If you can’t tell, all your marketing is guesswork.
Social media usage may differ among age groups, but everyone from children to seniors has the ability to find and engage your brand online. If your marketing or your social media messaging follows a one-size-fits-all approach, you may be ignoring (or alienating) various audience segments — and you can be sure that one of your competitors will find a way to engage the very users you’re overlooking.
But how do you know who’s finding you online?
One obvious way is to glance at your social media community. Who’s following you on Twitter? Who’s subscribing to your YouTube channel? Who are your Facebook fans? Users of social media channels are publicly volunteering the kind of information you’d normally have to pay a research group to track down for you. In these cases, all you need is a little time and some demographic search tools.
Another way to learn who your customers really are?
To better understand your audience and your customers, you need to ask them a little about themselves. Online survey tools abound, or you can take the old-fashioned route and fire a few key questions at your email list.
Not everyone will respond to these requests, but the ones who do are the ones who are most likely to care about the quality of the information you’re providing to them. They either want you to improve or they want you to succeed. Either way, they’re providing you with extremely valuable information, so treat them well.
And then, once you have a better understanding of who you’re talking to online, you can craft better messages that deliver more relevant information to the people who need it most.
During the initial wave of social media adoption by businesses and brands, conversation was key. Brands were lauded not for using these tools to sell, but for using them to chat. To listen. To appear human.
But that mentality may be shifting.
Remember Seinfeld? It was one of the most popular TV shows of the ’90s, but it was also (in theory) “a show about nothing.” Each episode consisted of a tightly-wound series of in-jokes derived from absurdly pedestrian circumstances, which gave viewers a chance to relate. In short, it was the kind of show designed to be relived around the water cooler for not just the next morning but the next few months… or longer. (Personally, I have friends who still celebrate Festivus.)
Why did Seinfeld succeed? In part, it was because — at the time — no one else was talking about nothing. When everyone else has a plot, you can break the mold by only having subplots.
Social media works the same way. When everyone else is selling, it’s easy to stand out simply by offering customer service. But once everyone starts using social media to “join the conversation,” the conversation itself becomes diluted. That’s when people start needing something… else.
When we helped Bigelow Tea create their Twitter and Facebook channels, conversation was key. Just chatting with tea lovers was enough to help Bigelow gain traction with the social media users they connected with.
These days, every tea company with access to the web is on Twitter and Facebook, which means Bigelow needed to shift their focus away from mere conversation and back toward informational value like their content-rich blog. They’ve begun offering successful sweepstakes on Facebook and Twitter. And their Facebook page has become a conversation that’s heavy with links to their teas and gift sets.
The results? Facebook is now one of the primary drivers of Bigelow Tea’s online sales, with plans to expand their strategy even further in 2011.
What has this shift taught us? Yes, people still like to talk tea… but they haven’t stopped needing actual value from their brand interactions, either.
So… what’s your brand’s Seinfeld ratio? How much time do you spend talking about nothing?
That’s how TV and radio got their initial push. “Program X, brought to you by Company Y.”
Or, commercials featuring the stars of everyone’s favorite programs would be planned to run during those same shows. For example:
These days, we’re more used to hearing and seeing commercials segmented to run between the entertainment itself. But the advent of view-on-demand devices like TiVo (not to mention mobile devices and the Internet) have made it quite easy for viewers to circumvent (or block out) traditional ads.
Now, enter (or, more accurately, re-enter) sponsorships, under the guise of branded entertainment. In fact, web content creators are seeing increasingly robust payouts as advertisers begin to embrace video embedded ads and branded entertainment as a new opportunity for increased brand awareness.
And while the future of branded entertainment looks rosy, it also presents a new set of questions that your company should be investigating to find a good fit for your brand. For example…
Are your customers regular consumers of mobile entertainment?
Which content creators have a track record of generating serious buzz?
Which YouTube videos are most popular with your target demographic?
How easily could your existing messaging be converted to video-ready advertising?
Is your competition creating branded entertainment?
If so, is it successful? If it isn’t, why not?
Are certain types of content (comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentary, etc.) proper or improper fits for your company’s culture?
As laptops, iPads and cell phones continue to gain critical mass (and more eyeballs every day), your opportunities to connect with those same consumers will continue to grow just as quickly.
When our client Ecover celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2010, we at Creative Concepts helped them develop a related 30 Under 30 contest to celebrate the innovative ecological ideas from young people across the country. During their celebration, they asked everyone a question:
“Where do you think sustainability will be thirty years from now?”
After all, for a company who designs every aspect of their cleaning products with the environment in mind — from their ingredients to their facilities to their packaging — the future really is their business.
This question may have initially been asked of some of the country’s top eco-bloggers and entrepreneurs, but that’s was just the tip of the iceberg. Who Ecover really wants to hear from is you.
(Yes, you.)
They’ve opened the discussion to everyone, because they believe everyone has a stake in our planet’s future. And Ecover is listening — on Twitter, on Facebook, and on their blog. They want to know what you think about sustainability, and what concerns or suggestions you might have.
Because reaching a business milestone is certainly something to celebrate, but if there’s one lesson Ecover has learned in their thirty years of creating eco-minded cleaning products, it’s that tomorrow is what really counts.
Part of it is the vast number of tools we have at our disposal. Since most of them (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are free, it’s easy to start using each of them… but that makes maintaining your ever-growing web of communications more difficult.
Part of it is the conflict between personal (customers, individuals, community) and business (corporations, marketing, sales). Social media tools are designed to facilitate the exchange of information between consenting parties, but the limitless kinds of information being exchanged further complicate our conversations.
And then there’s the ongoing debate about which social media metrics matter most. Is it the size of your audience, or the quality of your engagement? Is it inciting action or increasing awareness?
Our advice?
Shrink your focus.
First, re-examine your goals and your needs. (Maybe you need a new social media strategy?)
Then, instead of aiming too wide, narrow your attention to a handful of channels — maybe even one — and maximize the impact you can create there (or the feedback you can obtain). Then, once you have a true understanding of how your brand is perceived within that channel, start applying those lessons to other channels, if it makes sense for you.
There’s a presumption that companies have to be involved in social media. And while we here at Creative Concepts are sure that social media can benefit almost any company, charity or brand, we’d never advise anyone to bite off more than they can chew.
So don’t waste an opportunity to connect with your customers by spreading yourself too thin, or your valuable feedback will be reduced to a stream of white noise.
Need some help simplifying your social media efforts? Check out these tips from Mashable.
Before you dive headfirst into your lengthy list of New Year’s resolutions, we here at Creative Concepts would like to offer a word of advice about setting goals for this (or any) new year:
Focus on results, not on numbers.
With 52 weeks ahead of you, it can be tempting to set goals for yourself that involve all kinds of numerical feats, like…
Improving your web traffic
Boosting your search results
Increasing your inbound links, or your number of media mentions
Doubling your number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers
… and so on.
And while each of these occurrences would be a boost to both your business and your brand’s reputation, they’re also merely the measurable by-product of a more important goal: doing your job well.
As 2011 approaches, you already have some personal and business goals in mind that you’d like to work toward. But what about your social media goals? (You do have social media goals, right?)
First, identify the obvious problems that are hampering your social media efforts:
While recounting the top stories around the web can be instructive, inspirational or (oops) cautionary, don’t forget to look back through your own year of social media ups and downs. Ask yourself:
Where did we succeed at the individual and the campaign level?
Where did we exceed (or fall short of) expectations? Do we know why?
What did we learn?
Who did we meet?
What lessons can we apply to future endeavors?
Identifying the year’s high and low points, understanding what worked and what didn’t, and taking a wide view of your successes and failures can be critical in improving your results in the coming year. (Plus, in this era of nonstop media input, if you don’t occasionally take a moment to reflect on what just happened, you may not have another chance anytime soon!)
Here at Creative Concepts, 2010 has been an exciting and surprising year! In this year, we began working with the US division of Ecover, which has blossomed in ways the original RFP never foresaw. We continued our fruitful partnerships with longtime clients like Bigelow Tea and Ouidad, delved into the world of HD video, found several new and talented employees, and rebuilt our website — all while navigating new services like FourSquare and the ever-changing Facebook.
Thanks to our clients, our employees, our friends and families, and everyone who helped to make Creative Concepts successful in 2010. We couldn’t have done it without you! Here’s to a deep appreciation of everything we learned and had the pleasure of sharing during this past year, and an even more spectacular 2011.
For better or worse, the public has a short memory, and yesterday’s furious anger is tomorrow’s footnote. This means companies large and small can survive bad PR as long as they can ride the occasional wave up and down.
For example, considering how much negative publicity was generated in the mainstream media when NPR fired Juan Williams, you might have thought NPR would be destined for funding crises and possible financial collapse. Instead, as recent pledge drive numbers have shown, NPR’s donation numbers remained remarkably consistent despite all the media rhetoric.
So, if negative PR can’t sink a company… what can it do?
Ironically, bad PR’s biggest boon just might be providing useful feedback for the companies in question.
In the case of NPR, one of the lessons they learned was that the bulk of their angry commentary was coming from people who weren’t regular donors in the first place. As Paul Farhi in The Washington Post reports:
Several station managers say the angriest responses have been from people who appeared not to be regular contributors, based on their cross-referencing caller and e-mailers’ names with databases of donors.
If that’s the case, NPR might downplay similar criticisms in the future since such commentary is most likely to come from far outside their core supportive audience. Or, they could further investigate the issues at hand (freedom of speech, racial profiling, discriminatory practices) with the intention of appealing to that very same outsider audience. Or, they might even fan the same flames that caused such an uproar in the first place, as a way to differentiate the actions of their brand from their competitors.
However NPR or any other company chooses to react to a sudden swirl of negative publicity, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: although social media may help messages spread faster than ever, its continual flood of information also helps good and bad PR disappear from the public’s memory faster than ever.
When you’re the top specialty tea company in the United States, you reach a lot of tea lovers. Our client Bigelow Tea is using social media — from Bigelow Tea’s Facebook (and, yes, MySpace) pages to their YouTube channel, Bigelow loves to share their tea knowledge with the world. (After 65 years in busiess, they know a thing or two about tea.)
But how often do their customers have a chance to share what they know with each other? Normally, it’s not easy. Fortunately, we at Creative Concepts are helping Bigelow Tea bridge that gap.
Last month, the Bigelow Tea Twitter account asked its followers if they had any tea tips worth sharing. The results were instructive, and they formed the basis of a helpful blog post that allowed Bigelow’s fans to learn from one another.
This isn’t Bigelow’s first foray into customer connectivity. Earlier this year, they hosted their first Bigelow Tea Social in New York City, where bloggers and foodies alike came together to talk tea (and get their fill of free samples). How was that live event conceived of and managed? Why, on Bigelow’s blog and Twitter account, of course!
And while tea is obviously a communal drink to begin with, Bigelow Tea isn’t the only company finding new ways to bring their customers together. Our client Ecover celebrated their 30th anniversary of creating ecological cleaning products with a live event that united green bloggers, media-makers and innovators, all of whom swapped stories and tips until the party ended. How did we at Creative Concepts help Ecover organize this event? With a Facebook contest hosted on Ecover’s blog!
Social media: bringing companies and customers together — with the emphasis on together.
