R&R Partners: Moving Minds

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**