We are now meeting with dozens of prospective clients and we are seeing a pretty wide range of approaches being taken when it comes to Social Media. Many companies feel somewhat behind and they are tryin to "catch up" by throwing up fan-pages, twitter accounts and Youtube channels hoping that something positive will happen. We also see some companies starting to “listen” online by using online tools like SocialSense and Radian6. That’s good. Online listening should be one of the first Discovery steps when planning your Social Business Strategy. Overall though, one theme stands out more than any other: companies are applying social media without a solid plan for doing so. Even those companies listening online aren't sure what to do next. Here is a sample of what we see every day:

• Facebook pages that are virtual islands with no integration to other marketing efforts and no links into or out of the pages.
• Youtube videos shot by high-end ad agencies (that’s expensive) with no more than 40 or 50 views over 6  months.
• Companies with fan-pages for every sub-brand, but with no plans to moderate them and no forethought on how to handle an irate comment.
• Twitter accounts launched without a full understanding of the range of tools available, without knowledge of how to drive a relevant follower-ship, without a hash-tag plan, and/or without understanding how to really leverage this channel to reach consumers.
• Solid product reviews on sites like ePinions, Yelp, InsiderPages, ViewPoints, and MerchantCircle that are not being pulled into the parent website, fan-page or other web property.

This is standard fare out there. However, it does not (should not) have to be that way. Our last few posts resonate with one theme: social media should be integrated with your other marketing efforts. Our Strategic Framework for Applied Social Media illustrates how social media has taken its place in all phases of consumer engagement: awareness, relevance, conversion, involvement and ongoing engagement. Offline marketing, online/web marketing, social and ecommerce all come together here. An integrated approach simply garners the best results. Interactive Marketing has matured to the point that it has its own department in some larger organizations. Perhaps the word “integrated” should be substituted for “interactive” – it is a more powerful concept.

Another way of thinking about integrated marketing is to think about connections. Here, we mean connections that consumers perceive among your marketing efforts.

• ATTRACT prospective buyers and make them aware of your products or services.
• INFLUENCE the prospective buyer by using both search and social to establish relevancy for your product or service.
• ENGAGE your prospective buyer by directing them to the appropriate channel for conversion including the possibility to transacting in their desired media.
• RECRUIT new customers to get involved with your product, service, company and brand. Encourage ongoing engagement by inviting them to join your own community or relevant social venue.

To illustrate this point, we’ve tipped our Strategic Framework on its side.

In this model, you can see how all of the consumer touch-points across the social web come together around your product or service, from the initial search or word-of-mouth reference to the satisfied customer advocate.

At the beginning of this cycle, a consumer becomes aware of your product or service. They may have been struck by a need and then gone online in search for a solution. Or your may have worked to ATTRACT them. Yes, you can drive awareness by using both search and social to attract prospects. They might have been prompted by any number of stimuli including an offline ad, a radio spot, a TV commercial, a press release, a referral from a friend, or a host of other motivators in a range of appropriate venues.  A well-integrated plan begins with these earliest stimuli in mind. A product, its genre and targeted key-words are strongly correlated from the very beginning. The connection is planned from the start. Now when your audience moves online, the initial behavior is biased –they will be searching with a specific genre or terminology in mind. Those companies with savvy SEO and SEM execution will affect their product being presented near the top of the search results.

From this point onward, a prospective customer will be comparing the results of their search. Your product’s relevancy is established through combinations of ratings, reviews, blogs, discussion forums, and other user-generated content (UGC). They may also consult their “social graph” meaning the fans, friends and followers across their own networks. This is what we refer to as Social Commerce: using your social graph to INFLUENCE your buying decision.

To help perpetuate the cycle, one more connection is made. RECRUIT new customers by asking them to join a community, fan page or other venue and submit a product review when they are ready. These product reviews are an important step toward getting your new customers involved, but they also represent fresh content that will influence the purchase of other prospective buyers. In time, some of these customers may become advocates for your brand, lauding its attributes, products and innovation. Consumer advocacy is a much sought after aspect of the social web and an entire science is springing up around Social Influence Marketing. Mining for this information and elevating it through social venues sways future customers. This is what we mean by “connected”. Now we are back to online listening and making sure that all of this is working as planned – and this is making more sense.

I’ll close this post by pointing out one remaining aspect of this model: measure and refine. Social Media has made it easier to measure online consumer behavior. This allows us to create models that connect both conversations and activity on the web to business results. The right data can be collected and analyzed to provide insights on the value of your content as well as your products and brand. Consumer behavior is monitored and refinements are made throughout the cycle. This helps to get prospective buyers the right information at the right time to speed the process along. It also helps determine which venues and user-generated content are the most relevant toward affecting that transaction.

Social Media can be a powerful accelerator when properly integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts. Think about Connected Social Campaigns^SM as the outcome of a well orchestrated Integrated Marketing Strategy.

Paul Stillmank - 7Summits

We talk regularly to brands about where to begin with social media. As we shared in our last blog post, eMarketer recently published a survey touting the many benefits of social media presence for brands: 

• Influence brand reputation
• Increase brand awareness
• Improve search engine rankings (SEO)
• Increased Website Traffic
• Lead Generation
• Improved Internal Commuication
• Increase Online Sales

Well, the inverse also is true. Especially for brands that have no effective or coordinated social media presence. All too often, we see the situation where a negative blog or discussion thread is ranking higher than a brand’s corporate website – or at least in the top 10 results in Google. We see negative user comments, ratings and reviews on social sites like Facebook, YouTube, Glassdoor or business listing sites like CitySearch or Yellow pages. Again, with no response from the brand involved. Most marketers remember the scramble in the late 90’s to register a domain name and get a web presence in the Web 1.0 brochure-ware days. By early 2000, marketers started to realize that they needed search engines (specifically Google) to help online audiences find them. The craft of SEO was born. Next, there was an emphasis on brand protection. Everyone started to compete for search real-estate by using paid ads (Adwords) to better position their brand, their company, and their products or services. New practices evolved like registering variations of domain names, including misspellings, so that competitors couldn’t hijack a brand. These same concepts apply to social media, but with a twist. By its very nature social media is a two-way conversation. Simply setting up a Facebook page or parking a Twitter account with no monitoring or moderation only amplifies your issues. A business that doesn’t invest here risks dilution of their brand, hijacking of new and existing customers by competitors, and a truly negative perception by consumers that expect their favorite brand or product to accessible and enabled via the social web – in their media.

Whether you’re a small or big brand, B2C or B2B, you can’t afford to delay developing a social media strategy for business. Just like the last two iterations of the web (web 1.0 and 2.0), you can’t do everything at once, but you also can’t afford to sit still. The bottom line here is that Social Media is now an important part of the mix. Investing the time and effort to create a proper social media strategy helps avoid poorly executed social campaigns with little or no positive impact. Set the right objectives, create the strategies to support delivering on them, and then prioritize your efforts to reach that overall outcome. There is a craft here. A well-planned approach to social media integrates your other marketing efforts, amplifying the overall effect. That’s how you gain ground on your competitors with the social web.

Paul Stillmank

7Summits