Secrets of Social Media Marketing

How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business!

Paul Gillin

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781610350990
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

""Secrets of Social Media Marketing"" is a handbook for marketers and business owners to use in deciding how to employ the new social media for online marketing. Social media has quickly moved from the periphery of marketing into the forefront, but this is a new and quickly-evolving field and there are few established formulas for success. Building on the lessons set out in Gillin's acclaimed and oft-reviewed ""The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media, "" this book provides practical advice on strategy, tools, and tactics. It is a hands-on manual that will educate marketers on how to extend their brands, generate leads, and engage customer communities using online tools.

1

Making the Case

“The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”

—A. G. Lafley, CEO, Procter & Gamble, in a speech to the Association of National Advertisers

Fiskars, a maker of high-quality scissors and crafting tools, was frustrated by the low emotional connection its customers had with the brand in the United States. The nearly 400-year-old Finnish company made some of the world’s finest cutting tools. Its orange-handled scissors (a pair of which is on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art) were a favorite of crafters and the emerging cult of scrapbooking enthusiasts. Yet research showed that while people were aware of the Fiskars brand, there was no passion surrounding the products. The timing was bad: Big box retailers were beginning to draw down their selection of crafting supplies. Shelf space would become harder to find.

Fiskars had to shift its distribution toward specialty retailers. The company knew the old adage that people don’t buy drill bits; they buy holes. Fiskars knew that marketing scissors would be less effective than marketing what people do with scissors. It seized on scrapbooking, a popular hobby of preserving family history through decorated albums, as its target.

Conventional wisdom held that Baby Boomer moms were the most enthusiastic scrapbooking segment, but Fiskars wanted to test this assumption by analyzing online conversations. It hired the identity strategy company Brains on Fire, which enlisted the conversation mining company Umbria to validate the strategy.

Umbria monitored scrapbooking discussions and used text and language analysis to discover who was talking. The results surprised everyone. The analysis determined that younger women—the so-called Generation Y—were actually more passionate scrapbookers than Baby Boomers. The Fiskars strategy was revamped to engage that group. Brains on Fire conceived of an exclusive community of scrapbookers to be led by four part-time, paid enthusiasts who exemplified the members’ passion for the craft. Members—called Fiskateers—knew they were involved in a two-way relationship which encouraged them to share their passion with one another. The four lead Fiskateers were taught how to keep up the conversational momentum.

Exclusivity was important. Members had to apply to become a Fiskateer. The leads were equipped with samples and literature and encouraged to visit local craft shops to help merchants sell scrapbooking supplies—but as enthusiasts rather than as sales reps. An online community was set up for the Fiskateers to exchange ideas and designs.

Response to the promotion exceeded Fiskars’ expectations by orders of magnitude. About 200 women were expected to apply; more than 4,200 had become members as of mid-2008. The Fiskateers proved to be so passionate about their hobby that Fiskars staged events solely for group members. The four lead Fiskateers maintained a blog devoted to family, crafts, and everyday life. Some of their entries sparked hundreds of comments.

The bottom line: Within a year, sales of Fiskars supplies in stores that had been visited by a Fiskateer more than tripled. Online mentions of Fiskars products increased six-fold. Engineers in the U.S. headquarters began calling themselves “Fiskaneers.” The influence of the scrapbooking enthusiasts convinced the conservative company to take its product line in directions it never before conceived, including the introduction of designer scissors with skull and crossbones on the blades. In short, the Fiskateers transformed Fiskars.

The Fiskars story embodies the best of what social media can accomplish on several levels. It started with listening to online conversations to develop a segmentation strategy. It continued with communities built around shared enthusiasm and conversation. It turned a team of a few thousand unpaid customers into a national field marketing force. And, it transformed the culture of one of the oldest companies in the Western world.

If a company founded in 1649 can do this, so can you.

If you’re reading this book, you’ve probably already bought into the idea that social media has some marketing value for your organization. Maybe you monitored some blogs or customer review sites and have witnessed people discussing your company and its products. You know that these people can be powerful advocates for you and that word-of-mouth marketing can spread a message more quickly and convincingly than conventional advertising.

Most marketers already understand this, at least at some level, but most also harbor some skepticism. The newness and unpredictability of the medium is scary, and measuring results is still more art than science. They also face resistance from higher-ups who think that conversation marketing is a flash in the pan or who simply can’t adapt themselves to the atmosphere of trust, transparency, and two-way communications that this new world requires. The older higher-up people are, the more cynical they’re likely to be. There’s also a good chance that you report to them.

That’s why this chapter will be devoted to making the case for social media in your organization. We’ll start by looking at the most common objections and then present just some of the wealth of new statistical evidence that indicates the marketing profession is changing forever.

I’ll state my biases up front. I spent more than 25 years in the publishing business, two-thirds of that time putting printed words on paper. So I understand conventional media pretty well. My specialty was technology, so I’ve also seen more than my share of fads. I’ve watched momentous change in which new markets emerged and venerable companies collapsed with blinding speed. Disruptive change can have cataclysmic results.

The growth and acceptance of the Web as a means to disseminate information has been nothing short of astounding. Many experts now predict that the Internet will become the world’s largest advertising medium within the next three to five years. That means that the Internet will have gone from infancy to market dominance in just 17 years. In contrast, television took nearly 40 years to reach two-thirds of American homes.

Social media has given voice to millions of ordinary citizens who can now relate their experiences and opinions to a global audience at little or no cost. This is not a fad. People don’t abandon technologies that make it easier for them to communicate. The sooner marketers dive in and begin experimenting with these new channels, the more success they’ll have. In the chapters that follow, I’ll try to offer you advice and examples from the early adopters that will help you focus your efforts and avoid mistakes.

I’m not one of those zealots who wants to convince you to abandon traditional marketing. Broadcast and print advertising, direct marketing, events, and other tried-and-true channels will have value long into the future. However, all the evidence points to these traditional media becoming less important over time, as the power to publish is distributed to you and me. The age of broadcast is nearly over and we must prepare ourselves for the new reality of small, highly focused communities.

Embrace Change

Social media challenges nearly every assumption about how businesses should communicate with their constituencies. The most important change to understand and to accept is that those constituencies now have the capacity to talk—to each other and to the businesses they patronize. In the past, those conversations have been limited to groups of at most a few hundred people. Today, they are global and may include millions of voices. Once a shift like this occurs, a lot of change happens, both predictable and unforeseen.

Most marketers have their own definitions of social media, but let’s just quickly define terms. According to Wikipedia’s surprisingly brief definition: “Social media use the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to connect information in a collaborative manner…[they] depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit.” Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has called social media “the writable Web,” a description I like for its brevity. I think of it as “personal publishing.”

Social media is all about people sharing opinions. These opinions can be expressed as written entries in the form of blog posts or comments, spoken words via podcasts, video presentations, and votes on social news sites. These opinions are often direct and unfiltered. In contrast to mainstream media, which scrubs content for appropriateness and civility, the social media world is full of people talking about topics they care about, often in blunt terms.

This frankness is often startling to veteran marketers, those who have been accustomed to delivering messages via one-way media and receiving feedback only in heavily filtered and homogenized form. The first time they are the victim of a blog attack, their instincts are either to get mad or to walk away in disgust.

Take it easy. This is simply a new form of expression and it’s nothing personal. To work productively with social media, you need to embrace the idea that feedback of any kind is useful, not only to your messaging, but also to the way you develop products and run your company. Executives who deny or trivialize the value of customer feedback are not good candidates for social media marketing. However, it’s becoming harder and harder for anyone to do business the old way.

Let’s start by looking at three of the most common objections to social media adoption and how to overcome them.

“People Will Go Negative”

In my conversations with marketers, I frequently hear this fear voiced as the number one impediment to embracing social media. Marketers fret that if they acknowledge these new media channels as legitimate, they automatically endorse the whining and complaining that sometimes takes place in them. Control is their central issue. They believe that no one can control what customers say, but if you ignore them, you are not validating their comments.

Secret: Don’t fear negativity.

This observation was supported by research conducted by TWI Surveys for the Society for New Communications Research. It found that “fear of loss of control” was cited by nearly 47 percent of the 260 marketers surveyed as an impediment to social media adoption, second only to manpower constraints, at 51 percent.

Let’s examine a few famous examples of negativity at work:

• Jonah Peretti of the online news site Huffington Post tried to use Nike’s sneaker customization site to request a pair of sneakers with “sweatshop” written on the side, a reference to the sporting goods maker’s allegedly exploitative labor practices. The request was denied, but Nike never admitted that the sweatshop issue was at the root of the denial. Instead, it said the order was refused because of the use of “inappropriate slang.” Peretti forwarded the ludicrous e-mail exchanges to a few friends, who in turn sent them to their friends. Eventually, e-mail spread the story to millions of people.

“The only force propelling the message was the collective action of those who thought it was worth forwarding,” Peretti wrote in The Nation. “Unions, church groups, activists, teachers, mothers, schoolchildren and members of the U.S. armed forces sent me letters of support.” Peretti ended up being interviewed on “The Today Show,” where he was portrayed as an expert on offshore labor, despite the fact that all he had done was try to order a pair of shoes.

• In June 2006, New York blogger Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his America Online account. The AOL customer service representative refused to let him do so. During a five-minute phone call, Ferrari asked no less than 15 times to “cancel the account.” The customer service rep’s refusal went from comical to absurd. Ferrari recorded the phone call, and a week later he posted the recording on his blog. Word-of-mouth took things from there, and within a few weeks the story had been picked up in more than 40 newspapers and Ferrari had landed on “The Today Show” and “Nightline.” AOL characterized the incident as isolated and remained mostly silent as the story spread to tens of millions of people. But two months later is excited the consumer Internet service provider business, a decision prompted, in part, by customer service complaints. I provide an expanded account of this incident in the first chapter of The New Influencers.

• The 21st most popular story on Digg (a prominent social news site) in 2007 was about a man who was arrested for using $2 bills in a Baltimore Best Buy store. The story was covered in more than 600 online journals. Best...