Fourth Source

Contributed by Cameron Hulett, Head of Global Marketing and Sales, Acceleration

Although social media is a relatively young medium, evidence of its growth and importance can be seen by the fact that “social media” is now high on almost every marketing department’s priority list. Yet, strangely, it remains its own silo – an experiment that hasn’t been fully integrated into the marketing mix nor leveraged in any way by the other channels in the mix.

Now that organisations are moving beyond the trial stage of social media, senior management is rightly asking questions about its value versus other channels. For marketers to answer this, they have to integrate social media both technically and organisationally, then measure it alongside other channels as well interdependently. Without doing this, marketers are merely implementing social media in order to “keep up with the Joneses”.

It should seem obvious, but a clear roadmap to integrate ‘social’ properly into enterprise marketing is essential. So what does such a roadmap look like? Here is a process that will prove useful to anyone starting out on the social media journey.

Investigate

The best place to start is with an audit. Investigate the social space: what are your competitors saying and doing, what channels are appropriate for your brand in light of your goals, and what technology tools are available to help you market effectively?

Implement and integrate

Once you’ve established which social channels are relevant for your brand to engage with, it is critical to think about the technology that you will use to help you manage multiple communications across these channels.

This is where the challenge lies for marketers. Once you are certain about where you want to communicate, what do you look for in a technology tool (free or paid-for) to help you achieve your goals?

There are a few factors that come into play which need to be considered. Establish what type of tool you need to help you communicate across the channels you are trying to manage: – a social listening, promotion or publishing platform? It is also worth evaluating how it integrates with other existing marketing technologies that you are using, and finding out what kind of reporting it provides. This is critical because the data it is providing about conversations with people enables you to alter your communications and customer segmentation appropriately, or aid with product development.

Another vital part of selecting the right tool lies in defining KPIs (e.g. frequency of mentions, the state of sentiment allocation, traffic, reach or size of connections (friends, followers, fans, etc.)) that are used to measure campaign effectiveness by the technology vendor, but which have been married with the demands of the business. By working with your technology vendor you should be able to help set suitable metrics that enable you to measure the success of engagement and sales through this channel. Select these wisely. They point you to future success.

Listen and measure

After you’ve established the goals, channels and technology you will use to communicate through, you are ready to start listening across the multiple social channels you’ve selected. Typically you listen to what your competitors are saying and what your ideal community (target demographic) is interested in.

Engage and publish

Once you are comfortable with listening and have a good handle on what is being said, you are ready to start participating. Join relevant conversations, respond to and improve content, define future engagements and document who you want to communicate with. And don’t forget to humanise communications! Robots don’t socialize.

Initially you will most likely engage reactively based on existing dialogue, and maybe incorporate the proactive broadcasting of activities, events and announcements from within your organisation. Over time, you will learn that exchange is based on trust and loyalty, which is key to moving social media forward.

To engage effectively, you will also need to develop the social profiles of your audience. This again emphasises the importance of data and analysis, and reiterates how essential it is to integrate social into your overall marketing strategy.

Define a sense of purpose

Engaging is nice. But this next step helps you add value, which is far better. By showing understanding and integrating a sense of purpose into your social media programmes, you humanise the brand and define the experience.

Once you truly understand the people who influence your markets (through listening), you need to establish a persona worthy of attention and affinity. Therefore a social version of a branding communication style guide needs to be developed. This enables you to direct the communication and help you to shape perceptions.

This step gives a new sense of purpose which typically induces a brand makeover. As your audience goes from a vibrant social environment to your “static” website, you might also realise change is needed.

Promote

This stage typically centres on specific social marketing campaigns or desired outcomes – so, using social media as part of an integrated offline and/or online campaign. Use this as a vehicle to support any other marketing communications taking place within the organisation. And it’s at this stage that technical integration also becomes key and needs to be considered.

Build a community

Community isn’t established with the creation of a social profile, but earned and fortified through shared experiences.

You need to reach out to ideal participants and potential ambassadors, who build the roads necessary to lead customers to a rich and rewarding network, filled with valuable information and connections.

Using social media to evolve internally

To complete the integration of social media, you need to adapt and improve your products, services and policies based on the input from social media. This is easier said than done, as you might find IT and marketing departments still battling to work with each other, let alone a new social media team.

This step requires senior level involvement, governance and accountability. The internal reorganisation of teams and processes to support a formal Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM) programme will also become a future imperative.

Conclusion

Social media is here to stay. It is a powerful data-rich medium if used correctly. It’s just a question of how you effectively manage and integrate it into your business from an organisational and technological perspective that helps determine the true value it can bring. Start prepared and enjoy the journey.