Walter Adamson

Social Media Tools Week: Social Media Assessment - how to start

Thanks to all of you who attended my second webinar today (Social Media Tools Week) on Social Media Assessment - How To Start.

I've seen in practice that many companies skip this Assessment stage or don't understand why it is important. Of course the very large agencies do apply their own assessments,and have inhouse or acquired tools to do an excellent job.

The presentation shows how every business can think about Assessment, and why it is important.

I was struck by this comment: "Media is an arena where people with shared interest and enthusiasm converge around a shared idea" by Helge Tennø Post Digital Marketing 2009.

If you BELIEVE THIS, as I do, then you need to find the right arenas and match the shared interest with your own and understand how to contribute and ideally, find the actual people who are most enthusiastic.

This is Social Media Assessment – before thinking of tools or "doing something on Facebook".

You can get a copy of the presentation from Slideshare.

Where does an Assessment fit in with developing a strategy?

Let's say that:

• You understand enough about social media
• You have some kind of customer-oriented feedback, ideas
• You have some idea of resources and how it can be handle
• You need a strategy (however large or small).

It’s at this point that you need to do an Assessment.

You want to map the terrain, identify the places and spaces that matter, understand the real environment, and then develop a strategy which is informed and practical and effective.

The Assessment is one of the suite of methodologies taught by the Social Media Academy and put into practice by its graduates across the globe. These have the benefit of being consistent, having people talk the same language, and being continuously improved from global feedback.

I'm sure you have experience in developing forms of Assessment, before doing the strategy work, or perhaps you don't agree with this logic?

Please add your comments below as I'd love to see those ideas.

http://xeesm.com/walter

Brands in social media deliver higher search rates - comScore

Here is some good news for brands - people using social media demonstrate higher search rates for a brand if they have previously been exposed to branded marketing or "name dropping" on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or YouTube.

This a result of a study conducted by comScore: "The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption", in collaboration with social media agency M80 over a three month period.

"Social media-exposed consumers are far more likely to search for brand and product-related terms, and click on a brand's paid search ad," said Graham Mudd, vice president of comScore.

"This finding provides strong evidence that investing in social media marketing can both increase initial brand consideration and drive higher conversion rates once the consumer has decided to purchase." 

ComScore's survey found that the highest click-through rates (CTR) were seen when brands actively communicated with users through specifically tailored social marketing programs - such as when a company made and actively engaged with consumers through a  dedicated Facebook page.

More good news, you can find the Scribd presentation here and a whole further analysis by Cindy Kerber Spellman.

From my brand or your brand to everyone’s brand

There's a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion about "who owns brands" being stimulated by the impact of social media.

For example from Beth Harte of MarketingProfs:

If you’ve hung out in social media circles long enough, I am sure you’ve heard “you don’t own your brand, your customers do.” Nothing can be further from the truth and why we need to be very careful with how we phrase this as marketers, consultants, agencies, etc.

FACT: You do own your brand and brand messaging

FACT: You don’t own relationships customers have with your brand.

And I've weighed in thinking that while brand is alive and yours, "branding" is dead as in sending messages which "position" your brand into the social media.

But I'm on the fringe, and so when someone at the heart of consumer marketing speaks, from a company active in social media, I listen. Here's what Jose-Alberto Duenas, marketing vp of ready-to-eat cereals of Kellogg U.S. said in an interview in BrandWeek:

BW: What’s the greatest insight you’ve learned from using the digital/social media space?

JD: It’s an enabler of the relationship between consumers and the brand. It strengthens what you have. It gives you an opportunity to listen to what consumers think and feel about the brand, and also, one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is “transparency is key.” That’s basically because you are moving from “my brand” or “your brand” to, actually, “everyone’s brand”. And that is a very interesting [transition].

So it's everyone's brand, and the key is transparency - and it is a journey.

Planning the journey, recognising the true starting position, managing the risk as you go, understanding the organisational change, the cultural change - perhaps these are now the things on which we should be focused and not the debate.

Brand verus branding - has social media killed branding?

Over at Beth Harte's blog The Harte of Marketing, there is a good debate about brand versus brand relationships, and about the whole notion of a brand.

I'm far from knowledgeable on this topic, but I have been reading avidly and putting things in the context of the whole shift to and impact of social media, and in relation to buyer behavior and the way brands must now behave in the social media.

Here's what I wrote, you will have to read the full blog post first in order to place the people quoted below:

I'm confused myself, but I have formed opinions lately after researching the relationships between brands and social media, and observing the trends in buyer behaviour and their reaction to "traditional" advertising and marketing.

OK I'm confused, and I am also biased. I'm biased because I believe that marketing today is often synonymous with managing marketing campaigns - promoting stuff rather than helping an organisation manage the whole brand experience.

To me, sending out the "messages" is branding, and branding I think is dead since social media doesn't need or respond to "messages" and positioning. It's because of this thought that I can't find myself agreeing with Scott that "managing brand perception is as much about public relations". I think that is trying to "manage" the unmanageable - it's potentially fake and pushing messages which aren't going to hit fertile ground in the social media. 

Of course "brand" is alive, and is very well in many companies. 

But what is brand? You gave two sets of characteristics, or hierachies, and they are both useful. I think they overlap in various ways, and as you noted also useful frameworks for thinking about relationships in the social media in general. 

I'm preferring to think of "brand" as simply "brand behavior" - holistically, as Kim states. That need to operationalize the brand also fits in with what some of Craig says. And if I am interpreting Craig correctly, translated into my mindset, brand is defined by customers' experience which is "what THEY say" about how the brand behaves. 

Craig also says "if message doesn’t match perception and experience, we’re in trouble, and we’ve lost ownership right there". Brand does have signals and presence. "Messages" I am not so keen on as a term - it smacks of marketer and PR push. But for sure when the ads and the brand behavior don't gel then we have zero "brand depth". Personally, this lack of brand depth has reached plague proportions in say the airline industry and sections of the retail industry in my opinion. 

Scott also says "the best brand managers are those who nurture relationships with consumers to help influence those perceptions in a positive way" and that makes sense to me. I put that into "brand" not "branding" because it is not sending "messages" in a marketing or PR sense. It is being part of the behavior - participating and contributing - that's exactly what we talk about in social media isn't it. 

So this is where I have reached, my perhaps uninformed summary: 

1. Brand is brand behavior; Brand promise is the expectation of brand behavior;
2. Therefore brand has to be managed across all touch points, holistically, and this has to be well operationalized;
3. Therefore, where social media is part of the brand behavior it also has to be planned and managed across all touch points, holistically, and this also has to be well operationalized;
4. Most "marketing managers" "marketers" and "marketing" is simply promotion, bankrupt promise, same fake ads, and a complete disconnect from (a) the rest of the organisation, (b) the holistic brand behavior, and (c) brand.
5. Buyers now don't like the marketing of (4), don't trust it, don't believe it, and immediately sense its incongruence with brand behavior and REPORT on this in the social media. That is why I say "branding" a la (4) is dead - and those marketers, the majority, have a big problem as a "profession".
6. Marketing and brand management, done "properly" in the big picture holistic way as a guardian of brand value, through assuring brand behavior, has a bigger role than ever given the advent of social media.
7. But marketing as branding is the walking dead.

Do I have the right end or the wrong end of this brand stick?

By the way, the opportunity for marketers is to reinvent themselves "back to the future" - back to their bigger purpose of governing brand behavior.

Influencing action - managing in the social media?

In "What Managers Really Do" by Dr. Henry Mintzberg (Wall Street Journal | August 17, 2009) his theme was that "when they aren't dealing with interruptions they have three basic ways to exert their influence".

Read more at Wall Street Journal »

I noticed this bit:

"DR. MINTZBERG: Basically, managing is about influencing action. Managing is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action."

So perhaps the management in the social media is about influencing action - about helping partners and clients to get things done, which means action?

What do you think, is this part of the brand experience and brand behaviour?

See the Linkedin Discussion.

New IT tools less than half of new customer care

IDC APAC reported that "customer care is emerging as a key IT investment area for CIOs in the current downturn", according to the findings of a new poll. 

While most organisations are reducing or freezing their investments in IT, 23 percent of the Australian-based respondees indicate they will still invest in IT solutions that can help them increase earnings or save costs. Chief among these areas is customer care, which nearly half of the respondents saw as a way to generate revenue, with many ready to progress beyond traditional customer relationship management, IDC says.

The world has changed so rapidly in the last 12 months in terms of customers informing themselves and in creating their own customer experiences that it will take a lot more than "new advanced customer care tools, such as customer analytics, customer database management and new web-based tools".

It's going to take a whole new business planning approach to social media and customer engagement, and that's hard work. It's where you need serious business-purposed planning and execution processes, such as those of the Social Media Academy.

See full article and my comment.

Related is the study released today by the Australia Centre for Retail Studies, which found that found that about 50% of people in Australia research their purchase before heading to the store.  Comments to this article centred on the need for an effective online buying website, but I think that it goes much deeper given the new role of the social web.

The social media is part of the brand behaviour, and this needs to be taken in to account in planning the whole customer interaction and how they inform themselves. Again, this is not a simple matter and certainly not something like just running a Facebook campaign or "launching" a Twitter profile. It requires serious cross-function planning and a proper social media assessment.

See full article and my comment.

It's more and more shaping up that 2010 will be the year when social media and the customer experience hits critical mass.

Share