The Social Media Marketing Check List

In my recently published recently published book you will find a chapter on Monitoring of online social presences. The book comes with many checklists to make decision making for top managers quick and easy.

The social media marketing check list includes all the research and all the homework to be made to answer 3 basic questions and to come up with a proper strategy:

• What the heck is going on (online)?
• Where is my target group (online)? In which suspicious corners of the internet do they mingle and talk about my brand???
• How can we target them? (How can we meet them online, how do we start a conversation with them?)
  [Continue reading →]

Monitoring Social Media

The Social Media Handbook for CEOs, CMOs and General Managers offers detailed instructions for the methodical monitoring of
– your brands online presence,
– the presence of your competitor’s brands
– and the activities of your target group.
– [Continue reading →]

Free Monitoring and Measuring Tools for Social Media

Always start out with free tools to measure social media presences and social media marketing results.

Why?

If you are not PepsiCo’s Gatorade and can afford a “social media command center” then find out about the necessary features for your measuring purposes by trying as many free (online) tools as possible. You will definitely be able to gather a lot of data with these tools, but you will also be able to decide what is necessary to satisfy your measuring needs. With this know-how you will be much better equipped to decide on the proper paid measuring tool to buy or subscribe to. Here are two lists: free tools and paid tools.
[Continue reading →]

SMM SMO SEO SEM DAO

SMM = Social Media Marketing
SMO = Social Media Optimization
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
SEM = Search Engine Marketing
DAO = Digital Asset Organization

Social Media Categories and Tools

The content of this post is now part of the
Social Media Marketing Handbook
for CEOs, CMOs and General Managers.

Contents:

• How to come up quickly with a professional social media marketing concept?
• How do you plan social media marketing?
• How can you monitor and measure social media marketing?
• How to formulate a strategy?
• Where to take the content from?
• Was is SMO and SEO? How does seeding really work?
• What can social media marketing really achieve? How to measure it?
• How to integrate social media marketing into the company processes?

← Look inside?

practical handbook with:
– instructions
– checklists
– decision trees
– examples

…or order it now! →

(ISBN 978-3-8442-0453-7)

The book has been written in German language.
The English version is in the works.
Please request a notification as soon as the English version is available.

Understanding Twitter

Please check also

• “8 ways to use Twitter” (protected – please email to receive your password).
• Critique of the French “Journalists perform Big Brother media experiment”
• 4 Ways of Visualizing the Twitter Communication Phenomenon

90% of all human conversation is nonsense, not only on Twitter
Twitter is everywhere and hence its very controversial. Many marketers (in their 40s) see only the 90% useless and hard to read tweets. But compare adequately: go to a coffee shop of your choice and listen to the communications of patrons. Very likely, they will represent the same nonsense that you find on Twitter. And yet, they are all consumers that you want to reach with your product or brand. Before the internet you have paid good money to arrange focus groups, record their discussions and spend time on analysing their opinions. Today, you can have this communication from your target group for free, written and digital. So, go and appreciate it!

Twitter is a powerful communication category of social media – microblogging. Most of it may be useless, but nevertheless: Twitter is very efficient as an element of a strategic online marketing mix. Savy marketers have understood to tap into Twitter’s potential for their online marketing mix. Check the Moonfruit campaign as an example of a very cost efficient promotion on Twitter.

Why  research  does not catch the twitter phenomenon and is misleading marketers

Why research does not catch the twitter phenomenon and is misleading marketers
Even though the twitter demographic has its biggest user group in 25-54 year olds, checking the twitter trends just speaks a very different language.
Constantly returning popular hashtags are #MusicMonday, #nowplaying, #celebs, #signsidontlikeu. Recently it has become popular to exchange all sorts of socialisation symptoms like #thatsotrue, #domeafavor, #makesmesomad, #signsidontlikeu, #withyofatass, #cutthebullshit.

Rarely do cultural and political topics make it into the top ten trends unless they have worldwide appeal like the olympics, big catastrophes, political opposition movements and technical news like the iPad and Windows Mobile 7.

And frequently some teen star makes it into the top trends (like Justin Bieber even with two hashtags of his name on February 15, 2010).

This makes it likely that
1. the younger twitter users (up to 30 year olds) dominate the topics
2. without being the biggest user group.
3. The biggest user group is represented by more different topics

How can that be explained?
Teen culture simply follows different laws than the culture of twens
,thirties, over40s etc. The older we are, the more individualistic are our
pursuits. Teenage is all about mass followership, uniform fashion and belonging to a group. Nobody wants to stick out too much of the crowd, simply because the danger of being branded as a nerd is too grueling.

The lesson for marketers
Teens do not use Twitter as much as older generations, but what they
tweet is more representative for big clusters of them and hence has mass appeal.
25-45es dominate twitter as a communication tool but their topic universe is much more fragmented and barely evolves into a trend.

Therefore, it is easier for marketers whose target group is 15 – 30 year olds. Everybody marketing to 30+ generations need to do more homework to tap into the potential of Twitter. You need to find out, where the target group is meeting on Twitter. Since Twitter has launched the list feature, this has become a little easier. Moreover, there are a lot of Twitter service websites that offer intelligence that can me used in marketing.

Critique of the French “Journalists perform Big Brother media experiment”

Sorry, but anyone who is not able to attain quality news through facebook and twitter alone, simply has not understood how to use them.

Many major newspapers, magazines, tv-stations and newscasts have either a facebook fanpage or a twitter account or both. Following the news on facebook and twitter alone is as simple as reading them on their website. In twitter, you do not even need an account to read their news.

Examples of major news providers with a facebook or twitter offer are CNN, Financial Times, The Economist, LeMonde (since the journalists are French), CBS, to name but a few. Look up your favourite major news outlet – chances are you will find it on both platforms, twitter and facebook.

Ways of Visualizing the Twitter Communication Phenomenon
(Harvard Business Review)

Click the graph to see some examples of data visualization using Twitter as an example.

B2B and Social Media

Social media can of course be employed in business-to-business markets too. Not only for marketing but much more importantly for product development and for the improvement of workflows and information processes. Businesses can actually include social media functionalities into their products as well as build products around social media platforms.

The potential of employing social media platforms for any sort of information flow is fascinating: eCRM, social CRM, workflow management, closed company social networks, project management are just starting points where companies have found out how to gain efficiency by relocating communication processes to social media platforms. Security is certainly a concern, but can easily be controlled.

Here are some examples of b2b brands that have used social media for marketing or as a product/service feature:
T-Systems
Sun Microsystems
SiemensPLM
Intuit
EMC2

Monitoring Social Media – Tools to find out whats going on with your brand and your competitors (article summary)

My Book offers detailed instructions for the methodical monitoring of
– your brands online presence,
– the presence of your competitor’s brands
– and the activities of your target group.
– [Continue reading →]

The Social Media Marketing Concept in 7 steps

Visit the Sonncom Pin!

STEP 1 – PLANNING
Goal setting – what is your goal with social media marketing? Click for a the list of most common goals. You can manage the 7 steps with sonncom’s online concept guide.

Budgeting and Capacity
Most marketing budgets have not kept pace with the recent changes in communication culture. Now they have to be adapted and a social media marketing mix has to be added. Click for budget allocation and capacity planning.

By the way: a social media marketing concept IS NOT:

• your iPhone app, which at best reaches a certain smartphone elite,
• a few lost tweets mentioning your brand promotion,
• a facebook page, which has to reach its audience in a parallel universe of 700 million people,
• uploading tv-spots to YouTube, „to tap into their viral potential…“,
• offering a discount at Groupon,
• the endless internal discussion necessary to “narrow down our options and to definitely find the right strategy”.

A professional concept includes a strategy, is tailored to the target group’s needs, ca be started fast, is simple and easy to manage, is flexible and it needs to correspond with the overal marketing concept.
It can be created in 7 systematic steps: [Continue reading →]

Why does social Media matter? 4 Situations every Marketer is confronted with

Before a significant number of people had internet access, the dominant media communication was 1:n. In “one to many” communication, one media owner (newspaper, radio, tv, advertisers) broadcasts a message to a big audience, who normally do not or cannot respond directly.

n:n communication was mainly personal conversation between a small number of participants. Rarely did word of mouth overschadow 1:n communication.

For more than 10 years now, has n:n communication increased and achieved a volume, that was unthinkable in pre-internet times. It is safe to say, that in the diagram, which shows the cloud of noise and its division into 1:n and n:n the blue line has constantly moved north to the benefit of n:n communication.

Now what does it mean for marketers?
It means you are in one of four situations:

1. You are using social media to have a share of voice in the n:n part of the cloud of noise and to keep control of your share of voice level.

2. Neither you nor your competitors are using social media and the share of voice in the n:n part of the cloud of noise is controlled exclusively by your target group.

3. Your competitor is using social media and you are overall losing share of voice.

4. Your target group is criticizing your product and you have an urgent need for listening or for reputation defense, because your 1:n communication is negatively overshadowed by the target groups n:n communication (and your competitor is potentially adding fuel to the fire).

If you are not represented by number 1, think about the relationship between share of voice and cloud of noise.

Further reading: The Social Media Marketing Concept in 7 Logic Steps