Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Thanks julesandjaid, that was a very interesting study.

I think many more businesses would embrace social media marketing if they knew what "tools" to use for their particular business and industry and how to use the "tools", instead of just being told that they "need to" and if they could clearly see how these tools would monetize their efforts sooner rather than later.

How many people really know how to use Facebook to increase business? But everybody hears that they should be doing it or that they should be developing an app that will open the floodgates of revenue.

Most companies are to busy focusing on how to be successful in other online mediums that they can see provide immediate results like clicks, opens and conversions, as well as trying to still keep some momentum going in the offline world.

To see these same conversions and ROI in SMM is much more difficult.

Too much to do and not enough time to do it.

On the half-full side, all indicators are bright that the adoption is moving forward.

I saw this blurb from eMarketer:"As a result, eMarketer has increased its projection for US ad spending on social networks to $900 million in 2007, from the previous estimate of $865 million. By 2011, US ad spending on social networks is expected to reach $2.5 billion."

I agree with Harry.

Also, I'm not convinced social marketing is for everyone. If your audience doesn't look at blogs and the like, the tool is not right for you. Many B2B audiences in particular are not right for social media.

Objectives come before media selection. You need to figure out what you're trying to say, who you want to say it to, and then how you do that. Social media is a new tool, but the fundamentals of marketing remain the same.

Just because someone used the tools well doesn't mean that the story will go viral. The key was that the story is already in the social media, with lots of people commenting, and looking for the next "thing". It also helped that the distributor of the flyer wasn't selling a product (unless you call a political office a "product"). Generating viral momentum for a topic is much harder.

Good topic!

Media outreach examples are what really convinced me to develop a social media strategy. So far, I haven't been disappointed.

That being said, I see a lot of social media enthusiasts who lose sight of business objectives. Not only do I need to reach out to the media and other constituent groups, I need the team to drive real opportunities. We've not yet figured out how to drive sustainable demand generation programs through social media alone so we need to deploy a number of more traditional techniques as well. (there should be emphasis on sustainable)

As someone who has had the social media idea pitched to me, I can tell you it's a lot more convincing when you can tell me how it's going to help me reach my numbers.

It's not hard for me to make the leap. Again, I'm not that old and I love playing around with new ideas. However, if your management truly is old school you're going to have to try a bit harder to help them make the connection to core business objectives. Explain it to them in their terms, and based on what's important to them, just as you would for a customer of any of your products or services.

Melissa

Hi, I'm the original submitter and writer of this case study, thanks for picking it up.

I wrote this because I wanted to show how fast a viral concept can gain critical mass online (in less than 48 hours). I intentionally touched on a hot topic to promote this story faster, which should be part of a viral strategy (and for the record I tried promoting a lot of different stories before this one hit it big :-)). Either way, your organization should be addressing hot topics as part of an overall strategy to drive traffic to your website. In one of my next blogs I'll talk in further detail about making a social news campaign work, you have to do more than a "hope and wait" strategy with these sites, especially with the thousands of links being submitted each second.

Obviously it is much harder to achieve these types of results when your trying to "sell" something, but I believe that's where the lines get drawn between traditional media and utilizing social media for promotion. You should be utilizing social media to become an information source, an expert in your field, using the knowledge your organization has and promoting that information to become a thought leader in your industry. In an age where people research products online first, then buy, you want to part of that research, contributing your expertise and drawing people back to your site (even if that means you don't talk about your products at all). Example, H&R Block on twitter:

https://twitter.com/hrblock

I agree with Amanda, people WILL be having a conversation about your company and products, you want to make sure your part of the conversation and building trustworthy relationships with the online blogger community.

Hope this helps,

Andrew Sauter