International Digital Marketing

Social plug-ins are easy to implement and have the potential to increase reach and life span of your service/product. By adding social elements to conversations already happening around your sites and facilitating the two-way communication with the consumers and content sharing, you can both increase your brand awareness and loyalize the existing customers.

With Social Plug-ins media, entertainment and e-commerce brands with constantly changing content can quickly create buzz around their products and create a social experience for the people already visiting their page. Since the purchase decisions are influenced by Word-of-Mouth, recommendations/interests of friends in Facebook and the buying process made easy on the website can quickly push the consumer towards the purchase decision. For other type of brands, the Social Plug-ins are an effective way to build loyal database, to increase brand awareness and for example with Live streaming to create an online event that consumers think is worth spreading around.

What makes it so profitable is that the consumers who click that “like” button or use other social plug-ins on your site, show clearly their affiliations with you and that kind of engagement is gold. Targeting and reaching quality leads becomes easier, but…

Yes, there is always “the but” like in everything that has something to do with Social Media. Before adding any Social Plug-in into your site, you need to consider if you have any time in your schedule to invest on this. The risk here is that if you are not ready or do not have time to take this seriously, you can quickly lose that engagement. If you do not communicate with fans, use only hard sale or communicate too much, your fans can easily silence and block your messaging by simply “hiding” those communications in their news feed or by “unliking” you and telling their friends you are ignoring or spamming them.

How to keep the fans tuned in?

Do not spam them, do not only hard sale, do not forget about them, do not ignore them and invest time for some serious community management. Adding Social Plug-ins is a priceless opportunity to expand your database and build brand awareness, loyalty and engagement, but if you do not invest time and effort the momentum is lost.

Before adding the Like button or any other Social Plug-ins, plan carefully your strategy. Assess the frequency of communication, keep the content relevant – not for you, for your fans – and target these consumers only with truly interesting updates and offers. Simply adding a Social Button does not mean you will increase your sales without doing anything. People like and go back to the sites where there is an actual reason to come back. If your Facebook page leading from your site looks like a giant ad or exactly the same as your present site without any place for engaging conversation or comments, your fans will “dislike” you quickly.

Pay attention to your fans, let them speak, let them tell how much they love your brand and keep the content relevant and interesting. Answer their questions and read their suggestions or issues. Even a small gesture from the brand can create very positive WOM around the web and there is no better way to know what your best customers like than actually listening to them. Social Plug-ins can increase your sales, but only if you use them wisely.

Read more details on the Social Plug-ins here.

Social Media monitoring and engagement are hot topics of the 2010. It is very important to handle the good and bad reviews/comments/tweets/posts, but how to identify the real threats and opportunities from the enormous amount of information posted in the net every day? Which posts should be handled immediately and which ones have lower importance?

I stumbled upon today a very interesting “playbook” by Radian6 called Monitoring and Engagement Playbook. It has some useful advices for the over-stressed community managers (or people who have been assigned the monitoring task unofficially) by the constant stream of criticisms voiced through tweets, blogs and other social outlets.

To identify a real threat:

1. Define its importance by building a chart that identifies what qualifies as high, medium or low alert.

Requires immediate reaction:

• High importance: Influential blog with negative tone, post going viral via social networks, negative customer post that draws media attention
• Medium importance: Influencer or high visibility forum post, negative post that compels 3+ commenters to share their negative customer experience
• Low importance: Low influencer, very negative post with 12+ comments, or 5+ unique comments

7 day issue trend:

• High importance: 10+ negative posts/comments on a high authority site, 10+ unique users have the issue
• Medium importance: 5+ or more negative posts/comments on a high authority site, 6-9 users have the issue
• Low importance: 5 unique users have the issue

2. Timing: Tweets need to be responded to quickly, aprox. within 10 minutes because of the speed they come and go. Blog posts can be handled in more time, but still within an hour of being found.

3. Team involvement: Get your team involved: Communicate with your team and establish guidelines and process everyone applies and make sure everyone knows who should do what and what to respond.

4. Response & Follow-up: Make sure you are the right person to be handling the post/situation. If not, re-assign to appropriate person. Make sure you follow up

But which identified post you should reply, what you should say, when you should not answer anything and what you should never reply? Very tricky.

What you should respond to:

• Mentions of your company as part of presentations or events
• Compliments of your product, service, or people
• Recommendations or referrals to your products and/or services
• Customer Service/Support issues or inquires
• Sales leads of product inquires
• Feature requests

What you should reply:

Examples of 140 character or less responses:

• Thanks for the mention!
• Glad we could help.
• I’d be happy to to talk to you more about this.
• Feel free to pass along any feedback you have.
• Let me introduce you to our support/training team. They’ll be in touch to help you out.

What you should NOT respond to:

• Generic mentions among a sea of competitors, without commentary that’s positive or negative
• Sarcastic, snarky or potentially inflammatory comments
• Retweets of blog posts or news announcements, unless in low enough volume to respond individually
• Tweets from webinars or other online events
• Discussions/conversations between individuals that mention your company in passing in which your involvement could be perceived as intrusive
• Posts in a language that you don’t have the appropriate understanding or resources to respond to
• Posts/forum threads that require membership to respond to,unless it’s a customer service issue, negative post or misinformation you need to correct

What you should NOT reply:

• Unwarranted public apologies
• Any details about future product enhancements
• Any announcement regarding technical difficulties or service interruptions
• Profanity or inappropriate subject matter
• Reference to partners, customers, etc. that are not publicly known

These are only quick guidelines, but it is worth having a look at the playbook. The most important thing to remember is that even if your company cannot control the conversation about your brand, you can control your own response and try to resolve the issue before it’s too late. All the posts should be treated individually without a mechanic response (that is easily spotted and seen in a very negative way).

86% of B2B marketers already use Social Media, according to a recent study by digital marketing firm, White Horse. Yet, surprisingly, only 32% of B2B marketers take advantage of the interactive media and engage their audience on daily basis. Why?

The 4 main reasons why the 54% of the respondents drop off are:

• An insufficient personnel to maintain (approprimately 50%)
• A lack of organizational knowledge (approprimately 45%)
• A preference for traditional marketing (approprimately 45%)
• A perceived irrelevance to your field (approprimately 45%)

Understandable, yet resolvable! Thanks to the article of Ian Smith of Intelegia.com, here are some solutions for each one of them:

Insufficient personnel to maintain

The workload marketing department faces when managing content on social networks can be reduced by using tools such as HootSuite and Ping.fm. Creating a concrete plan how to manage these networks in a team (who does what and when) and setting reachable objectives keeps the project reasonable and realizable. For more information on HootSuite and Ping.fm: ” Using Hootsuite To Manage Your Social Networks and Pre-Scheduled Posts” and “Ping.fm – Manage Your Presence On Social Networks In Five Easy Steps”

Lack of organizational knowledge

One word: Training. Since we are talking about new media, many of the key decision makers do not even know what Social Media is. Give them a brief overview on Social Media and its advantages, inform them the competition is already taking advantage of them and wake up their interest by talking about all the benefits it will bring to the business. Show them a concrete, realizable plan and offer them a short training: get them involved in B2B professional networks, blogs, message boards…If they do not use the media themselves, they will not believe others do.

Preference for traditional marketing

There is no conflict between the two: Social Media marketing can compliment traditional B2B marketing and even strengthen it. According to the demographics, the majority of users of social media sites are in the 35 to 54 age group and the professional use of Professional networks is exploding, you only have to see recent growth of the LinkedIn, Xing and Viadeo users. Ignoring the new media will not only leave you behind your competition in innovation, but ignoring your potential online clients can decrease your annual revenue. Stop thinking it is only a trend.

Perceived irrelevance to your field

Social Media suits for every industry, company and business, but you have to think which Social Media to use.

Ask yourself:

1. What (or who) do you want to sell/ promote/ protect/ recruit/ elect?

2. Who do you want to influence?

3. What influences them?

4. Which Social Media Tool/Channel/Network your target audience uses?

There is no point investing in a Social Media Channel your audience and potential clients do not use. However, believe me, there is a little, medium or big market niche for every industry. You just have to see where your target audience/best customers move. There are message boards, blogs, tweets, groups, consumer opinion forums, chats, social networks, etc. Maybe the target is not involved in any, but he surely uses google search, which brings these channels to his fingertips.