Social Media in a Corporate Context

So I'm heading off to the Palace Hotel in Manchester next week, to attend the Social Media in a Corporate Context conference.This promises to be an exciting event, with some great speakers and interesting topics.

Amongst the social media landscape, some important questions are still emerging:

What's the best way to measure social media ROI?
Why are social media platforms taking over from news sites as the first source of information?
How can you manage your reputation online and deal with negativity?
How can you establish trust in your brand through social media?

These questions and more are all due to be addressed at the conference.
For me, I'm especially looking forward to the first talk of the day, creatively titled 'The social media newsroom X Factor' - how companies aggregrate their own social media into a 'newsroom' . We'll be looking at the best of those and who does it correctly.

I shall be tweeting live from the event on Tuesday (19th) @kerryneeds and using the hashtag #smcc10.

Will report back!!

(by the way, if you're a geek and would quite fancy those social media cushions shown above, visit here for more)

What's the purpose of social media marketing?

When you embark on creating your social media strategy, you have to discern why you are doing social media in the first place.

Are you setting up a Facebook page just because everyone else has one?
Do you tweet without knowing exactly why you're tweeting?

Social media is simple- but you need to have your objectives in mind.

Do you want to use social media for:

-Informing customers on latest deals
-Attracting new customers
-Building a community
-Answering any questions and dealing with feedback
-Positioning yourself as an authority


The case will be that you'll have some or all of these objectives.
So obviously, your tweets/posts will be different in tone depending on the type of communication and relationship you want to build with your followers.

So your purpose, first and foremost, needs to be assessed. This can be done by assessing the types of channels, and what types of conversations work best within each platform.

For example, Twitter is used best for frequent updates- so perhaps your companies latest news, special offers and events. Facebook might be a good place to upload some product photos, or encourage customers to share or post content of their own.

With a purpose in mind, you can then start designing your strategy and focus on where you post, how you post, and how you are going to measure your success.

Define your key performance indicators- how will doing social media marketing make your business better and bring in more sales?

It may be that you have several objectives in that channel. If so, devise a content plan- roll out different kinds of tweets or posts for different days.

So before you start any kind of social media marketing, ask yourself 'why I am doing this?'

Innocent Drinks uses Social Media to support Peace One Day

I love Peace One Day.

Its on the 21st September, every year, by the way, and is an 'International Day of Peace'. Its a movement that hopes to inspire peace in each and every one of us around the world, and encourages us to think of ourselves as a collective whole, living on one earth.

Just a small step towards every day hopefully becoming a peaceful day on earth.

Apparently, Innocent Drinks loves Peace One Day too.

Today, they've launched a fab new social media campaign to show their support (as well as launching their own limited edition Peace One Day peaches and raspberries drinks)
which I'm sure will end up being incredibly successful.

I follow Innocent Drinks on twitter: @innocentdrinks, which is how I heard about it.
I quickly popped over to their microsite: http://peaceoneday.innocentdrinks.co.uk/

They are utilising the power of social media to promote this new limited edition drink (which comes with a free peace badge!)

There's the usual suspects- facebook 'like' and new twitter button at the bottom of the page, a youtube video introducing you to their campaign, but what I really like is the 'wall of peace' sign up.

It uses social media to connect users through Facebook and Twitter to pledge their support for Peace One Day. This then displays an attractive photo 'wall' of users, with names.
You're then directed to retweet/share:
'I've just become the 440th person to pledge my support for Peace One Day, it'd be ace if you joined me. Just follow this link'

Thus, the user retweets/posts this as their status, encourages to friends.

A fab little campaign, and, with the launch of their limited edition 'peaceful peaches and raspberries smoothie', there's even more incentive to get involved.

World Peace and a smoothie? Sounds good to me ;)

What are you waiting for? Get signed up!

Is your website social?

Silly question, you might think- isn't everyone doing social media these days?
After all, with 500 million users on Facebook and Twitter growing at an exponential rate, you'd think most people who own a website would integrate it with social media so people can easily tweet/like their content or add them to their 'likes' on Facebook.

At a social media event the other week, I was astounded to hear that only 33% of businesses are using social media. When I look at any website, I instantly look for social buttons, either to follow the company/person or to share their content.

You want people to find your website right? Otherwise, you wouldn't have one. Your website is your shop window, a way to showcase your product, service or talent.

Why wouldn't you want people talking about that?

You may need to revamp your website to include social media buttons. I like ones that are prominent and are visually striking, rather than the small, discrete ones nestled away at the bottom of your pages.

Don't forget, social media is a marketing tool- so the more prominently you have your social media buttons, the better.

For encouraging users to follow you, I like the Social Media Widget Plugin (for Wordpress). You can have the icons in a sketch, cut out, heart or default shape- very pretty for putting at the top of your home page!

Of course, it pays to have at least a couple of pages on your site that people want to share, too, and tell their friends about.

Don't worry if you dont offer articles, podcasts, blogs on your site- your visitors may want to tweet your product page, your about page, anything.

The easier it is for them to share your pages, the more likely they are to do so.

My personal favourites (and the most popular) are:
Tweetmeme: You've probably seen this. One click easy share, with a counter button to show how popular you are ;). Twitter have just launched their own version, but I think they're a bit late!


Of course, the latest big thing is the Facebook 'like' button. Let your visitors easily share content by 'liking' your page, posting it to their profile on Facebook and showing up on their friend's newsfeeds.

Of course, you need to adequately assess what types of social media networks are relevant to your visitors- maybe its Bebo or Linked In.

I'll cover that in another blog, but for now, go back to your website and have a look- is your website allowing users to engage?

Social Media: The next B2B marketing force?

Social Media is usually thought of as purely a B2C marketing initiative, something for B2C's to market their service or product to their customers, to share company news, to encourage brand loyalty, and to develop strong relations with their audience.

But what about B2B?

Many B2B companies believe that social media is irrelevant to them- they focus on a small niche audience, and are not targeting the public. This fantastic article by Mashable shows that social media could be an untapped resource for B2B's, who can leverage sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to leverage their brand and promote their expertise and knowledge.

So, how should B2B's start looking at social media? Think about your social media strategy in terms of your ROI. How long are you going to spend on it? How many people will be involved? What goals will you have in place to ensure your reach has been successful?

As you may know, social media is a 2 way process- a conversation. This means you can take one of two roles- the listener, or the talker.

So how would B2B's effectively carry out these roles in order to boost ROI?

Talker: By posting content on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In, you are establishing your credibility and expertise. No one needs to know which clients you have on your books (unless you want to tell them, of course!), but gaining credibility by showing off your talent and expertise in your field shows you are to be trusted and of course, it shows personality. B2B is all about expertise.

Whether you're in B2B or B2C, don't forget- people buy people at the end of the day. And social media is a way to make your voice heard in a competitive B2B market.

Tweet about your networking events, post a bit of helpful information- make yourself an authority and an expert in the eyes of your target businesses.

Listener: Social media may be even more powerful for you by adopting the approach of a listener. Use Social Mention or Radian 6 to find out what problems your target businesses face. Listen to the conversations they have, find out where they hang out- which events they tweet about going to, what their current business focus is, where they are based.

You can even perform Twitter searches on your own company to see who's talking about you, and more importantly, what they are saying.

The power of social media is so great that it can literally elevate you from being a no-one to being a trusted, respected, authority in your field. A company who other companies want to do business with.

So what are you waiting for?

Don't be a social media chatterbox

Have you ever met a person who seems like they don't pause for breath? Who speaks and speaks and speaks and doesnt let you get a word in edgeways?

How do you feel when you speak to them? That's right, like you may as well not be there. There is no balance of listening, no two way dialogue, just a rambling monologue by one person.

The quickest way to lose followers in social media? Post too much. Tweet incessantly, post 5 facebook posts in a row, update your status 10 times a day...guess what?

The one person people are sick of seeing in their news feed is YOU.

Of course, you don't want that to happen right?

To avoid that, you only need to keep one simple social media philosophy in mind:

Social media is a conversation.

The art of a great conversation?

Listening, appealing to the other person's values, telling them something funny or interesting, sharing a personal story, updating them on a news story you have heard- it's all the same, just virtual.

No matter how loyal you are to a brand you would soon stop following them if all they did was post about themselves- and too much. It smacks of desperation.

As long as you post in intervals, people will more likely want to listen to you or look at what you've said. Too much 'noise' from you, and people will just switch off- the same as if they would do in real life.

So when assessing your social media engagement and developing your online 'voice', don't be that person that never shuts up!

Don't forget the SEO in Social Media!

You have created your social media community, you're happily tweeting/blogging/posting away to your many followers...but have you thought about:

a) what you are saying

and

b) how you are saying it?

Now, hopefully you will have already optimised your main website/blog so that it is easy to find you in search engines (This is called organic search engine optimisation, or SEO for short).

You'll probably have 'landing pages' on your site that are full of keywords related to your product or service and that are different or unique to those of your competitors.

Because this isn't an SEO blog, I'm not going to go into the finer details of SEO and how it works. All I will say, however, is that you need to have your list of relevant keywords that are applicable to your site and what would be your search terms through using a keyword tracker (i.e. http://www.keyworddiscovery.co.uk )

Once you have your list compiled, its good to start utilising them in your social media conversations. Think about your aim- are you indirectly wanting your followers to go to a specific landing page?

If so, make sure you make best use of keywords. Especially for content that can be shared- optimising your social media 'currency' is one crucial task that many fail to overlook.

Remember- more optimised shares = more inbound links = more targeted traffic to your site.

One tip, however- don't compromise the quality of your conversations. If your keywords dont fit what you are saying, that's ok. Just remember that the majority of what you post should be keyword-focused. Mentioning your brand or company name is a good idea, too.

Don't forget the SEO in Social media- optimise your conversations for success!