Praise for Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement

 Praise for Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagementhttps://storysbook0786.blogspot.com/

“Social media has become a primary tool for higher levels of fan engagement, directly driving lead generation through interaction and content sharing that is especially relevant to media companies. Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement deconstructs the tools and techniques, showing you how  to apply social technology to your business.”

—Johni Fisher, CEO, Looppa, Buenos Aires

 

“Innovation is not a one-way street where you walk alone! Take your customers on the journey, and see the difference. Social technologies, clearly explained in Dave’s book, enable you and your customers to work as a team.”

—Kaushal Sarda, Founder, Uhuroo, Bangalore

 

“Rigorous, measurable quality improvement is critical for getting social media and word-of-mouth working for your business. Dave’s book highlights quality programs that work, and shows you how to implement them in your business.”

—Jeff Turk, CEO, Formaspace, Austin, TX

 

“What’s so appealing about social media is its power to reach not just one consumer at a time, but a huge network of friends through the open graph. Businesses must learn to do this or risk losing their connection with consumers altogether.  Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement shows you how.

—Roger Katz, CEO, Friend2Friend, Palo Alto, CA, and Barcelona

 

“Dave provides a practical approach for leaders who want to harness  the  power  of social media to cost-effectively transform their business  and  catapult  themselves ahead of the competition. At the same time, Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement is extraordinary because it is a fun, genuine, and inspiring resource that sets a new standard for social media insights.”

—Ian Giles, Vice President, Strategic Services, Thindata 1:1, Toronto

 

“Dave takes social media from concepts and theory to concrete, simple steps that make it easy to implement social technology in your business.”

—Marco Roncaglio, Director of Online Marketing, Personal Care, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, Amsterdam

“Purchase decisions are now influenced by complex networks of friends, family, and peers. The new market winners will be the companies that excel at identifying and engaging with their customers’ influencers across the Social Web.”

—Paul May, Founder and CEO, BuzzStream, Austin, TX 

Social Media Marketing

The Next Generation of Business Engagement

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Evans, Dave, 1956–

Social media marketing : the next generation of business engagement / Dave Evans.—1st ed.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-470-63403-5 (paper/website)

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1. Internet marketing. 2. Social media—Marketing. 3. Social marketing. 4. Customer relations. I. Title. HF5415.1265.E927 2010

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Thank you for choosing Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

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Foreword

My phone rings on a sunny January morning.

A friendly voice—the chief content officer from ad:tech, the world’s largest digital marketing conference, has an offer I can’t refuse.

He asks me to run a Marketing Masters double session at the next event to review the state of the industry for social technologies, all current trends and data, and to present case studies and best practices from smart brands—all in two hours.

I say, “Sure!” (I know I have an ace in my pocket.) The ace in my pocket is Dave Evans.

Dave has a “catalogic” perspective of social media. Catalogic is a word I’ve made up to describe Dave. He’s that unique. Catalog + Logic = Dave Evans. He has indexed and organized social technologies and strategic approaches. He has dissected exactly how to measure this world, from ROI to KPIs to quantifying the Intangible Value of social mar- keting. His experience working with brands and at an enterprise level to integrate social strategies results in straightforward, no-fluff processes you can use to get your social busi- ness plans confidently organized.

With the help of speakers from Toyota, Levi’s, and New Belgium Brewing, and especially from Dave, we satisfied the hundreds of eager social strategy seekers in the audience at ad:tech that day.

Think about this social networking phenomenon as a big, black stallion that used to be owned by marketing. Now it’s kicked down the fence—and HR, Ops, Customer Care, and the CEO are out there in the field, all trying to get Social Stallion back in the marketing paddock.

Social Stallion ain’t gonna go back: Instead it’s taking over your entire business.

The Internet and search engines have fundamentally altered biz ops, and now social networking is the next gale force to blow us forward. As football moms in Australia and tribal chiefs in Tanzania get on Facebook, or one of hundreds of thousands of other niche social networks, and bring their opinions and their contacts with them, the way we con- nect with customers hits a whole new dimension of complexity, yes, but more importantly, opportunity.

Social media marketing seeks to engage customers where they naturally spend their time. As Dave says in this book, “Social business picks up on what customers are talking about and connects this back into business where it can be processed to create the next round of customer experiences and hence, the next round of customer conversations.”

Yet social business goes beyond listening to your socially distributed customer feed- back loop that’s spread across Twitter, a zillion blog posts and social network profiles.

There’s a larger change afoot, the concept of applying social technologies to your whole business.

No more sweeping consumer’s problems under the rug in your Customer Care department—active social listening, understanding consumer sentiment, and having a social policy are baseline smart business practices in the twenty-first century. This book will teach you how to create internal applications with social technologies so you can trans- form customer insights (and complaints) into useful ideas and practical business processes.

That’s “social business.”

Suddenly, by using social platforms internally, Ops, HR, Customer Care, the CEO, and Product Development are networking cross-organizationally, and vendors and customers are an integral part of your business conversations. Now business deci- sions take into account customer intelligence to generate customer-driven and collab- oratively designed products that are simply more successful and profitable.

This book will reveal to you the tools, platforms, and technologies to operational- ize and capture collaborative activities. That’s the whole notion of social business. Simply put, use social platforms internally and with vendors and customers to listen, collaborate, and then measure the effectiveness for growing revenue, cutting costs, or both.

Dave says, “The Social Web is, in a sense, the great equalizer between large brands with big budgets and small brands that simply “do it better.” No matter what your size, social business tools are affordable and mandatory to stay competitive in today’s global market.

You are the Social Stallion, kicking down the walls in your organization, the walls between you and your vendors, the walls separating you from your customers. It’s time to do the internal schmoozing and get the buy-in to rework the very way you do business. It’s up to you. You have chosen to read this book. You have nominated yourself to be the social business vanguard. It’s an imperative.

There’s bigger work to be done here. It’s not just about kicking down the walls around our own organizations, it’s about creating social technologies that unite busi- ness and people to light the way for the challenges ahead of us.

We must become skillful with these social platforms so we can leverage our col- lective global input, to create better solutions for humanity. People need access to infor- mation, water, medicine, and sources of income. Camfed, oDesk, Kiva.org, and Care2 are philanthropic organizations making tremendous headway because of their use of social business technologies. Make your business a social business, and then apply your talent and experience to humanitarianism.

Start to work on things that matter.

Ring…Ring…

It’s for you.

It’s Social Stallion saying, “Let’s go kick down a few walls.”

 

—Susan Bratton

CEO, Personal Life Media, Inc.

Introduction

“If you have questions, go to the store. Your customers have the answers.”

Sam Walton, founder, Walmart

 

The challenges facing global businesses and the people who lead them are now, more than ever, intertwined in the direct empowerment and involvement of customers and stakeholders. The World Wide Web— described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as “an interactive sea of shared knowledge…made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out”—has dramatically accelerated the shift to consumer-driven markets. For millennia, power has rested with those resources: first with land, then capital, and most recently, information. In a socially connected marketplace, shared knowledge is now emerg- ing as the ultimate resource. Information wants to be free, and in these new markets it is: free of constraints on place, free of control on con- tent, and free of restrictive access on consumption.

Social technologies, on a mass scale, connect people in ways that facilitate sharing information, thereby reducing the opportunities for marketplace exploitation—whether by charging more than a competing supplier for otherwise identical goods and services or charging anything at all for products that simply don’t work. Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant, and the collective knowledge that powers the Social Web is the sunlight that shines in these new connected marketplaces. The Social Web dramatically levels the play- ing field by making information plentiful, just as it also levels businesses and organiza- tions that operate on the principles of making information scarce.

The Social Web exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly, simultaneously raising up what works and putting down what doesn’t without regard for the interests of any specific party. Web 2.0 technologies—expressed through social CRM, vendor relationship man- agement, collective ideation, customer-driven support forums, and communities where participants engage in all forms of social discourse—act together to equalize the market positions of suppliers, manufacturers, business and organizational leaders, customers and stakeholders. To again quote Sir Tim Berners-Lee, “If misunderstandings are the cause

of many of the world’s woes, then (we can) work them out in cyberspace. And, having worked them out, we leave for those who follow a trail of our reasoning and assumptions for them to adopt, or correct.”

So whether supporting Unilever, P&G, and Nestlé, all working with Greenpeace to ensure supplier compliance in the use of sustainable palm oil and thereby reducing environmental damage in no-longer “far away” places like Malaysia, or just making someone’s day run a little more smoothly by preventing a coffee stain through a simple innovation like Starbucks’ “no splash” stirring stick, the businesses and organizations embracing social technologies are delivering better solutions—developed through direct collaboration with customers and stakeholders—to the world’s woes however large or small they may be. Contemporary businesses, cause-based organizations, and governing authorities are increasingly meeting the challenge of “opening up” and operating with their customers and stakeholders—often through a similarly empowered and connected workforce—to deliver self-evident value that gets talked about. For these entities, their customers, suppliers, and stakeholders are the new source of future innovations and

“marketing,” and therefore also the drivers of long-term growth and success. This is what social business is all about.

How to Use This Book

This book has three parts: Taking a tip from one of the reviewers of my prior book, I’ve written this one so that you don’t have to read the whole book! I recognize that you were already busy before you purchased this book, and that the true cost of any social media program—at least at the outset—very much includes the opportunity cost of your time. So, here’s how the book works:

Part I: Social Business Fundamentals

At just over 100 pages, Part I will get you up-to-speed quickly on the primary aspects of social technology and how it applies to business. Its four chapters include plenty of examples and references to experts and thought leaders freely accessible via the Web,

along with a set of “hands-on” exercises that will provide you with a firm grasp of social technology, applied to business.

Part II: Run a Social Business

Part II takes you deeper into the application of social technology to your business or orga- nization, showing you how business decisions are informed through collaborative soft- ware and surrounding processes. Part II provides a starting point for measurement and, like Part I, includes references and pointers that quickly take you further as you develop your specific social business programs and initiatives. Part II concludes with a set of tips and best practices, along with a couple of things not to do—and what to do instead. 

Part III: Social Business Building Blocks

Part III takes social technology as it is applied to business down to its basic elements. More abstract than Parts I and II, Part III includes cases and examples that bring the essential core social concepts to life. Engagement and Customer Advocacy, Social CRM, social objects, and the social graph are all covered (and defined) to give a you a solid understanding of the principles of social business and the use of social technology. Each of the five chapters in Part III presents one key concept, in depth and again with hands-on exercises and additional pointers to online references and thought leaders.

Appendices

Appendix A (key definitions), Appendix B (thought leaders and resources), and Appendix C (hands-on exercises) are applicable to anyone reading this book. They provide a handy way to quickly locate key terms, find thought leaders, and revisit the hands-on exercises presented at the end of each of the individual chapters.

What This Mean

If you read Part I, you’ll understand the basic concepts well enough to participate on a team that is suggesting, planning, or otherwise requesting your involvement in a social business initiative for or within your organization. If that’s you, you can stop at the end of Part I. Of course, you may not want to, but then that’s your choice.

•      If you read Part II, you’ll be informed well enough to question or guide a specific implementation of social business practices. If you are a business or organization executive, or a process leader within one that is championing a social business ini- tiative, you should consider reading at least through Part II, and especially “What Not to Do” in Chapter 7.

•      If you read Part III, you’ll have a solid handle on the underlying concepts along with the resources and pointers to actually plan and implement social technologies. You’ll be prepared to actively participate in the design of social-technology-based solutions for your business or organization. If you are responsible for such an implementation, or if you are planning to undertake a project like this yourself, you should read through Part III.

Above all, enjoy this book. Use it as a starting point and reference as you define

and specify the way in which your firm or organization will adopt social technologies, and to then use them to engage your customers and stakeholders. Social media is the next generation of business engagement.

Figure 1.1 shows the classic purchase funnel, connected to the Social Web through “digital word-of-mouth” (aka social media). This loop—from expectation to trial to rating to sharing the actual experience—is now a part of most every purchase or conversion process. Whether consumer-facing, B2B, for-profit or nonprofit, people are turning to people like themselves for the information they need to make smart choices. These new sources of information are looked to by consumers for guidance alongside traditional media; advertising and traditional communications are still very much a part of the overall marketing mix. The result is a new vetting that is impact- ing—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively—the efforts of businesses and organi- zations to grow their markets.