We’ve talked (and we’ll keep talking) about the need for a strategy to apply social media to your business.  The islands of Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, Youtube Channels, and one-off blogs need to be reigned in and managed. A strategy integrating them into an overall marketing and execution plan is needed.  These new media components can become important to how your organization grows its business, or they can become paid hobbies for fervent employees leaving you to ask later on whether any value was gleaned from their activities.  Even after your strategy is developed, even after HR and Marketing have aligned your brand with your employees’ online behaviors, even after you’ve figured out how to reach a relevant target audience in their media; you need one last item to activate your social media strategy.  You need to find your social spark.

Time and again, we see overzealous companies trying to ignite a fire, but with no real spark. They’re trying to build a bonfire that can be seen all across the social web. They want to attract as many people as possible to their brand, their product, their service.  They’ve amassed their best content and product information (the wood for that bonfire); they’ve even stacked the cards in their favor and dumped a little kerosene into the mix with some blogger outreach and paid blogger programs; yet things just aren’t igniting as they’ve planned. They still don’t have any fire. So what’s your spark? 

We’re finding that the answer can be different for different organizations. For Zappos, it was a Twitter aggregation model. For Siemens it was a focused Info-Center for employees to channel their social power. Dell lit a fire with IdeaStorm and @DellOutlet. Starbucks lit several raging fires starting with mystarbucksidea.com and then adding a blazing hot Starbucks Fan-page. Blendtec lit their fire with a viral youtube series Will It Blend? It takes a little creativity to find your spark, but it starts with a mindset change.

We see traditional corporations that move into Social Media adopting a defensive posture.  They take the standard PR position of trying to manage the message.  They might hire a PR Social Media Agency. This is the mindset change that needs to occur.  You don’t want to manage the message, but engage the conversation.  Think of it as a party with a room full of people.  Don’t worry about the two people in the corner talking trash about you.  Get the rest of the room to look to you as the conversation catalyst.  Have everyone else want to get into your conversation. There will always be negative noise in the digital world.  Don’t focus on snuffing it out.   Focus on building the positive, collective voice so big that any negativity gets drowned out.

Sure moderation needs to occur, but it’s not the focus.  Every time I see a job posting for a ‘Social Media Moderator’, I wonder how much different that organization would be if they hired a ‘Social Media Catalyst’ or a ‘Social Media Evangelist’ instead.

In the book, Groundswell by Charlene Li, Charlene lays out the requirements for sustaining a social networking site.  She suggests that to be successful the site must:

• Enable people to connect in a new way
• Be effortless to sign up for
• Shift power from institutions to people
• Provide an open platform that facilitates partnerships

These points are all true, but they alone are not enough. Twitter had everyone one of these, but that fire smoldered along for over a year before igniting when Ashton Kutcher competed with CNN for the most followers.  That event brought Twitter’s bonfire to life. Of course, the answer isn’t to go out and engage a movie star for your strategy, but asking these questions may help find your spark:

• How do you monetize all of the user-generated content out there about your products/services?
• What will spark the conversation?
• What’s your ‘pick up’ line?  What do you hope the response to be?
• How will people even know about your conversation to begin with?

In your quest for the answer to these questions, you will hopefully discover your Social Spark.

Paul S.

7Summits

The recently published Strategic Framework for Applied Social Media serves as an excellent back-drop for discussing our Marketing Imperative: “creating awareness, growing sales and taking market share.”  We presupposed in our earlier discussion that some definite value levers supporting marketing can be positively affected through the use of Social Media:

• Improving the efficiency of creating brand awareness & customer attraction
• Gathering insightful, segmented market intelligence
• Quickly identifying market trends
• Multiplying the effectiveness of campaigns
• Building brand-centered community to increasing customer loyalty

We’ll be talking about these on and off here and ultimately starting a discussion for each business imperative elsewhere on this site.

Let’s take the first value driver for Marketing.

Improving the efficiency of creating brand awareness & customer attraction.

The most expensive aspect of marketing is acquiring and re-activating customers. This means gaining awareness and providing relevancy to affect a sale or conversion. Social Media venues are gathering places for a targeted purpose, allowing companies to take their brands where it makes the most sense. This lets companies more efficiently reach the demographics that best fit their product, service, or need. The location of a company's content has become just as important as the content itself. Traditional models are too focused on broadcasting brand promises where the message is not wanted or heard. Integrating a corporate blog to social media sites where the content is relevant, however, creates a rich brand experience.

SEO and SEM techniques are now complemented by the fact that search engines also read social media. These sites are updated frequently by users, often affecting the conversations that a company participates in being picked up and transmitted to the search engines more effectively. This paves the way for a host of solutions that leverage social media to drive awareness. Unfortunately, there is a temptation to apply traditional marketing measures like cost-per-click to rationalize the effectiveness of social media campaigns. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their advertisement. Google AdWords has a pricing system based on clicks. Even though early research results imply a better CPC return for social media, I have to completely disagree with the premise here.  There can be little debate that the cost-per-click for social campaigns is a less relevant measure. PageOne PR recently published some comparative CPC results that further confuse this point:

      Excerpt taken from PageOne Public Relations at

Limiting social media to traditional measures reduces its context from being truly social. As the social context develops, relevant measures, and the way they relate to Sales & Marketing, will become evident. Think of things like the number of times someone tagged, commented, favorited, or embedded information about your company, brand, product or service. What about the number of fans, followers, and friends? What about the number of discussions that they are participating in? These are better measurements for the social context. These are truer indicators of the quality of awareness that companies are seeking. Relevancy now becomes implicit. If we can devise social campaigns that trigger these behaviors, then we will be well on our way to driving awareness from the audience we are targeting, reaching them in a more efficient manner and converting more like-minded peers.

I'll close with this. The majority of marketing executives now recognize many benefits of using Social Media. 

So collectively, we are seeing results. We know that Social Media has made it less expensive (and easier) to reach consumers. We know that we can now use Social Media to tailor messaging across a range of consumer groups, venues, and advertising channels. We just aren't completely tuned in yet to the measurements that are the new indicators of success. We mentioned some here and we'll continue to explore this topic in future posts.

Paul Stillmank

7Summits