Going Social

Jeremy Goldman

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814432563
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

In the increasingly vital world of social media marketing, if you don't have a strong digital presence, it's like you're not even there. Going Social is an indispensable guide to taking advantage of digital marketing, reaching a critical number of prospective customers, and revitalizing your business's brand. You'll gain answers to the questions every marketer is asking, like How much is a Facebook "like" worth? What are the best dashboards for monitoring multiple social channels simultaneously? How do you keep it all going around the clock? And which automation tools, promotional ads, scheduling platforms, and social media channels offer the greatest return on investment? For more than a decade, author Jeremy Goldman has helped companies inject "social" into their marketing processes. He explains the ins and outs of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Instagram, and Pinterest and teaches readers how to formulate a social strategy, pinpoint and cater to the right audience, give their brand a unique online voice, create relevant and engaging content, identify and reward influencers, build strong bonds with bloggers, become truly customer-centric, respond to negative feedback, use targeting to engage more effectively, turn employees into social marketers, and engage with ROI in mind.The digital landscape offers unprecedented opportunities to spread the word about products and services. While other businesses struggle to transition from traditional marketing to online engagement, you'll be enacting a social media strategy that magnifies customer loyalty. Featuring insights from entrepreneurs, social media directors, community managers, bloggers, and other experts, Going Social will teach you how to leverage our brave new social frontier.

1

social marketing: even more important than you think

AVINASH KAUSHIK , Analytics Evangelist at Google, famously said: “Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better.” ¹ In a similar vein, many business owners see social marketing as something that will change their businesses fortunes forever and perhaps overnight. However, they don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t get the results they expected.

If you’re reading this book, you’ve most likely realized how important it is for your business to use social marketing effectively. You’re probably also aware of how much the Internet is used for socializing and sharing information. To drive that point home, the story of a solitary man walking on the side of a highway off-ramp in central Ohio offers a good example of how quickly things spread on the Internet.

The man is named Ted Williams, and, for quite some time now, he’s been panhandling by the exit of I-71 that leads onto Hudson Street in Columbus. Thousands of people drive past him each day, presumably paying him no attention. True, data aren’t available on this, but it seems unlikely that many people mention to their friends that they saw a panhandler as they exited the highway.

All of that changed in the first week of 2011. The Columbus Dispatch posted a short video of an interview with Williams, dubbing his voice “golden” for its perfect, radio-quality pitch. The video was ripped from the newspaper’s website and posted on YouTube by a Good Samaritan, along with the following brief message: “Throwing this video from The Columbus Dispatch out there, hoping we can find this talent a place to call home.” ²

Soon the sheer oddity of a bedraggled man speaking in such a clear, voiceover-quality tone touched a nerve with a number of people, who forwarded it to their social networks. Within hours, Williams had job offers. Mind you, he hadn’t applied for these jobs through LinkedIn or CareerBuilder; these employers contacted him after hearing his voice via YouTube forwarding. They also weren’t mom-and-pop businesses; some of these offers came from the Cleveland Cavaliers and the National Football League. Williams ultimately accepted an offer to be the new voice of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

Humans Beings Are Social

Within just a few hours of birth, newborns try to imitate the facial gestures of the first people they meet—an early attempt to socially interact. Humans have such a need to be social that we’re social even when we’re still inside our mothers’ wombs. Researchers recently used ultrasound to record the interactions of twins and found that the twosomes were reaching out for one another at 14 weeks of age. That means people have a propensity toward social action, which is already present before birth. “These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior,” says Umberto Castiello of the University of Padova, one of the researchers who led the study. “When the context enables it, as in the case of twin pregnancies, social movements, i.e., movements specifically aimed at another individual, are observed well before birth.” ³

Given how social we are, it makes sense that people will find ways to “bake” social features into new technologies. In fact, there’s been a tremendous paradigm shift in the last few years, in that the fastest growing and most influential digital companies are the ones that create websites and applications that are more people-centric, such as Facebook, rather than technology-centric or algorithm-centric, such as Google. As a matter of fact, companies like Google are moving more toward people-centric models with social channels like Google+, as we’ll discuss later. We are moving into a world where we will be able to bring our online identities and networks with us wherever we go.

The human need for social interaction is more important than the need for material goods and monetary wealth. Don’t believe that? Think about the foundation on which a site like Facebook is built. On social networking sites, the users create the vast majority of content, which in turn is monetized by the company owning the social network. The hottest web properties are nearly entirely comprised of things that users contribute for free. Take YouTube as an example: On average, 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute; every week, users upload the equivalent of 240,000 feature-length films. It would take you approximately eight years to view all the content that gets uploaded on any given day. ⁴

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and similar sites are social hubs, and our need to be social runs pretty deep. To survive, people require food, shelter, and clothing at a minimum. Once people have those things, the next thing they typically desire is to be able to socially connect with others. Paul Cohen, founder of Cognection, has built a business around human social behavior, and he has found that humans are hardwired to be social: It’s helpful for us to keep track of whom we’re indebted to and whom we should probably delete from our iPhone’s address book. “If you look at social networking based on its ability to enable reciprocity, it makes complete sense that we want to engage in prosocial behaviors,” Paul explains. “It makes it easier for us to transmit social signals that allow us to reciprocate.”

People want a place to hang out virtually and interact much more than they want to make a quick buck. Does that statement sound outrageous? Consider the following: In an effort to attract users away from Google and Yahoo, Microsoft offered cash rewards so that customers would run searches on its Bing search engine. When users shopped online using Bing, Microsoft sent users refunds of as much as 50 percent of their purchase. ⁵ When Bing started aggressively offering this feature, its market share was 8 percent, compared with Yahoo’s 20 percent and Google’s 65 percent. ⁶ By most accounts, Bing Rewards helped contribute to Bing’s growth; it reached 12 percent of the U.S. market by December 2010. Yet during that time, its growth was far outpaced by the top social networks. In 2010, Facebook grew 48 percent in the United States, with many emerging countries growing at even faster rates. ⁷ In 2010 alone, Twitter opened up more than 100 million accounts. ⁸ The desire to socialize and make meaningful connections with friends and strangers online is outpacing the need to search, even when incentives such as refunds are thrown in. People are apparently more interested in socializing than in making a dollar for searching for fleece penguin pajamas on Bing.

Maslow and Starbucks

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology developed by Abraham Maslow in 1943. It’s usually defined as a pyramid, with the most fundamental needs at the very bottom and the desire for self-actualization at the very top. The most fundamental needs are physiological, such as breathing, food, water, and sex. Next up on the pyramid is the need for the safety and security of the individual, the family, and property. After that come love and belonging: friendship and family. Once an individual’s physiological and safety needs are met, the remaining layers of needs are all related to social well-being.

The basic principles behind online socialization are the same as those behind socializing in so-called real life. As I write this, for example, I’m sitting in a Starbucks on 75th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan. It’s 7:30 on a Sunday night, and I can count 18 people sitting alone. Most are on their laptops; a few are reading from piles of newspapers in front of them. Oddly enough, at this time, not a single person seems to be sitting with someone they know; everyone is reading or working. All of these people seem to have coffee next to them, but they’re not really here for the coffee. The coffee is serving, essentially, as an admission pass. It entitles these people to sit in Starbucks and read or write for as long as they please. The benefit of sitting in Starbucks, as opposed to working at home, is the availability of company, of human companionship. Even though no conversations are going on between patrons at the moment, all these people would rather spend $3 for a cup of coffee from which they’ll only drink a few sips so that they can work in a big room surrounded by other people. When we go online, why would we lose our overriding urge to be sociable? It’s deeply embedded in all of us.

Increasingly, customers want to be reached on social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like, by companies with which they choose to interact online. When Facebook first launched its news feed in 2006, it was a game-changing feature that allowed individuals to stay in touch with their “real connections”—that is, their friends and family. Now, however, an individual consumer’s friends and the businesses they love are lumped together in the same feed. When customers become fans of a business on Facebook, they are opening the door to communicating with that brand. People want to feel as though they belong and are accepted by a larger whole. Your organization can tap into people’s innate need for love and belonging.

Old Paradigm, Meet the New Paradigm

Even if your job involves working with social media channels at a business that has its own Facebook page and Twitter presence, the process of communicating directly with your customers can still seem confusing and fraught with complications. The old model of doing business was that you developed your product, found people to sell it for you (be they your own sales staff or a wholesale distribution partner), and then received feedback from the people responsible for selling the product. Most of the time, you didn’t receive feedback directly from the customer; if you were lucky, you received feedback through an intermediary. In the new model, if your company has a presence on social media, your most important feedback will come straight from your customers—the people who actually use or consume your product.

If you’re one of those people who find the idea of going social directly with your customers to be nerve-racking, keep in mind we live in a world where having an online relationship with customers is rapidly becoming the norm. At one point, even having a website was a scary proposition for a company. Today, if your CEO were to say that having a website is just too much effort, he might have to update his LinkedIn profile and start looking for a company based out of, say, 1996.

The Rise of Social Media Has Transformed Society

People are arguably becoming more social as a result of social media. Think about how costly it would have been a generation ago for me to have over 900 friends. It would be just about impossible to call everybody, send people snail mail, and keep in touch with all of them. However, I have 900 friends on Facebook and follow many more people on Twitter. The cost of staying in touch has gone down dramatically, and so has the cost of marketing directly to a customer. Of course, as a result of costs going down, you need to break through much more noise in the marketplace in order to be heard. After all, just as it’s really easy for a customer to like your Facebook page or start following you on Twitter, it’s just as easy for them to stop following you.

Each day, over 20 billion minutes are spent on Facebook. ⁹ Not only is a high percentage of the world’s population on Facebook, but over half of its registrants log onto the site at least once a day. In many cases, rather than beginning a web-browsing session with the static old media properties like The New York Times, people are using social networks as an entry point of sorts to the Internet. They will follow recommended content from Facebook or Twitter and then follow links off-site. This isn’t all that different from the dawn of the Internet, when people started their web browsing from the AOL start-up screen. The only difference is that now people are going where they want to go based on recommendations from their network, rather than where a single corporation has decided to send them. Your company can still affect what content people read, but first your firm has to build trustworthiness in the eyes of your audience.

This makes sense, right? You want to be where your customers are. Let’s say you’re opening a day care center for children between six months and three years old. Presumably, when you’re scouting for locations, you’re not going to consider the part of town that is filled with retirement communities and has very few young couples needing your services. It’s the same thing online: Just as you wouldn’t set up your business far away from your customers in the physical world, so too, online, you have to be where your customers are. And your customers are spending more of their time on social networking sites. This isn’t just if your customers are young: The fastest growing segment of social networking users is between 35 and 49 years of age.

The emergence of social marketing has coincided with a new-found lack of reluctance to post personal data online. At one time, if you wanted to figure out people’s political affiliations, you might have to have many discussions with them around the watercooler at work before you could finally figure out that they were diehard libertarians. Now, there is a pretty good chance you can find this out from a colleague’s social profile.

Social Recommendations

Users of the social web watched the video of former panhandler Ted Williams because their peers recommended it to them. Social recommendations occur every second online, and, with the rise of new social media, the pace at which these recommendations occur continues to grow exponentially. In 2010, Josh Bernoff, coauthor of the bestseller Groundswell, analyzed a 10,000-person survey studying online influence that was conducted by Forester Research. He found that, between social networks and posts on blogs and forums, there are more than 500 billion recorded social impressions about products and services a year (opening up any webpage with a product or service opinion counts as one impression), with the number undoubtedly growing since the study. As a point of reference, Nielson estimated that for a 12-month period, there were about 1.974 trillion advertising impressions (including all types of paid media, factoring in text, images, and video), compared to those 500 billion influence impressions (including any peer-to-peer recommendations). Of course, not all impressions are created equal. Although there are still many more advertising impressions than influence impressions—four times as many—the latter hold more value. In fact, each online impression is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase compared to another kind of recommendation. ¹⁰

Who among us is more likely to spend time focusing on an online ad rather than a comment from a friend about the new pizza place down the block? Think about your recent web browsing: Off the top of your head, can you list some advertisements you’ve seen today? Yes, maybe some particularly clever ones have embedded themselves in your conscious mind, but a much larger number of these are valueless impressions that made no impact on you whatsoever.

Now imagine logging in to Facebook and seeing a stream of status updates and pictures shared by friends and influences. In the not-so-distant past, if you wanted to recommend something to others online, you sent them a link. That has quickly been replaced by the social recommendation or social action. Whenever sharing their activities online, people are engaging in an implied recommendation for something. When beauty and makeup guru Michelle Phan listens to “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé using Spotify and that action is syndicated across Facebook, it essentially serves as a social recommendation. It is an implied endorsement from Michelle to her 250,000-plus Facebook subscribers tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Social Marketing: Even More Important Than You Think
• 2 Devising Your Strategy and Getting Started
• 3 Engagement 101: Determine Your Voice and Personality
• 4 How to Develop Content That Promotes Engagement
• 5 Become Truly Customer-Centric—and Reap the Advantages
• 6 How to Avoid Pitfalls, Deal with Crises, and Keep Your Brand’s Reputation Intact
• 7 How to Staff Your Social Team and Organize for More Effective Engagement
• 8 Tools for Producing More Relevant, Targeted Engagement
• 9 How to Identify Influencers, Work with VIPs, and Grow Word of Mouth Substantially
• 10 How to Build Strong Relationships with Bloggers and Work with Online Personalities
• 11 Increase Engagement by Turning Your Employees into Marketers
• 12 How to Engage with ROI in Mind
• 13 Going Social in Real Life
• 14 Final Word
• Notes
• Index