FRANKthoughts

Melbourne’s freak storm on Saturday ended up as the most talked about topic on twitter and hundreds of videos were submitted to youtube:

This is mass media. This is main stream. This is where brands need to go next.

Here are three things to do BEFORE launching a facebook page:

1. Invest in social business strategy – don’t just start a twitter. Make sure you’ve got a plan first. This will be the best $20,000 you invest.

2. Find a community manager – earned media is not another task for your marketing manager. This will be the best $40,000 you invest.

3. Align social media with internal/external objectives – If you have the strategy and the management resource this should grow organically.

Anyone else with some more pointers?

Well we are finally pleased to reveal how much fun we’ve had going through our online strategy process and community manager’s course with carsales.com.au. After immersing ourselves in the business we developed an internal and external social media plan. A big part of that plan was to introduce “community managers” within the organisation. Running for 4 weeks we covered topics such as earned media, social tools like twitter, facebook, youtube and flickr (with hands on exercises on the brand social profiles), community management roles, responsibilities and challenges (by our own GPO community manager Sarah) and advanced blogging techniques and social SEO by our Web ace Arnold. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive with most attendees wanting the course to continue for longer. Understanding that earned media is a process not an event we’re still working closely with carsales.com.au on an ongoing basis. Hey, why not check out carsales.com.au’s twitter and facebook and say hi?

One the most common topics of debate we receive from clients is setting our goal for social media tools.   The easiest and familiar metric for marketers is to grow followers and fans for Twitter and Facebook respectively.  It’s a solid online metric that is similar to growing traffic visits and email databases.

Whilst that is important, it does not paint the broader picture of what social media is all about.  Conversations.  Conversations that help build advocacy, spreading the word (WOM), relationships and ultimately trust or loyalty.

At FRANkVizeum, we have illustrated this via our Conversation Venn Diagram.  By infusing the thoughts of Communities with traditionally 1 to 1 relationships between brands and consumers, we can clearly start seeing where brands sit.

Brands that communicate privately with consumers sit in “Closed Conversation.”   They could be feedback forms, newsletters, or surveys.  Whilst this is effective, it does not make use of the scalability of social media.  The metric here could be site traffic, email database, etc.

For brands that do not participate in any conversation but have consumers enjoying sharing experiences, stories, and news within the community, they sit in “Open Conversation”.  A great example is Nintendo Australia.  They do not participate in Twitter but there are a multitude of conversations, posts, RT, news, etc about the brand.  The metric here is volume of posts, tweets, RT from consumers.  The challenge is how do involve and mobilise the legions of fans?

Brands that use Twitter feeds as a way to broadcast news with little/no followers or active conversations sit squarely in “One Way Broadcasting.”  This is the traditional model in the social space with the focus on building traffic or news feed.  An example is TheAge twitter feed.  The metric here is growing Followers and/or volume of external tweets/post.

Ultimately, it comes down to the a brand’s objective.  Through these objectives we implement a strategy using the right tools and right metrics based on the above Venn Diagram. Eg. Traffic? News? Advocacy? WOM? Monitoring?

Our belief is Brands should find the right balance and should sit in the middle of all 3.  Not only broadcasting feed but to also build relationships to generate RTs and spreading the word to the community.

To support our thinking, there is recent research shared on Fast Company that looked at what is the most effective way to spread news on Twitter (a common client objective).  It shows “the most influential spreaders of news aren’t neccessarily those with the greatest number of online friends or followers.”

Source: Fast Company

We have known this for a while now (we even demonstrated this for GPO in our FRANkademy sessions), but this is the first piece of research that validates our strategy.  The trick is to find the right people strategically placed as the gate holder to people with larger followers that spreads the news.  These guys are hard to find as they aren’t immediately obvious (eg. through their number of followers).

By implementing the strategy that address the 3 points of the Venn Diagram, we can only find these “influencers” by a) increasing followers b) be active c) increase RT and conversations.  They will not only help spread the word, but build lasting relationships, loyalty, WOM, sales and traffic.

We had some FAIL, we had some NAIL but the most important thing is that brands are starting to understand more about earned media. I believe next year will see a growth in this area especially in social business strategy and brand community managers. You can check out some other opinions: Mumbrella’s FAIL list for 2009, Ben Shepherd and Julian Cole’s 2010 predictions (On Ben Shepherd’s blog with a great comment from Mo from NOVA) and this video by Laurel Papworth:

What are your thoughts about earned media towards 2010?

Here’s another (very funny) video via Mo and Henry Feagins:

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

Is it the PR agency? the advertising agency? the marketing department? Whoever it is they need to practice what they preach. They need to be familiar with the tools, to know the language and have guidelines to follow. They need to have something to measure with both short and long term goals. They need to provide value for your customers and business. Can anyone do it?

Here’s something from Seth Godin in his post “Watch the money“: If you’re in the music business but you never buy tickets or downloads, can you really empathize with the people you’re selling to?… if you work for a non-profit and you don’t give money to charity, what exactly are you doing in this job?… Money is more than a transfer of value. It’s a statement of belief. An ad agency that won’t buy ads, a consultant who won’t buy consulting, and a waiter who doesn’t tip big—it’s a sign, and not a good one”.

If there is one rule when it comes to building your brand and business social assets it is to buy it from the people who invest in it themselves. They have probably faced the same problem you’re facing and have the hands on experience to build a sustainable social business solution. Do you think brands should have a community/social officer?

When the world is changing so quickly some organisations will survive and some not. The difference will be in how well you prepare and how good is your solution. Here are three examples of three different industries going through changes. These are my observations and I will love to hear your thoughts:

1.MUSIC: Artists are doing it for themselves – Superstar artists are now using social media to launch their new video/show/single using Ustream.tv and facebook: That’s right both Shakira and Chamillionaire did this in the last week against their record label’s advice and I expect to see many more artists doing this “social media” thing in the near future. So if you’re a record label or a music related business this act represent both threat and opportunity. When your artists know better than you how to reach their audience, there is a problem.  It’s up to you to keep up.

2.NEWSPAPERS: What will be the new model? Rupert Murdoch continues his war against google and wants to charge for online content. That’s great. Now he’s saying that without eTablets, “Newspapers Will Go Out Of Business.” Do you actually know anyone who owns an e-tablet? Any way you look at it, the newspaper model is broken (now they might charge you for a day pass?) . People are getting their news from other sources for free. Will people pay to get the same content on an e-paper? I don’t believe quality journalism is broken but I feel the delivery mechanism is. In a world where everything is shared by niches what’s the role social media and crowds can play within a publication? I’m sure Murdoch is working on it but if I was working for a newspaper or a magazine I’ll be thinking about it too.

3.ADVERTISING: The rise of the consumer-ambassador – When Coca-cola is doing it you know it’s real but they are not the only ones. More and more brands are using reality type “social” campaigns featuring real people to earn brand recognition, more fans/followers and the holy grail: organic google juice. Think about how many mentions your brand can get when people are constantly adding content, twittering and blogging about it, sharing the content with their friends and their friends friends. When the consumer journey starts with a google search, your first page is the most valued property you have. In this kind of world you need to be sure of what happens when someone is googling you.

During the last six months we had the pleasure of having around 300 people join us for a two hour social strategy session followed by drinks at FOG. As the year comes to a close we would love all the people who attended to have the presentation handy and the people who missed out to have a taste of the action.

FRANkademy has three parts:
1. twitter for brands.
2. Blog networks eg. Nuffnang.
3. Social business strategy case study – Melbourne’s GPO.

So here it is. Please feel free to comment, suggest improvements, share and tweet if you find it useful.

The improved FRANkademy will be back next year. If you’d like to be notified please put your name + email here.

Thank you everyone. We had a blast.

Not so long ago we helped Melbourne’s GPO to start a dialogue with it’s fans. We developed an annual online strategy including an editorial site, profiles on social networks and a community manager. This Sunday three of Melbourne’s most prominent fashion bloggers went on an intimate shopping spree with three loyal fans at the GPO with us throwing in a $500 voucher for each. You can read more and look at the photos here. Thanks for everyone involved in this campaign: Tracey, Sarah, Leanne, Ben, fashion hayley, Lady Melbourne and Nuffnang. In the photo: Nadia and Alicia from Sea of Ghosts.

Many brands are already using online to the max. A combined effort of search, content and social profiles can get your website noticed, talked about and shared. But maybe social media isn’t for everyone?

I believe this is what’s happening while you sit on the fence:

1. Your competitors are moving in and away – Are your competitors on twitter yet? It’s safe to say one of them is already using these tools. It means that they’re getting the following and attention that could have been yours. They’re also becoming more advanced, knowledgeable and familiar with future tools and marketing techniques making the gap between you even bigger.

2. No investment means no return – Do you own assets or are you paying rent? When no investment is made in the social space and all you do is pay for traffic the only return you see is the return you paid for. Social media is an asset. It GROWS in value. It means your money is invested rather than spent. Two years after starting this blog many of our new business prospects find us online without us paying a single dollar on search.

3. Missing out on word of mouth and traffic – Do you have an opinion about your industry? Do you have specific knowledge you can share that will help people? If the answer is yes then you have two options. Talk to people at bbq’s, networking events and elevators or choose to do the same thing online. Social media is conversation. It’s a place for you to demonstrate value, teach, help and foster an interaction between your customers. You’ll be surprised how powerful one post can be. Social sites are also the top traffic referring sites: 20% is the amount of loyal traffic Facebook brings in as a referring site, making it the most valuable source of traffic.

4. Spending resource and money – Research, customer service and product testing cost a lot of money. What if you can reduce this cost by 10%? How about using the resources you have in a way that saves time? Social media is a great research, testing and customer service tool. Take a look and discover what people are saying about your brand right now?

5. Internal communication, education and innovation suffers – How many of your employees are on social networks? How many of them are encouraged to talk about you online and have the tools to do so? It’s safe to say most of the people you work with have a presence on at least one social network. If you’re not in it you’re missing out on them communicating and sharing your brand with others. You’re also not providing self expression on the company blog or the opportunity to learn from others in the company. Innovation is a word that comes up a lot when talking about business advantage – when there is no place to communicate ideas and opinions in the company, it takes longer to innovate.

6. Missing out on talent – Every business needs to get young talent in. Most of them now communicate online and use these tools for work. If you don’t have a social media play you might be missing out on the best talent out there. The last three people employed by FRANkVizeum came from a social network/blog interaction. Our positions are usually posted on twitter and linkedin which makes the process of finding the right person a lot easier (and cheaper).

7. Not fishing for knowledge – The internet (i can’t believe i’m writing this but hey) is an ocean of knowledge. But you need to talk to the fisherman to catch the best fishes. Other people in social mediums are fishing constantly and if you’re not there you’re not enjoying the most up to date knowledge available. If you’d like to know more about social media and how to start a social business strategy you’re invited to RSVP for the last FRANkademy for 2009.

What do you think? Are these points valid? Do you have any other examples for the cost of inaction?