Give up control to gain control

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

Websites have evolved from static brochure-ware to more interactive experiences with video, chat, forums, etc. However, with the new social media platforms, you need to re-think how you design your website to take advantage of the power of these mediums. Just having a Facebook or Twitter badge on your site is not enough. You need to consider these platforms as extensions, if not a discrete part of your website. You also need to treat each platform differently to get the most out of it. Here are some thoughts on how to think about each property:

• LinkedIn: More formal than other social media sites and should be used to promote networking, best practice sharing and industry collaboration. The subgroups are a great way to develop specific topics for discrete groups, such as local user communities.
• Facebook: You should use Facebook to develop conversations with your target market. Think of Facebook as the forum for your customers/prospects to informally interact and collaborate.
• Twitter: Twitter is a "volume" play both from amount of information you should tweet as well as how "loud" you want to be heard in the market. I think of Twitter as a communication platform, where you are sending out messages to people versus interacting with them like you do on Facebook and LinkedIn.

You need to utilize each of these sites to achieve a connection with your customers/prospects. Let's go through a use case with an integrated site that includes your corporate domain coupled with the appropriate social media sites:

Let's use Bestbuy as our use case. I am looking to purchase a new camera. I have been on BB's site and identified a few options. I have read the reviews on the site to better narrow my options.  I now go out to Facebook to seek other experiences and gather feedback on my options. I go to LinkedIn to also see if there is  a camera sub group to ask for feedback. After this due diligence, I have chosen the camera I want but do I need to go back to Bestbuy's site to purchase the camera? If the platforms are integrated, I should be able to buy it where I am at that moment. Frictionless commerce is an old concept but it is more important and more possible today than ever with these social media extensions. But we are not done yet.

To add to the complexity you also need to add in mobile as a potential platform. Say Bestbuy has my mobile information from our interactions on the website. My phone sounds and it is from Bestbuy telling me  I am right near a Bestbuy and here is a coupon for 10% off in the store for the camera I want to buy. Ask for Jim if you go to the store or you can purchase it now with the credit card we have on file. Friction? Not so much. And that is the point; your corporate domain is no longer the place to go to purchase something. I am not coming to you - if you want my business you be where I am. And that is the potential with these platforms if you use them correctly.

Extension. Placement. Location. Timing. Sales.

Cleaning out the marketing attic of the mind

Cleaning out the marketing attic of the mind.

• We received our first lead from Facebook. I am still amazed when I look at referral traffic and Facebook is one of the highest referring properties.
• Still somewhat skeptical of Twitter, however. Not sure I have gone to a site to purchase something based on a Tweet. It is good for finding interesting articles, but is that all there is to it?
• Need to start thinking about how and if to include Youtube and Flickr in our social media portfolio.
• The soccer world is not helping to get the US as an avid follower with all the fake diving in the World Cup. Brutal.
• The vuvuzela's aren't helping either.
• If you are interested in Inbound Marketing or how to use social media in general, you must subscribe to http://blog.hubspot.com/
• User generated content is going to be the learning platform of the future.
• The golf industry needs to slow down new product introductions. You can get last year's model's for next to nothing. It is like they have not noticed that consumer spending habits have changed.
• I do not have a good feeling about economic recovery in the second half of 2010 or even 2011.
• When was the last time you saw a really funny commercial? 
• I wonder how the marketing folks at the Bruins office are going to spin next year after the awful fail of the playoffs and the lousy 3 decades. "This time we mean it!"
• Obama could use a new PR and marketing person.
• Not quite sure I get what is happening at Google. I get search/ads, android and apps but not Buzz or them opening a music store. Seems like they are trying to be like Apple instead of choosing their own path.
• Worked on my first logo design project this year. Not as easy as it looks. Makes you appreciate some of the iconic logos out there.
• Very clever: http://www.cheeseandburger.com/ Definitely a bookmark for burger ideas.
• Going to be revamping our corporate website in the coming months. Really need to make it more informal and social. Something our brand is not necessarily known for in the market.
• What is the next great idea in the vein of the iPhone, Google, Facebook, Twitter?
  

How many handles should you have on Twitter?

Image by stevegarfield via Flickr

I just came from a meeting where the topic of how many Twitter handles should we have to message out to our customers. This particular unit currently has five different handles and different parts of the business are approaching the social media group to ask for a handle so they too can tweet.

I believe that there is a danger in diluting your overall messaging with too many people tweeting. While the theory is you should tweet more to get your message out, that does not, in my mind, mean that you should have multiple handles tweeting the same or different ideas. To me, that sounds like Twitter spam.

Additionally, the more people you have the greater the risk of someone tweeting something inappropriate.  Everyone has a different ideas of what "Do not post anything stupid" means. A 20-something may think it is ok to tweet anything as that is they the way they have been brought up. An older worker who has not grown up with these technologies may not understand the reach that they have and the impact an off-hand comment could have on your firm and brand.

Your marketing message needs to be clear and concise and the more people voicing that message the greater risk there is in being tuned out.

Sequencing Change

Image by Todd Huffman via Flickr

It used to be that technology was adopted first at the corporate level and then by consumers. That sequence has now changed. It is the consumer who is driving the adoption of technology by corporations. Social Media and mobile are prime examples of this switch.

According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites. I would bet that this traffic is primarily consumer driven. That said, what does this mean for corporations, especially in the B2B space, as it has been shown that the Internet is one of the top places buyers begin their research on a product. Will they now be shifting from Google searches and SEO to FaceBook Fan pages? Searching Twitter for end users or stories? Mining LinkedIn for Groups and people that can help them with their decision? Yes, they will be.

The ramifications for corporations is that they must have a presence on all these sites, regardless if they are B2B or B2C. At my firm, we are really just ramping up the use of FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn to support the launch of our next generation product, Harvard ManageMentor. I am the primary person updating all these sites, as well as contributing to our new blog, and I know that it takes a lot of time and effort. As the use of these mediums becomes more prevalent in buying decisions, the need for a full time person in the marketing department will be mandatory.

Additionally, marketers will need to rethink which marketing automation platform they use and your messaging to fit to these sites. Can you explain your value proposition in 140 characters or less? Firms such as HubSpot are going to become even more important to help analyze the new inbound marketing results. It will be interesting to watch VC investment in this area of analytic's.

It has been interesting to see the new traffic being referred by these sites and I hope it only increases.

Can social media take the place of marketing automation platforms?

The Corporate Learning group at Harvard Business Publishing  currently uses Eloqua as our marketing automation platform (MAP). Eloqua is very robust and does everything we need and more. However, I have been thinking lately as social media applications mature do they have the potential to be a free marketing automation platform, especially for a small business? Already today there are services that you can use to do some rudimentary tracking. For example, if I use bit.ly to shorten my URL and post a note on Twitter about a free article on my site I can track click throughs and retweets through bit.ly's tracking capability. I can then use Google analytics on my site to gain even more information.This certainly is not as robust as an Eloqua, but it certainly gets the job done, and it's free.

Another important aspect of social media that can't be replicated by a MAP is highlighted by the findings in the recent Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey as seen in the chart above. The survey found that recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising. Ninety percent or consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.

“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.”

Marketing is all about building trust and being relevant to the consumer. I know I regularly look at recommendations on sites like Best Buy before I purchase any electronics. I do not know these people, but it goes back to James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds theory, "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." Social media has a much greater advantage over a marketing platform because a Tweet to people who follow you is more likely to be taken more seriously than an email from a campaign.

Think of the power of some of the services below and compare them to how you would react to items posted there versus an email in your inbox from a vendor that you may have a passing knowledge of but no real relationship. What do you trust and believe more?

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• revver
• Gist
• knol (yes, knol)
• Meetup
• Youtube
• Hollr
  

What other services are out there that have this same power? Do you think that social media could eventually be the defacto MAP as the technologies mature and people start building applications to track items (like Metricly)?
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Eloqua and social networking

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with Eloqua, it is a marketing automation platform. The software as a service allows you to track email campaigns, website visitors, lead nurturing and prospect profiling (among other things).

My company, Harvard Business Publishing, had a full time person working on Eloqua up until about 4 months ago. Since then I have been in charge of it. I have a basic understanding and really had just been using it for email campaigns. Lately, I have been trying to utilize more of the functionality to help drive leads.

One very interesting campaign I just launched involved placing links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the landing page and encourage people to use those platforms to pass along information about the article we were giving away.The audience was probably not perfect for this experiment (high level C types), but the potential is very intriguing. Considering that many firms are seeing traffic from these sites explode I hope to take advantage of this trend for our website.

The one outstanding question is does our customer base utilize any of these services. I know a lot of our prospects are on LinkedIn yet I do not know how many are on Twitter. I expect few to be on Facebook, let alone use it for business. All of this goes back to a previous post I made about whether or not every business can use social media sites to driver traffic (Can any site use social media to drive traffic?). I think this will be a good experiment and possibly provide a glimmer of an answer to that question.

You can see the landing page here

Can anyone use social networks to drive traffic?

Image via CrunchBase

You’re all aware of the rise in social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Businesses are using them more and more to reach out to customers. An interesting stat that highlights the emerging power of these platforms to reach customers is that some commercial websites are reporting Facebook and Twitter as the number 2 and 3 referrers of traffic behind Google.
That type of trend begs the question: Why aren't' all firms, B2B and B2C, using Facebook or any of the other social media platforms to drive customers to their websites? First, you need to think about whom is your typical customer and ask which social media platform they would frequent for information to help them do their job.
Facebook
Facebook has seen huge growth in adults lately. The growth in older adults would make you think that Facebook is a great place to interact with your customers. However, do you believe that your target market is frequenting Facebook for work? If the answer is no, then move on but continue to monitor its relevance for you audiences.
Twitter
A lot has been written about Twitter, a micro blogging site. Twitter also has seen huge growth rates, particularly in the workplace. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was the age group 35-49 (42 percent of the site’s audience). Nielson ratings found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only. Again, this is a pretty amazing trend. However, if you look at the top followed people on Twitter you see that Britney Spears is #3, Shaq is #8 and Whole Foods Market is #24. These facts may lead you to believe that Twitter is not a place that your target market is going for information about your product.
LinkedIn
At my work, I am currently discussing setting up a Harvard Business Publishing Group on LinkedIn. We feel that LinkedIn’s business focus lends itself well to interacting with our prospects and partners. In fact, according to the latest January data from comScore, the LinkedIn’s U.S. unique visitors shot up 22 percent to 7.7 million, up from 6.3 million in December. Total minutes spent on the site doubled in January to 96.8 million, from 47.6 million in December. These trends do make us feel comfortable that LinkedIn may be a good place to interact, and help, our customers.

Is Twitter and FaceBook a vialble source of traffic for all firms?

Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Partners, blogged today about the impact of social media on driving traffic to 3rd party sites. Specifically, Fred's post highlights the power of Twitter and FaceBook in driving traffic to websites. However, while the data certainly shows that firms should be using these outlets to drive traffic, can Twitter, FaceBook and other social mediums be leveraged by all firms?

In my case, it is not obvious given my firms brand (Harvard Business Publishing) and the restrictions surrounding the use of it for marketing purposes. Not only do the restrictions have to be weighed, but would Twitter and FaceBook have the same effect on driving traffic to our site?

Given the impact of Twitter and FaceBook, we will certainly look into having a presence and it will be interesting to see, brand restrictions aside, what the outcome will be if we do use these outlets.