt be ignoring socials impact.

Scott Brandt is the CMO atSprout Social, a leading provider of social media engagement, advocacy and analytics solutions for business.

Read more here:
What Working at a Social Media Company Taught Me about ROI - Entrepreneur

Social media has become more than another brand marketing platform. For consumers, it has created a front door to directly communicate with organizations and seek support in a timely manner (usually in less than an hour), whether brands are prepared to do so or not.

About 67% of consumers have used a company's social media site for servicing, compared with just 33%for social marketing, according to a study by J.D. Power and Associates. Nonetheless, we continue to see a significant gap between rising customer service expectations and what brands are providing.

It's clear that many brands have yet to grasp the importance ofcustomer support on social media and what a critical part it plays in overall brand marketing.Maybe theyve been lied to. Yes, some untruths about social care have spread through the social media grapevine.So lets debunk the top three myths about social customer care and see how brands can best benefit from having a robust plan.

Nothing could be further from the truth. More than ever, customers are leveraging their empowered voices to talk about brands, with or without their involvement, and that word of mouth has become increasingly important when it comes to purchasing decisions.In fact, 84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues and friends about products and services, according to market research firm Nielsen.

What customers are freely saying online about your brand is debatably more powerful and effective than expensive marketing tactics. Leading brands know this and are not only addressing customer concerns on social channels, but learning to integrate this content with their marketing plans to show transparency and stay connected to their consumers. They understand the direct results of delivering a great experience to the connected customer who will consequently spread a good word about their interaction.

So, it's crucial to recognize how big a part social care plays in the overall picture of brand marketing and customer loyalty. Whoever said, Social care is the new marketing wasnt lying.

Careful: This is a vicious and dangerous one. The reality is, smaller brands have an even bigger opportunity (dare I say, responsibility) to stay relevant and compete through creative customer care strategies on social. I would go as far as saying they should center their primary marketing campaigns around exceeding customer expectations, rather than delivering pretty ads about their products or services.

Excellent customer experience innately fosters a community of loyal customers who will gladly market your brand and positively influence others. Brands that integrate social care as part of their business goals are already reaping great benefitsand they are not necessarily the biggest names.

A good example of this is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, who launched their Meet and Seat program in 2010, letting passengers link and share their Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn accounts and select a seat matchmaking-style according to their profile. The program is going strong to this day and their customers continue to be delighted. Some are even seizing this initiative for personal business opportunities. Now thats great customer service.

Learn more from Microsoft's Miri Rodriguez atThe Social Shake-Up, which will be held May 22-24, 2017 in Atlanta. Brand communicators from Coca-Cola, Dunkin' Donuts, the Atlanta Hawks, Arby's and many more will speak on a breadth of topics from content marketing to measurement to Snapchat strategy.

The all-time biggest falsehood on why brands dont have a dedicated social care team, Twitter handle and/or overall social customer service strategy: No budget. As Vice President Joe Biden once said,Show me your budget and Ill tell you what you value. Thats as real as it gets.

Companies that truly understand the importance of the customer experience on social are prioritizing it, redirecting and repurposing funds to these functions. The numbers dont lie: Companies with a social care program experience a 7.5% year-over-year increase in customer retentionthose without only see a change of 2.9%. Not having a budget for social care is a clear indication of your organizations lack of understanding about how impactful this is to the bottom line.

Social gives us a great opportunity to increase customer loyalty and meet business goals by providing support when and where it's needed. But beyond that, it also allows us to creatively use this platform as a fresh way to attract and keep new audiences. So, you can cut down on creating costly new content and instead, leverage what customers are already saying for your campaigns. Create programs like #ShareACoke that gives the power of expression to people and watch your content calendar exponentially grow with genuine feedback from fans.

Lets stop deceiving ourselves with unfounded fabrications about how costly or unnecessary it is to provide the social customer experience and start giving our customers what they expect and deserve by integrating it as part of our business goals and digital transformation journey. Customer loyalty and bottom line numbers wont lie about that.

Miri Rodriguez is the senior social media and communities lead for Microsoft Americas, responsible for managing three social care teams responding to thousands of customer inquiries in Global English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Connect with Miri:@MiriRod

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Don't Fall for These Top Lies About Social Customer Care - PR News - For Smart Communicators (subscription) (blog)

Social media has become as much of a resource as any other media platform. The stats vary from report to report, but its safe to say that a significant number of social media users leverage those platforms to make purchasing decisions. When you consider only the millennial generation, which has now become part of the wage-earning community with purchasing and decision-making power; they often view social media as the sole purchasing influencer.

Studies from 2014 put both of these groups at near 50 percent, so you can expect both to have increased at least slightly since then, given the massive amount of time the average user spends on social media, which, according to recent reports, is close to two hours per day across all social channels. So, imagine how much teens and millennials spend, compared to their parents and grandparents. Knowing that, its no surprise that social media ad spend is expected to jump to $36 billion this year (eMarketer).

But, social marketing is only part of the picture. The other side is social care, interaction and, most importantly, listening. Instead of being the loudest on social channels, companies need to focus on listening to whats being said about not only their brand, but about other similar products and brands, to gather information, interact with customers, prospects, vendors, and the entire community around them. By becoming embedded in the ecosystem, businesses can not only draw attention to their brands, but help build their presence as resources and thought leaders, and they can gain valuable insight into what the community at large is thinking. Thats all in addition to being able to provide social customer service to those in need.

It takes more time and resources than simply posting product offers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, but the value of the two-way social interactions is immeasurably more valuable. Beyond understanding the community on a human level, each interaction creates new data that can be collected, complied, analyzed, and used create actionable insight.

In her keynote speech at the recently concluded ITEXPO 2017 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Jamie Thomas, General Manager of Strategy and Development for IBM Systems, discussed the massive volumes of data were creating, indicating close to seven terabytes per person per day by next year. While the sources of this data will be many and varied, a key contributor will be the incredible time we spend online and, specifically, in social apps. The challenge is turning that data into actionable intelligence something that will lead to real business productivity and revenue, which Thomas says is impossible with traditional analytics systems. Rather, a new approach to IT and data is needed one that embraces hybrid cloud and the APIs that are being developed by just about every tech company today to integrate with various data flows.

So, while businesses should continue outbound social marketing, they must also designate resources to social listening and analytics. Ultimately, they will provide a much more detailed customer portrait and allow them to create more impactful outbound campaigns in addition to the immediate benefits of creating relationships with the community, including both existing customers and prospects. We all know, as human beings, we are much more likely to be influenced by someone with whom we have a relationship than someone weve never engaged even if those engagements are behind the social media veil.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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Social Media is More Than Making Bird Noises - Techzone360

As YouTubes biggest star finds himself mired in controversy, brands are getting a wake-up call about the potential perils of social influencer marketing.

After TheWall Street Journal revealed that PewDiePie had posted videos with anti-Semitic messages,Disney and YouTube distanced themselvesfrom digital medias biggest celebrity.

But some marketers are taking a more cautious approach.

This doesnt have to be a red flag for the industry to pump its brakes, said James Nord, CEO of Fohr Card, an influencer-marketing platform.

PewDiePie was known for his over-the-top humor, and any brand buying ads against an influencer, or working with them on a campaign, takes a risk of putting themselves into an influencers hand, he said. Its like working with The Fat Jew or anyone else who likes to ruffle feathers and get into the news.

One of the videos PewDiePie posted included a man dressed as Jesus, saying, Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong. Another featured two men holding a sign that said, Death to all Jews.

Whether or not you work with [influencers] for paid marketing or happen to advertise on their videos, the standard of vetting should only be getting higher.

-InsightPool CEO Devon Wijesinghe

In a Tumblr post,PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, explained he was trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online.

I make videos for my audience, he explained. I think of the content that I create as entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary. Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive.

While YouTube has removed PewDiePie from the Google Preferred list, brands also have control over where their ads appear across the platform by targeting or excluding various demographics, topics, categories or levels of appropriateness.

But at what point does it become too risky for a brand to partner with a bona fide global influencer like PewDiePie, who has 53 million YouTube subscribers?

Marketers havent quite yet evolved their mindset to remember theyre dealing with humans and emotions, and people who follow influencers because of those feelings, said DevonWijesinghe, the CEO of InsightPool, an influencer-marketing platform that also collects real-time data and audience sentiment.

Wijesinghe suggests marketers spend time vetting influencers before placing ads against them or working with them for sponsored content to make sure their values are well aligned. He also recommends that brands monitor influencers after a campaign is over to make sure the messaging doesnt slip.

Influencers become inextricably tied to brands that advertise with them,Wijesinghe said. Whether or not you work with them for paid marketing or happen to advertise on their videos, the standard of vetting should only be gettinghigher.

As Nord explained, there are millions of pieces of content uploaded every day, and very rarely do you hear of an influencer embarrassing a brand. With celebrities, they might appear as a spokesperson for a fragrance one day and end up on the front page of a tabloid for falling down drunk outside a club the next.

With the rise of influencers somewhat replacing celebrities as representatives for brands, they tend to get into less hot water than they used to, said Nord.

Even as influencer relationships are proving to be less risky for brands, they still face similar criticism as celebrities. It goes down in comment sections now, rather than in the tabloids.

Growing your following on social media starts out as a really positive, supportive space, said Nord. But there could come a time that people follow you because they hate you. And that can turn nasty.

Perhaps PewDiePie wasnt getting the same kind of audience he was when he started his channel. Or, perhaps he wanted to try something new, something beyond the typical video-game commentaryhes known for.

Its hard to be that popular and that relevant for a long time, said Nord. Every TV show youve ever loved turned crappy eventually.

Read this article:
PewDiePie and the Potential Dangers of Social Influencer Marketing for Brands - Fishbowl NY (blog)

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Many of us remember the good old days when you used to sit in your travel agency and wait for walk-ins or for the phone to ring. Wasnt marketing so much easier back then?

These days you do have to be pro-active, but now the pool of your potential clients has grown exponentially, thanks to (surprise, surprise) the Internet.

But if you arent yet a fan of social marketing, how can you get into it relatively painlessly?

And for those of you new to the travel industry, there are a few tricks to keep in mind when it comes to social media.

Networking gurus Gayle Hallgren-Rezac and Judy Thomson of Shepa Learning Company counsel would-be networkers across North America from their base in Vancouver. Theyve got some great messages for anyone whos still not 100% comfortable with social media.

Online networking isnt that different from face-to-face networking, says Hallgren-Rezac, who has spoken at Vision Travels annual Power of Vision conference.

Chances are you already have a Facebook presence and are FB friends with both true friends as well as your clients. Why not look at separating your personal and professional lives by opening a WhatsApp account for strictly family news? WhatsApp can also be great fun when you are on the road with a group: you can open an account for your gang to post messages and photos while you are travelling. If you dont travel a ton, think about also posting info on your hometown or region.

More news: More Portugal and a foodie tour in Paros with Med experts Preference Vacations

Why not tell destination stories based on what you learned at that supplier presentation you just attended?

Facebook Live is a great way to showcase how you are getting out and about. Posts of local restaurants and attractions with your own experiences of them will go along to building your reputation as a trusted voice: what social media marketing is all about.

Thomson is also a big booster of LinkedIn, which is up to 450 million members worldwide. You must be on LinkedIn because it shows you are a professional. If you met a financial advisor who asked for your business, wouldnt you check him or her out on LinkedIn?

Your page will take only a couple of hours to build thanks to LinkedIns fill-in-the-blank forms. Make sure your page is professional looking a photo of you is a must.

Invite people to join you and join groups, she counsels. Not just travel groups: if you want to build your golf (or wine-tasting, or garden-touring) business, look to join those groups and participate in them with responses to postings and queries. Again, the goal is to build your reputation as a trusted voice in travel. LinkedIn is definitely a way to raise your profile and can be a revenue builder, adds Thomson.

More news: More Portugal and a foodie tour in Paros with Med experts Preference Vacations

And we havent even touched on Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram! But if you still consider yourself a beginner in social media, Facebook and LinkedIn are amazing ways to build your business (and the price is right!)

With over 30 years in the Canadian retail travel industry, she says she Lives and breathes what goes on at the front line. She can be reached at lynda.sinclair@visiontravel.ca.

Continue reading here:
Social media marketing? Ugh. If that's your take on it, read on! - Travelweek (blog)