Growing your Digital Footprint

We find ourselves drawing this diagram all the time for clients when we’re talking about social media so we thought we’d reproduce it here and get some feedback.

Conversations tend to go something like, “Why social media?”.

After introducing them to the idea that engaging with audiences, listening and harvesting feedback, gaining insights into audience thinking and breaking down corporate barriers is the most rewarding business change event they’ll ever implement it’s much much simpler to draw it.

If their corporate, e-commerce, flash website sits at the centre of their digital marketing strategy, implementing a social media strategy around it is making a much bigger target of your brand, that will attract the as yet un-reached, empower critics and creators who want to talk about your brand increasing their digital brand footprint.

The excitement in the voice is hard to hide when clear value, both for the audience and the brand is this obvious.

Why do we need a social media presence?

• Increase customer base.

• Build awareness.

• Establish thought leadership.

• Educate customers.

• Customer-source part of your product development to try new ideas.

• Reach new channels of customers.

• Improve internal communication.

Manage Objections. (Thanks to Pistachio Consulting for the following excellent arguments which I’ve used alongside my own thoughts)

Here are five objections (budget, audience size, loss of control, priorities and uncertainty) and ways you can address them:

Budget

Before committing to any budget expenditure adopt a listening strategy to help people understand where conversations are happening online and what topics around your brand and services are being discussed. Arm yourself with evidence that people (Customers) are talking about the services you provide and your company is missing out by not joining in.

Don’t limit yourself to a new “social media” budget, and don’t even remain within the confines of marketing, publicity and other outbound communications. Social tools can make substantive contributions across the organisation —HR, R&D, project management, customer service, administration, IT

Taking this idea one step further, be as clear as you can about the value or potential value social tools can contribute within each of these areas. What can be done less expensively or more profitably?

Audience Size

The audience value proposition just does NOT work the same way old school “tonnage based” advertising via expensive mainstream media buys always did. You’re not just trying to scoop up tons and tons and tons of eyeballs, hoping to extract actual business results out of some crap small percentage of those that you “reach.” Things can be more closely targeted and more tightly mapped onto fundamental metrics of business success. “Tons of eyeballs” metrics at their best are usually just proxies for “a hope of selling more.”Three takeaways about social media/social networking audience sizes:

It’s Social media and social networking audiences are growing fast.

Even small audiences that are well-targeted or influencers are quite valuable.

Off-platform benefits.You’re not always just trying to reach the direct audience. On Twitter in particular, we see massive applicability and advantages in SEO, market knowledge, word-of-mouth “passability”to others outside of the platform, and as a content-generation engine the pulls together flows of content that can be displayed and syndicated using widgets and other RSS-based tools.

If you want to get a handle on demographics you might try using a profile tool like the one developed by Forrester. You can at least see what percentage of your audience are likely to be Creators, Critics, Collectors, Spectators, Joiners or Inactive and therefore gauge where your company can engage with its audience.

Loss of Control

You can argue that they’ve already lost control. You can argue that they never even *had* control. Instead, underscore the increase in learning. Companies can learn an incredible about of information about their products, their customers unarticulated wants and needs, how to make it easier for customers to buy, how to serve customers better, and THAT’S just talking about the customers. This magnitude and value of learning is also available for the engineers, the researchers, the manufacturers —compare notes, parse problem-solving, crowdsource and figure out more, faster.

Priorities

Get laser focused on management’s existing business problems and pains. Apply the tools and opportunities you know about to the priorities they know they already have. Be very diagnostic in understanding and maturely articulating what could be achieved and how.

Uncertainty

Don’t forget, this stuff can be really SCARY. That’s okay. Encourage them to take a flexible stance, to start dipping their toes in, and to remain learning-focused whether or not they are ready to jump in whole hog.

Yes, ideally, the company should start to respond and manage its message contributions as soon as there are issues to respond to. But I don’t buy that they should not engage in formal listening until they’re ready to engage in formal responding. In many cases, the longer they listen first, the better their response skills will be.

If something major breaks, by all means address it, but it’s MORE important that the listening period not be delayed by fears over how the company can respond. It’s NOT okay to clap hands over eyes and ears just because the mouth – and corporate mind – need more time to prepare.

Why do all of this?

The relationship between you and the reader is one-to-one. In time it creates a bond of trust which over time they share with their peer groups and keeping your customers close to you in economically uncertainty times should be a priority for everyone.

Contact the Better team to discuss how we can support your Social Media project. Better Brand Agency is a brand agency offering brand, graphic design, marketing, social media and social networking, web and digital services based in Tees Valley, North East and North Yorkshire.

Mobile marketing is set to take off as major brands look to invest in the platform over the next five years, according to an independent survey commissioned by O2.

The survey shows brands will have increased their spend on mobile marketing by 150% come 2013 and do not anticipate any impact on budgets as a result of the economic downturn.

The survey, which was carried out by Vanson Bourne in May this year and included marketing and IT directors at 100 leading brands, also found that the personalised nature of mobile marketing campaigns means they generate a higher response rate than traditional advertising.

Of those marketing directors questioned, 60% favoured mobile marketing because it was considered better for close targeting, especially in financial services advertising.

The use of mobile marketing is increasing with specific services gaining in popularity. Text-to-win competitions and text-to-call-back or email campaigns have increased in use by more than 20% each, while retail and financial services ads were judged the most popular mobile advertising areas.

SMS was used by nearly a third of all businesses interviewed, yet half of the marketers questioned who have yet to make use of mobile marketing campaigns claim they are concerned that their customers will view the text messages as spam.

Simon Dean, head of mobile media at O2 UK said there has “never been a better time for brands to engage with their customers via mobile”.

Dean said: “One in 10 of those we surveyed already think mobile marketing has saved their business at least £1m when compared to other marketing solutions.

“With more consumers than ever browsing the web through their mobile handsets, there is a significant and largely untapped audience for brands to target their customers directly.”

View full article and more related articles at http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/852401/Mobile-marketing-spend-rise-150-five-years/

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THE real story of the 2008 US presidential election will not be about the first African American elected to the Presidency nor about the first female elected vice president.

The lasting legacy of this election will be about the rise of Silicon Valley in influencing and financing presidential campaigns and potentially all campaigns from here on in.

Over the summer, Joshua Green documented in the pages of The Atlantic about Barack’s secret weapon in his rise from obscurity to toppling the world’s most popular and powerful political couple.

Since the beginning of his campaign, Barack Obama has raised nearly $500m which is a staggering amount of money. He has raised more money from more people than anyone else in history by far.

The amazing thing about this feat is that he has done it almost effortlessly. In the past, an aspiring candidate’s diary would be dominated with countless appearances at fundraising events.

While Obama has done his share, he has been able to spend far more time straight campaigning.

What Obama’s campaign did is mobilise Silicon Valley. Hillary Clinton chose to ignore the Bay Area early on and it was possibly her single biggest mistake. Silicon Valley has a lot of money but much more importantly, Silicon Valley also knows how to exploit technology.

Read the full article here on www.nebusiness.co.uk.