Social media
Social commentary - who do we listen to
There is a marketing strategy that is often used around us and can be incredibly effective if executed properly. First build trust, credibility and reputation with your lists of prospects using social media networking sites like facebook, linkedin and others of their like. Blogging is also a great tool for communicating with the audiences and telling them your perspective on things. Through your blog, you can give them free content, information and tips up to a point where they feel enlightened. If you are marketing an event, you give them enough information about what to do without diving into how to do it.
When they learn something from you that they didn’t quite know about, they will invariably look up to you and follow you. Once you have their trust you can up-sell them a course on the ‘how to go about it’ part. If they are sure that you are indeed someone who knows what you’re talking about, they will be less hesitant in doubting your abilities. And you should be knowledgeable in whatever it is that you’re selling - you can’t and shouldn’t ever risk losing your customers by fooling them into buying below-par material from you.
If done well, you can even get them onto an expensive subscription course or seminar that steps them through executing what needs to be done. All of these are revolving door strategies of relaunches that we have discussed earlier in our Launch strategies blog here. Business is about getting the most out of your products, services or events, so why wait around? Social media is a powerful tool in our hands that shouldn’t be put to waste. Can you think of innovative ways of marketing your events online using Facebook? How about Twitter? Think about it.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a world where everyone coexists as a social tribe? Thats the internet for you. Have you ever wondered how online networks often represent the tiniest niches and topic areas that you never even thought existed? Have you ever wondered how amazing it is to be able to say something, and be heard (or read) all over the world through the internet in less than a second?
If social commentary is about the cream rising to the top, allowing early adopters and thought leaders to lead groups who still lead their tribes in a self regulated filtering manner. What kind of a tribal system would this be? Now, not everyone in society is web savvy enough to exploit what is already happening, so the changes social media has upon us may not be as apparent to some as they are to others.
BUT I have always wondered how the future of social media will take shape? How will things turn around this time? Will they be any different from what they have already achieved so far. What happens when my small kids grow into adults and each of them have been trained onto the internet as kids so the entire population lives like this. What implications would this have for event managers or promoters? Should you start working on strategies of promoting virtual events on second life? What will it do to the traditional education process? Who will we listen to? Do industries continue to become less valuable by spending per capital whilst companies who best harness new technology & their ability to process information (Google) continue to get richer?
Social networks - Have the hunted become the hunters
Why do some marketers still shy away from social networks?
Its funny how things can take such a flip turn in just a few years. I have seen how marketing concepts have transitioned along with the evolving internet. The greatest difference in the emergence of social media as a marketing medium is that 5-10 years ago marketers would be the ones with the lists. Marketing would be a one-way communication of messages from companies to consumers. They would work off a database of customers to find ways of penetrating them. TVCs, Radio Ads, Publications, Direct mail, Cold calling etc were all a core part of all marketing activities. The impact of the Ads was difficult to gauge.
Google search engines have turned the hunted into the hunters. Consumers now work off a list of merchants or providers and through a substantial supply of information to choose from. They decide who to listen to, trust and buy from. They are more empowered and in many ways less gullible. More access to information makes them wiser and better decision-makers.
This information gets to them via search engines and community based platforms. Search engines run algorithms to parse through information and show it to the consumers. On the other hand, community based platforms are enabled by elements of social interaction. Humans (not machines) filter content based on preferences and popularity. It is us who sort the information to protect our networks from poor choices.
Its the hunted who now have the power - the merchants must win over the prey if they want the prey to endorse whatever they are peddling & invite their social network to embrace it. To some naive marketers these facts represent a nightmare, which it is not. If you use social media effectively and not for spamming, a marketers cost of sales can drop considerably. Not only that, we now have the power to leverage mob-effects, community shifts, emotional linkages - all using simple social networking strategies.
If you are event marketers or promoters you can now directly interact with your audiences and get a direct feel for their thoughts and opinions. You can get early feedback. You can involve them in planning the different dynamics of the event. You can create groups and communities around your event to help build hype and excitement. You can let evangelists and fans promote your event for you. You can allow your prospective audiences to blog about your event. You can enable live twittering at the event. You can allow them to share photos of the after its over to build lasting memories and nostalgia.
Get creative.
Measuring event branding through online social interaction
I find it amusing whenever I come across big healthy organizations stingy when it comes to investing money in social media marketing through online social interaction. I guess, they fail to see it as an investment rather than a cost for their event branding strategies.
(On branding: a smart marketer once told me that branding is just a word used by advertising agencies to justify a budget. That great products brand themselves & thats all there is to it. Thats another post though).
I came across one such company recently that has outsourced a project to a team for developing, conceptualizing and writing a corporate blog for their upcoming annual expo event. Their blog was conceptualized in a manner to invite thought leaders and industry experts to participate in it as a rich community. I visited their site and was happy to see lots of activities, regular postings, participatory comments, etc.
These people informally told me their concerns about the fact that they have no real way to measure the impact on event branding quantitatively for this project. I was both shocked and amused to hear them say this. Shocked because somehow it seemed like they didn’t care about the community that was being formed around the blog - or the enthusiasts that were being born. Amused because, I knew that they don’t know any better. Social media marketing is far different from traditional media, my friends. I think I’ll also write a post on how adapting social media requires a complete mindset shift, to stop myself from going out on a tangent here.
If you find yourself in a similar situation where you want to measure the impact of all of the tools that you are using then here is some honest advice.
Measuring the benefit to your brand via social interactions, communities and social networking is difficult to put down on numbers. However, it can be calculated based on a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measures such as: increase in your list numbers, increase in your ticket demands, increase in audience traffic, participation levels in your blog posts, increase in sharing and bookmarking of your sites, development of evangalists, increase in page rankings, increase in exposure to industry bloggers, increase in authority of the blog rankings, decrease in your involvement to keep your blogs afloat. These are all rich online social interactions. Some of these directly effect your bottom line figures, where as others are going to be more subtle and may go unnoticed.
Please don’t start counting the number of times your event brand name has been written or talked about as a measure for the success of such social media marketing projects. Be realistic in how you factor in different elements of event branding when deciding whether or not your money is being well spent.
Social media etiquittes for event planners
It seems that people tend to misuse social media and networking sites for their marketing campaigns leaving users irritated. Spam in emails is something I have learned to get used to (sort of), but Facebook spam and blog comments spam is always an annoyance.
It is important to be careful in your social media strategies and implementation because one wrong move can defame you in seconds in the online world. Although these things may seem obvious to most people, I will still share them with you so that you can run through your plans to make sure you don’t unintentionally push the wrong nerves. As event managers or marketers, your reputation and credibility are things that need safeguarding.
I consider these an understood underlying part of my preachings, but if we’re not on the same page about them then there is a chance you may misinterpret my social media strategies and harm your events or businesses. So, here goes:
If you are leveraging social media for marketing your events, please make sure of the following:
1- You send messages to only those people who are interested or have opted-in to hearing from you. No random catching strangers in the marketplace.
2- If you have found your demographics online (randomly), then try to build a relationship of trust with them before pushing marketing message down their throats. Make them your friends by helping them or providing them value. This is always a mutually beneficial relationship.
3- Even if you have built a relationship with prospects, make sure they are open to hearing about your event, instead of giving them attendance ultimatums. You don’t want to drive the traffic away but instead attract them.
4- To attract that traffic don’t fabricate things about your event that are not true. There is nothing worse than finding out that you have been deceived into buying tickets. deliver what you promise and promise what you can deliver.
So there, is out of my system now. We’ll move onto more serious topics tomorrow onwards.
Social Media - an online mindset shift
Its interesting to see how event managers with old-school traditional marketing knowledge are using social media in the wrong way. When it comes to social media, you have to have a complete mindset shift or else you’d end up wasting time and energy with little or no rewards.
People who don’t change their mindsets want to see immediate results, want to get immediate outreach (outreach doesn’t necessarily mean better branding), don’t have the right conversations with their potential customers (have to be two way), don’t let communities evolve on their own (by trying to control everything), are not open to criticism, don’t switch to online mediums completely (still rely on offline techniques more), can’t synergize different mediums for planning and marketing their events.
Of course, I do understand that it can be difficult to just switch a perspective that has been embedded in our systems for years. If you are having trouble adapting your thinking process around the latest and newest technologies, here are some things that may help:
1- Be in the know of whats going on. Subscribe to different authority blogs in your industry. Get Google alerts for updates on happenings that can effect your business. Keep yourself constantly up to date.
2- Learn from others. When other industry thought leaders share their experiences and ideas - be sure to learn from them. Often times, those people who close themselves up to what others are doing become increasingly averse to social media.
3- Keep a watch on new tools and spend time playing with them or analyzing them regularly. Follow the latest internet marketing trends (Brad Fallon’s www.freelinereport.com is good place to start) and keep trying them out off and on to see how your events and businesses can be improved by using them. If you don’t like a tool, you don’t have to use it - but at least give them a try. There are so many cool free online applications that can benefit you.
4- If you think you are still not the social media type - get tech friendly people on your team and give the space and leverage to get creative with social media marketing. This is a great way of bringing in new ideas into your business. If you think you are up for it, you can even hire experts to do your events marketing for you.
Whatever road you choose, try not to stay stuck with the old methods of marketing. Leverage the power of social media.
Can sharing be a marketing technique?
Who would have thought a few years ago that sharing content with others would become so easy? Now we have blogging software for sharing ideas, Youtube for sharing video clips, Flickr for sharing photos, and great services like del.icio.us and stumbleupon that let us filter the best content from the web in groups.
But a common question I get asked is this - how do we manage content that is our IP, content pertinent to our event and businesses? Do we just publish it into the public domain freely?
Brad Fallon stated at a recent STOMPERNET conference that in the next 12 months alone, more content will be published for public consumption than has been published the history of time. The reason is that everyone can publish now days and not just the media barons.
That said I think its fair to say that whatever it is you are doing it’s been done before. The question you need to be asking yourself with the surge in open (social) media and content sharing is this; If you do keep what you are doing for your events (business) locked behind a firewall and your competitors don’t. Who is going to prosper over the next 5 years.
I know who I would be betting on and invite readers to comment on who they would put their money on. We will delve into this further in future posts.
I believe sharing content is very important - at a recent conference we discussed the fact that over 60% of media content being consumed by the new generation of people is content that was discovered and shared by their friends.
Sharing information that would be useful to people and to their friends is not just an important emerging way of promoting events or getting the word out about something, but to create credibility among people who would want to find you and follow you over time. The social web makes it incredibly easy to find the truth about a person - if a person wants to be perceived as an expert, that expertise will truly be tested with the strategies employed when sharing content.
Here are some of my own recommendations on content sharing:
1- Be Authentic and Consistent. This is incredibly important - the best strategy for sharing content is to genuinely want others to grow to understand and appreciate the space in which you are an expert. If you keep focused on this mindset, and on the subject matter that you want people talking about, you will find yourself sharing very relevant material about that subject consistently.
2- Share incredible content. Having content by yourself doesnt make you the expert - your expertise comes from how you have interpreted, thought about, and applied that content over years. So its ok to give your content away - this is the best way to build meaningful relationships with your potential consumer base.
3- Share content meant for learning. You should think about sharing both content which represents the cutting-edge stream of thought in your subject, but also content that allows newbies to get excited about what you’re talking about. This will not only increase the community of people who follow you but also enable you to start conversations with the experts on the best paths of teaching new comers. A community of participants starts to evolve from these interactions.
4- Time your multi-media content. What you are sharing at any given time is going to be perceived as how you are thinking about the subject at that time. The content starts becoming what you are exploring or what you are excited about, and that in itself gives your audience a hint about who you are. While creating a full roadmap of how you will “unfold” content may not be a nice idea, it is very important to share similar content across all mediums. E.g. if you are sharing links on del.icio.us and also videos on youtube, then make sure they are all touching on similar topics at any given point in time.
How do these techniques tie back into marketing and promotion? What you are trying to aim for here is to become a reliable source of good knowledge about a subject matter - if people can begin to expect good things from you, they are likely to invite their friends to follow you as well.
You will over time become the go-to authority on your subject, and if people trust the content you share to be good, they are also likely to trust you when you talk about your events, your services and your products.
Video Marketing Case-Study
Since we’ve been discussing the importance of using videos as an integral part of your marketing strategies, I thought I’d share a case-study with you. A number of companies have been engaging audiences in activity based marketing to build viral campaigns. We all saw the red Gmail envelope exchange hands all across the globe, didn’t we?
The Heinz ketchup campaign specifically stands out. Here is a summary of what they did:
- They first checked to see where there market was. Youtube had a significant presence of their demographics, so they built a competition for Youtube users.
- They designed the competition perfectly: there was an incentive for the winner ($57,000 cash prize). The competition was to design an ad campaign for Heinz. A win-win for all.
- They got popular bloggers to spread the word.
- They played with the right mental triggers and feelings: association, loyalty, fun, good moments.
- They got smashing responses in thousands of participations. Anticipation and hype kept growing until they finalized the winner (has a link to the winning video as well).
- They finished off with great Ads and an incredible amount of media attention and hype.
- They let those feelings of association translate into brand attributes that those participants feel about Heinz. They got themselves a horde lifetime customers!
How to get other bloggers to pay attention?
The blogosphere is fascinating - on the one-hand it is an open environment of people sharing interesting ideas between micro-mediums of influence, and on the other blog-based business are making bloggers increasingly more political in how they interact with others.
The best analogy for blogging I have heard is that its no different to a dinner party where all the guests were knowledgeable on a particular topic. Throughout the evening conversations, comments, retorts, statements, stories & lessons would be traded. As the night wore on it would become evident to all those present that the knowledge base and more importantly the ability to articulate this knowledge was not equal across all participants. In fact it would be most probable that one or two of the parties at the table will have established themselves as unrivaled authorities on certain subject matter.
Blogging is, in my view, a very large dinner party that spans the world and it never ends.
So if you have an event you’d like to promote, what is the best way to get other bloggers and influencers to engage into a conversation with you about it? You have to be in a conversation in order to be considered an authoritarian contributor to it, right?
Here’s a few tips:
- Dont be anonymous to a blogger - get to know them. Bloggers dont like being used as a promotion tool. You cant make that as a premise of knowing them. Most bloggers write because they want to meet interesting people and share ideas with them, they too are looking for conversations with other bloggers who can challenge them and their views. So to begin with try to establish a relationship with bloggers you respect by participating as a commenter and also otherwise.
- Make it easy for the blogger to research you. Bloggers have a lot of demand on their attention from people trying to get in touch with them. They will try to make very quick decisions on whether or not they want to get to know you. So make sure you are active enough in social media that it is easy to discover who you really are. Consistency in your online activities will help other bloggers form quick opinions on who you are and if they want to enter into a conversation with you or not. Remember, cream always rises to the top if it’s in the bottle.
- Request, dont ask. Even if you know a blogger well, dont ask or expect them to talk about your event or product. What you want to focus on is just talking to your friend, the blogger, and talking about your new product to that friend alone. Whether that person chooses to share it onwards with his friends or community is entirely his or her choice.
- Make life easy for the blogger. Again, bloggers have very limited attention to give to your product, so if there is a set-up time involved in them getting into your product (for example, maybe people need to sign up and set up their profiles to use it) try to spend the time to do that for them. Other bloggers will appreciate that and then pay a little more attention to what actually matters.
- Refer to interesting incidents from the blog. Each blog has interesting incidents happening in it - E.g. maybe they wrote about something that was controversial and there was a big debate on the topic in the comments. Only people who follow that blog would actually remember such things, and if you can refer to one of those incidents (maybe to show which side of the fence you stand) the blogger would appreciate that and understand that you are not just an anonymous one-time visitor.
- Refer to the bloggers thesis. Every blogger talks about a particular subject, and every blogger has a core set of beliefs related to that subject. Maybe that bloggers has a particular definition of conversational marketing. Maybe he or she has invented terms they use frequently in posts. Only people who follow a blog frequently would understand this. When you are communicating with another blogger, make sure you touch on those important parts and give your position on them. This would also help him or her treat you like a regular reader.
- Feel free to polarize, but make sure you can. If you also have a blog, feel free to take something that another blogger wrote and polarize yourself against it by arguing a point against his argument. But do this only if you really have something to say, because doing this will not only give you a critical eye from that blogger, but also his or her audience. If you survive their critical analysis of your counter-argument, though, you will win to earn their respect in future interactions.
Most importantly, though, remember that the aim is for all your interactions in the social media space to create additional value to the overall sharing of thought. Dont be evil, and play fair, and people will be fair to you when you need them to be.
Making Friends in the online Social Networks
If you can remember the first time you signed up for Facebook and you had no friends or very few. You hear all these strategies for utilizing these platforms but with few friends to start with, its kind of hard to be taken seriously.
I am often asked where to start?
Social marketing is all about getting the most out of social networks. Here are some important friending techniques to be aware of:
Step 1 - Creating your networks
First of all, create your presence on different social networks like facebook, MySpace and Linkedin. Set up your accounts and customize your pages.
Step 2- Adding people to your network
Once you have your pages all set up, you need to get people onto your network. First of all make sure you can distinctly define what kind of people you would want to add as friends. These will be people who can benefit your business in any way. People who are part of your market segments, people who are domain experts, people who can benefit you through synergies, people who are influential in the industry, people who look up to you as an expert.. etc
There are different levels of potential friends on social networks: First of all, add all of those people that you know directly. If you know someone, then approach them in an a way you would to a real human being and not a robot. That is, introduce yourself.
I get friends requests all the time from spammers who use automated software for friending or cut and paste the same message to hundreds of people they find in other people’s friend networks. Be realistic - thats no way to befriend people. Be warned that if you do this you can be locked out of the platform for spamming, your IP address can be blocked from ever accessing the domain again. Recipients can click a link in each request that says, “report as spam”. A few of these reports against your name and you’re out of the game.
So when finding old acquaintances out of the blue, approach them like you would if you had seen them in a crowded bar. I’m assuming that if you come across them after a long while; you would walk over, re-introduce yourself and engage them in brief conversation after which you would initiate a desire to share contact details to remain in contact.
Its no different in these online networks, except that the crowded bar extends across the globe and its open 24/7 and you don’t need to exchange contact details. You simply send a friend request.
Next, you can introduce yourself to the friends of your friends by letting them know who you know in common. It’s not recommended to say “hi, I am a friend of John Smiths do you want to be friends on Facebook” - although a lot of folks do adopt this tactic.
I prefer to look at the persons profile to find something in common. I then introduce myself on the basis of our common friend and try to reference the topic that person seems interested in. Its an idea to be positive and complimentary where you can and end your comment with a question so it’s easy for the recipient to reply. If done right you can come back at their reply and before you know it you’re no longer strangers - so at a convenient time you can ask them if they would like to hook up as friends.
Thirdly you can search for groups in whatever niche you’re into and invite the people in these groups to become friends. Its recommended to join the group first and always contribute to the conversations in the group in an intelligent way before attempting to friend its members.
Expand your network as much as you possibly can.
Follow and be followed:
Find people that you want to have on your lists and follow them on twitter and other social network sites. Later, send them invites - a good percentage of them will accept. Social networking is all about following and being followed. Its about giving first and then expecting something in return. The more you follow and the more you contribute towards adding value to the more you will be followed in return.
The rule of thumb is the more value you bring to other people’s daily lives by what you do and say; the more people will follow you. Its no different to life offline, really except its far less forgiving than real life.
Web2.0 platforms take life as it has always been and makes it possible to maintain relationships with far more people that the offline world ever could. It takes away the factors of space, distances, traveling and communication logistics - and viola, there is no limit to the number of people you can befriend online. Um, yes, you will need high-speed internet though. This changes the social dynamics somewhat, which I will go into in another post but the thing you need to be careful about is that in the online world everything is recorded.
Everything you do leaves a footprint so there is less room for error. Offline if you say something you regret to someone, the damage can be limited to those who hear you say it first hand, those that hear what you said second hand and to a lesser extent those who hear it third hand.
Make the same mistake online and what you did or said can haunt you for life, so be careful.
A good writeup from the blogging world around us…
What Social Networking Can Do For You - Social networking is literally the way of the future.
Why social media?
Social media is something which you just cannot ignore. Whatever industry you are working in, it is amazing how much influence social media can have on your business, you just need to know how to use it to your advantage.
Social media marketing basically defines how you can use online channels to market your products, get traffic, convert people into customers, get your conversation started, etc. So when you’re planning your marketing mix, it is important to understand the dynamics of different social media tools to find the right ones for your business. You can’t just put them all up and expect magic to happen. What works for a online clothing store may not work for a web services company and so on.
That is why we keep reminding you not to follow someone else’s best practices by the book, figure out what will work for your business or get a consultant to do that for you. If you are an event manager, figure out what tools to use for maximum impact: e.g. you may want to create an online page for an event and choose not to for another. Will a short-lived fame from getting highlighted on Techcrunch or Digg help you or will creating an authoritative blog about your industry? Are different internet marketing techniques like SEO and PPC going to work for your launch or event or are they just hyperboles? You need to know how to make these important decisions effectively, and for that you need to understand the impact of social media on launches, events and any other services.
The truth is that the world has changed. People, audiences, consumers, business are all looking for more value from everything that is offered to them. You see it all around you in the offline world, where even food joints are giving out upsize meals. Translate that to the online world and everything multiplies exponentially. Its easier, its more powerful, it has more of an outreach and most of it is available for free.
Well, the question that comes to mind is that if there are so many free ways of marketing online, why isn’t everyone doing a great job at it. One of the reason could be that the face of the online world is constantly evolving and you need to be at the foremost in order to know what’s going on. I guess that’s where posts like these come into place - we’ve worked, consulted, tried, tested, experienced, experimented and think that we have gained considerable knowledge that we can now share.
We will be sharing a whole series of step by step guidelines on how to market your events through multiple channels and how to use different online platforms to your advantage. The guidelines will be posted on a daily basis on this blog. Do check it out whenever you can.
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