Digital Marketing Consultant

The death of CoTweet should not have come as a surprise to anyone. The Twitter tool, whose users had included social media paragons JetBlue, was sold in 2010 to ExactTarget, an email marketing firm with revenues of over $100 million. After beginning as a free beta, it was one of the first Twitter tools to appeal to enterprise clients, charging a fee of $1,500 per month for access to functions that included multiple account management, click tracking and monitoring mentions.

ExactTarget will discontinue CoTweet on February 15th, replacing it with SocialEngage, a subscription-only service with a currently opaque pricing structure.

CoTweet’s death gives three warnings to people using social media tools for professional purposes.

First, you are going to have to pay. Although there is no shortage of other companies happy to pick up CoTweet’s disappointed users (Mashable offered a list of seven of them but plenty more popped up in the comments to let reader knows that they are around too), if those services cannot make money, then they are going to die as well. 

Second, you are going to have to pay because other companies are willing to pay. ExactTarget is doing away with its free tool because it knows that firms see a value in the sort of functions that their tool provides. JetBlue is certainly big enough to pay $1,500 per month for its dozen-strong “Real Time Recovery Team,” the name it gives to its social media department, to have access to click-tracking, fast monitoring and scheduled tweets.

And third, you are going to have to use tools, even if companies are charging for them.

For now, Twitter only delivers the most basic of statistics and the barest of services. The company has always worked that way, preferring to let the community develop the tools for which it saw a need. That situation will not remain forever though. Some services, such as URL shorteners, have already been embedded into Twitter, killing demand for third party add-ons. Other developers, like Tweetie, TweetDeck and Summize to name just three, have already been bought, leaving rivals to pick over the remains. Twitter is now rolling out new business profiles which will give companies an opportunity to push themselves harder on the site. 

But while analytics that track replies, retweets, and clicks, and which even return some demographic information about followers are currently only available to advertisers, there is a good chance that Twitter will also provide access to numbers for all users. There is likely to be a fee for some details, especially the kinds of figures that will help any social media marketer to tweak their strategies most effectively. But the ability to really target your messages and reach readers will make that fee worthwhile.

At the moment, it is just too easy to think of social media as a free ride. It is free to join and free to use. You can upload all the images you want and send as many messages as you want for nothing. But as the demise of free CoTweet shows, you cannot expect to get something for nothing forever, and if that something brings value to a business, you should be getting ready to pay for the value.

 

Dell takes social media seriously. It was one of the first big companies to announce that it had managed to make money from Twitter. (More than $6.5 million by the end of 2009, if what the firm told Mashable is true). It is active on platforms that include the Chinese Facebook clone Renren and the country's Twitter site Weibo, as well as Orkut, Flickr, and Slideshare in addition to the more expected Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. It interprets social media broadly to take in forums, blogs and even wikis.

And it encourages its employees to make use of those platforms to build communities and engage with customers. 

That sounds like a recipe for disaster. Dell has more than 3,000 employees. Using them as an army of social media-based evangelists may look like a good idea, but it also leaves open the possibility that some of them will say things the company will wish they had not.

So Dell goes out of its way to make sure that its employees are using social media carefully. The company even runs its own Social Media and Communities University (SMaC U) where employees are taught how to tweet, post and comment.

More importantly, Dell issues five principles which it expects its employees to follow on social media, at risk of losing their jobs if they fail to abide by them.

The principles are all fairly sensible. They cover confidentiality to prevent corporate and customer information being made public; transparency and disclosure to ensure that readers know that the person writing works for Dell; the requirement to follow local laws and the company's code of conduct; responsibility, which includes not posting anything the employee would not send to his/her boss's inbox; and, most importantly, a requirement to “be nice, have fun and connect.”

It is that last point that is both the most crucial and the most surprising. Dell has 34 official Facebook pages, representing different divisions of the company and different regional markets. It has numerous Twitter timelines and an untold number of employees posting on the company's behalf. It understands that social media platforms can deliver real, valuable returns.

But while some of its social media accounts, such as its @delloutlets Twitter timeline, are devoted to pushing deals and winning sales, the company also knows that those returns will not come in if its social media users are not enjoying what they do. The company deliberately tells its employees to have conversations rather than push an agenda. It reminds them to connect as the best way to build Dell's brand.

That is something that is too easily forgotten when you are using social media professionally. Like any job, if you do not enjoy it, you will not be very good at it. Dell understands that that is especially true of social media: if you are not enjoying it, not only are you doing something wrong, you will not get the returns. You should be using social media to promote deals. But if you are not also chatting and connecting, you are not pushing the brand.

 

 

 

One of the earliest commercial success stories on Twitter came from Comcast.  The company had a reputation for delivering poor customer service.  Customers struggled to find agents to speak to and when they did manage to find someone, they often felt that the agent was not listening.

That changed when Frank Eliason, the company’s “Director of Digital Care” opened a Twitter timeline.  Whenever anyone complained about Comcast, he shot back a reply asking if he could help.

For Comcast, it was a great thing.  Customers began to feel that there was someone listening to them.  They felt they could get help easily and Comcast began to rehabilitate its image as a company that could care less.

For other companies though, it has been something of a disaster. 

Take a look at the timeline of Dunkin Donuts.  Or of Target.  Or of Macys.  All of those companies have tried to copy Comcast – and come up short.  Their timelines are filled with tweets offering email addresses or phone numbers to make a complaint.  They read like long lists of apologies for poor service and shoddy products.

They are not bad companies.  Dunkin Donuts recently opened its 10,000^th store.  But if all you had to go on was the corporate timeline you would have to believe that these were firms that had no idea how to serve customers and had nothing good to give them. 

That is not just wrong; it is a waste of an opportunity.  A corporate timeline should be used to push deals, make product announcements, engage with influencers and drive sales.  If it is dominated by apologies for the bad service of individual staff in far-off outlets, it is not fulfilling that role.

There are a couple of alternative approaches to using the main corporate timeline as a customer service outlet.

 The first is just to ignore complaints made on social media.

That is Walmart’s approach.  The official timeline lists special offers and links to media initiatives.  Complaints about products or service are not answered anywhere.  It is a risky approach.  A serious complaint that is not addressed could quickly spread across networks.  But most issues tend to be fairly minor and Walmart feels big enough to shrug them off.

The alternative approach though is to go back to Comcast.  The company operates multiple timelines.  Its @comcast account, is relatively inactive.  Its @comcastvoices account talks about deals and promotions.  And the @comcastcares account is dedicated to dealing with customer complaints and issues.  That account is filled with apologies and offers to send technicians.  But that is what you would expect to see on a dedicated customer service desk.

However a complaint is addressed, it is picked up and dealt with by @comcastcares, leaving the rest of the social media team free to build the customer base.  It is a much smarter system than the one used by Target or Macys, which allows complaints to overwhelm social media promotions.

Usually, you want to make sure that you’re servicing your customers as much as you can.  But social media is a public forum and you do not want everyone to see a long line of dissatisfied customers at the front door.  There is a reason that retail stores put the complaints department at the back, and there is a reason that smart businesses on social media guide complainants away from their main page.

Take a look at the video above.  Author Neil Gaiman is talking about copyright piracy, and describes the difficulty he had persuading his publisher to make one of his books available for free for a month online.

His reasoning was based entirely on numbers.  After his books were pirated in Russia, a place in which he was little known, sales in the country of his next book jumped 300 percent.  He compares piracy to book lending, an opportunity that allows readers to try new authors at little risk.  They then buy those authors’ books in the future.

It is a controversial topic, and a complex one.  Making a sample product available has long been an important part of marketing.  Giving away the entire product not so much.  It is possible that ebook piracy only works for some authors and only under certain conditions: people will buy when buying is easier than stealing; if Neil Gaiman’s next book had been easy to download, instead of a matter of playing with torrents, then perhaps his sales would have been lower.  Other authors, and their publishers, are less happy to endorse piracy.

But Gaiman has more than 1.6 million followers on Twitter.  He also writes a regular blog and answers questions on Tumblr.  He gets social media and he understands the importance of community. 

When he says that giving something valuable to a community brings dividends, he knows what he is talking about.

You can argue that that is also what social media is about.  Every tweet you make, every status update you post, and every URL you like should be delivering valuable knowledge to a market that will want to know it, to use it, and to enjoy it.  Corporate blogging, after all, is the free distribution of knowledge in the form of articles with the aim of attracting prospects and building a brand.  (The SEO benefits came later.)

Those tweets and updates though are small and limited.  They are snippets of information, especially when compared to an entire novel.  But they do provide a channel through which you can share other, longer-form, pieces of information.

You can use Twitter to distribute your white papers, place a link on Facebook to tell people where they can download a guide to one of your products.  Depending on the nature of your product, you might even be able to hand out free samples on Twitter: a free version of software, for example, or a few chapters of a manual.

Ask people to share and retweet what you are giving them, and you can create a viral effect.  Your followers will tell their followers and they will pass your product around among themselves.  In the process, they will be inviting their friends to try before they buy, giving you more customers for your next release.

It is not a completely new idea.  Chris Anderson talked about the value of not charging in Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which he too gave away for a while.  But social media has made giving value away much easier and much more powerful.  Do not be afraid to use it to hand out your samples.

 

Social media marketing feels like a universal solution.  Sales not strong enough?   Create a Facebook page.  Engagement not high enough?  Write more tweets.  Profile not big enough?  Run a campaign that targets influencers.

Whatever your business…whatever you are selling, pull the levers in the social media machine and you should find more money rolling out the other end.  Right?  Well, ahem….

It Ain't Easy

Business is never that easy, and consumers do not all behave in the same way.  Beyond, a digital marketing firm, has been working with a number of partners to examine different kinds of social consumers and how they buy.  One notable conclusion is that how a customer researches a product — and what leads them to buy it — depends largely on the type of product they are purchasing.

Travel, for example, tends to be booked after looking through a search engine.  For cars and electronics, customers are more likely to head straight for the brand’s website.  Fashion items will be picked up through online ads.  Baby products will be reached through Facebook, music through YouTube, and restaurants through FourSquare.

It is All Intuitive Stuff. 

When you are making a big purchase of a complex item — like a car or a digital SLR — you want to know as much about it as possible.  You want to use the site’s 360 degree animated images to look the item over as though you were sitting in it or holding it, and you want to examine all the features listed and understand exactly what the product can do. 

Travel is a hugely competitive industry with deals that change all the time and provides a range of different ways of delivering the same result through different routes and an assortment of hotels and places to stay.  The best way to get the latest and most up-to-date information is by checking search engines.

And when you are looking for something as simple but as important baby products, trust is the most important factor — and that is delivered from the friends and contacts on social media sites.

Who is Social Media Good For?

So does that mean only companies with products with mass appeal and which sell on safety and reliability need to use social media?

Certainly not.  Customers do not just look for recommendations for baby products on Facebook.  They also look for music on the site, as well as beauty products, fashion items and restaurants.  They also review electronics on YouTube, as well as on Twitter, and search for kitchen appliances.

In short, the path from interest to purchase is never straight and includes stops at a number of different stations.  A buyer might gather information about a new pushchair from the brand’s site, for example, before asking friends on Facebook whether anyone has used it and can recommend it.

For sellers, that makes understanding customer behavior vital.  You need to know what your customers are doing when they reach social media sites, what information they are looking for, and — most importantly — what are the triggers that encourage them to make their final buying decision. 

It Used to be Easy, But....

You want to make sure that your sales funnel, even as it crosses media from websites through YouTube to Twitter, delivers all the knowledge the lead needs to give you a sale.  Is it possible to discover this path?  One of the great characteristics of social media marketing is that it can be analyzed in detail...a great opportunity to spend marketing money judiciously. 

 I forgot to wish everyone a successful Christmas.  Please!

 

Say this three times: Will there be a repeat or a retreat on the retweet?  No prize, however.

Much of the marketing done on Twitter is subtle and unseen. It takes place through regular tweets of interesting news, through retweets of other people’s contributions, and through comments addressed to followers. It’s a process of constant engagement which should keep a market close, informed and likely to buy from you — rather than a competitor — when the time comes to make a purchase.

Some uses of Twitter though are far from subtle. The sponsored placements in trending topics and at the top of timelines are meant to be unobtrusive but they’re always a bit pushy. They get eyeballs, might win clicks and may deliver sales but viewers know they are seeing advertising.

This year, Wendy’s, the fast food chain, took two approaches to marketing on Twitter: one subtle and the other bold.

The subtle campaign, which was run by ad agency the Kaplan Thaler Group, just came to an end. Using an account called @GirlBehindSix, the company ran a Twitter-based game show with prizes that began with $1,000 to six followers who retweeted the rules, then ran through mopeds, sleeping bags, turntables and host of other expensive goodies. The aim was to raise awareness of a new burger that would take sixth place on the chain’s menu.

Within about a month, the timeline had picked up 33,000 followers. In mid-November, it revealed its true identity and has since been trying to shift those followers over to Wendy’s timeline by promising more prizes over in that timeline.

I want you to keep reading, so I am inserting this picture of Wendy herself to keep you interested:

But I digress...

As that stealth campaign was coming to an end, Twitter announced that the chain had won the Golden Tweet Award for the most retweeted post. The tweet? “RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50¢ to help kids in foster care. #TreatItFwd”

That was a pretty blatant piece of advertising. It was essentially a bribe offered to Twitter’s community to spread the name of the company across the site. The original tweet was sent on June 15^th, and although Wendy’s has not said how many retweets it received, the campaign has been reported as raising $50,000 for charity which would translate into 100,000 posts.

So that is two different campaigns: one complex and subtle, the other simple and direct. Both had an impact and both worked… at least as far as winning followers and views are concerned.

The real question, of course, is whether those views translated into sales and whether those sales more than made up for the cost of the campaign. $50,000 is not a small sum but not all of those who saw it would have retweeted the post, making the cost per viewer a fraction of 50 cents each. If a typical customer spends $10 in Wendy’s then the company would need that campaign to produce 5,000 extra sales — 5 percent of the 100,000 people who retweeted or perhaps half a percent of all the people who saw Wendy’s name in other people’s timelines and didn’t retweet. That sounds feasible, and it doesn’t include the halo (and the tax deduction) that the company gains from donating money to charity.

The game show campaign may have cost a similar amount in prizes alone. Again, we don’t have figures that show whether it paid its way but not all of @GirlBehindSix’s followers have moved to Wendy’s timeline and some were no doubt put off by the campaign’s stealthy approach.

The campaign was clever and complex — as you would expect from an ad agency — but whether it was more effective than simply bribing Twitter followers with a charitable donation is questionable.

But, then again, I only eat their chili, so what do I know?

StumbleUpon redesign gives the site a fresher, more visual look that is easier to navigate and simpler to use. The introduction of Channels provides a separate space where brands and companies can promote themselves, a less obviously commercial version of the site’s Paid Discovery service which some 60,000 products, publishers and other sellers have already used.

For marketers though, the question is whether they should be using it at all.

StumleUpon recently landed its 20 millionth member. Although that’s only a fraction of the 800 million or so people who regularly use Facebook if those 20 million people include your core buyers, then being active on the site might well be an important part of your social media strategy — or should be.

The site throws up some unique challenges though. It’s a social bookmarking service rather than a fully-fledged social media site. Think of Facebook with only the option to like (and un-like) a site, and those sites thrown up to visitors almost at random so that they “stumble upon” new publishers and firms with content and products that interest them.

It’s the “almost” that makes the difference. Click the Stumble button and StumbleUpon will offer a page based on interests, preferences and friends. The site tries to target pages to its readers, a system that allows for some influence. Recommend pages in the same field as your firm’s, follow other Stumblers and suggest more pages, and there’s a better chance that your own Web pages can win more views. That’s useful if your main goal on social media is to drive traffic to your website. 

And that can happen. A recommendation on StumbleUpon can deliver a sudden spike in view numbers. Once that happens, the page can sometimes turn up again, delivering occasional spikes in popularity.

Digg — another social bookmarking site —  has been known to deliver even bigger spikes but the site is also known for not delivering sales. Win a high ranking on Digg and the sudden burst of popularity can be enough to crash even mid-sized servers. Companies have found that very few of those new visitors bother to click through or buy.

It all comes down not to functionality but to demographics. StumbleUpon was long thought of as the “everyman” of social bookmarking sites, a place that was simple enough for anyone to use and where the Web pages offered covered a broad range of topics. (On Digg, you can expect to find lots of weird news stories, technology links and raving reviews of Ron Paul.) That title has probably now been taken by Facebook. But StumbleUpon’s users might be more geeky than many thought.

Analysis of StumbleUpon traffic to websites has revealed that the site’s readers are heavy Firefox users, with as many as 93 percent using the open source browser. One site came up with a profile of the typical StumbleUpon user as a 26-year-old, middle class, Firefox-using student with a big screen and a PC.

The question for marketers though is whether those students are likely to be buying our products. You can figure that out by tracking those visitors through Google Analytics to the purchase page. 

If you are getting traffic from StumbleUpon — and that traffic is buying — you are going to need to learn more about StumbleUpon’s new design.

 

Google’s recent announcement that it is going to be retiring a bunch of its products has got people wondering.  If the company is prepared to kill off Wave after less than two years — a tool that Techcrunch described as one of the most ambitious products it had ever seen — will the company one day pull the plug on Google+?

Those banging the drum for the social network’s demise point out that membership has flattened out.  After racing to 40 million members in the months since its launch, activity on the site has remained relatively stable.  People who use social media rushed to join and see what all the fuss was about, but it does not appear that mainstream users have been tempted by the promise of Circles to abandon Facebook for the Google competitor.

So give it another year or two and we should be waving goodbye to Google+.

But perhaps not!  And whether we should celebrate its demise is questionable.

Sure, the thought of having to use yet another social network to market products is unlikely to make many sellers happy.  And the idea that markets might be fragmented across different platforms is always going to mean more work for the same results.  But Google+ did bring some valuable new tools to the social marketing field.

The ability to build Circles, Google+’s main advantage, is a powerful marketing device.  It might have been created with the idea of allowing members to separate the posts they want their friends to see from the posts they want their relatives to read, but it also allows marketers to segment their lists.  

That is hugely valuable.

Being able to ensure that particular posts are only read by the people most likely to respond to them will help to ensure maximum conversion rates.

How frequently firms are doing this is hard to say.  Companies have not started releasing figures and it may be too early anyway to build enough data to draw conclusions about the strategy’s effectiveness.  But while it should yield better conversions, it will mean significantly more effort: organizing the Circles; monitoring activities in each of those Circles; and creating different posts for each of those groups of buyers.

Should Google+ fail and the market stay concentrated solely on Facebook, it could save us all a lot of effort.

But it is unlikely to happen.  Not just because Google has so much invested in Google+.  And not just because the search company cannot easily do without its own social media platform at a time when Facebook pages are as important as website URLs.

It is unlikely to happen because Facebook has already started copying many of the biggest new features that Google+ brought to social media.

Subscriptions and lists might not be as user-friendly as Circles but they do the same thing: they allow users to read posts from people — and brands — they don’t know; and they allow marketers to send different messages to different groups of people.

And, one more thing: Google is not finished building Google+ and its social media marketing strategies.   I think we should look for some positive surprises ahead.   What do you think?

General Motors might be struggling but when it comes to social media, at least, its Cadillac brand seems to know exactly what it is doing. Reach the marque’s Facebook page and the first thing you will see is a beautiful shot of the “All-New Cadillac XTS.”

That is tempting enough but what you will also see is a good example of the range of skills that any social media marketer now has to master.

The area above the fold, on the screen before you have to scroll, looks like a magazine ad. The car is properly photographed, and beneath it are a few lines of copy describing its features. 

So we already know that behind this social media page lies the work of a professional photographer and the work of a professional copywriter. But that is not all. You can also see more images of the car, not just by clicking the Photos tab on the left of the page (as you would expect) but by pressing the dots on the image itself.

In addition to the photographer and the copywriter then, you can add a developer because someone has gone to the trouble of creating an app for the company’s Facebook page. And a film-maker because as you shift down the page, you will find a pair of videos that can be chosen by selecting a little screen-like widget.

That is just the landing page. Move across to take a look at the Cadillac ATS, and you get more of the same… with one interesting addition. At the top of the page is a big red banner urging viewers to “Click the Like button to unlock NEW photos of the ATS below.”

That is a cheeky bit of social media marketing. Cadillac relies on the like button to spread its message virally and withholds some of the most tempting goodies until visitors have paid by sharing with their friends.

It is all complicated stuff which is what you would expect from a firm with the kind of advertising budget that is more usually used to pay for national television ads. 

But none of these things represent the meat of the Cadillac’s Facebook presence. That happens when you press the first menu item on the left of the page — and reach the Wall. Most of the posts here read like news items from the company’s PR department. One fairly typical post says:

Each of our past and present creations has inspired the chic design and performance of our latest model. Introducing the XTS, Cadillac’s all new luxury sedan

But even those posts are capable of almost a thousand likes and 175 comments each. Where the page really comes alive though  — and where it start to build a meaningful connection with its readers — is when the company thanks its “dedicated community” for picking up half a million fans and rewards them with a new album of images.

What you can find on the Cadillac Facebook page then is more than a piece of corporate social media real estate. It is a combination of all the elements that any professional social media presence has to contain, from the professional images, copy and development of the landing page, through the blatant pitching for viral sharing, to the personal gratitude for the engagement. 

Some of those skills will be familiar to anyone with hands-on experience of marketing. Others will be learned through management and outsourcing. But they all make a professional Facebook presence that builds a community and keeps it close.

 

So Google+ has now opened up to business pages. Companies can create pages, just as they can on Facebook, sit in a Circle with other favored corporations and interact with customers through discussions, posts and images. 

For owners of small businesses, it is a huge headache.

Competition is a great thing, but we are not really expected to choose between marketing on Facebook or marketing on Google+. We are expected to connect, brand and sell on both of them… and to do it while we are tweeting, creating YouTube videos and participating in forums on LinkedIn.

And it is not just that writing posts for Google+ and monitoring activity on the site is another draw on our time. It is that we have to learn how to do it. Google+ is new, so there are few case studies to look at and no figures to see which kinds of posts draw the biggest responses. While it is likely that the biggest influencers on Twitter and Facebook are also likely to be the most dominant on Google+, that is not certain. Until your Google+ page is up and running, you cannot be sure which of your followers are (notice I optimistically use the plural) most likely to spread the word, pass on your updates and take part in your discussions.

Google has now given us all a whole new learning curve to ride.

That is the bad news. The good news is that those marketers whose background included time in a traditional sales environment have an advantage.

It may not look that way. Facebook is now seven years old so many of those leaving college and starting careers in marketing will have been using the site since their mid-teens. To them, social media is as familiar an environment as the local park, and as challenging a tool as an old-fashioned feature phone. 

But take a look at Toyota’s Google+ page. Sure, the company has used the layout of photos at the top of the page to create a single image (just as some smart Facebookers have done). But look at the posts. There is lots of talk of “we” and “our.” When someone asks when he can expect to see the new Rav4s, the response is personal:

“Hi Jeremy. You'll see the '12 RAV 4s towards the end of December. Thanks for the post. ^RF”

This is not hi-tech wizardry, and it is got nothing to do with all of the smart things that Google+ can do that neither Facebook nor Twitter can do. This is a salesman fielding an enquiry from a customer. It is a personal touch with a greeting, a first name and initials at the end that tell the reader that this is coming from a real person and not from a company.

This is a simple post that lets leads know that when they are ready to buy, someone will be there ready to help them.

That is what traditional sales people have always done. They have always answered questions, built connections and used their personalities to make them the go-to guy when the lead needed products like theirs.

Google might have given marketers a new sales vehicle to learn how to drive, but for anyone who knows what really drives sales, getting behind the wheel should not be too uncomfortable.