In this new spot by R&R Partners, for our Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority client, a woman creates an epic tale of heroic battles and scantly clad men as an excuse to skip work and go shopping in Vegas.
Posts by Sean Corbett, Corporate Director of Digital Marketing
Content… Content … Everywhere and Nothing to Post
You’ve got yourself a Twitter account. You’ve set up Facebook. You’ve even got yourself all set up on LinkedIn. You might have even built a blog. But, you find yourself… Well… Talking to yourself. What’s the matter?
Avoid trying to do too much. Start with what you can handle and master it.
After spending the better part of the last year watching social marketing rocket in popularity and advising clients I have found a disturbing trend emerging. I call it the “content-less social program”. The symptoms are easy to spot. Nobody is following you. Nobody is commenting on your posts or retweeting you. You are starting to question the value of your social efforts. Does this describe you?
If you are suffering from a “content-less social program” I have some tips for you.
Listening
Like most conversations it starts with your skills as a listener. You see, at R&R we recommend every social plan start with a listening program. Why? The answer is this… The social universe is full of free and wonderful information that you can use to shape your program. Your audience is talking right now and tools exist to tap into that conversation. Some of them are free such as SocialMention.com, Google Alerts, Twitter Search, PostRank.com and Technorati. Some offer partial content for free Techrigy (techrigy.com) and have a fee for premium content. Some of them are sold for a fee, including Radian6 (radian6.com), Spiral 16 (spiral16.com) and ViralHeat (viralheat.com).
Audience
Whether you do your listening manually with free tools or in an automated way with paid tools you will be tapping into your best source of content… your audience. They will tell you what they like about your brand. They will tell you what value you provide them. They will also tell you where you are weak as compared to your competition. They will also tell what other brands they associate with. All of this is valuable when creating your content development strategy.
Content
When it comes to content I recommend you look internally first. My guess is you are sitting on a mountain of content and you don’t even realize it. Look in the research department. Does any of that research you produce have legs that would extend to your target audience? If so, package it up and distribute it with your point of view attached. I am sure you have lots of smart people in your company and no shortage of expert opinions just looking for an outlet. Tap those people to join your content team. The national media tees you up all the time and you just don’t see. Take a national story and localize it for your market or tailor your response to the industry you represent. Look at your Web site data. Anything interesting going on online that may serve as an indicator of a trend or change in consumer behavior? Talk about it. The point is, you don’t have to hire a newsroom staff to produce content of value to your audience.
Feedback
Remember we are talking about social media. I know it is a scary thought, but your customers want to talk to you. To be successful you need to engage your audience in a conversation. That means you need to determine what you will respond to, who will do the responding, and how quickly you will respond. I recommend identifying internal resources from various departments or areas of expertise and getting them set up to respond when called upon. Your audience will like to know they are talking to a real person who can provide them with the knowledge they seek.
Set Goals, Measure and Optimize
Lastly, avoid the temptation to try and do too much. Set clear expectations and objectives for your program. Identify the ways you will measure your program against business objectives. When doing so remember this… social marketing is not a silver bullet. It is not a great way to reach a mass audience. But, it is a great way to empower your influencers and to make your mass channels more effective by laying down a base of peer to peer influence. And remember…. The audience has no expectation for how many social channels you will use or how often you will update them. That pressure you are feeling to be everywhere. That’s pressure you are putting on yourself. Stop it. Start with what you can master and sustain. Kick ass on a few channels and add new distribution channels over time.
Following is a little chart we created here at R&R to help structure our social plans for clients. I hope you will use it to start your social marketing program. This concludes the free advice portion of this relationship. **smile**
Oh My, What Big Data You Have!
It’s no secret that I am completely and totally enamored with Google. I spend my days wondering what they’ll invent next or what company they will buy. I love their desire to simplify search, browsing, photo sharing, blogging, communicating etc., etc., etc. I love that they open the source code and invite others to create things that make what Google does and my Internet world even better. I just got done reading a blog about the new Google Chrome Operating System. I love the idea behind it. I love that they keep it simple mentality. I love that they intend to make your PC operating system light on memory use, easy to use, open source, and reliant on the Web for the bulk of the computing. But, another Google product in my life also gets me thinking.
Think about this for a minute. You use Google to search and they know what you search for. You might use a Google Android phone and they know who you call, where you go every day and what apps you download, buy, etc. They know who your friends are and what you talk about by offering products like Gmail, Google Messenger and now, Wave. And, with this new browser, they’ll learn more.
I wonder what Google does with all of that data they collect. I wonder if it’s good to have one company know so much about me. I think of movies like Terminator and Minority Report and think to myself the rise of the machine is inevitable. I think about which Gap pants will be suggested to me as I walk by the outdoor board and it scans my retinas (please note, I am a nerd). I also ponder the billions of ways marketers can use that data. Part of me drifts into daydreams of robust targeting methodologies and one-to-one messaging. I dream of automated systems delivering multivariate ad units that can predict what products and services a consumer is likely to buy next based on the millions of other consumer data profiles. Some of these things may be built by now. I dream of a future where companies consult with Google to determine what types of business models to pursue. Why? Because Google will know everything we’re talking about, searching for and buying to the person. Why not start your R&D process with Google? How much would that data be worth to you as a business searching for new products to build and market?
Did Minority Report predict the future of advertising?
I also think about how annoying all of that could be. I think about the plethora of spam that lands in my e-mail inbox. I think about the spam-robot Twitter followers I swat at on a daily basis. I think about how much I hate it when people tell me what I should need or want. I am a free thinker after all. Not really!
Remember that old cartoon where the bulldog is being annoyed to death by the little dog that jumps around saying, “Hey Spike! Hey Spike! Hey Spike!”? We run the danger of being that little annoying dog. As marketers, we have a responsibility to not annoy people. To use the knowledge we have for the purpose of good. Not evil. Our responsibility is to the consumer and for us to provide them with messages that improve their lives. To send them messages they want, when they want them, how they want them. Google is our friend. Not the Terminator.
