Social Media: The Five Steps for Long Term Success: The Event Mechanic! Maturity Model

I have been doing a lot of research in the past year on social media. In that time, I have been trying to figure out how to separate the ‘sizzle from the steak’ and come up with a clear road map to help people who are starting out in social media, or perhaps those who are floundering and don’t know how to rescue their effort.


1) Philosophy

In order for social media to work, you’re going to want to subscribe to the following:

1) you want to connect people(not just to you);
2) everyone is invited to benefit from your efforts;
3) you want to know more about your customers, their customers and what they need the marketplace to provide.
4) you need to be in this for the long term;
5) you need to be consistent in your content provision( every day, three days a week, etc.)
6) you have to provide valuable content for free without hope for immediate return.
7) Everyone is invited, you might treat certain people in your sphere, but evryobne is welcome to join.

Hopefully the main tenets of your corporate mission and values meet some or all of the above. If none do, social media will not work for you.

Take some time to evaluate the above before proceeding to the next step.

If you don’t know your customer base intimately(come on by honest with this one), do detailed market research on what information the customers in your marketplace need and how(and when) they want to receive it.


2) Knowledge of Customer

Next you are going to need to build an audience to whom you’ll target your content efforts. These ‘straw men’ are called ‘target personas’. And what exactly is a target persona and how do you develop them? Part of this is a repeat of a past article I wrote earlier, but it’s worth saying again:

A target persona is a model of an ideal customer which incorporates primary research and data, such as income and gender, with personality traits, such as goals, attitudes, behaviors and interests. All of this is put together in a short statement which describes the ideal customer’s personality as it relates to your business.

Let’s get started on how to develop your target personas:
• Start with three types of customers who you’d like to develop into target personas;
• Go into your customer data. Once you have chosen three types of customer, answer as many questions about them as you can, using the information you already have. Look at averages and aggregate data to get some of the basic information about your personas—age, income, shopping habits, average spend and frequency of visits to your site. If you don’t have all of the information, use what you know to fill in the blanks. Make sure you update this information as you learn more about your customer segments;
• Write a summary for each target persona. Aggregate what you’ve learned from your customer data and what you have observed or instinctually know and use this information to write a summary which describes this “perfect customer.” Include his/her likes and interests, goals and motivations, interactions with your site and other relevant information. Keep the summary interesting and brief and write it as if you’re describing someone you know. Give your personas names as well as pictures to make them real;

Creating your target personas will help you better understand your customers and what influences their interactions with you. You can improve your customer’s online and offline experiences much more easily, and help people throughout the company have a uniform understanding of your customers, their needs and wants. Your target personas allow you to develop more tailored marketing strategies meant to reach people, not data. Continually updating, modifying and adding to your personas as you learn more about your customers and your target audience will keep your marketing fresh, relevant, personal and effective.
Remember to do this both for current and future customers as they may be different.


3)Strategy to meet Philosophy

Assuming you have found out what your customers want, now is the time to build the strategy. It should be assumed that to ‘reach the dark corners’, that you will need to show evidence of your expertise in the market which is not product centric. You’ll therefore need to become a content producer through blogs, e-books, articles, have experts contribute to industry publications, etc.


OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the four major elements:


Content strategy

Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.

You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.

As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.

In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.


Search Engine Optimization strategy

This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).


Pay Per Click strategy

One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.


Inbound Link strategy

Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.

Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.


4) Tactics to meet the Strategy

Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.

Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.


Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.




5) Measurement

In order to be able to know whether you are successful at this social media effort, you are going to need to set up some benchmarks by which to measure your progress.


Examples you might use are:

Members of a LinkedIn or Facebook group
Followers on Twitter
Google ranking for your top 30 key words
Number of inbound links to your content pages
Number of average comments per blog post

And the ROI driven ones:

Number of new customers
Amount of revenue generated by new customers


Remember that your effort may take six or months, so don’t make your measurements too severe you may fail before you start!

Also remember that the ROI case is what you will need to do to get resources for the plan above, so make sure you can argue the case in front of your boss to get money and people to help you!

Social Media Case Study

Thanks to Dave Reske for pointing this out to me:

Generate Leads with Social Media Strategy: 6 Steps to Fill Up Sales Funnel
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SUMMARY: Just over a year ago, Pam O'Neal, VP Marketing, BreakingPoint, shared her team’s success using a wide-ranging social media strategy to generate leads. We’ve asked her to present an update on their tactics -- with a focus on integrating email and social media -- at our upcoming Email Summit.

In advance of this session, we're highlighting the original case study that first demonstrated how the team tested and measured activity from several social media channels. The results included 55% of all leads coming from inbound Web visits, and 75% of marketing-influenced pipeline coming from inbound Web leads.
CHALLENGE

Pam O’Neal, VP Marketing, BreakingPoint, didn’t want to adopt a typical demand generation strategy after she joined the networking-equipment testing system provider in April 2008. The startup company had a limited budget, and their target audience of security and quality assurance professionals in R&D laboratories wasn’t merely skeptical of marketing -- they hated it.

O’Neal and her team wanted to supplement traditional PR, events and demand-generation campaigns with a social media strategy that created strong relationships with hard-to-find prospects. But they wanted to make sure those efforts were reaching the right audience and turning them into leads.

"It was either going to work big or be a huge failure," says O’Neal. "We didn’t know, but we wanted more than anything to have a good solid case study and have metrics that prove social media could work in this climate and with this audience."

They took six steps to develop their social media strategy and measure its impact.

CAMPAIGN

O’Neal and her team tested several social media channels while revamping their public relations tactics to drive visitors to the company’s website. They tracked growth and engagement metrics from those initiatives. They then correlated those results to traditional metrics, such as unique visitors, leads, and pipeline activity.

The six steps they took:

Step #1. Create blog to start and join online conversations

O’Neal’s team began its foray into social media by launching a company blog. They didn’t wait to finalize a blog strategy before launch, however. Their blogging approach evolved over time, based on observation of online conversations related to their network equipment testing niche.

- First, the team set up an online monitoring system that scanned the Web, the blogosphere, online forums and communities to find conversations relevant to their industry and their technical audience. The results were consolidated into an RSS feed that a team member could review each morning.

Scanning tools included:
o TweetScan, for Twitter posts
o Google Alerts for industry terms, such as "security threats" and "equipment testing"
o Boardtracker.com, which monitors technology forums and message boards

- When the scanning tools found a relevant conversation, such as a blog post about cost of network equipment-testing tools, a team member would join that conversation. They would comment on the blog post and point readers to content on the same topic at the BreakingPoint blog.

- The team also used their blog to break stories with the potential to go viral. For example, the company’s security research team published tests and research related to clickjacking -- a recently discovered security flaw within websites that takes clickers from a legitimate-appearing button to an illegitimate site.

Those stories generated links from other industry blogs and articles in major trade publications.

Step #2. Establish a Twitter account

The team supplemented their blog with a company Twitter account. It allowed them to post shorter, more frequent updates to their niche audience.

Company "tweets" included:
- Notices of new blog posts, webinars
- Fun entries (e.g., trivia questions, quizzes)
- Informal focus group questions (a poll of Twitter followers about potential names for the company newsletter)

As they did with the blog, the team used their scanning tools to find and participate in Twitter conversations relevant to their industry. They were particularly interested in community members asking for advice about equipment testing, so they set up alerts to find key terms, such as:
o "Bake off," an industry term for a head-to-head equipment test
o "Test methodology"
o Competitors’ names (along with the word "sucks")

"People are complaining a lot more on Twitter than in the blogosphere," says O’Neal. "It’s a place people go to vent, as well as search for solutions."

They also re-tweeted relevant information found through their scans, such as reports about equipment testing results or interesting industry news. "It gives us a reason to stay in front of our followers and stimulate conversations."

Step #3. Create LinkedIn group

To explore an array of social media channels, the team created BreakingPoint groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. They quickly realized that their target audience wasn’t well represented on Facebook. But the LinkedIn group began attracting members with the right professional backgrounds.

The team established the group as an open forum to discuss issues related to network test equipment and security -- not to the company or its products.

Group members took the lead in starting conversations among themselves. Typical topics included:
o Advice on vendors
o Reviews/suggestions for industry events
o Feedback on new testing approaches or programs

O’Neal’s team acted as hosts, joining discussions when they had a pertinent point to contribute, or sharing relevant industry news, blog posts or other content to keep members engaged.

Step #4. Modify press release strategy for blogger coverage

The team revamped its press release strategy to encourage more online coverage for the company. Actions they took:

- Release at least one new press release each week.
- To encourage inbound links, press releases were shorter and contained more links to sections of the company website.
- Shift their release time from 8 a.m. Eastern time to late morning/early afternoon, when West Coast bloggers were most likely to begin scanning for news.
- Publish press releases using a service called PitchEngine, and post releases to social media channels, such as their Twitter feed and LinkedIn group.

Step #5. Promote social media channels on company website and in email signatures

To encourage customers and prospects to participate in their social media channels, the team included links to different accounts from the company’s website and in their email signatures.

The news section of the website, for instance, included links to the company’s Twitter feed and LinkedIn group under a "join us" headline. They also included updates from the company Twitter account in the right-hand column of the company blog.

Employees’ email signatures could include links to the blog, Twitter account or LinkedIn group, along with name, email address and phone number.

Step #6. Measure growth of social media accounts and Web traffic

O’Neal was determined to measure the contribution social media efforts made to the company’s marketing and sales activity. So, they tracked metrics to determine the growth of their various social media channels, such as:
o Unique blog page views
o Twitter followers
o LinkedIn group members

At the same time, they tracked a series of marketing metrics, such as:
o Unique website visitors
o Traffic generated by SEO
o Leads
o Leads by source (inbound Web, email, trade shows, seminars)
o Marketing-influenced pipeline activity, by source

When comparing the metrics side-by-side, they looked for correlations between activity in social media outlets and an increase in leads and sales pipeline activity.


RESULTS


"After six months, we saw some amazing results," says O’Neal.

The team’s analysis showed a dramatic correlation between the use of social media channels and the growth of the company’s Web traffic and leads. (See creative samples link below for a chart illustrating growth trends.)

By the end of Q3 2008, their social media campaign resulted in:
o 10,230 unique blog page views in Q3
o 280 Twitter followers
o 141 members of their LinkedIn Group
o 155% increase in unique Web visitors

Most important, that Web traffic is now contributing the majority of the team’s leads and pipeline activity.

- Leads by source:
o 55% inbound Web
o 23% trade shows
o 20.5% email
o 1.5% seminars

- Marketing-influenced pipeline by source:
o 75% inbound Web
o 17% email
o 4% seminars
o 4% trade shows

The amount of leads and pipeline activity generated from Web traffic demonstrates to O’Neal that their social media strategy is reaching their marketing-averse audience.

"In my prior position, I felt like I was on a treadmill when every quarter I had to come up with more and more clever campaigns to drive demand generation," says O’Neal. "I’m not saying that there isn’t a lot of work that goes into social media, but I’m not constantly having to do these elaborate demand gen campaigns anymore."

The team’s social media efforts also support their ongoing search-engine optimization strategy. By engaging in conversations about industry issues, they’re generating more links on non-brand search terms that help boost their search engine results positions. Non-brand search terms are typically those used by prospects when searching for testing equipment.

When O’Neal joined the company, the ratio of Web traffic from brand terms to non-brand terms was 2.5 to 1. "That’s really bad. It means more than twice as many people were searching for our company name versus their own pain point."

Now, the ratio of brand to non-brand search traffic is 0.6 to 1.

Useful links related to this story

Hear Pam O'Neal's update on integrating social media and email for lead generation at MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Summit in Miami, January 20-22:
http://www.sherpastore.com/EmailSummit2010.html

Creative samples from BreakingPoint’s social media campaign
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/breakingpoint/study.h
ml

BoardTracker
http://www.boardtracker.com/

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com

LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com

PitchEngine
http://www.pitchengine.com

TweetScan
http://www.tweetscan.com

Twitter
http://www.twitter.com

BreakingPoint
http://www.breakingpoint.com

I still think they need to figure out the philosophy piece, but results speak for themselves....

Social Media Plan in 2010

I promise you I will shortly be rolling out my Social Media Maturity Model shortly for all to see. In the meantime, I was interested in this post focused on the wholly grail of social media(ROI) and their soon to come Benchmark report. Enjoy...

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/general/social-media-marketing-using-data-and-metrics.html

Social Media: What’s all the fuss and how do I make it work for my company? Part Two

This will appear next week in my CW Allen Group column:

As I mentioned in my last column, I am in the process of building a social media practice as it relates to events. For those who didn’t read part one of this article, here it is: http://www.cwallengroup.com/newsletters/sept09/social_media.pdf

In the last article, I emphasized the importance of making sure that you business philosophy aligns with the ‘rules’ of social media, those are:

• You must offer valuable content with no expectation of immediate payback;
• You must want to grow your market segment for everyone(including competitors);
• You must make a commitment to be in the social media sphere for the long term;
• Everyone must be welcome(although you can treat certain segments better than others) including potentially competitors.

Next, you need to know your customers and future customers intimately enough to be able to create ‘target personas’. For more detail on this, see my blog post here:

http://www.theeventmechanic.com/blog/2009/05/developing-target-personas-in-marketing.html


OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the five major elements:

Content strategy

Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.

You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.

As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.

In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.


Search Engine Optimization strategy

This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).


Pay Per Click strategy

One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.


Inbound Link strategy

Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.

Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.


Social Media Tool strategy

Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.

Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.


Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Warwick Davies is the Principal of The Event Mechanic!, a consulting company which helps event organizers realize greater revenues and profits by fixing ‘broken’ events and launch new ones both in United States and internationally . He is an up and coming guru on Inbound Marketing and Social Media for event companies. His clients include event organizers in the information technology, healthcare, biotechnology construction and design engineering and executive event markets. Previously, Warwick was responsible for internationally recognizable event brands such as Macworld Conference and Expo, LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and the Customer Relationship Management Conference and Exposition worldwide. For more information on The Event Mechanic! and past ROI-Q The Event Mechanic! columns please visit http://www.theeventmechanic.com/resources.html . He can be reached at Warwick@theeventmechanic.com or at 781 354 0119.

Attending Expo! Expo!

I am attending Expo! Expo! in Atlanta for the first time(kind of odd considering I've been in the business for 18 years).

It's kind of funny as to why I haven't. DCI(my first 11 years in the business) didn't allow any employees attend any industry events because they were afraid staff would be poached. When I was at IDG, we went to SISO but not Expo! Expo!. In the last four years, I have either been too busy to go, or I didn't want to go to the particular venue, or something else. This year I planned to go in July around the time I went to SISO.

I had been told that Expo! Expo! is a 'sea' of people and difficult to navigate. My impressions on the first day is somewhat different, as I was invited to the 'first timers' brunch where I got an opportunity to meet folks, then we broke up into groups. I had a chance to talk about my 'The Five Steps for Long Term Social Media Success" concept which went over very well within the group. Seems like people within events are struggling with putting together a long term plan which can convince their bosses that the investment is worth it.

So far, so good but I have great expectations....

Social Media: What's all the fuss?

My latest article for the CWAllen Group:

http://www.cwallengroup.com/newsletters/sept09/social_media.pdf

The new event landscape

As I mentioned before, I was at the SISO Executive Conference last week.

What did I learn?

That times are tough for most people with some events off 40% of their paid conference attendees from 2008. Funny that, as my business has never been better. What I think we are seeing is the transformation of the industry to one that is more agile, flexible and user focused.

Gone are the days when you could put up the tent and push a button and send out hundreds of thousands of emails into the unknown, hoping a gimmick will convince faceless thousands to hit the link entitled 'register here'. Gone are the days when top executives don't pick up the phone to speak with key buyers to make sure they're providing ROI. Gone are the days when events are just project management charts and budgets and internal meetings.

The customer(information consumer) now decides whether they will pay ANY attention to you. The show was good last year, but what's in it for me now? Maybe I'll just view a webinar on the subject, I can't be seen in Las Vegas/Orlando/Kansas City/San Francisco for a week enjoying myself, my own job's at risk.....

I think that the events business when it comes back(some say in 2011), it will be half the size in terms of employees as it was in 2007. The revenue for events may be the sames(or greater) for the winners...but is there room for a number 3 or 4 show in a market segment anymore which isn't regional?

Sounds tough? If you are reading this then you're asking me, Warwick what do I have to do to survive in this business?

Here's my prescription:

1) Get profit and ROI focused. No matter what position you have, make sure the bottom line is in your sights always;

2) Remove yourself from the office politics as best as you can;

3) Get to know your customers and their customers;

4) Try to make an impact on your job every day and at least every week;

5) Learn from problems and mistakes, and don't make the same mistake twice;

6) Find extra work to do, volunteer, and take on someone else's load if at all possible;

7) Learn about social media and how it can help your business;

8) Pay attention to the trends in the marketplace;

9) Network and learn from other companies' events;

10) Plan for the long term;

11) Read my blog and give me comments, I am about to post some real valuable stuff.


You know where to find me.....

Return from the SISO Executive Conference

Wow, in the middle of summer I am yet again insanely busy, with a client event and then the SISO Executive Conference in NYC.

I was especially looking forward to Barry Libert's sessions on community building. Barry is an old client when I was helping him at Shared Insights, so I got a chance to speak with him at the function on the battleship Intrepid the night before.

We agreed that some of the reasons why social media or inbound marketing is not taking off in the event space is because:

1) The events business is a technology laggard;
2) The whole area is reasonably new;
3) Not every event manager is focused on social media as a means of providing value to the market, just another tactic to 'drive revenue'.
4) There is not alot of strategy making going on, just using tools such as Twitter which may or may not work.

As Barry mentioned, the key also is giving up control, ie letting the users build content within your community which is SCARY. Most traditional event producers won't let this happen.

Oh, and I came across this blog called the Trade Show Marketing Report which is going under apparently. Looks like some good content and right about social media......

Onwards to Labor Day

Strategically Using Social Media

I am thankful for Stephen Nold. He has set up an event(The MTO Summit) which was the catalyst starting me on this Inbound Marketing path.

I was checking out one of his old newsletters today and found this:

http://www.meetingtechonline.com/articles_
Strategically_Utilizing_Social_Media.aspx

Which basically says don't adopt technology for technology's sake, hallelujah!