Is Your Company Social?
Michael Weisfeld

Social Media --> Assessing where your company is, and how to get involved and be successful. Does it fit with your customers?

93% of Americans expect companies to have a presence in social media. Does yours?

No more one-way communication, needs to be two-way.
Needs to be integrated with all of your other touch points and your overall marketing plan.
Same marketing objectives, SM doesn't change them. New tactics.

Outcomes change -- explorations, blog topics, discussions, reviews, comments, questions.

Needs to be a triangle of communication -- you at the top, with your customers below helping each other to share information, help each other, and can always give you feedback directly and ask questions.

STEPS:

Review biz goals, what are your marketing goals, CRM initiatives

Know your audience, web-survey on your site, ask where they're interacting online, where are the best communities for them, ask them, and ask them about your brand/feelings, identify the most active users of these services, pin down commonly used keywords and topics.

Competitive assessment, are any of them out there, and what are they doing? Is it time to be the first to jump in and capture the market in this space? Create the first social network for librarians before anyone else does and make it the best.

Analyze trends and patterns, is it seasonal? Where are they participating and when?

Identify topics to talk about, is there content in service logs from customer service, FAQs, recommendations, Twitter posts, blog posts, etc.

Use all of the above to begin planning and how to roll things out.

The success of a social media program will rely on your efforts to humanize the approach with lively, passionate, tactful individuals.

Apply clear strategies and objectives, support your brand values at the core, and allow it to shine through with how you build your network. The team you pick should be extroverted to make your network -- need to be passionate about research and the ProQuest brand. Want to be on the team and be an active voice in the new community.

Need an executive at the top level who's behind the idea and will support it, an internal community manager to establish a vision, and a team of content contributors (customer service) who can be community moderators and keep things moving and active.

Planning every element of the rollout is key. Need to train your internal members on how to act/make things work in your network.

Other planning slides here, refresh from last year, along the same lines.

Active Listening is the key to start. Be sure you have a plan for what you want your users to be doing on your network. Channel them to the activities, pages, functions, tools you want them to use.

Success? Must measure it and monitor it -- quantitative, how many comments/subs/followers/new accounts/videos watched? Qualitative -- corp. reputation, neg/pos ratio, customer opinions and wishes, do they like you more/are they keeping their subs?

Is there business value? Budgets going down make social media look like the pretty girl at the ball... Make short videos that delight audiences and get them interested in your product or service. Will it blend? is an example...

Only 14% of people trust ads -- 32% trust a bloggers opinion on products and services.

KEY DATA:
In 2008, we learned that it's not enough to throw up a page on FaceBook or elsewhere. You need to participate in online communities and have a voice among your customers. There's not one right platform, integrate across platforms and connect to cross promote. Understand that there are different kinds of Internet users/profiles (some are spectators, others will actively engage), and measure metrics like frequency, reach, and satisfaction.

It's all about humanizing your brand. Your company represented as a human, attribute human qualities to, adapt to human nature or use.

There IS business value to being in social media, need to figure out the mix.