Some of the BuzzNumbers team are up in the Gold Coast at the AMI’s Marketing for Government conference… all work I promise!
This morning I had the chance to see Lindy Kyzer from the US Army’s social media team. She talked about how they trained army personel on how to use social media, including getting generals to Tweet and how it is a vital tool for both internal and external communication.
Obviously there were questions raised about how you do this without compromising national security but in a simple case of life mirroring the web (who would have thought it??!) the Army just adhere to their policies of how they govern any type of communication. i.e. you don’t talk about stuff which would compromise the army or the safety of your fellow service men.
I guess that rolling out social media across an organisation is nothing new but to do it on such a large scale in quite a staid organisation and get a whole load of generals (think CEO in the commercial world) actively participating is a pretty big achievement.
One of the really neat thisngs they have done is to share content created by their personel through their Facebook and Twitter pages. It allows the army to seem “real” without actually creating the content or putting it out on their main website. This one shows that there is a lighter side to life – even when you are posted in Iraq. Pretty good PR for the Army with over 5.5 million views.
And for those of you who love a good policy this is the document they created to give organisation wide rules of social media use.
Recently I was in San Francisco talking to the CMO of a financial services business. They had been listening to social media for a while and were just getting ready to actively engage with people talking online about their brand. Their challenge was how do you set rules around what to say to who, keep consistent tone and not make posts too personal. After much research they can across this great flow chart. The USAF have been going great guns (pardon the pun) in the SM space and using it not only to promote what they are doing, but also as a support mechanism for families of personnel serving overseas to connect with each other.
We often get asked for recommendations by clients for who to use to develop a strategy which compliments our listening platform. This is always a hard one as there are so many variables around goals, expectations, culture fit, budget etc.
Today I came across a great article with some really useful questions that I thought I’d share…
How will you report on brand mentions? Can you provide a sample report?
How often will we receive a report or will we have access to the reports?
How do you assess which brand mentions require an immediate response and which do not?
How soon will we be notified of brand mentions that need a response and how will we be notified?
What is your approach to responding to mentions, positive or negative?
If you respond, who do you leave a comment as and how do you determine what to say?
If you don’t respond, will you provide us with a template for how to effectively respond to brand mentions?
Do you just monitor existing mentions or will you help us to build new ones?
Reputation Management Questions
What services do you provide as part of an online reputation management campaign?
What is your typical process for handling online reputation management issues?
Can you completely get rid of the negative result(s)?
What responsibilities will your team handle and what will you need us to manage in-house?
Do you write content/press releases/guest posts for us or will we have to hire someone else to do that?
What information/access will you need from us before you get started?
How much information do you need regarding the cause of the ORM issue?
How will you determine if reputation management is successful?
How much time could it take to displace negative search results?
Can you make a 3-month projection of how the search results will look for target phrases?
Social Media Measurement Questions
What social media marketing channels do you have the most expertise in?
Will you work with us to create a social plan/strategy or do you just create the initial presence?
What tools do you use to measure social media metrics? Do you have your own tools or do you use existing ones?
Can you pull archived data with those tools to establish a baseline or are we starting from present day?
How should we define success/conversions?
Can we use our analytics with your tools when reporting on conversions or will we have to switch to something else?
How do you the measure the effectiveness of each social media channel?
How should we define ROI? Do you measure the cost per lead/ cost per acquisition?
What methods will you use to grow the accounts and measure success?
Do you have 3-month projection of what we can expect from this investment?
How long will it take to see results?
Community Questions
Will you help us build satellite communities within social media or focus strictly on our Web site?
How will you help us determine our community influencers? If not, can we keep the list that you’ve created?
Will you reach out to the influencers on our behalf or will we? If it’s on you, how transparent will you be about our relationship with us? How do you keep it authentic?
Will you give us a strategy for how to connect with influencers in a way that doesn’t appear spammy? Small talk makes us nervous, but we want people to know we’re real.
What methods will you use to grow our audience? Will they get us in trouble or turn people off?
How do you measure community ROI? We hear follower numbers are so 2008, but what else is there?
What about the new FTC guidelines for sponsored advertising? How do we know when or what to disclose?
How can integrate our online community with our offline community and into our traditional marketing efforts?
Will you give us any guidelines for how to talk to people and how to be a good social media citizen so we don’t look foolish?
Will you teach us how to sustain what you’ve started? We will be taught how to use the tools, identify people, and essentially do what you did?
The Right Fit Questions ( to ask yourself)
Do their core values match my own?
Are my customers on social media? Do I even need these services?
If I’m the one who will be tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, am I social enough for this?
Am I being offer a social media presence or an outlined strategy?
Do they seem excited to work with me? Am I excited to work with them?
Do they understand our point of difference?
How customized does their strategy feel?
Do they take time to answer our questions and explain rationale or do they seem fearful of going into specifics of what they’re doing?
What does this company’s reputation appear to be in the community? Are they practicing what they preach and tracking/responding to their own mentions?
Do I trust the people behind this company? Do they seem to care about my brand?
How will the strategy they outline complement your larger objectives?
I’m sure there must be more … please feel free to add them in the comments section.
The guys at Vertical Response (a US-based SEO, email marketing, online survey and postcard marketing company) have just put together what they’re calling a social media planning checklist. Inside this list are a whole bunch of ways companies, both big and small, can begin to tighten their focus on how they attack the wide world of social and online media.
Included in their 3-page checklist is information on promoting blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, the importance of LinkedIn and also the importance of EDM. There are some great tips here!
Budget airline Jetstar has announced a “significant shift in marketing spend”, with 40% of its budget to go into social media.
David May, Jetstar’s head of marketing and PR, said the move – which will be implemented during the next financial year – followed trials during 2009.
The move marks bad news for print, with Jetstar a big newspaper advertiser. Jetstar is the first major brand to make such a dramatic shift of marketing spend into social media.
In a special report on social networking in The Economist, the fact that Australians are leading the way in the number of hours people around the world are spending on social networking sites: Since February 2009 they have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. Measured by hours spent on them per social-network user, the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy (see chart 2). Last October Americans spent just under six hours surfing social networks, almost three times as much as in the same month in 2007.
We, like so many others, have joked about Twitter’s non-existent business model and its frothy billion-dollar valuation. Apparently we might have to stop that – at least for now. The San Francisco-based micromessaging company is said to be profitable, according to a report in Bloomberg that quotes someone close to the company. The profitability might be shortlived, however, as Twitter continues on path of hyper-growth.
The company is going to bring in revenue of $25 million, thanks to its search deals with Google and Microsoft. Google is paying the company $15 million a year, while Microsoft is paying it $10 million for access to its real-time data. The company, Bloomberg claims, has operating costs of $20-$25 million a year, which allows it to be slightly profitable for 2009. According to some estimates the company, which has 105 employees, is likely to have revenues of $114-$134 million in 2013, sans profits.
Many companies are starting to make their mark in the social media sphere. Some of them are working with various agencies and specialist social media marketers, while some are deciding to own these objectives internally.
Qantas have just revealed that they are now hiring a senior online communications adviser which has featured on the Mumbrella blog and this raises an important question.
Should companies be owning their social media strategy, or should they be outsourcing to specialist agencies or consultants?
At BuzzNumbers we’re not just about corporate branding, but we also care a lot about personal branding. Keeping your online persona closely managed and in-check with how you want to present yourself is just as important as Qantas doing the exact same thing.
KnowEm is a brand new service on the block that we’ve had a play with and seems to be getting us some great results so far. Check out their latest blog article titled Do-It-Yourself Reputation Management which gives some great tips.
Whether you’re ready to embrace it or not, social media is changing the way we communicate and make decisions. Today’s technology has impacted our daily lives and routines in a big way. If you don’t wake up to Facebook, you probably know someone who does. And good luck trying to escape the world of Twitter – it’s even invaded the nightly news.
