Marketing and public relations communications through social media can be complicated. There are a vast number of networks and platforms, all interlinked, allowing messages to spread extremely quickly. For those not used to online communications this can seem like a mysterious and dangerous world governed by technology geniuses and teenagers, and in the most part the people who are building and marketing these networks tend to promote this stereotype. This is big part of the problem. For many brands this creates a sense of fear; the fear creates the desire to control. In the end it is this desire to control a vast and dynamic human network that leads to systemic failures in social media communications. You can control the software but you can’t control the way people use it.

The second, and most important part in the equation is around the messaging itself. What some brands have failed to identify is that the rules have significantly changed. For many demographics social media is how they discover news and messages. It is not through press releases, or TV ads but through peer recommendations and online discussions. Online is now the thin end of the wedge, the mainstream media is increasingly starting to play a supporting role. What this means is that brands no longer get to tell the consumer what to think any more. They need to spend more time developing real relationships with their customers. They need to be responsive. And they must  respect the individual and tell the truth.

It is in the arenas of honestly and integrity where almost every social media disaster of the last 12 months played out.  People can sniff out a lie easily – and they will expose it when they find one. As a group they will ask the brand to come clean, and if their demand is not met they will respond. They now have the power and they will exercise it. On the flip side, if a brand that has made a mistake deals with quickly, honestly and bravely the issue can quickly be turned into a positive.

Brands no longer have a choice about whether or not to participate in social media. They must be active or risk becoming irrelevant. What is important to realise is that markets take all interactions through social media as deeply personal experiences. This means that they expect a level of respect – one that does not always exist in the one-way communication world.

To manage and capitalise on this new frontier you must plan well, educate your staff, develop a clear set of communication guidelines and above all, be earnest.

Before you can begin a thought leadership strategy there are a few things to consider: who are your companies thought leaders, who are the influencers in your network, how often can you create content and how will you distribute it? It is necessary to start to document each of these points. They will evolve over time but let’s look at the starting points.

Every professional service company has at least one thought leader. If you are a small consultancy you may be the one and only. If the company is bigger then it is best to try and get more than one person being a thought leader. This will put less pressure on one person and will exponentially grow the network you have influence over.

You then need to think about who the influencers in your network are. If you use LinkedIn it can be relatively easy to do this. The ones that have the most connections and are most active tend to be the most influential. It can get more complicated than this but in general that’s a great place to start.

It is important to try and plan regular updates to the thought leadership strategy. The first place most companies start is writing short pieces for their own blog. Creating a content roster for this activity is one way to make sure that everybody is participating in the thought leadership process. Try and avoid a flurry of activity followed by a long silence. If you develop a following and then simply stop because you get too busy then you run the risk of disappointing your market.

If you do develop a strategy around your blog you then need to think about distributing your content so it gets in front of more people. One mistake that is easy to make is assuming that people will keep coming back to your site or blog. Chances are they won’t as most of them are as busy as you are. Make sure you employ tools and techniques that automatically send your intent to various social platforms while also making sure you content is easy to share.

The ex CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, is a great example of a business leader who developed a thought leadership strategy. He had a blog where he openly discussed what was on his mind. And he invited comments from the public. Importantly, he tried to answer as many of those comments as possible, especially the negative ones. Over time this created a culture of honesty and a focus around customer service.

This is what being a thought leader is all about. You know a lot about your particular speciality – that covers the thought. How you express that, and
how you communicate with your market as you do so is where the leadership part come into play. If your up to the job your market is looking for a leader.

Like most aspects of running a business, rather than focusing on products or prices, it is best to focus on outcomes and objectives. In this article we will explore how social media monitoring works, and discuss what to look for when making choices.

Social media monitoring tools are similar to search engines in that they look through vast quantities of data and serve up relevant results. At a basic level the results show mentions of your company or brand name. There are many free tools that do this simple task well. But to obtain real intelligence, much deeper insights are needed. This is where more sophisticated tools shine. Each one has it’s strengths and weaknesses, so knowing how to ask the right questions becomes very important.

The ‘social web’ consists of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but it also covers blogs, special interest forums, wikis and any website that has an area where people can leave comments. Some of these platforms allow anonymous interaction, others ask for more detailed personal information. Understanding where your market is, is important. A basic search with a good monitoring tool should be able to give you this information quickly.

From this point you can start to dive into the data to obtain more meaningful insights. Basic demographic information – such as age and gender – can help you define segments quickly, and start to define the culture and language of the different groups. Many tools allow you to see how ‘important’ different users are – meaning you can pinpoint the influencers – positive and negative – very quickly, and develop strategies to manage them.

Geo-location information is being shared via smart phones with GPS functionality at an ever increasing rate. This allows you to know where people were when a certain comment was made. If you are looking at your own brand or product category, this can be helpful when thinking about where to focus resources. However, it can be far more powerful when you are monitoring your competitors. Knowing where your competitors are performing poorly can allow you to direct marketing spend to that area, and pick up the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Better social monitoring platforms also have a dictionary you can program, allowing you to apply context or meaning to words and sentences. The phrase ‘fully sick’ may be very negative for one demographic group and very positive for another. Once the meaning is developed, it then becomes reasonably straight forward to understand the sentiment, what people think about your brand, your competitor or anything else you choose to monitor.

In the end, listening to social media is about developing a business intelligence strategy. Your people in your market are having conversations every day. These conversations can provide valuable insights. If you get it right, it can be like running a never ending focus group. But, much like real life, it’s important to know ‘how’ to listen.

Before the communication revolution ushered in by platforms like Twitter and Facebook, companies were very much in control of the messages surrounding their brand. Marketing was a one way street where the brand developed a strategy and told the customer what to think. Customer service was relegated to call centres and market research happened behind closed doors with small focus groups. All of that has now changed. Customers now have more power to voice an opinion than they ever have had, and they are wielding that power ever more rapidly and with greater impact. Ignore this development at your brand’s peril.

The reality is that people are not always going to be happy with your brand. They will occasionally complain. And they will do it publicly. You can try to persuade yourself that if you do not get involved in social media then it won’t happen. But you’d be wrong because it will. Ignoring it just means that you won’t be able to do anything about it, and that may do irreversible damage to your brand.

The good news is if you recognise and respect the relationship you have with your customers, social media can be a very powerful tool. Your customers deserve to be valued and heard. Work out how to do this well, and do it out in the open, and your reputation will grow. People can accept mistakes. It’s how you handle them that determines whether the outcome is disaster or an opportunity.

Being open and honest is healthy for a brand. It tells your market “we can be trusted” – and trust is what your customers are looking for. All it takes is a bit of planning. Develop a strategy. Know what you are trying to achieve, who you are going to be talking to and how you are going to handle difficult situations. Make sure that staff who are involved in the “customer conversation” are all properly trained and on board. If you need help at the planning stage then go and get it. This is a strategic exercise that will enhance and possibly determine your competitive advantage. Getting it right from the outset will save you a lot of time and expense.

So don’t be afraid of negative comments. Embrace them. They are part of the texture of the marketplace you compete in. You cannot control social media any more than you can people’s thoughts. But you can manage it by being involved.

In the world of social media it is safer to step into the light than hide in the shadows.

One of the business staples that is undergoing a transformation, and one that lends itself to the two way nature of social media, is customer service. Large and small companies alike are experimenting with innovative ways to use use social media to connect with customers to get feedback and provide pre and post sales service – all the while collecting valuable information as they do. As may of these tools have very low barriers to entry to set up all companies are essentially on a level playing ground. The only thing dividing one from another is the approach they take, or to put it another way, how much time they have spent on developing a strategy.

One stand out is the Best Buy in America which sells technology and entertainment products. They have developed a distributed system using Twitter. It works like this: A member of the public send in a question like “What is the best 3D TV?” or “Which headphones have the best bass?” and a team of Best Buys employees, known as the Twelp Force (a combination of Twitter and Help) respond with expert advice. What’s more they are actively searching Twitter for questions about the products they sell – even if they are not directed at Best Buy. The brilliant thing about this is that they have had the insight that customer service and customer acquisition are one in the same. To find out more click here.

There are many other cases of companies using Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms well for customer service. Take a look at what the big Australian banks are up to for example. There are also many examples of companies that are not doing it well. The difference between success and failure, as with most projects, is management buy in and a well developed and focused plan.

A big part of any social media customer service plan needs to be around measurement. Thankfully sentiment is reasonably straight forward to measure in the social media space so building a realistic set of goals for the team on the front lines can be quick to implement and simple to evaluate.

Whether your company is a major brand or you are a sole trader, customer service is a vital component of continued growth. Constantly fielding the same questions on the phone can be a drain on resources. So it make sense to direct a significant portion of customer service enquiries towards a public social media space. In doing so your customers may be able to find what they are looking for before they have to ask.

Most importantly, taking this approach shows that your company puts a high value customers as people. Just spend a bit of time thinking about how you will do it.

History

To gain an understanding of how the digital landscape is changing for Australian sport we first need to consider some of the history. Not so long ago, when a sporting organisation wanted to develop systems for managing memberships, communication with members and fans, manage websites and organise sporting competitions, there was not a lot of choice available to them. The organisation’s needs were ‘unique’, so the only option was to find a technology partner and build a bespoke platform.

This worked well, for a time. However, this approach frequently meant the sporting organisation had to go back to the same technology partner to improve and update the ‘technology platform’. As these systems became more complicated, the technology vendor would often end up working on functionality that was far removed from their area of developmental expertise.

This cycle of request and response is a common in the technology space, but it can cause difficulties. Spreading development resources too thinly, and tying the sporting organisation in a bilateral relationship are both almost inevitable outcomes from this type of arrangement.

Being Data Centric

In recent years the technical landscape for such organistions has undergone a significant and fundamental shift. The emergence and growth of online applications (‘Software as a Service’) and cloud based infrastructure means that it has become much easier to find highly specialised, independent providers and products that can talk to each other via APIs (Application Programming Interface).  Specialised marketing, event planning, membership management, finance, mobile applications, results tracking and video distribution are now all available using this approach.

This development is having such a profound effect on what is possible, that the platforms themselves are becoming less important, allowing the data to become the centre of the organisation’s universe. Exactly how it should be.

This is good news. The data that a sporting organisation can generate about its members and marketplace is now its most valuable asset. As quality data is collected, there is a greater opportunity to generate value for the sporting community — players, teams, fans and sponsors.

Segmentation

One of the most obvious benefits of developing this ‘data centric’ approach — an approach that acknowledges the value of data in all its forms, even when the methods of understanding it have not yet been developed — is that it makes segmentation far easier. The more accurately audience segments can be identified, the more personalised the communication can be. This in turn makes any communication effort far more effective.

Sponsorship value

The impact of a data centric approach is ultimately about providing value to the sponsors. Sponsors are now looking for a high level of interaction with their market. As the world of digital communication becomes increasingly sophisticated, sponsors of sporting organisations are wanting to communicate as effectively as possible, with increasingly smaller sub-groups. It is no longer enough to be simply talking to all of the members en-mass. Sponsors are looking for intelligence driven marketing, with high engagement and response rates from their market.

It’s important to also realise that there is value in this more finely tuned marketing for the entire sporting community. If the sporting organisation is providing data that enables superior targeting and higher success rates, sponsors will very quickly experience better returns on their investment. In turn, they will be incentivised to increase the value and length of their sponsorship funding – allowing the sporting organisation to do more for the community.

Social media’s increased value

One of the key areas that will be driving this growth in coming years will be social media. Not only does the social web deliver a way of communicating instantly and directly with a sporting organisation’s market place, it can also provide the data to make those messages as effective as possible. Brand communication through social media is in its infancy, but 2011 will see it mature at an astonishing rate. The organisations that take advantage of this shift will be positioning themselves for success in the future.

Capitalising on this shift will require sporting bodies to become just as ‘social’ focussed as they have been ‘communication’ focussed. They will need to break down traditional marketing models based on speaking to your audience, and embrace a more conversational approach to how they engage with their community.

Teamwork is the future

In order to realise this bright new future, sporting organisations  may need to discover ways to collaborate with each other. Most sporting organisations are facing enterprise scale audiences, armed with entry level budgets. Through collaboration and data sharing, the smaller organisations will be able to pool their resources and gain access to the tools necessary to take this leap forward, and become sophisticated digital communicators.

The strategy we developed for Netball Australia was a the first phase in a new and exciting phase for the sport. It showed that the digital space is currently more active than it has ever been. Sporting organisations have what most brands would kill for – a passionate and enthusiastic base of fans who are falling over themselves to share their opinions and information. There may be a steep learning curve to navigate this new landscape, but the future has never looked brighter.

Social media has really made it’s mark on 2010. Twitter and Facebook seem to be in the headlines almost every day, Hollywood is even making a movie about Facebook, and it seems as if every company is now looking to social media to help propel themselves beyond the aftermath of the GFC. But there is still a lot of confusion about what social media actually is and where the threats and opportunities lie.

In this article I take a close look at the social media landscape, describe some of the “platforms”, examine how these are changing the market place and outline a strategic framework for deploying social media as a branding, marketing, PR and intelligence tool.

What is social media really?

The big social media brands are YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn but they are just that – brands, and like any brand they are designed to cater to a certain niche to meet a specific need.

As with any successful product or service the people behind these brands spotted a market need and developed a solution to it. They then had to work out how to generate revenue. Because social media is able to generate a huge amount of data about each user (age, gender, place of work, where they live, things they like, people they know and so on) the most obvious choice was to provide highly targeted advertising. Facebook is the brand that has managed to do this most successfully so far. But it is still early days – and Google is yet to weigh in seriously.

The market leaders do not define the market.

Social media is the convergence of technology and the desire people have to be heard and connected. In an age where people are feeling increasingly isolated, social media has managed to connect people with old friends, complete strangers and interest groups – or said another way connect people to the “market segments” they wish to belong to. This has happened in a way no other technology has been able to do.

We humans are essentially tribal animals and social media has allowed us to gather into these new ‘location free tribes’ incredibly fast. What’s more, the users of social media like it and want more.

The march of social media is now unstoppable. There have been times this year where the amount of time spent on Facebook eclipsed the time spent on Google. This competition is only going to intensify. Facebook recently released some new tools to extend its reach and influence over the whole of the web. Recently rumours around a new service called GoogleMe have started to surface.

Social media is now becoming more than a marketing experiment. By the end of the year the majority of big name companies will be looking at how social media can be directly integrated into their brand strategy. It will be the core of any new digital strategy.

Why has it happened?

Networking and collaboration is fundamental to what it means to be human. In our bodies atoms work together to create cells and cells work together to create our organs. In our brains’ neurons work together to create our thoughts, feelings and language. In your company people are working together in a similar way – to create something bigger and more exciting than the sum of it’s parts.

We can take this thinking and look at the development of the personal computer and see a very distinct pattern emerging.

Before anyone had a computer or a smart phone, everything was a social event. Meetings were face-to-face or over the phone. Communication in general was human-to-human based.

In the last 30 years things changed. Initially the personal computer made everything a private and secluded affair. Games, for example, could be played without the help of another human and work could be carried out sitting in front of a screen. The advent of the early internet exposed the power of a computer network. But from a personal perspective ‘computing’ was an insular activity.

The first social networks, forums and blogs worked with a huge number of anonymous users. While this was a step forward in person-to-person networking, the anonymity allowed people to behave in ways they would never dream of in real life. This constrained many of these networks to the domain of early adopters and special interest groups. The ‘rules’ that govern effective social networks were yet to be developed.

What has happened recently, particularly with Facebook, is that it’s become far easier to transport your real identity around the web. This means that increasingly people are joining new social networks with their ‘real identity’ – their real name, their place of work, and other details that define them as a person in a movement (sometimes referred to as the ‘Open Web’). Naturally this makes people think more carefully about what they say and how they behave on social networks.  Because they ‘own’ their comments the common rules of society come into play. When a person’s reputation is attached to what they say it makes them think carefully about what that comment might mean to others.

Of course people can still misbehave in social networks as they can in real world networks. But the networks are now being governed by majority rule so this behaviour is quickly dealt with. This makes cooperation and collaboration much easier. Because of this the barriers to entry are dropping at an astronomical rate. Companies are starting to feel more secure in setting up their own networks, knowing that the majority of users will join to get value out of the information that is provided and quickly deal with other users who lessen the overall value of that network.

So when thinking about why social media has become so widely adopted, and pondering where it is going, avoid getting distracted by in the leaps in technology. These are important of course but it is the behaviour of the network and the development of new social norms that are really driving the progress. Every individual in this massive network is doing what he or she is preprogrammed to do – communicate, collaborate and continue the march of civilisation’s evolution.

The New Web

The age of the “website” as we have known it is coming to an end. People may still go to your site but they expect information to be tailored for them and available on the social media platform of their choosing and on any device that connects to the web. What’s more they expect to be able to comment on almost everything they see. The web is no longer a digital version of print. It is the space where conversation is facilitated. Websites are becoming applications that feed information out to various social based platforms. This allows people to receive and consume information the way they choose.

The more you can utilise your social media presence and leverage the influencers in your network the better. It is even possible to embed e-commerce and other web based applications directly into Facebook. Most brands need to start thinking about their websites as a database that organises and distributes information and features to specific groups within the world of social media.

Owning the data

One way to think about the forces driving the development of social media is the old saying: “knowledge is power”. To that you need add a more recent motto “and the person with the most data wins”. Each social media brand-name earns its money from collecting and analysing data. And they are not too keen on sharing that information.

Obviously there’s a huge amount of data that brands can obtain from the many social media monitoring tools currently available. But if you really want ‘granular’ information about your brand you need to devise ways to generate and own your own data. If you are used to thinking about campaigns and short term goals this might feel difficult. If you take a longer term view however, it is possible to generate massive amounts of data relevant and specific to your brand, your product category and your competition.

It’s the economy, stupid

During the 1992 presidential campaign in the USA, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist coined the phrase “…it’s the economy, stupid…”. He did this to make the case that Clinton was a better choice for president because president George H. W. Bush had not successfully addressed the economy, which had recently undergone a recession. Clinton, of course, won that election.

Nearly twenty years later the world is emerging from a period of economic turmoil that has forever reshaped important elements of the market place. One of the most significant changes is the movement of social media into the mainstream. This is far from surprising. Challenging economic times always induce consumers to carefully assess how they spend. Being a member of a community where you trust the recommendations of people who are real consumers is an obvious choice. Technology has allowed this to happen in a measurable way and on a global scale.

We are now in a time where the phrase “it’s the social economy, stupid” could well become a catch phrase for companies rather than voters. Those that ignore the opportunities social networks provide may well be putting themselves at a distinct disadvantage.

Fractured or identifiable markets

There has been a lot of talk about how social media is fracturing markets. This is a myth.

Social media doesn’t ‘create’ new markets and market segments. It just identifies them. The interest groups and needs already existed – we just didn’t know enough about them.

The mountain of data that social media produces can now shed light on who these people are, and what they like. We now have clearly identifiable and serviceable markets.

Of course this has created an additional layer of complexity. But utilising tools to listen to, and more importantly, understand these market segments gives you an opportunity to talk to them in their own language and hear what they have to say. You might say this technology can help you treat your customers like humans – something that most forms of marketing and communication have not been good at thus far.

Defining value

A recent survey of the social media activity of major brands, including Nokia, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola and Red Bull, showed that some brands are engaging well with their Facebook fans. The people who have voluntarily decided to follow what these brands have to say tend to spend significantly more than non-fans – sometimes more than twice as much. Further, fans were more loyal and 68% were inclined to recommend the product to their peers. Nike was able to put a value of $209.83 on each Facebook fan – even though some fans spend nothing at all.

It could be argued that these fans would be loyal brand advocates anyway. But even so social media has given them a convenient platform to stay engaged and and share their views and preferences with others.

Starting a social media strategy

With this background we are now equipped to discuss how to form a social media strategy. Before we start a couple of principles need to be highlighted. First there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to strategy. Secondly it’s worth taking time to get a strategy right.

Many companies have been adopting an approach to social media based on an assumption that it is ‘free’. They have set up accounts and hoped it will work. It won’t. Hope is not a strategy, and social media takes time to get right – so it can’t be free.

So let’s walk through the basic steps…

Define your goal

A brand needs to first define it’s goal. Social media can be used for customer service, customer acquisition, brand awareness or public relations. But trying to do everything will produce unfocused results. Understanding what stage your company is at and setting goals to propel communications to your desired stakeholders is the first step.

Listen to gain context

Once you have defined your goal you need to measure what is already happening. Before meaningful KPIs can be set it helps to know what measurement tools are available and the quality of the data they generate. These tools can be categorised into three groups.

Site analytics – One of the most important tools you will need to utilise is website analytics – tools that measure the activity on your website. Google analytics is an extremely good free option but there are many others depending on what it is you are actually trying to do. Make sure you do your research get advice and know what option is right for you.

Social media monitoring – There are a number of ways to monitor what is happening in the social media space. Who is talking to who, who is influential and why the conversations are happening. There are free tools available but some of these lack precision as the technology is not constantly upgraded or not enough effort is put into collecting the data. A well developed tool is worth the investment. Good monitoring tools can give you extremely detailed information – what people are saying about your brand, who is saying it, details of the demographics of your social media following and even what people are saying about your competition. The right data allows you to snare the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Data mining tools – To dig deeper into data it may be necessary to employ more advanced tools. You may need ‘text mining’ to get an overview of what words or themes seem to be surrounding your brand online or ‘geo-locating’ comments to identify potential new markets.

Good choices require knowledge of what type of data is available, and how to best get your hands on it.

Choose your communication platforms

Platforms then need to be chosen. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are a few of the big ones but there are many more. Each is focused on a different demographic. There is also the possibility of creating your own platform to fulfil a need that may only exist for your market

Set KPIs

Once you know your goal, have chosen the tools you will use to measure it and the platforms through which you will focus your communications you are ready to set your KPIs. There are many ways of doing this. One of the most effective is aiming to ‘increase positive sentiment’ – basically getting more people on side.

Define a voice

Finally you need to create a ‘voice’. A tone for how you will communicate. Will you be informative, humorous or serious? What language will your market respond to?  Making the correct choice and implementing well is important. Get this right and your market will follow.

Get good advice

Ultimately a good social media strategy needs good advice. So make sure you talk to people who know this space well.

Looking to the future

Social media is here to stay. These methods of communicating have become embedded in our technologies and culture. Companies will soon be interacting with a generation that will find it impossible to imagine a time where the individual didn’t have a voice and an ability to exert influence.

This gives those companies a huge opportunity to be involved in conversations about their brands and to learn and respond to the views and preferences of their customers.

We are moving into the age of the ‘people organised web’ – information organised by people, for people and recommended by people in your network. We have moved beyond the ‘industrialised’ view of the world where markets are represented by impersonal statistics. Markets are made of individuals and they demand to be treated as such.

This is the beginning of the next great step in the evolution of human civilisation. It’s happening. Time to get on board and be part of that evolution.

I recently read an article in this magazine written by Mark Ritson titled “The Emporer’s New Tweets”. In essence the article argued that Twitter was a waste of time. It made some interesting points but it’s logic was flawed. To make a coherent comment on Twitter as a marketing tool, or for that matter any social network, you need a deep understanding of social media strategy and the technology behind it and that wasn’t displayed in the article. So let’s explore…

First the facts. Ritson asserted that Twitter’s brand is in decline because it has been losing visitors to its site. Indeed the Twitter site has been losing visitors. But that’s because increasingly more account holders access Twitter through mobile devices. It’s worth remembering that Twitter was originally intended to be a service that could be updated via SMS, hence the 140 character limit. So an increase in mobile users is actually a sign of the platform maturing and succeeding.

Twitter is a “micro blogging” service and it has gone through the same sort of evolution as full scale blogs. People create accounts, then realise that there is commitment involved. So some accounts become inactive but the users with a strategy and commitment use it to their advantage.

So while traffic to the Twitter site is declining the actual usage of Twitter is rising. In fact, one of the biggest issues Twitter is facing is keeping up with demand. The World Cup has caused so much Twitter traffic that the service has been near collapse from the pressure.

The article also critisised Twitter’s 140 character limit. That misses the point. Twitter is used as an information stream. Each tweet can link to pages, videos and images – all with as much content as is necessary to get an idea across. It’s like picking up the paper and scanning the headlines for stories you may be interested in.

Next let’s look at the companies that the article highlighted. Ritson was right. Some of these companies seem to be wasting their time. But not because the platform has no value. Rather it’s their strategies that are failing. The article focused almost exclusively on the number of followers these brands have. Wrong call. Social media engagement is about creating brand evangelists – or true believers. Australian’s are some of the highest consumers of social media in the world, in both ‘per capita’ and in ‘time spent’ terms, so any social media strategy needs to address that fact.

CBA and Telstra are currently doing a pretty good job on Twitter. They simply need to develop recruitment strategies, and learn to stay focused. They started by just pushing out messages but now are engaging with customers directly. The engagement is good. Sticking with it and making their customers feel heard should become most important part of their strategy. They may also want to think about relevant messages that are worthy of being passed on – environmental, social or charitable work they doing for example. This type of information creates discussion in the social web.

The big challenge these two brands are facing is defining how Twitter fits into a wider social media strategy. Twitter seems to be a bit isolated. Telstra for example has over 14,000 fans on Facebook. How are these two platforms working together?

Rio Tinto, on the other hand, seem to be completely oblivious to how the social web operates. The messages they post have no coherency and seem to be random at best. The brand has a lot of information that members of the public would be interested in. They simply need a way of engaging and communicating that makes sense. They also need to focus on getting influential followers to ensure the right information gets in front of the right people.

Ford in Australia has a lot to learn from it’s American parent. The engagement that Ford has created in the US is regarded as a social media case study. They create activity across the whole social web, and each platform – Blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook – work together. Visit http://bit.ly/GwZUa to read more. What is obvious is that Ford USA are employing social media monitoring tools.

What then does a good social media strategy look like?

Social media, if used correctly, can be the biggest and most honest focus group imaginable. So you need to start a strategy by listening. There are many ways to do this. Companies need to focus, not only on what people are saying about their brands, but also what is being said about their competition. Indeed their entire industry. Listening is a very important step because it provides context. Understanding how your market is communicating is important if you are going to engage with it.

At the Gatorade headquarters in Chicago staff are taking this strategy all the way. In the middle of the marketing department sits a room called Mission Control. The room is filled with screens showing social media data visualisations so the marketing team can always make informed strategic decisions. This data is feed into every element of their marketing strategy – online and offline. They understand the importance of monitoring and facilitating conversations.

Once it is actively listening a brand needs to define it’s goal. Social media can be used for customer service, customer acquisition, brand awareness or public relations. But trying to do everything at once will produce unfocused results.

Next the platforms then need to be carefully chosen. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are a few of the big ones. But there are many more, each focused on a different demographic. There is also the possibility of creating a platform that fulfils a need that may only exist for your market.

Establishing performance measures and KPIs is an important step of any social media strategy. There are many ways to do this. One of the most effective measures is the increase in positive sentiment – basically getting more people on side.

Finally your social media strategy needs to create a voice. A tone for how you will communicate. Get this right and your market will follow.

Towards the end of his article Ritson suggests that marketers are ‘fickle’ and social media is comparable to “the emperor’s new clothes”. I disagree. Smart marketers now realise that their customers no longer trust conventional techniques. They want to be heard. Social media makes this possible and it provided measurable results compared to some of the fuzzy numbers that other forms of marketing produce.

The closing sentiment in Ritson’s article was spot on – we should take note and take action. Treat your market with the respect it deserves and customers and other stakeholders will listen. That’s what a social media strategy does.

Are you using social media to push your companies message, gain a thought leadership position or generate new product ideas? If the answer is yes then that’s great, consider yourself ahead of the curve. But if you are now wondering how to measure the effectiveness of your activity or if you have spotted that a lot of information is slipping through the cracks then it may be time to be rethinking your strategy.

know what you want

The first priority is to define a goal. That goal may be as simple as ‘generate new leads’, or you may want to manage your brand reputation, segment your market place to communicate with them more effectively, or generate long term customer loyalty by forming an effective customer service channel. Think carefully about what stage your business is at and what goal is most important. Remember effectively utilising social media takes time so it is not possible to do everything. Focus on one goal, and then set a realistic timeframe.

Know your tools

Once you have defined your goal you need to measure what is happening. Before meaningful KPIs can be set it helps to know how to define the metrics. The way to do this is understand the tools that do the measuring. They can be categorised into three groups:

Site analytics – One of the most important tools you, or your supplier, will need to utilise is site analytics. Google analytics is an extremely good free option but there are many others depending on what it is you are actually trying to do. Make sure you do your research and know what option is right for you.

Social media monitoring – There are a number of ways to monitor what is happening in the social media space. There are some free tools available but some of these lack precision as the technology is not constantly invested in or not enough effort is put into collecting the data. A well developed tool is worth the investment. Good monitoring tools can give you extremely detailed information – what people are saying about your brand, who is saying it, details of the demographics of your social media following and even what people are saying about your competition. The right data allows you to snare the ‘low hanging fruit’.

Data mining tools – To dig deeper into data it may be necessary to employ more advanced tools. You may need ‘text mining’ to get an overview of what words or themes seem to be surrounding your brand or ‘geo-locating’ comments to identify potential new markets may be essential.

Good choices require your knowing what type of data is available and how to best get your hands on it.

Choose your platforms

There are thousands of social media platforms operating in the market place. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are three of the best known ones but there are many many others. These social media platforms are brands designed like any other to meet a specific need. What matters then is finding out what your customer needs are, then choosing the platforms that fit them best.

It is also well worth remembering that social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn make their money through targeted advertising. This means that their most valuable asset is the users’ data – what they like, who they talk to, what stage they are at in life and so on. While this may make your advertising on these platforms cost effective it may also mean that you have limited access to the raw data.

If your market is big enough you may need to set up your own social network so you can ‘own’ the data and use it to define new products, segment your market and really understand what people are talking about. There are many ways to approach this, from blogs and forums to fully fledged social platforms with user profiles and interest groups. Don’t get caught up in the technology, it’s your customers needs that are important.

Get going

Of course you will need to define how KPIs are going to be set, who is going to be managing the communities and how your reports are presented. But knowing what data is available and how to read it is vitally important. In some cases just collecting the data and really understanding your customers may be a goal the is adequate enough.

Your customers are openly discussing their likes and dislikes, what they saw on TV and what they think of the news. There is also a good chance they are talking about you. If you want to get on the front foot and respond to that then get moving – start to collect data and make decisions based on what it is telling you.

If knowledge is power then data is it’s generator.