Social Media Marketing Library

Filed under: Facebook, Integrated Marketing, Internet Marketing, Loyalty Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

One of the biggest challenges that marketers today face is not how to use social media to attract and retain customers, but how to measure the return on their social media investments. The trick really comes when you go to measure the return on a particular channel, as so many of the available social media tools today are so interconnected, unraveling them becomes almost a Herculean task.

The best way to measure ROI for social media initiatives is to have a clear understanding of what you will consider success. As Steve Kerho points out in an article from early this year, defining success is the first step in being able to measure it. If your organization does not know what it wishes to achieve from a particular social media marketing effort, there will be no benchmark against which to measure the eventual success or failure. Kerho’s article describes in detail one of the best ways to date for marketers to successfully measure the ROI of their social media and online use. A link to the article can be found here:

At the end of the day, though, no matter what the outlet, marketers have to consider their audience, and play to their strengths within whatever channel they choose to pursue a marketing strategy. The idea in all marketing should be to create return customers who will want to be brand advocates. Through enhancing the delivery of the message, and tailoring it to the customers, marketers can significantly increase the customer lifetime value. In other words, let your consumers tell you how they want the message, and then tailor that message to their wants.

Filed under: Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Two companies are joining forces and changing they way that most of us thing about online customer loyalty. If you are like me, you have not heard about Bazaarvoice or Badgville, but the firms that these two companies serve are nothing short of everyday recognizable brands – Samsung, NBC, Interscope Records, Deloitte Digital, Best Buy, Blue Shield of California, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, P&G, Panasonic, QVC, and the list goes on.

Traditional customer loyalty programs reward customers for buying by offering a future discount.  Bazaarvoice and Badgville are collaborating to change this notion in a way that is more valuable for customers, as well as businesses.  Bazaraavoice, with a network of more than 260 billion customer conversations across the world is working with Badgeville to implement “game mechanics” to provide reputation and social loyalty programs in an effort to increase contribution of customer-generated content and online social sharing. This is the new form of online customer loyalty – increase consumer interaction with the brand (on a times per customer and total number of customer basis), and create brand advocates in a new and innovative way who will create content and advertise for you using arguably the most powerful form of advertising- word of mouth.

The collaboration seeks to accomplish this in three main ways:

1)  Increase onsite engagement with gaming campaigns. This gets customers to interact with a company’s site, and results in new products and service discoveries, finding helpful articles and reviews, and encouraging people to share recommendations with friends.

2)  Create additional brand advocates by enabling customers to establish an on-site reputation.  This drives loyal behaviors and reinforces trust and credibility. Using game mechanics, firms provide incentives for customers to interact, rating products, writing reviews, and blog.

3)  Reward loyal customers by recognizing the most “loyal” customers (not necessarily those that buy, but those that spread the word) with achievements and reputation rewards, such as badges and placement on leaderboards. Ultimately this ties game campaign metrics to loyalty programs, and loyal customers are rewarded for creating content about product purchases and social product sharing.

Early results show up to a 200% increase in business objectives such as online content creation and social sharing of brands.  As for businesses and marketers, they can tap it to this by hiring these companies, but more importantly gain a new perspective on loyalty programs, and exactly what a “loyal customer” looks like, and how they act. From a financial perspective, this makes a lot of sense – firms create more value without discounting, engage more people and engage them in a deeper way than what traditional loyalty programs aim for.

Filed under: CRM, Customer Experience Management, Integrated Marketing, Internet Marketing, Loyalty Marketing, Online Marketing | No Comments »

Klout was first established in San Fransisco in Sept 2009, it’s main aim is to measure users activity on social media. It evaluates how interactive people are on certain social media sites including: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, google+ and many others. It generates a score between 1-100 on how influential users are on social media sites. (socialexcerpts.com)

The score is broken down into 3 sections; True reach, amplified score and a network score in order to generate a final Klout score. It is based on the number of friends/ followers you have on different sites, the amount of posts, comments, tweets you create and how many people retweet, comment, ‘like’ your posts. Companies then pay Klout to get in contact with users with high social influence and then offer them perks/ freebies in order to try and generate social buzz around their company. (technology-digital.com)

It may seem like a great idea but there have been many mixed reviews regarding Klout; here is a summary of some of the pros and cons:

+) There are so many social media sites around these days that it is hard to keep track of all of them, so Klout is a good way to summarize users who have a large influence and to target them specifically.

+) It is more timely and efficient for companies to target people with high social involvement and with specific interests rather than spending so much time updating numerous social media sites on a regular basis.

-) Many ethical problems including; disclosing information about minors, the ‘perks’ can be seen as bribes and unethical, many people were put off by the site due to low Klout scores and felt they were being graded on their social media performance when it was meant to be fun.

-) It can cause negative association with the company if people feel like they are being bribed or if they weren’t satisfied with the product/ service.

Overall, Klout has a very clever business model that has many advantages for companies, however there are still a lot of negative feelings towards some of the ethical sides related to their process. In order for them to continue to build and be successful I think they need to address some of these issues and expand to more social media sites as it is fairly limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, however they do have plans to expand to Youtube, Yelp, Posterous and many other sites.

Filed under: Facebook, Internet Marketing, LInkedIn, Marketing Experts, Marketing Trends, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter | No Comments »

This week Advertising Age published a white paper on women and technology, the result of a partnership with JWT. Research conducted for the report found that one in five American women uses a smartphone when shopping, primarily to connect with her social circle. Women predominantly seek out opinions from friends and family, much more so than men: 73% call family or friends to get their opinions (vs. 59% for men), and 40% take photos of products and solicit responses through e-mail or social networks (32% for men). Brands need to find ways to help customers tap into the social graph at the point of purchase, when women seek trusted recommendations. They can also create messages that will drive women to share, and they should leverage social networks to spread the word about exclusive merchandise and sales.

Why is this news worthy?

• Women spend about $5 trillion, or half of the nation’s GDP, every year.
• Women talk more and text more than men every month, 28% and 14%, respectively.
• Women use social features of their mobile devices like SMS, MMS and social networking more when compared with men.
• Their approach to technology is much more practical.

For Marketers

• Use tech solutions to mimic, amplify, augment or simplify existing behaviors
• Fully leverage the social nature of women
• Create experiences designed for simultaneous consumption and engagement
• Master mobile compatibility, commerce, messaging and location-cased everything

Filed under: Marketing Trends, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »

Are online product reviews fair to the companies that are being reviewed, or are they just a way for upset customers to get attention from the companies? James Lindsey said in an article titled “The Power of Online Product Reviews” “A bad review can cost you $10,000 a month. A few bad reviews can put you out of business, your whole investment is down the drain.” Also in the article a woman named Heather Armstrong mentions that she bought her washing machine, the machine broke within the month, and nothing was actually getting done to fix her machine. She says she started posting on the Twitter page to tell people not to buy the machine, and within a couple of days after tweeting her machine was fixed completely. “For businesses right now, the landscape of online reviews can feel like the Wild West.David Lazarus: Except instead of carrying a Smith and Wesson or a Remington, you’re carrying a blog”.

Online reviews are a wonderful thing when they are used to actually review the products, instead of griping about how you didn’t like the accent your server spoke with. Millions of people subscribe to Consumer Reports to be able to see how different products have been rated and reviewed, this in itself demonstrates the importance of the online review. These reviews help many consumers gain information they would not be able to obtain a different manner.

The question still remains, are online reviews fair to the businesses that are being reviewed? When thinking about this question you must think about the context in which some of these reviews are being left. An irate customer had one bad experience somewhere and begins to tell the world what a terrible experience they had at the store, they don’t ever mention the hundreds of good experiences they have had at the store, they only gripe about this one bad experience. Or at an extreme it could even be someone who had a friend who had a bad experience at a store and they are trying to get back at the store by leaving scathing reviews of a company they themselves have never interacted with.

So what do you think, are online reviews fair to the companies that are being reviewed?

Filed under: Internet Marketing | No Comments »

A panel discussion titled: “Marketing Strategy Online: Trends and Implications Every Exec Should Know” was presented at the National Retail Federations 1001st Annual Convention & Expo in New York City in January. The panelists included:

Brian Tilzer, VP e-commerce and business development, Staples.com; Prama Bhatt, VP e-commerce for Kenneth Cole Productions; Steven Dee, CIO of Hayneedle; and Cathy Halligan, senior VP sales and marketing for PowerReviews. The four speakers presented insights on online marketing strategies within their respective companies, largely based on audience questions. Here are some highlights of the discussion:

What other trends in online retail have you noted?

Halligan (PowerReviews):  Forty percent of retail sales are now impacted by digital influences. In fact, 31% of consumers use Google to compare prices, review product information and research product features.

What about the emerging value proposition?

Halligan (PowerReviews):  Clearly, today’s value proposition is about everything being on sale. And that’s something we want to move away from as much as possible. We have the capability, for example, to deliver relevant experiences locally. Nordstrom, for instance, could send an email on Aug. 15 to parents of school-aged children, featuring top picks for back-to-school shoes and offer to reserve a pair for in-store trial or the opportunity to order online. It’s not about offering the shoes at a discount, but rather about presenting a localized and relevant offer. That’s the wave of the future. Another opportunity is to leverage the power of social media. More people today are using social networks than were on the Web in 2006. Most of that, of course, is Facebook, which has nearly 1 billion users worldwide. Other social networks include LinkedIn (135 million users); Twitter (100 million users); and Google Plus,which after just six months has 65 million users.

What is the most material change you are making to your marketing strategies?

Tilzer (Staples.com): Delivering a more personalized and integrated experience across multiple channels. If we can do that better than anyone in the world, we can compete against even the $100-billion Amazons of the world. Online isn’t just staples.com anymore. It’s the entire ecosystem of the Web.

Bhatt (Kenneth Cole): Personalization, for sure. And more integration as well. From a marketing strategy perspective, in 2012 we are going back to basics in retailing. And our challenge is to deliver that across our entire business. We have to revisit our core values of retailing. A tremendous partnership between marketing and merchandising has to happen to deliver this.

Tizer (Staples.com): The notion that ‘you can’t win on price but you can lose on it’ has never been more true. Competing on price — which everyone is doing now — is tricky. It puts a lot of pressure on an organization to think differently, but we have to do it.

Dee (Hayneedle): If you think about what differentiates your brand from another, other than price, you are going to win.

What role will your app play in building a CRM base?

Dee (Hayneedle): We’ve focused on building the right mobile experience. But in 2012, the app will become more important. We’re looking at such capabilities as QR codes.

Batt (Kenneth Cole): The app strategy for us will come later, when we gain a better idea of what its purpose should be. The fact that 6% to 8% of our business comes from mobile/tablet tells us that we are delivering the most basic of experiences. We will build the foundation first and then the app will deliver on that.

What percentage of your strategic mindshare will go into mobile in 2012?

Dee (Hayneedle): About 50%. We want to be a platform for innovation without pushing too hard. It’s about balance.

Tilzer (Staples.com): In 2011, mobile was a key strategy for Staples, as we saw it as a major untapped opportunity. We now have a mobile app. It’s been a major strategic initiative that we’ve put a lot of resources behind and put a great team into place. In 2012, we will continue that initiative.

 Is Google a friend or a foe?

Tilzer (Staples.com): Google is an important partner of ours. We use their services in a number of critical ways.

Batt (Kenneth Cole): It is the same for Kenneth Cole. You have to think about how to best leverage Google and make it work for you.

Dee (Hayneedle): Google has always been a friend. I want to utilize it and leverage its marketing channels rather than compete against them.

Is geo-location important for your business in terms of growing sales?

Tilzer (Staples.com): Yes. But as a support function, not as a direct driver of sales.

Dee (Hayneedle): Yes. It leads to personalization and understanding where our customers are.

 What are you thinking about this year?

Tilzer (Staples.com): Talent. How do we attract more talent, and how do we pull together the right teams to accomplish our objectives?

Bhatt (Kenneth Cole): Our in-house competencies. Content generation and thinking about generating new content rather than repurposing content from our other channels.

Filed under: Marketing Experts, Marketing Trends, Mobile Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized | No Comments »

[eMarketer, 1/30/12]

As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.

A survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide shows:

• 88% say that social media helps grow brand awareness.
• 85% say it helps them engage with customers.
• 58% saw an increase in sales and partnerships.
• 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.

Companies such as Charles Schwab understand the benefits of engaging in dialogue with customers via social media.“It has opened up this whole public communications channel, where we can get great feedback,” said Lindsay Tiles, director of corporate public relations at Charles Schwab. Read more

There is little doubt, social media can influence and add value to a company and these statics show that. If you need help getting executive buy-in for integrating social media into your overall mix let the experts at Customer Insight Group help you.

Filed under: Facebook, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter | 1 Comment »

These recent statistics caught our eye. Where does your brand stand on wielding the power of social media?

A recent report titled The Social Brand Experience released by the CMO Council had some interesting findings that shed light on what consumers think versus what marketers think consumers think. The survey involved 132 senior marketers and more than 1,200 consumers on the subject of social media.

Ready to move social media up as a priority for your brand? (80% of the marketers in this survey are!) Let the social media experts at Customer Insight Group help you use social media to build better customer relationships, promote brand awareness, increase loyalty and improve the customer experience.

Filed under: Facebook, Loyalty Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Filed under: Marketing Trends, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter | No Comments »