A big question for those interested in social media marketing today is effectiveness. What drives customers and businesses to my site? How do I engage my customer base to create a two-way dialogue that promotes positive interaction?

A recent survey conducted by MarketingProfs in September 2009 of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers found that the marketing tactics most often used on social media sites aren’t necessarily the best.

Simply friending customers and attempting to drive traffic to corporate websites with status updates on Facebook, ranked among the most common tactics. But brands cannot expect to gain traction with these simplistic one-way communications.

Looking at MarketingProf’s survey of B2B and B2C marketers, the most effective tactic for consumer-oriented companies was creating a Facebook application. However, less than 25 percent of the total number of those surveyed used this approach. A close second for both B2C and B2B marketers were fan surveys, although ranked as the third most-common tactic attempted.

Coming in dead-last as effective were Facebook ads. Even targeted ads, using Facebook’s improved ad targeting package came up short.

Not a surprise really when you recognize that social media users, especially those savvy to traditional communication techniques, expect companies to provide value, interactivity and ultimately open up a human dialogue.

Twitter is another application where the goals don’t match the approach most marketers’ take.

Because of Twitter’s features, brevity and fairly recent entrance into the web its user base is different from Facebook’s and so is its utility to marketers. Those who used Twitter as a tool for monitoring and person-to-person communication, instead of as a sales channel, reported 40 percent or higher success rates.

Buzzphoria knows that success in social media means going that extra mile down the road less traveled to interact with customers and clients in a dynamic way. One-way traditional communications aren’t how real people talk to one another and it shouldn’t be how companies going forward address their consumers.

Has your company embraced social media’s human communication?

As more and more people hop onto social media platforms, we are seeing more companies tapping into technology in new ways. The word is spreading that there are ways to create dialogues and conversation with your own customers while being introduced to millions of potential new clients.

For those not tuning in to the stats, Facebook is currently leading in terms of users. On September 15, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted a message stating that Facebook “now serves 300 million people across the world.” To put some perspective on that number, there are just three countries with a 300 million+ population: China @ 1.3 billion, India @ 1.2 billion and America @ 307 million. Simply said, your consumers and potential customers are out there… and they are talking.

So how is social media changing business strategy?

1. Social Media Gives Candid Feedback:

Last time I took a restaurant phone survey, there was no option along the lines of ‘push 7 if your waiter should have been fired on the spot for the horrific service you received.’ However, many consumers will express this frustration in the medium most commonly at their fingertips. Before a company is even aware that someone has dropped their name in cyberspace, their brand is smeared all over Twitter within hours. Or the total opposite may be occurring and users are mentioning how much they love your product. Either way, it’s up to the company to react and create dialogue or to be totally absent from the conversation.

2. Social Media Creates B2C Dialogues:

One of most influential factors in a company’s choice to plug in to these networks is the opportunity for consumer dialogue. Instead of buying ad space to talk AT your target market, we now have the option to talk WITH them. Time to phase out the little feedback cards and mini pencils; the answers are right in front of us! Using social media gives companies a perfect opportunity to show personality and character 24/7 rather than trying to cram feeling into a :30 or :60 second ad slot. As for ROI, your success is solely dependent on the effort you put into your accounts. Dell has around 40 Twitter accounts, each personalized to a different target group of consumers. Definitely a lot of work to maintain correctly, but the end result is an estimated $3 million in sales attributed to Twitter.

3. Social Media Allows Personalized Service:

Of course, so does a customer help phone line. Here’s the difference: a recent Mashable poll showed that people spend an average of 68 hours per week on the internet. Social media-savvy companies are reaching out to their customers in a place they know they can find them. This is proactive approach can save a lot of problems down the road. For example, when a user tweets about their negative experience with Comcast, Frank Eliason (@comcastcares) responds with tips or offers to help. Eliason’s efforts were highlighted last year in a NYTimes article that shows how effectively social media works to allow companies to help consumers… and hopefully quiet the consumer’s negative postings!

Buzzphoria stays connected to the web, constantly seeking out conversations involving or affecting our clients. From there, when a company really sees how consumers are reacting to their brand, they can respond in an honest and helpful way.

Has your company gotten in to social media? Why or why not?

Do you know what your employees, past employees and stake holders are saying about your company and brand?  While many brands and corporations are focusing their social media efforts on consumer/customer dialogues; many fail to monitor what their internal audiences are saying.

We’ve been seeing repeated patterns among employees of companies, both publicly traded and privately held…Does your company fall into this pattern?

At Buzzphoria, we use proprietary software to measure what’s being said about companies, brands and their competitors across all social media and web-based communications channels.  When we first begin working with clients, we run historic searches to provide a benchmark for where they are in social electronic conversations - who’s talking about them, what’s being said, where it’s being said, what’s the tone, sentiment, relevancy of the conversation (ie., how many people are monitoring that particular conversation and what is the level of influence of the sites, platforms and individuals who are having those conversations, etc).  This Social Media Reality Check, as we call it, provides valuable insights that shape our recommendations, strategy and implementation of our clients’ core social media outreach.

In addition to consumer/customer communications, we also spend a great deal of time working with our clients to identify the social media discussions that are taking place by stake holders within their organizations.

From an internal corporate communications standpoint the pattern that we’ve been seeing:

1.  Most of the clients we’re called in to work with (both private and public companies) do not have a blog/twitter/social media strategy policy related to employee communications.  Many have been calling us in to a) see if they need a policy, b) run a baseline to see what’s being said and c) craft a policy for them that is easy for employees to understand, is easy to monitor and enforce and is respectful of protecting proprietary corporate information while also being respectful of the employees’ personal rights…

2.  It has been more of the rule, rather than the exception, that we’ve found multiple employee run groups on social networking sites (not just business sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo; but also more generalized personal sites such as Facebook).  The groups and pages we’ve uncovered have by and large been using the corporate logo, have identified themselves by the corporate name and have encouraged and have been populated by both present and past employees.  In nearly every instance, the corporation hiring us was unaware that these groups existed.

3.  In addition, for each of the corporations that we’ve done this for, we have also uncovered both employee blogs and Twitter accounts.  While the bulk of the Twitter accounts and blogs we’ve found have been for personal use, we have found that in nearly all instances, the employee with these accounts is also sprinkling their personal conversations and communications with corporate information.

Since one of Twitter’s best uses is as a content aggregator, we’ve found that most Twitter accounts held by corporate employees has also been programmed to aggregate Twitter communications onto multiple social networking and blog platforms the employee possesses (for example - they send a Tweet on Twitter and the tweet is updated to their Facebook, Linkedin and Blog pages).

Some specific examples of information we’ve seen that can be damaging to the corporation:

-   employees conversing about new clients they’re going after

-   employees conversing about job and company dissatisfaction

-   employees conversing about looking for new jobs

-   employees conversing about problems (product failures, forthcoming earnings statements, possible recalls)

-   employees conversing about product development initiatives

Most of the time, the employees are not even aware that their conversations could potentially be having a negative impact on the corporation.

4.  For the majority of publicly traded companies we’re working with, we’ve found that both media and analysts are conversing on multiple platforms (Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, social media pages, etc) and that our clients were unaware these conversations were taking place.

Do you know what your employees and stake holders are saying about your company and or brand?

In our last posting, we talked about how we’ve made ourselves our own best case study by putting our own brand on the line to illustrate how we can help you protect yours.

As we discussed last time, there are unscrupulous individuals and groups who are hijacking brands for both sport and profit.  In our case, a hijacker registered and began impersonating the Buzzphoria brand on Twitter.

The first step in defending your company and brand when a hijacker hits it to verse yourself on your rights within terms of service for the social media platform or site in which your brand has been compromised.

Below is a screen shot from Twitter’s Terms of Service:

Twitter Terms of Service

Notice that the Terms of Service clearly state that:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.
2. You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.
3. You must not, in the use of Twitter, violate any laws in your jurisdiction (including but not limited to copyright laws).

Twitter General Conditions - Terms of Service

Please note the following:

1. We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Use.
2. We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Below, we’ve share the final section of Twitter’s Terms of Service - Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours):

Twitter Terms of Service - Copyright

Please note the following:

Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

At the beginning of the .com boom, it was squatters grabbing brand names they felt were valuable and holding them for ransom to corporations.  In the past weeks and months, it was employees at a Dominoes who disparaged the brand by posting YouTube videos, causing the company to go into crisis communications mode.  It hasn’t just happened to Dominos:  with the rise of user generated content, comes the crush of corporations being impersonated and spoofed across user-generated mediums, creating more publicity nightmares, crisis communications situations and expensive legal battles.

Equally as deadly and dangerous to brands, are imposters who grab brand names within popular social media platforms such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, to name a few…

Thus, the Buzzphoria case study continues… We too were a victim of brand high-jacking and the retrieval process to gain our brand back.

Within Scott Allen’s original blog post about Buzzphoria, he essentially posed a call to action for someone to high-jack the Buzzphoria name and identity within multiple social media sites.  Someone took him up on it and immediately grabbed the Twitter identity @buzzphoria.  The individual(s) then took elements of artwork from the Buzzphoria website and set up a branded page, representing themselves as our brand.  From our tracking, we witnessed the individual(s) populating the page with tweets representing themselves as us, sent to the followers the culprit(s) had begun amassing.

When we spoke to Scott Allen, he told us that the culprit(s) had reached out to him and had let him know that they would give us our brand back…if we asked.

Unfortunately, most corporations don’t see that level of generosity and kindness (I’m being facicious here…).  No…brand high-jackers do not usually reach out to a blogger or journalist to say - “hey, if you do talk to that company let them know I’d be happy to hand them back their brand…”

So, what’s the journey for a corporation or brand to retrieve its identity?  (without an expensive and protracted legal battle?)

Our next few posts will show you step by step how we were able to retrieve our identity from Twitter.

In our last post we covered To Blog or Not to Blog. In that post we mentioned that too many brands and corporations take a Field of Dreams approach to creating a blog believing that just because they build it the audience will come.

A report in the Wall Street Journal, noted the effect of adding a blog to a web site: unique site visitors increased from 100 per month to 150,000 per month; total sales increased 18 percent; web-site generated sales increased to 25 percent of referrals, up from a mere one percent.

The Wall Street Journal article also suggested that a blog can be more important than having a web site.

While we agree that blogs can be an important component of a brand’s marketing mix, we feel that it would be reckless for a brand or company to depend solely on the blog as their online marketing initiative. A blog is a great tool if properly planned and executed, however, if there is no voice, no plan and no audience it can also fall into the proverbial tree falling in the forest argument…

Creating a blog can be inexpensive when free blog sites such as Google’s Blogger.com (www.blogger.com). And while no one can promise that using Google’s blog site will get your blog a better listing in a Google search, it just seems like common sense that it would be a plus.

Other free blog sites include Wordpress.org (www.wordpress.org), LiveJournal.com (www.livejournal.com), and . . . we’ll stop here, because any list will be sure to omit the one blog site that someone thinks is the best blog site on the web. But that’s one of the great things about a blog: readers add value by posting comments. So, let the debate begin over the best place to be blogging. Or whether Blogger.com earns better positioning in a Google search.

But back to business . . . your business.
 
Why Blog?

A blog is alive.

A web site is static.

A blog is fresh, it’s now: content with a “born on” date.

A web site is like . . . that jar of peanut butter of an unknown vintage, lost in the back of the pantry.  Contaminated with salmonella? Who knows how long it has been sitting.
 
A blog engages the reader by empowering each reader to post comments.

A web site is mere dictation . . . dictatorially delivered.

A blog collects consumer feedback . . . in a place where your business can respond, especially to show the world you care about satisfying any unhappy customer.
 
A web site may invite an email or phone call, but can fail miserably at enabling you to show the world you care and do deliver excellence in customer service.

Updating a blog is as easy as posting your latest text, pics, or video to the blog.

Updating a web site? Unless you’re technically savvy, you’ll be writing text and a check with every little update.

A blog allows you to show your expertise. With this blog, Buzzphoria aims to illustrate details about our being our own best case study while at the same time showing how your business can use digital marketing strategies to enhance your bottom line.

To help stimulate the discussion, Buzzphoria will continue, intentionally, to do some things wrong, while unfolding all the elements of endgame and “we are our own best case study” illustration . . . and, we invite readers to demonstrate their informed opinions on the better way to achieve marketing success in this space. Uncensored.

Coming soon: What is a social media reality check? and What happens when your brand gets hijacked.

In our last post we talked about Buzzphoria being our own best case study. Our example was blogger journalism and some of the comments received helped to also illustrate other elements of our case study such as freedom of speech and brand hijacking.

As part of our case study we decided to illustrate the mistakes companies often make in thinking they absolutely have to have a blog…

Perhaps that’s why there are estimates that there will be 110 billion blogs by 2010.

See, so often companies feel compelled that they have to have a blog just because they have to have a blog.

They never ask themselves the critical questions:

- why they have to have it,
- how are they going to maintain it,
- what do they want it to achieve - what’s the blog’s purpose,
- how are they going to build a following for it,
- what voice do they want to set with it,
- what do they want to say,
- more importantly, do they have something to say?

Instead many companies rush to set up their blogs. They post a couple times, get side-tracked by other projects, lose interest and ultimately abandon the blog.

They enter into the blogging endeavor like Kevin Costner clones in Field of Dreams thinking all they have to do is say, “Hello World”

And they wait, and they wait and they wait…a long time. Like a tree falling in a forest, did anyone hear it fall?

Waiting…Waiting…For that one person to say hello back.

For most no one ever says hello back.

In our case we waited patiently for 5 months from the time we posted that blog page for the first hello.

In our case it came through five months later through a tweet by Jim “Genuine” Turner who was first to note that we had left the original Word Press message “Hello World” sitting out there.

This led to Mr. Allen. That led to tweets and blog re-postings and link backs chastising us for what these folks perceived to be our foolishness, a novice error.

Thank you gentlemen for proving another of our points to our clients:
You don’t need a blog just for the sake of having a blog. Only do it if there’s a reason why anyone would care…

And then maybe, if they’ve developed the right strategy, done the proper planning and knew what their end game was the pollination effect will begin to take hold. 

In our last post, we talked about having the end game in mind when you enter your brand or company into the social media stratosphere.

We figured the best way to illustrate what brands and corporations often do wrong (without pointing fingers at brands and corporations that are doing it wrong) was to create a case study and example.

Congrats to journalist, blogger and social media guru Scott “Social Media” Allen for revealing typical bungles brands make and special thanks for also illustrating our point about the dangers many companies don’t realize when they embark on the social media journey. Naive mistakes, they make, but that’s what happens to the naive.

Numerous studies estimate by 2010 there will be over 1 billion blogs worldwide. 

According to Reuters, many people see blogs as alternatives to the mainstream media. Reuters goes on the say that many bloggers do so as a hobby rather than as a vocation, with 77 percent of them saying they post to express themselves creatively rather than to get noticed or paid.

Reuters pointed out these specifics:

37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topic, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.

About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism.

 Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.

 More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly.

11 percent said they post corrections.

61 percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyrighted material.

55 percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym.

Nearly 90 percent invite comments from other readers. 

Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos and audio links play on 30 percent of blogs. 

82 percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. 3 percent say they have quit. 

We especially appreciate Scott Allen’s help in communicating an important message to our clients by  dissecting many  of the things we intentionally did wrong or left incomplete. (See his blog posting published March 27 @ http://scottsocialmediaallen.com/index.php/buzzphoria-social-media-reality-check/)

But Mr. Allen never called the subject of his critical story prior to publishing it.

Had Mr. Allen — who admits in his post about Buzzphoria that he had contact information (it is after all posted on our website), contacted us he would have learned the end game strategy around our public launch.

In fact, we reached out to Mr. Allen via email through his blog and received a response in less than 24 hours.

The good news is that Scott Allen is an exception to the complete point we were looking to illustrate.

After our reaching out to him and letting him in on our end game, he’s turned out to be an amazing good sport.

Mr. Allen makes the #1 point we needed our clients to realize:  many bloggers feel no responsibility to contact the subject of a critical story . . . at all!

Thank you Mr. Allen. You helped us achieve our end game…generating social publicity for us and reinforcing the many points we evangelize to our clients about the dangers of lack of proper planning and the potential irresponsibility of bloggers and journalists who do not properly fact check.  This is EXACTLY why our clients hire us and why we generate such great results for them.

Watch for posts over the coming days and weeks as we reveal more of our end game…

It seems everywhere you go people are either talking or writing about Social Media.  Articles herald that Social Media is a must-have in any brand or company’s marketing mix.  Corporations are converting large segments of budget previously allocated to traditional marketing channels into social media marketing.  Many of these corporations and brands end up being disappointed or disillusioned with the results.

The reasons?  Lack of planning, entering into social media without understanding the mediums they’re leveraging and not identifying upfront the brand or company’s end game for engaging social media into the marketing mix.

When clients work with Buzzphoria, we feel the questions we ask are as critical as the planning of the campaign, the campaign implementation and our client’s end game results. 

Some questions you should ask yourself in the planning phases of your campaign:

Why are we doing this?  What do we hope to achieve?  How will we measure results both on and offline?  How will our social media activities enhance other activities within the client’s communications and marketing channels?