As a social marketing consultant and instructor of social marketing at Northwestern, I am surprised how many of my clients and students are unaware of social monitoring and how it can impact your bottom line profits.  When you think about it, every minute of every day social networks are talking about you, your competition, your products & services, your customer service and every other aspect of your company.  Sometime it is an honest and realistic conversation…other times it isn’t.  The risk is, if you don’t know, you can miss major marketing opportunities or -worst yet – not detect a potential crisis coming your way.

Social monitoring software monitors these social networks - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, bloggers, news aggregators [Huffington Post, etc.] and other sources- in real time to extract key topics related to your company and your competitors.  It uses sophisticated language analysis software to determine what is being discussed, where the discussion is positive or negative, and if it involves something you are monitoring.  If so, it presents it to you for analysis.  What is amazing is this all occurs in seconds so you can see and monitor conversations as they are happening.  And – better yet – some of this software is free.

 Because social monitoring software is new to many business owners and marketing managers, I developed a short, 5 minute video demonstrating the marketing capabilities of social monitoring software and give you several free tools you can use to improve your marketing knowledge of your company and your competition today.  

While the free software can give you some insights into the power of social monitoring, you can gain key competitive advantages with a more indepth analysis with a Social EKG from Marketing Synergy.  One of the advantages of using more powerful software is it can be custom tailored for your specific products, competitors, and markets.  In using the free software, you will note most of the discussions are neutral.  This is because these free systems are not tailored to you.   In addition, they cannot be used to look back in time to see shifts in the markets or identify trends in the marketplace.  This can only be done with more powerful software and data suppliers who have captured and stored the data relevant to you and your company.

With a more indepth social monitoring program like our Social EKG, your company can:

• Determine the topics social networks are discussing about your and your products – and if that conversation is positive or negative
• Evaluate what they are saying about your competition and how you compare
• Identify the super connectors or influential bloggers who are critical sources of expertise for the community
• Determine rising topic trends to best position your company as a solution to their new needs
• Examine competitive position and topic trends over time to see the impact of both social and traditional marketing programs on the social chatter
• Develop word clouds to determine the terms being used by your customers and prospects and identify where these discussions are taking place
• And more

If you want to learn more about social monitoring solutions like our Social EKG or have questions about the video, please feel free to send me an email to info@msinetwork.com.  Social media is rapidly developing and you owe it to yourself to learn more about how monitoring the social conversation can help you stay ahead of the competition and better understand your high value customers and prospects.

If you like this blog, please re-tweet it to your friends.  Also, visit my blog at http://www.msinetwork.com/blog/ where you can sign up for my periodic blogs on social and integrated marketing.

Randy Hlavac is a 21 year instructor of integrated marketing in the Medill IMC [Integrated Marketing Communications] program at Northwestern University.  He is also CEO of Marketing Synergy and is a member of the Board of the CADM [Chicago Association of Direct Marketing].  Randy is an active speaker on social and integrated marketing and is currently working on a book on Social ROI – Social Marketing with Bottom-line Impact.

 Social media is struggling to develop a business model which provides business proof on the effectivess of this new form of marketing.  While Marketing Sherpa reports 20% of all companies do have social programs with bottom line ROI, most don’t.  Google Analytics – a software used by most companies to analyze website activities, has just announced the creation of new reports which take the first step towards reporting on the ROI of social marketing.

In their announcement, Group Manager Phil Mui said the following “Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it’s not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.”

The Google Analytics reports are designed to take the first step in integrating social media with interactions on a company’s website.  While it is not a total answer and does require some integration, it is worth trying.  When you use this new capability, please provide some feedback on my blog.  I would like to hear from you what you like and dislike about the ROI feature.  It looks good and is a great first step towards Social ROI [my upcoming book will be another step].  Here are several blogs – the first from Google Analytics telling you more about their new feature.

Google Analytics Social ROI annoucement

Daniel Waisberg article in Marketing Land

Please let other markets know about this new capability on Google Analytics

Geocaching – New Marketing Opportunity?

As a social marketing consultant, I am constantly on the lookout for new technologies and trends which might provide you with new tools to add to your social marketing arsenal.  Here is a hot, new game with the potential to become a part of your marketing program.  Check it out!

My college age daughter and her friends play it every week.  And so do over 5 million players at 1.67 million geocaching site.  Yet most marketers have never heard of it.  But you should.  It could be a new marketing hook to strengthen your relationships with current customers and attract new prospects to your site.  Geocaching is catching on throughout the world and is something with unique and interesting marketing opportunities.  If you are interested in making more money and increasing involvement with your customers, it is a new use of proven media and in a way that makes it fun to associate with your company.

The concept of Geocaching is simple.  Geocaching is an electronic treasure hunt.  One group of individuals takes some interesting trinkets or items, places them in a waterproof container and then hides it somewhere – in a field, on a sign, in a tree, buried in a yard.  They then use their cell phones to determine the geo location of the hidden item.  The individual then records a description of the “treasure’” on the geocaching website.  You can go to the site, enter your zipcode, and see the “treasures” around you.  Your mission – if you choose to accept it – is to get to the treasure before anyone else and get there undetected.  If you do, you retrieve the treasure and it is yours.

See for yourself – go to geocaching.com - and see what is around your home or office.  Then watch their videos.

What is the marketing potential of Geocaching? 

As marketers, we must always look for ways to engage & involve our target markets.  Regardless of what we sell, people enjoy competition and the ability to do something fun – with others like them – and get some sort of reward at the end.

Geocaching is a way to accomplish this goal.  How can it be used for marketing?  Here are some ideas I came up with:

• Combine Geocaching with a contest – Hide car keys, puzzle pieces, or medallions which teams can collect.  Whoever has more or the right one can get a prize.  You can do this locally, regionally, or nationally.
• Geocaching at a convention - Hide items at a convention site and then have attendees search to find them.  They can be given prizes or rewards at your booth.  You might even have teams working to win a grand prize awarded at the end of the convention.
• Combine geocaching with a scanvenger hunt – Start with a single geolocation that links to others.  Individuals must follow the clues to a final reward

Those are a few ideas I developed … but I am sure you can come up with better ones.  What are your ideas and thoughts about Geocaching and its potential marketing applications? 

Your thoughts?  And, if you like this blog, please re-tweet it to your colleagues

Blogger extraordinaire Mark Schaefer published a timely blog article on metrics and ROI as it relates to social programs.  You can read the article here.  In his article, he discussed some rather passionate discussions of social ROI and similar business metrics.  Mark was at one of the annual Social Media Week conferences held throughout the world earlier this month.  When the conversation came around to social ROI, here is what he reported was said:

I was speaking on a panel for Social Media Week New York when one of my fellow panelists said “This ROI stuff is just a bunch of crap. I’m so tired of it. You can’t measure what you’re doing and people should not even try.”

I began to twitch.

“I agree,” said the second panelist. “Too much focus is placed on measurement.”

My head began to throb.

“As a social media marketer, I can’t measure what I do,” said the moderator. “I just do it.”

Mark goes on to discuss his objections to this line of thinking regarding Social metrics and – in particular – Social ROI.  However, this view has been echoed by many of Social Pundits in the recent past.  As Mark points out in his blog:

Unfortunately, the tone is being set by some of our most beloved social media celebrities such as Gary Vaynerchuk,  David Meerman Scott and other high-profile pundits. When Gary is asked about the ROI of social media his famous reply is usually ‘Well, what’s the ROI of your mother?” Scott’s retort is usually something like “Why have a double standard? You don’t measure the ROI of the company receptionist.”

What is Social ROI?

We have been grappling with the challenge of developing Social ROI at Northwestern’s Medill IMC program and have found that the challenge isn’t in calculating ROI but understanding the many roles social media plays within a company.  If you understand how you are going to use social media from a business perspective, then you can determine which activities can be developed using ROI type measures.

Confused?  Think of Telemarketing

In my past life, I have had to build telecenters for several businesses.  When you design a telecenter, there are several type of telemarketing which occur every day.  There are two types of business activities in telemarketing, which are:

1. Inbound telemarketing – this is where businesses field questions from prospects and customers.  They call when they have a need [trigger event] or have been stimulated by some company ad or a discussion with a friend.
2. Outbound telemarketing – this is company driven activites where we initiate the contact for a specific marketing goal. 

If you think about these two types of telemarketing activities, the first is controlled by the market.  They call when they want to do discuss what they want to discuss. In telemarketing – as in social media – many of these interactions are untrackable because we don’t know the individual.  The conversation is 1-to-1 but anonymous.  This type of telemarketing is much like our social conversations on Twitter, Facebook or on forum sites.  These are social sites where people can find us to ask us questions and discuss options. 

Outbound telemarketing is much like blogging, viral programs, and other social media activities which are designed to stimulate a community to action.  It occurs because the company initiates an activity which impacts a target market and delivers them a communication & offer they find appealing [some of the time].  It is heavily tracked and measured … all the way through to the final sale.

How does this apply to Social Media and ROI?

When I cost justified a telecenter, the activities associated with inbound were viewed as either a pass-along cost to a specific marketing program or simply a business expense.  When a person called our center, we asked them if they could give us a code embedded on our advertising message [a keycode].  if they could do it, we would then attribute the call – and its related expense – back to the marketing program which generated the activity.  If it was a customer call for information, we attributed cost to the product.  When we couldn’t get the caller to give us information, it was considered untrackable and became a “cost of doing business”. 

In justifying our telecenter program, we could track customers who did and did not use the telecenter and did generate some ROI activity.  However, unless we could link it to a customer database, we could never generate ROI-type calculations.  This is similar to many social media programs.  Because they are anonymous and not linked to any database, they are simply expenses to a company and can never be measured.

Outbound programs are different.  They started with a market and – at every step in the process – contain tracking codes and links back to the source of the names.  This allows no only ROI tracking within the marketing effort but it allows us to track the impact of telemarketing on the lifetime value of our customers.  With tracking systems and a link of every outbound telemarketing activity to the customer database, we could determine the exact impact of outbound telemarketing on the value of every customer we acquired [and the cost of those we could not sell].

So where is the ROI in Social Media?

At Northwestern and my company – Marketing Synergy – we build social marketing which is designed to achieve two major objectives.  The first is it must “go viral”.  It must be so exceptional in the eye of our target community, it generates talk throughout the social community where our prospects congregate.  The second objective is it must drive the individual to an information exchange where we trade their email for mass customization & total control of the marketing process.  Unless they request information, they will not hear from us.

Why these two objectives?  Because having the email & other personal information lets us:

• Track the level of involvement on the social site
• Separate prospects from customers
• Identify all sales from each individual on our customer database
• Determine current and potential lifetime value
• Calculate ROI and other business measures

This allow us the ability to now have ROI from each of our social marketing programs.

Today, ROI is necessary to allow us to talk about our social programs and justify them with metrics used by senior management.  The key is to develop a business model which tailors social marketing to develop the tracking and metrics necessary to “speak” to the CEO.

I

In a recent article, Hubspot’s Sarah Goliger published an article called How to Build Better Personas to Drive Killer Content.  While I love to read Hotspot’s blog as they always present tips on how to improve my blogging, this article – while technically correct – presented steps to developing a clearer perspective of your target market which varied from my experiences at Northwestern and at Marketing Synergy - my social consulting company.

In the article, Hubspot recommended you perform a three step process to build your persona.  They were 1] Segment your markets by demographics, 2]Identify each market’s needs, and 3] develop behavior based profiles.  While this is a time proven methodology used by traditional marketers to develop their target markets,  I have found it less than appealing when develop any type of social marketing plan. 

Demographics have always been useful in traditional marketing because it was some of the best data we had to define our markets.  While we knew demographics were always surrogates for actual motivators, we knew that analysis of age, income, household composition, wealth, life style and other data would produce segments with differentiated purchase behaviors.  While this works when we had little other information and were attempting to segment national markets, social networks and social communities have radically changed our ability to target social markets.

Think Communities, Triggers, and Passions

Social networks are formed by consumers and businesses based on identified needs and desires.  They form regardless of our marketing and social activities and are created to fulfill some type of need.  While these communities have demographic dimensions, as a marketer I don’t care if a SciFi buff is 17 , 37, or 74.  If I am selling SciFi books and memorabilia, I want to target all SciFi buffs.

Rather than start with demographics, we teach our Northwestern students to think in terms of the “forces” which create social communities – triggers and passions.

Trigger Events are a Key

When you are considering social targets, the first question I recommend you answer is “what triggers a person [consumer or business] to action to begin considering your products and services.   It might be a specific life event – having a baby, getting married, graduating from schoolm etc – or a periodic event – tax time, new years, back to school, etc.  When these relevant trigger events occur, your prospects are likely to seek out community sites and begin search activities which predictable.  Identify where they will go and what they will search for and you can build a social marketing strategy to make them your customers. 

Passions are also important

While trigger events identify when a less interested person will trigger into action to consider your products and services, there are also people who are always in the market.  We call these the passion markets at Northwestern.  People who are passionate about a social topic – fashion, sports, politics, etc – are always looking for the new and trendy.  They are the ones who will tell others about your new products if it really excites them.  In creating our social marketing plans, we focus on the passion markets because these are often the people who are instrumental in taking your products viral.  They are heavily networked, aggressive in giving you their opinions, and active in blogging their point of view to your prospects.  These are the people who will likely read your blog aggressively and tell others about it if they like it.

Things you can do

Here are some recommended actions you can take to develop personas to drive your communications:

1. Identify your trigger and passion markets – There are statistical ways we can do this but your market experience is often a great place to start.  From your experience, what are the events that trigger prospects to action.
2. Learn what they do when triggered – Where do they go for expertise?  What search terms do they use?  Who are the influentials in their social space?  At Marketing Synergy, we created the Social EKG to quickly and effectively answer these questions.  If you know where they are going, you can intercept them and make them more likely to consider your solutions to their needs.
3. Develop your social marketing strategy – Finally, develop a social marketing strategy to “be there” when they are actively seeking solutions.  This strategy should include a mix of social and traditional integrated marketing elements to reach out to influencers, social communities, and social news aggregator sites to show the social community your expertise and ability to address their triggered or passion needs.

By better understanding what moves your prospects to market – regardless of their demographics – you can better develop your communication, blog, and social marketing strategies.  To see more on how this is done, visit my social marketing page.  Also, please sign up for my blog to receive future article on social marketing with bottom line ROI, social monitoring, and social media.

Finally, let me know what you think of this blog article.  Always interested in your comments and views. 

Randy Hlavac is teaches Social Marketing and Integrated Marketing at Northwestern’s Medill IMC programs and teaches adult education in social marketing at the Northwestern Allen Center.  Randy is also CEO of Marketing Synergy - a consulting organization – specializing in social and integrated marketing and marketing database development & deployment. 

Casey Stengel "It's like Deja Vu all over again"

 If you have ever had the unfortunate circumstance to look at my photo, you will immediately notice two things.  One is that I am a marketer [because I said so] and that I am old.  This makes me an “old marketer” and allows me to tell brief but important stories from the past.  So, here comes one:

Just after the dinosaurs died out and I got my MBA, I was attracted to a new form of marketing called “Direct Marketing”.  While I was attracted to it because it was measurable, testable, and I could analyze and develop it, my bosses were primarily attracted to it because it was cheap, new to most propsects, effective and – did I mention cheap?  As a result, we mailed A LOT…I mean A LOT.  Like we mained millions evey month.  In fact, at one point we tried to develop a single campaign with 4 million prospects!  As I recall, we didn’t make it but we got close.  And this campaign was in addition to dozens of similar efforts we were excuting at the same time.

And why not?

We felt that everyone in the US would purchase from direct mail…if only we could get them the righ prodct and make an attractive offer.  And, because there were no laws governing it, we pursued our goals of direct mailing everyone we coule because we were oncinved it would work.

As direct marketing grew, consumer [rightly] grew tired of this intrusive form of marketing.  Even though we in the industry sensed this backlash [all you had to do was listen to people calling our call center], we did little to help them.  Further, our major associations also avoided the issue.  They fought any attempt to monitor direct mail and, for the most part, viewed any governmental action as negative.  We fought it for as long as we could … to our detriment.  Consumers began calling it “junk mail” and they were right.

The SAME THING happened with telemarketing and emails.  Each time, the industry paid scant attention to consumer and givernmental interests and failed to lead in addressing key concerns.

This brings us to SOPA

History is repeating itself.  As marketing and business managers, we need to:

1. Get educated on SOPA and its implications for your business – I posted some great videos and links as have others.  Find out the broad reaching powers it grants to government and its impact on you
1. Here is a great article from Forbes with several great SOPA options 
2. Another one from gizmodo
2. Better understand the issues & [more importantly] the nature of the problem - While I agree copyright & intellectual property rights are important, if most of the problem is overseas, then punishing US citizens is not the solution.  It is just a loss of rights and freedoms.  I encourage you to understand where the problem is and determine if the SOPA solution, no matter how it is re-written, is the right solution.
3. Get in touch with your representatives in Washington –  The law is currently being re-written.  Tell them your concerns about the current plan and how we should manage the internet to punish those who break existing laws which leaving most of us alone.

Now is the time for action…before someone in Washington does it for you.  Thanks

Football & Social Marketing – More Related than you Think?

As the former head of the Nebraska band & an instructor of social marketing at the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I really love college football.  The band playing, the fans yelling, and the spirit of the event are infectious.   It’s great to attend the game whether you win or lose … OK, winning is better but it is still fun regardless of the outcome.  But what does this have to do with social marketing?

Think of the crowd at a football game.  Occasionally, we all yell the same thing because the cheerleaders or the scoreboard tell us to.  When this occurs, the stadium loudly resonates with the cheer.  It is powerful, directed, and is often effective in lifting the spirits of the fans and the players.  At the right time, a cheer or school song can appear to lift the team to another level.

However, most of the time the crowd is involved in the game but not participating in coordinated cheers.  We all yell to encourage the team but our yelling is much like the picture…individuals shouting their own message to the team.  While it creates noise, individual shouts are probably not heard by the team members and the noise generated is both positive and negative.

But what does this have to do with Social Marketing?

Altimeter Social Media Usage Survey Results 1/2012

 In a January 2012 survey on social media usage from the Altimeter Group, determined that – on the average – a large company has 178 SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS!  These accounts are on a wide range of platforms and have been established by individuals throughout the company.  Companies have 39.2 Twitter accounts and 29.9 Facebook accounts.  Think about the implications of these findings for your company.

In marketing, we spend a lot of time discussing the importance of brand and the brand message.  We teach students that the brand is to be treasured and carefully managed to both differentiate you from the competition and to provide prospects with a known product to purchase.  From start-ups to the largest corporations, we spend a great deal of time [and money!] to be consistent in our brand mesage.  And we do…sales, marketing, and PR work hard to ensure all communications with stakeholders, customers and prospects uniformly position the company, our products and services, and our brand “essence”.

Is your Social Media program a crowd or marketing? 

 Think about your social marketing program in light of this survey.  You know social media is an effective way to impact prospects and customers.  It’s ability to effectively target the high value communities which produce your company’s business is unparalleled and it’s growing.  However, if dozens of people within your organization are yelling messages into the social cloud – with little or no coordination within your company, what is the brand message your are communicating?  Your carefully developed brand and company positioning is lost the same way an uncoordinated crowd has its message lost at the football game.  Rather than a strong, loud, coordinated yell or fight song, your message is lost as literally hundreds of social media sites shout at the very prospects you want to attract.

It’s time you take control of social media

Marketing Sherpa social marketing survey

In a 1/2012 survey, Marketing Sherpa found that only 20% of all companies are producing a measurable ROI from their social marketing programs and 64% – while feeling that intuitively social marketing should have ROI – don’t see it in their current efforts.  It’s time for that to change.  [I will be discussing this Marketing Sherpa survey in a future blog article]

Today, there are business models producing measurable ROI.  That is what we are implementing at Marketing Synergy and at in my social marketing classes at Northwestern.  From this experience, here are some actions business and marketing managers should do today:

1. Determine the role of social media at your company – You cannot successfully develop and deploy a social marketing program without a goal.  As I discussed in previous blogs, is the role of your social program marketing, customer service, brand positioning or something else.  For many combinations it is all of these … but in an uncoordinated fashion.  Worse, for many companies, their marketing and brand presence in the social cloud is run by PR or other non-marketing functions [or - worse- just someone in the organization who wants to talk products].  Managers need to discuss what they want to accomplish and where in the organization that function should occur.  You CAN have social marketing programs with measurable ROI and trackable results…you just need to determine that is what you want.
2. Develop clear roles, responsibilities, and communications goals – In integrated marketing, companies go to great lengths to clarify who will run their marketing communications and the company, brand and product essences they want communicated.  However, in social, this is rarely the case.  When we create an integrated marketing campaign [email, telemarketing, DRTV, etc.], we develop a creative brief which defines our target market [social community], marketing objectives, key measures, selling propositions [USPs] and the creative and marketing tests we will undertake in the program.  These marketing efforts go through many levels of management review to ensure the final prpgram is consistent with the company and brand positions we carefully developed.  Does your social marketing efforts have the same level of scrutiny?  Is anyone really watching it?  Whether you are just “talking” to people on Twitter or Facebook or doing a sophisticated social marketing program like we develop at Marketing Synergy, you need to manage social media just like any other marketing program.  Whether you acknowledge it or not, you are marketing when you “go social”.
3. Identify the markets you want to impact – There are two types of social media deployment.  One waits for prospects to show up at your site to initiate a conversation.  At Northwestern, we call this the Twitter/Facebook strategy.  A second form of marketing goes to targeted communities to join them and become a part of the community.  This is what we call social marketing at Marketing Synergy and at Northwestern.  To develop this second type of marketing strategy, we start with a Social EKG.  This is an analytical methodology designed to:
• Identify the customer segments of highest value to your company
• Use social monitoring and primary research to determine where they are in the “social cloud”.  We want to know what social media they use and how frequently they use it.  This includes Facebook, Twitter, social aggregators [Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc.], bloggers, news sites, and other social network elements.
• Determine if they are discussing you and your competitors and, if so, what are they saying and is it positive or negative about you
• Identify the influentials in the social networks where your high value prospects go for information
4. Develop community specific strategies, tactics, and – most important – performance measures – All forms of integrated marketing – including social marketing – are inherently targetable, testable, and measurable.  This is the foundation of the Social IMC business model.  It is now time for companies to transform social media into a marketing strategy we can measure, improve and – most importantly – justify at the “C” level of your company.  Today, companies are developing social marketing programs with measurable ROI [20% are doing it from the Marketing Sherpa survey].  It’s time for your company to do so as well.

It’s Time

It’s time to make social media more focused for your company.  It’s time to transform social from talk to action.  It’s time to  add the elements which makes integrated marketing successful – targeted, testable, trackable, measurable & justifiable.  It’s time to change social media from a crowd yelling at a football game into a marketing asset for your company.

Best Books of 2011

As an educator and consultant in social & integrated marketing, I love to read books to keep up & for use in my social & integrated marketing classes at Northwestern.  The following are some of the best books I read last year.  Several are – in my opinion – “must reads” for marketers who are involved or considering developing social marketing programs in the near future.  

Here are some of the best books of 2011.  I have included a link to Amazon.com if you want to purchase an electronic or paper copy.  Best books include:

1.  Groundswell – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff  Amazon link  This is one of the best books exploring the transformation resulting from social media and social networks.  It is a great first book to begin understanding the marketing and business potential of social media.  It shows you how to monitor & interact with social communities.  A “must read” book.

2.  The New Rules of Marketing &PR – David Meerman Scott   Amazon link  This is a book I use in the social marketing classes as it covers how to create blog and social content which is interesting, engaging and effective.  For companies using social media for press releases, business blogs, video, and viral marketing, this is also a “must read” book.  My students really like it.

3.  Reality is Broken – Jane McGonigal   Amazon link  Gamification or game theory is playing a bigger and bigger role in the creation of community focused website for an integrated social marketing program.  This book is an excellent primer on game applications in the social world.  I have listened to Jane in TED presentations and she is right on target.  This is another “must read” for today’s marketer.

4.  Gamification by Design – abe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham  Amazon link   This is another good book on game theory and gamification,  It is much deeper than Jane’s but is still a good read for a marketer wanting to learn more about how gamification might work for your website or social marketing program.

5.  Social Media ROI – Olivier Blanchard   Amazon link   This is a bit academic but a useful read if you are wondering about social media tracking.  Not really social marketing as we define it at Northwestern but it does present a decent overview of the challenges of applying ROI to social media.  An interesting read.

6.  Social Media Marketing – An Hour a Day – Dave Evans   Amazon link   OK, its not a book published in 2011 but I am a slow reader!  Actually, it is a book we use in class and is a great primer on how to being doing some forms of marketing using social media.  A useful read – especially if you are a marketer new to social media.

7.  Media:  From Chaos to Clarity – Judy Franks  Book link  Judy and I have been friends and colleagues for a number of years at Northwestern.  She is a media and creative guru who consults and educates companies on media and PR.  Her book explores how to use the “tried and true” media approaches and adapt them to the social & electronic ages.  It is great “must read”

These are my best reads of 2011.  Now I am preparing to being reading some of the book recommendations of Joey Strawn, Mark Schaefer, and other marketer / bloggers I follow to keep up

See the survey at Marketing Sherpa survey 2011

In a recent survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa [a great source of marketing insights], 64% of all companies deploying social media strategies view it as a promising tactic that will eventually produce ROI. In simple terms, they are saying it makes sense but let’s go at it conservatively because it isn’t really producing results right now.
As a professor of social and integrated marketing at Northwestern’s Medill IMC [Integrated Marketing Communications] program, my graduate and undergraduate classes have focused on developing ROI justified, measurable social marketing programs for a wide range of companies. Each quarter, we invite companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 firms, for profit and not-for-profit, and business-to-business and consumer direct companies to work with us to build social marketing programs. Some of these companies have sophisticated social media programs while others are just starting to explore the potential of marketing in the social “cloud”. After working with over 50 companies, we have found there is considerable confusion about what social marketing is and how social should be integrated into the marketing mix of a company.

Many companies view social marketing as the development of Facebook and Twitter pages to engage visitors in discussions about their needs, the company’s products, and issues related to customer service.  Some companies also use these social sites for coupons and special offers.

While we also use Facebook and Twitter in our Social IMC programs, these “Facebook & Twitter first” types of strategies are not really forms of marketing because they are reactionary, not trackable to individual levels, and cannot be deployed like other integrated marketing programs.  As a result, many companies deploy this strategy in the PR – not their marketing department – and the deployment is viewed as an investment with minimal bottom line impact.

Companies in the 20% of the study that do find ROI do social marketing differently - they do Social IMC.  A Social IMC program uses the IMC business model to identify high value target markets and locate them in the “social cloud”.  They then develop marketing strategies designed to access and engage high value prospects…enticing them with exceptional community offers [which often go viral], and finally moving them to purchase.  The results are marketing programs that are targeted, justifiable, measurable, testable, and database driven.  Social IMC marketing programs allow social marketing to be justified, discussed, and developed by the CMO with the same control and predictability of all other marketing programs.

From working with companies to deploy Social IMC programs at Marketing Synergy and through the Northwestern IMC marketing program, we recommend marketers today need to identify the specific goals and objectives they want to achieve from their social marketing programs.  If you want your social program to be an integral part of your marketing mix, there are proven business models which can develop, deploy & manage your social market programs with the same precision and control as your other marketing channels.  With Social IMC marketing programs, you can create social programs which produce solid ROI.

Randy Hlavac is a lecturer professor of Integrated and Social marketing at the Northwestern Medill IMC program.  In addition, he is the CEO of Marketing Synergy – a social and marketing consultancy located in Naperville IL.  Randy can be reached through twitter – @RandyHlavac – or by calling 630.328.9550.

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