Is Your Business Meeting Our Social Media Expectations?

According to a new study by Cone, a strategy and communications agency, you and I are among the sixty percent (and rising) of Americans who use social media.  More interestingly, among those of us who use social media, the vast majority—93%—expect companies to have a social media presence.

Your customers want to engage and communicate with you online.  If your business does not have a social media strategy yet, it’s clearly time to develop one.  Here are a few tips to get you started in the right direction:

1. Start by listening. What are your customers saying about you online?
2. Join and add value to the conversation by responding to feedback.
3. Be genuine.

Don’t confuse “Web 2.0” technology and design patterns with communication.  Social media is not about Ajax, tag clouds, RSS feeds and embedded Flash video players.  Social media is about sharing content and having conversations.  Those of us who do want to engage with your business online are not looking for a sales pitch.

Marketing To vs. Communicating With

During yesterday’s Mzinga/Cramer webcast (#mzcramer on Twitter), “Taming the Monster Issues with Social Media Marketing,” the panelists (including yours truly) discussed some important issues facing marketers interested in entering the untamed world of online social media.  As user generated content takes hold and anyone with an Internet connection is given a voice (or a megaphone), it is essential that businesses rethink their marketing strategies.

Old School Marketing is Uni-Directional

During the Twentieth Century, most marketing was unidirectional.  The few who held the power to communicate with the largest audiences were able to spread and maintain control over their message.  There was very little listening in this marketing model; brands and messaging were created and controlled from the top-down with scarce customer feedback.  Marketers who cut their teeth on this style of polished, one-way broadcast messages (and there are quite a few of you) must evolve as people’s communication patterns evolve.  It is time to listen and communicate with your customers.

Social Media Marketing is About Communication

As I stated during the webcast, the Twentieth Century was a communications anomaly.  Throughout history humans have shared messages through words and images within personal social networks… communities.  These communities tended to be localized and modest in size, but word of mouth marketing (both good and bad) reigned.  We are entering an age when word of mouth marketing—social media—is not only reclaiming its dominance, it is obliterating the idea of uni-directional, controlled brand messages.

Today’s technology provides anyone with the ability to easily re-edit and publish your television commercial, pontificate on your products or expose proprietary information.  Corporate and political press agents and spin doctors will no longer have weeks or days to do their jobs because the user-generated messages can spread across the globe to millions of connected users at the speed of light.

Marketers, the Twentieth Century is over; show your human side, and build a community with your customers.  It’s time to start listening.  Be sincere, and build trust.

Your Customers are Talking; Are You Listening?

Admit it—you’ve Googled yourself; we all have.  It can be surprising (or alarming depending on your perspective) to see how many search results turn up when performing the ego search.  What kind of content is returned when you enter your name into a search engine?  Is the information personal?  Is it favorable?  What about your business or products; what are people saying across the web about your brand?

Every day, millions of people are going online and creating content.  Remember when we were Time Magazine’s Person of the Year?  The combination of search engines indexing billions of pages of content and the social web have given millions of people a megaphone to broadcast their messages to a global audience.  Sometimes that message can be unflattering, embarrassing or downright false, and Google’s search results don’t discriminate between approved brand messaging and an irate customer.

Fortunately, there are tools available to help businesses detect valuable user feedback by monitoring online conversations.

As noted earlier, Search Engines are a reliable way to locate online content that is being published about your brand.  Unfortunately, depending on the search term, sifting through several pages of results can be time consuming.  Moving beyond the standard search engines, the following are useful applications which can enable marketers to monitor social media:

• Blogpulse – search and other tools targeted around content found on blogs
• Technorati – another search tool specializing in blog content
• Twing – this tool locates content specifically on message boards and forums
• Summize – what are people saying about you on the micro-blogging site: Twitter?

Rather than spending hours manually sorting through search results, Google Alerts will deliver the results straight to your email account.  Users can set up alerts in no time, just enter the search term(s) that you want Google to monitor, define the type of search (Video, Blog, News, All, etc.) to be performed and how often you’d like to view results.  This method is the most effective for searches that contain unique keywords: like “Kiekbusch” or “adjustafresh”.

Google and Yahoo! allow users to create custom RSS news feeds (similar to the Google Alert, but delivered via RSS) that will automatically aggregate content and push it through users’ RSS feed reader of choice.

In addition to the aforementioned tools, there are, of course, businesses like Andiamo Systems and PopularMedia that are developing algorithms specifically to monitor and track corporate reputations and buzz.

You’re Listening, Now What?  Engagement

Now that it is clear how to monitor content on the web, the next step is developing a Social Media Engagement Strategy (SMES).  Each corporate culture is unique and each should approach social media engagement differently with an understanding of possible privacy, public relations, marketing, legal and regulatory concerns.  Does your business want to be proactive or reactive; have a distinct voice or let your customers do most of the talking; create content or collect content?  Whatever engagement strategy is best for your business, there are some general best practices to consider when becoming involved with social media:

• Build trust
• Develop relationships with consumers
• Be transparent & respectful
• Facilitate a dialogue

Above all, it is imperative to remember that your customers control the message in social media—this is a bottom-up philosophy that many senior marketing and brand managers find uncomfortable.  Rather than attempting to control the conversation, let your brand be the catalyst for conversation– the campfire around which people gather to connect and converse with one another.  This mentality goes a long way to promote a positive corporate image online and off.