Social Media Next Best Practices … 3 Examples to Study

This concept of changing people’s behavior is the basis of this section, and of social marketing as a whole. We will talk about what social marketing is, and why it can be of use to you in your organization for the next best practices.

Then, we’ll go into more depth on marketing, and discuss what is known as the “4 Ps”–the four elements around which all types of marketing, social or profit-oriented, are centered.

Finally, we’ll finish with an overview of the stages someone will go through if their effort is successful.

Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.

-David Freemantle

It’s a lot of information, and much of it is more conceptual in nature than many other sections of the ToolBox. The next three sections of this chapter, then, will try to ground these ideas more thoroughly, so they can be used in your day-to-day work.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MARKETING?

So what, exactly, is social marketing? In Social Marketing Report, it’s defined as, “the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems.” It means to take the same principles used in selling goods–such as shoes, television shows, or pizza–to convince people to change their behavior.

What does that mean? Well, instead of selling hamburgers, you’re selling a life without heart attacks. Instead of convincing teenagers to buy blue jeans, you’re convincing them to buy the advantages of postponing pregnancy.

Of course, if you are selling blue jeans, you’re still trying to influence behavior–you’re convincing people they need to wear your jeans–either for comfort, or for style, or value. So then, what is the difference between social marketing and commercial marketing?

It’s really summed up in one key point: commercial marketing tries to change people’s behavior for the benefit of the marketer; social marketing tries to change people’s behavior for the benefit of the consumer, or of society as a whole.

“I’m not a doctor,” runs the joke. “I just play one on T.V.” Television and other forms of mass media, it seems, are often highly adept at making complicated tasks look simple.

This is especially true when it comes to marketing. The thirty-second ad for toothpaste will seem incredibly simple, even a bit silly–yet we’ll find ourselves humming the jingle in the car on the way home. When we stop by the grocery store a week later, we might pick up that toothpaste, caught by its colorful box and placement on the shelves.

We’ve been grabbed by a successful marketing campaign. It might seem so simple, that we’re barely aware of it–but it really represents a huge amount of research, design, and testing done by the toothpaste corporation.

Social marketing is based on the same principles used to sell that tube of toothpaste. It means using commercial marketing techniques to try and improve social problems. A social marketing campaign might be used, for example, to try to reduce violence against women, or to increase the number of people who sign up as donors for the national bone marrow registry.

Managing a social marketing campaign might look fairly simple–like you’re just putting up more posters to raise awareness of the lead poisoning problem in your community, for example. In reality, however, it’s much more than that. Social marketing is no less than a shift in how you view and run your program or organization. It can be a very effective approach, but it’s one with many details to consider.

On the following few screens, we’ll try to make concrete how you can accomplish many of these details. We’ll start by touching briefly on the importance of social marketing and when might be a sensible time for your group to draw up a social marketing campaign.

Then, we’ll dive into the details of how to manage a social marketing program. We’ll include how to separate consumers into individual groups and how to find out what those groups want (and how you can give it to them). Then, we’ll discuss designing the message, choosing the medium, and finally, implementing and evaluating your work.

Social marketing is an approach with a lot of advantages. Perhaps the two most pointed benefits are:

It helps you reach your target audience. Social marketing makes you look at whom you want to influence, and how to sway these people most effectively. And, for this reason,

It works. If creative, thorough marketing has helped numerous companies make millions of dollars, there is no reason, that well-run social marketing campaigns can’t be even more effective, in changing people’s behavior. After all, the benefits of good health (or a clean environment, or an end to date rape) are surely more evident than the benefits of a pair of running shoes.

So when is the proper time to run a social marketing campaign?

It will depend quite a bit on your program or organization, of course, but generally speaking…

When you are trying to change the behavior of a large number of people. If the number of people who you are trying to reach is small enough that they can be spoken with individually, or in a group, the time is probably not ripe for social marketing. For example, if you are interested in asking students at Pleasant Valley High School to volunteer at the upcoming spring fair, you might speak to them at an assembly, or visit individual classrooms. The development of a social marketing plan is more than is necessary. If, however, you want to increase volunteerism among everyone who lives in Pleasant Valley, a social marketing plan might be just what’s called for.

When you are trying to change behavior over a long period of time. Social marketing plans tend to be for long-term projects, when you are trying to change people’s behavior permanently, or over a long period of time. Generally speaking, if you are asking people to perform a particular action once, efforts to convince them to do so wouldn’t use a social marketing campaign. This is a bit tricky because some of the same principles might be used, or such an action might be a part of a social marketing campaign.

For example, asking people to give blood once at their office wouldn’t be social marketing. However, a concerted effort by the blood bank to try to increase the number of people who donate blood regularly might use office blood drives as a part of the campaign. That effort as a whole might be a social marketing campaign, provided it used the marketing principles we have talked about.

When you have the resources necessary to manage a comprehensive effort. As we’ve seen in the previous two bullets, running a social marketing campaign is not a short-term idea. It’s more of a philosophy that will direct how you approach your work as a whole. Therefore, a social marketing campaign should only be undertaken when you’re ready to use the time and resources it will take to make that shift.

This doesn’t mean your organization or program has to have a lot of money to use a social marketing approach. Excellent social marketing can be done on a shoestring budget if people are excited and willing to put a lot of effort into making it work.

With a dizzying array of new mobile apps created every day, it can be hard to decide where to invest your digital marketing dollars. But certain platforms have become canonical social media marketing tools. Facebook, Twitter, and more recently Instagram and Pinterest are being seen as essential to the digital arm of any campaign.

But being a whiz on one platform doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be a whiz on the next. A campaign that works on Facebook may not be fair as well on Twitter. It’s important to appreciate the nuance of each platform.

With that in mind, here are three beautifully executed social marketing campaigns.

Ford

Ford decided to market its C-Max hybrid with a cutting-edge campaign that integrated customer Instagram photos into a C-Max commercial. For those who have been sleeping under a rock for the last year, Instagram is a social photography app that lets users capture, modify and share compelling photos with their friends. The social and visual nature of the app makes it a prime target for marketers.

The core of the idea is to use Instagram to create one of the first collaborative stop motion animations. First, a 30-second animation was created and individual frames were stripped out of it to create 98 billboards that are going up all across the country.

Anyone can stand in front of one of these billboards, take a picture, and hashtag it #CMAX. A backend system was built to scrape Instagram for these pics and sequentially order them using image recognition software.

What you get is a collaborative animation that is constantly changing as new people upload their pictures. If you live in a big city, there might just be a board near you!

Check out the campaign here.

Nike

Nike has been reinventing consumer choice with NikeiD, a program that lets users design their own Nike sneakers.

Nike PHOTOiD goes one step further and socializes the whole process. Users are invented to submit Instagram photos from which Nike’s software will automatically design a sneaker based on the photo’s dominant colors. Users can then either purchase the sneaker or share their creations with friends.

Check out the campaign here.

Taco Bell

Every year, South By South West (commonly called SXSW) attracts tens of thousands of music fans to Austin, Texas. Taco Bell targeted this young audience by making them the focal point of its Feed the Beat“rockumentary.” Fans were encouraged to tweet with the hashtag #feedthebeat images and videos of a show. All the footage and images were compiled by a documentarian. The final project yielded 500,000 views.

See the campaign here.

These are just three examples of innovative social media campaigns. Have any of your own? Let us know in the comments

Social Marketing Tactics To Get More Small Business Customers

The networked consumers know more than most companies about their own products and services. Whether the facts are good or bad, they tell everybody about what they know. Have you had this experience with networked consumers? Certainly motivates you to know about small business social marketing, doesn’t it?

Types of social marketing …what is social media?

“Social media” is a way for people to communicate and interact online. While it has been around since the dawn of the World Wide Web, in the last 10 years or so we’ve seen a surge in both the number and popularity of social media sites. It’s called social media because users engage with (and around) it in a social context, which can include conversations, commentary, and other user-generated annotations and engagement interactions.

Publishing content has become exponentially simpler over the last several years, which has helped skyrocket the use of social media. Non-technical web users are now able to easily create content on a rapidly growing number of platforms, including those that are owned (hosted communities, blogs, etc.), rented (social networks or third-party communities), and occupied (commenting, contributing, etc.).

“What’s that word again that you used for stealing content,” my newspaper editor friend asked me? “Curation,” I said, “and it’s not stealing content.”

It seems to me that at the heart of the controversy is a fundamental shift in the value of information. It used to be scarce, but now we’re drowning in it. That’s creating a fundamental shift in the economics of media. Therefore, the answer lies not only in product innovation, but business model innovation, which is even harder.

Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.

For businesses, the shift in web consumerism and an accompanying rise in social media brings excellent opportunity. The real magic lies in the ability to grow lasting and scalable relationships with your organization’s customer base through social media.

Whether your business is listening and engaging or not, customers are having conversations relevant to your operations. It’s better to be part of the conversation, right?

Why does my company need social media?

Whether you are running a small, local operation, or heading a global, enterprise-level effort, the statistics above make it clear: Your customers are online. They are interacting in social channels with their friends, colleagues, and other brands in search of information, recommendations, and entertainment. If your company is not around to answer, a competitor will be. In doing so, your competitor will quite likely take away the customer at hand, along with anyone else listening.

Using social media for marketing can enable small business looking to further their reach to more customers. Your customers are interacting with brands through social media, therefore, having a strong social media presence on the web is the key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business.

Social marketing … create community engagement

Social media community engagement? What does it mean to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? We believe it is all of these things.

Have you ever thought about how you should build positive social media community engagement?

This task starts with what customers want and need. Most people want to: feel needed, be valued, be appreciated, be fulfilled, share emotions, laugh and be happy, succeed and be inspired. Make them feel something that feels unique to what other brands are blasting at them. To do this you must know who your community is. You must know how to catch and hold their attention.

So let’s examine our recommended game plan to build a positive social media community engagement:

Social marketing examples …win the first impression battle

What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.

Be human

Humanize your brand. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook. Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of your brand.

Small business social media marketing … Be patient yet persistent

You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right.

Have patience and persistence. Slow down and do it right and at the end of the game, you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.

Connect emotionally

Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on G+, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day and I am replying to posts I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond.

It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card.

Focus on relationships

The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard.

Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge.

Inspire them

Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire, Connect, Achieve. To do this you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience then you can know how you can help them be better.

How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners, and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.

Teach them

What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old, same old you wrote two years ago that is overused and oversold, by everyone everywhere.

Make it easy

People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.

Listen

The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen.

In summary, building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.

*Small business social media marketing … u**se engagement to build relationships*

And social media and commerce are all about building relationships. Social media gives a business or brand the ability to turn communication into interactive social conversations. Anyone eager to create an online presence can take static or one-way communication and turn it into a vibrant, dynamic and energetic conversation. Ones that trust and relationships are built from.

Social media opens the door to deeper, more meaningful conversations; allowing businesses to share meaningful, relevant messages consumers seek and all in real-time.

Before we get to these great ideas to create or improve social conversations, lets first review some frequent misconceptions about social media. Social media is NOT:

About being on Facebook. Or Twitter. Those are platforms and not the end state. The end state is about customer engagement.

About being a big brand. When creating social conversations, the size of the business doesn’t matter.

About being the first mover in adopting new technology. That has value, but is it what you want your customers to talk about? We think not.

In order to create meaningful social conversations, you must first open the lines of communication. Below are 15 ideas for creating social media conversations that captivate and inspire your online community!

Customer retention

It is less costly to keep existing customers than finding new ones. So focus conversations on current customers. They are not all alike either, so watch for your priorities.

Think stories

Think about the stories that you were told as children. They are etched into our subconscious. Use pictures and videos to tell your stories in creative new ways. Ways that will be remembered and talked about. Stories are sticky.

Think service

Always put your priority on your service, not your products.

Company culture

Every successful brand has a specific culture. One that relates to the brand’s personality. And yes, of course, a brand has a distinctive personality. Decide what personality you want for your brand and build your culture around it.

Keep it simple

It is difficult to be heard above all the noise in the marketplace. So grab attention and hold it with simple messages.

What do you want customers to remember?

Plan your conversation topics on the interests of your most important customers. It’s not about you and rarely about your business. Will your conversations be remarkable enough to be talked about? That is your goal.

Monetary value or conversation value?

Here is the question. Who are your most valuable customers? The ones that spend the most? Or the ones that create the newest customers for you? It turns out that both are needed. Target both.

Random acts of kindness

Nothing works better than a simple surprise act of kindness. Do something that will make a difference and be talked about.

Relationships are key

Social media is all about building and exploring customer relationships. Continually look for new ways to engage. Remember engagement is a two-way street.

Happy customers

Turns out that the happiest customers drive retention and conversations. Are you committed to making your customers happy?

Offline conversations

Remember that 80-90 % of conversations happen offline. So pay attention to customer conversations in the store.

Manage expectations

Do more than customers expect … but don’t go overboard.

Everything business is conversations

Create interesting topics that are conversation worthy. Plan ahead and stay up on interesting and current topics in the media.

Facilitate

Use techniques that permit customer collaboration. Ask for their explicit opinions and recommendations. Set up simple polls and opinion surveys on topics of customer interest.

Pilot projects

Try new ideas as pilot projects on a small scale often. What works build out in scale.

Employee traits and skills you will need

The most important part of social media marketing? It is being social … hands down. A difference maker for future success, no doubt.

What skills, though, do successful social media marketers have that put these individuals above the average social media user, and better yet, above the traditional marketer? Authenticity? Personality? Market knowledge?

Your personality traits have a lot to say about your social ability. Just as your personality as well as social ability have a lot to say about your social media marketing.

Our vote for the most important type of marketing? Word of mouth marketing, hands down. And the best channels to create word of mouth marketing? Social media, again hands down. A great way to get attention in a crowded marketplace. Seth knows.

To us, it’s clear that it takes a certain type of person to manage social channels. From managing attacks on your brand/company to interacting with people on a daily basis, being in social media requires some specific traits.

Here are 14 traits, skills, and/or characteristics of highly effective social media marketers and some tips to help you rock like them:

Curious

From constantly reading about new trends and happenings in your industry to learning about your audience, curiosity is key for a successful social media marketer.

In this type of position, it’s important to know as much as you possibly can about your brand, your industry and the audience you’re catering to.

Build trust

Be honest in your communications at all cost. Trust is very hard to earn back once lost. It is a basis of good relationship building.

Innovative

Innovation adds ‘flavor’ to your skills and makes them adaptable. Be innovative to stand out above the noise.

Sense of humor

Adding humor to marketing is a cool way of saying “we are a friendly business”. It makes your marketing memorable. Gives your brand a distinct personality and yields priceless results.

Patient

Never be pushy, and know the path to the social media community takes time. Be patient yet persistent with all your marketing goals.

Newsworthy

Demonstrate both the ability to make news as well as create effective curation; rarely be predictable yet always consistently adding value.

Unpretentious

Don’t create a feeling of ego. Be genuine and humble at all times.

Nurturing style

Avoid a selling style. Always aim to be relentlessly helpful to customers.

Engaging

Practice continuous networking, both online and off. Use many channels to connect. Your goal is to optimize relationship building.

Listener and learner

People usually have something to say, so listen and show appreciation or let them know you are working on it. Never put down or ignore negative feedback.

Listen, asks good questions, then listen intently some more. Continuously study and learn from customer insights.

Responsive

Recognize the consistency of engaging customers promptly. Right on it when customers ask questions or give comments.

Sharer

Stay open-minded and always eager to recognize and share the work of others.

Natural leader

Be the person that makes all the people around you better. Empower people to act. And build a tribe of like-minded professionals.

Newsworthy

Show your ability to make news, but also be an effective curator. Be a person who is rarely predictable and always adding value.

Most of these traits aren’t rocket science, are they? Create a checklist of these traits to keep in the forefront of your thinking.

Design ideas

Social engagement design usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. Company messages, stories, and helpful information spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it provides relevant, interesting and/or useful information.

We think of social media as just another marketing channel when we need to instead think of it as the influencer of all channels.

To improve your social media design, you must improve social networking and customer engagement. We have found 9 ways to accomplish these improvements that we use with our clients:

Know as much or more than your audience … valuable content is essential

It is all about quality … quality is much more valuable than quantity

It is about building relationships … meaning conversation is required. Don’t add to the noise

A picture or image … is worth 1000 words. Visual marketing is growing rapidly

Keep you messages … short, simple, and relevant

Define … specific objectives for your campaigns

Measure your accomplishments … against your objectives. Learn and apply learning.

There are NO shortcuts … it requires time and energy

It requires persistence and patience … don’t give up

We are finding more and more businesses are defining meaningful initiatives to use social media. And guess what … the best uses aren’t to sell.

Let’s examine some of the more popular customer engagement design initiatives many businesses are using:

Soliciting Opinions

What charities to support

Asking favorite flavors or products

What they would like to see on social media pages

Likes and dislikes

Collaborating on product/service design

Voting on Most Favorite Things

A moment in Michael Jordan career

The scariest roller coaster

Donuts

New design features

Pictures of Customers with Products

New Application Introduction / Usage

Creating customized holiday cheer cards

Ordering products (even for local delivery)

Local store locator

Use of Videos

Live events, such as fashion shows

Product demo’s, do it yourself tips

Game clips

Local, regional activities

Promotions

Weekly giveaways

Coupons

Free products to entice Facebook fan signup

Special rates for Facebook fans

Content

Menus

New product introduction

Share product/articles from magazines

Targeted messages to customer groups/segments

Special business events

There is considerable creativity in the use of social media by many businesses, with very good engagement results.

If you are not taking advantage of social media marketing strategy for consumer engagement, you are missing a great opportunity to create/build customer relationships for you and your brand. Why not put some of these ideas to use and gain valuable feedback and customer insights?

Guidelines for staff

The greatest danger of participating in online social media? Just like Stephen Hawking says … it is the illusion of knowing what you are doing. And that can be very dangerous, yes? Therefore we believe it is critical to provide guidance to all employees by means of a social media employee handbook. Here we create some employee guideline tips for your consideration.

Every day, people discuss and debate our company and brand in online conversations. We recognize the vital importance of participating in these online conversations and are committed to ensuring that we participate in online social media with excellence.

This Social Media Employee Guide has been developed to help empower employees to participate in this new marketing and communications, represent our company, and share the optimistic and positive spirits of our brand. It is intended to outline how employees should be engaged in the online social media space and to guide their participation. , both when you are participating personally, as well as when you are acting on behalf of the company.

We encourage all employees to explore and engage in social media communities at a level at which they feel comfortable. Have fun, but be smart. The best advice is to approach online worlds in the same way we do the physical one – by using sound judgment and common sense, by adhering to our values, and by following a Code of Business Conduct.

Remember that local posts can have wide significance

The way that you answer an online question might be accurate in some parts of the world, but inaccurate (or even illegal) in others. Keep that “worldview” in mind when you are participating in online conversations.

Don’t share business confidential information

Do not publish, post, or release information that is considered confidential or not public. If it seems confidential, it probably is. Do not discuss numbers and other sales figures (non-public financial or operational information), strategies and forecasts, legal issues or future promotions/activities. Do not post any merchandise pricing information or comparisons.

When in doubt, do not post

Employees are personally responsible for their words and actions, wherever they are. As online spokespeople, you must ensure that your posts are completely accurate and not misleading.

Exercise sound judgment and common sense, and if there is any doubt, DO NOT POST IT. In any circumstance in which you are uncertain about how to respond to a post, ask someone responsible for social media and communications.

Never hesitate to ask anytime.

What to learn now: Facebook Design … 8 Secret Factors for Most Successful Marketing

Be responsible for your work

The company understands that employees engage in online social media activities at work for legitimate purposes and that these activities may be helpful for the business.

However, the business encourages all employees to exercise sound judgment and common sense to prevent online social media sites from becoming a distraction at work.

Give credit where credit is due and don’t violate others’ rights

DO NOT claim authorship of something that is not yours. If you are using another party’s content, make certain that they are credited for it in your post and that they approve of you utilizing their content.

Do not use the copyrights, trademarks, publicity rights, or other rights of others without the necessary permissions of the authors.

Be mindful that you are representing the business

As a representative of the business, it is important that your posts convey the same positive, optimistic spirit that the company instills in all of its communications.

Be respectful of all individuals, races, religions, and cultures; how you conduct yourself in the online social media space not only reflects on you – it is a direct reflection on the company.

Fully disclose your affiliation with the company

The business requires all employees who are communicating on behalf of the company to always disclose their name and their affiliation. It is never acceptable to use aliases or otherwise deceive people.

State your relationship with the Company from the outset, e.g., “Hi, I’m Mike Schoultz and I work for Digital Spark Marketing.” This disclosure is equally important for any agency/vendor/partner/third party who is representing the company online. They must disclose that they work “with Digital Spark Marketing Agency.”

Follow the Code of Business Conduct and all other company policies

The Code of Business Conduct provides the foundation for these Online Social Media Principles: “As a representative of [the Company], you must act with honesty and integrity in all matters.” This commitment is true for all forms of social media.

In addition, several other policies govern your behavior as a Company spokesperson in the online social media space, including the Information Protection Policy and the Insider Trading Policy.

Let the subject matter experts respond to negative posts

You may come across negative or disparaging posts about the company or brand, or see third parties trying to spark negative conversations.

Unless you are a certified online spokesperson, avoid the temptation to react yourself. Pass the post(s) along to company spokespersons that are trained to address such comments.

Be conscious when mixing your business and personal lives

Online, your personal and business personas are likely to intersect. The business respects the free speech rights of all of its employees, but you must remember that customers, colleagues, and supervisors often have access to the online content you post.

Keep this in mind when publishing information online that can be seen by more than friends and family, and know that information originally intended just for friends and family can be forwarded on. Remember to be aware that taking public positions online that are counter to the business’s interests might cause conflict.

In conclusion, remember this:

The purpose for you to become more actively involved with social media is to find additional opportunities to connect with customers and share information with them that they enjoy receiving.

As a front-line salesperson, or any employee for that matter, this should just be another valuable tool that will help you further accomplish that goal—but it shouldn’t take away from the very important person-to-person contacts that you will continue to make each day.

Above all, remember to have fun and be yourself!

Responding to negative comments

Do you have a response strategy for customer crisis? It is logical that you occasionally deal with negative customers, no matter how good you are. How well you deal with these customers will determine whether you are dealing with a crisis or a non-issue. Response time in these situations is critical also.

So it is wise to prepare a response plan how you would respond before you receive any such comments. Note that part of the response plan requires action prior to receiving negative comments from customers. Here is the response plan we recommend to our clients:

Humanize your brand

Always create a personality through laughter and having fun in the workplace. Be able to laugh at yourself. Wear your enthusiasm and your passion at all times.

Listen and accept

Avoid censoring at all costs. Listen carefully and try to understand your customers’ viewpoints.

Respond directly

Respond directly and early response time matters. Time is critical and you have very little.

Be transparent

Always explain without offering excuses. Remain calm under fire at all costs.

Fix the problem

Fix problems if they are present. Acknowledge the issue and communicate your solution.

Funnel comments/concerns

Provide all information to your staff. Keep everyone in the loop and up to speed.

Build a community

Build followers of passionate defenders. Let them defend you with their views.

Create an opportunity

Try to turn the problem into an opportunity. Don’t neglect to spend time finding the opportunity from your adversity … it often will not jump out at you, will it?

Know when to walk away

If it is a lose-lose situation and you see you are not making headway, be prepared to walk away. When is the issue over? Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes not … but monitor closely for a while.

Your customers are not always right, but they always have the right to choose. And when they do, they will tell their friends about their experiences and their choices.

In conclusion, remember this:

The purpose for you to become more actively involved with social media is to find additional opportunities to connect with customers and share information with them that they enjoy receiving.

Digital Spark Marketing. location in the Finger Lakes.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

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11 Ways the Facebook Business Page Will Improve Social Marketing

Yes, your best competitors are making their business better and better all the while. And their growth is all about their social marketing strategy. Of course, if you pay attention to competitors, you know this. What would you do to your Facebook business page if you were trying to improve your social marketing?

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time.

Henry Ford

Check out our thoughts on team leverage.

Social media has come a long way since then as have the strategies, tactics, methods, and power associated with social media.

In reality, a successful social media marketing campaign is multi-dimensional. It’s complicated. Ask any social media marketer “How do you do social media marketing?” and you’re likely to get the “Um, where do I start?” look.

There are a lot of elements to address and minute details to cover. Often, the most difficult stage is the initial one, when you’re trying to gain traction and pick up momentum.

5 Content Marketing Strategies to Engage Your Customers

Lots of advertisers wonder if Facebook advertising works. Take a look at these numbers: 85% of new WordStream users are already advertising on Facebook;

Facebook ads get 22 billion clicks a year, and those ads reach a total of 1.6 billion active monthly users. It’s clear Facebook is an attractive channel for advertisers — that many users can’t be wrong.

Related post: Social Media Plan … Successful Tactics You Need to Employ

Have you noticed? It is hard not to see, isn’t it? Let’s examine the ten ways Facebook would recommend improving your social marketing strategy:

Facebook business page … tagline and Brand

The heart of any businesses’ marketing strategy is their brand. The brand is built into and reflected by its tagline … spend enough time to find a good one. As an example, we like the one used by the Morgan and Morgan law practice: For the People. Or, the longer version, representing the People, not the Powerful.

They clearly understand that their brand is not about them. Rather it is about how the potential client community sees them, feels about them, and talks about them. They realize that their brand represents their current and future relationships. Their goal is to deliver an emotional connection to their services. And they are doing it very well. Got the idea?

Media commercials

You should use both TV and radio ads building and reinforce the brand. Educating the public on important issues that are important to them. Doing almost no selling. Make them a short 15 seconds with one simple message. Make as many as possible and use them all. You don’t want to swamp potential customers with repeats. Create a very personal image in these commercials and use them on your social media channels.

Facebook business account… website

Google would tell you to make the site the physical center of your firm’s marketing. Make the design simple but as elegant and eye-catching as you can. Give it the means to contain all the strategy elements discussed today. Encompasses several ways to allow two-way client engagements, including live chat, email, and telephone.

Again little to no selling. Your strategy should reflect the belief that pushy sales pitches turn customers off, but personally relevant and interactive engagement switches them on. Make customers notice that all the material is put into their language.

Facebook business page tips … embrace public issues

Keep several public concerns front and center in your marketing strategy at any one time. Let your senior leadership take their messages on the issues of potential clients via community speaking engagements as well as all the marketing channels at their disposal. All of the items on the agenda represent those that the public majority supports.

Advocacy advertising

Most of the issues that you decide to support should be used in the commercials as advocacy advertisements. These create very strong brand reinforcement.

Facebook business page tips … content marketing

Put content marketing to very practical use on your blog and other social media platforms, starting with your Facebook page. They typically recommend at least have 8-10 blogs on various topics per month to help educate potential clients.

The blogs should be archived by multiple categories and by month and year. With proper search engine optimization on each blog, the blogs do an excellent job of driving new potential customers to the website.

Adapting to change

Facebook recommends being very progressive, keeping up to speed on customer trends, problem areas, and social media technology. Certainly, always be eager to adapt your business marketing expertise to new areas. And certainly always look to try new things throughout their company marketing, with a particular focus on social media.

Social media

what would you do youtube — What would you do youtube?

Facebook believes businesses should start with the Facebook platform and then add 3-5 more (Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and YouTube) over time to increase your customer engagement. All channels should be utilized to share all their material in a conversational manner. Always looking to engage.

Short and sweet messages

80-90% of the marketing messages should be 15 seconds. Very simple and to the point or objective. As we said previously, many topics are used to produce many notes so as not to over saturate the market with the same messages.

More learning: 6 KLM Airlines Marketing Examples for Winning Campaigns

Integrating the elements

All 10 of these strategy elements complement the firm’s brand and messages. The integrating elements? The brand and the client educational element. The key is to have a central theme to the brand. This is the most important part of the strategy.

The bottom line

The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. If it was easy to see coming, everybody would be doing it already and the market impact would be minimal. So you can never create something truly new based on what you already know. The only way to find it is to start looking.

Not all who wander are lost. The trick is to wander with a purpose.

Here’s the thing, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business. Facebook certainly has figured this out and are using social marketing to rapidly grow many of their client’s business.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

More reading on social media design from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Creative Tips for Stunning Infographic Design

Social Media Graphics …9 Great Ways to Improve Your Marketing Designs

Facebook Design … 8 Secret Factors for Most Successful Marketing

Creative Stories … Are You Employing the Best Smashing Value?

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Customer Relationship Marketing … 4 Examples of Personalized Approach

Maya Angelou once said: People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. What do you feel is the most important factor in establishing personalized relationship building? How you make customer relationship marketing the most important factor is key.

Hands down the most important factor, in our opinion. Like making new friends. Assure customers that you are who you say you are is the foundation. It is becoming the most important element of social commerce.

“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

For some reason, many of us have been conditioned to be more afraid of failure than we are of inaction. However, failure, in addition to being inherently valuable as a learning process, contains within it the chance of success. And no matter how small that chance is, it’s better than the chances of success when we choose not to even try.

Have you noticed the growth in interactive marketing? How about personalized customer engagement? Lots going on in this field.

Related: Whole Food’s Customer Engagement Using Social Media

But what exactly is interactive marketing? The main ingredient of interactive marketing is being social. At its core, it focuses less on an immediate sale and more on building a relationship. Building relationships with customers by engaging them in conversation.

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, which is why companies often focus a lot of their efforts on continuously acquiring new customers. However, they fail to realize that what matters is not so much how many new customers you acquire but how many loyal customers you keep. It is also harder to acquire new customers than to retain old ones, which means that businesses must shift their focus to customer retention instead.

With the proliferation of social media and mobile phone use, opportunities have surfaced that make interactive marketing easier than ever.

So how are well-known companies putting it to use, and more importantly, how can you? Let’s take a closer look:

Customer relationship marketing … Jack Daniels wants your stories

Stories of intrigue, passion, and maybe a few chairs and tables flying. That’s what great bar tales are made of. Sensing that everyone loves a good story, whiskey manufacturer Jack Daniels invited users to share their wackiest, most unbelievable bar story. They then bundled them into a campaign it called “The Few & Far Between”

Some of the stories involve Jack Daniels, like the “200 Shot Salute”, wherein a well-liked bartender’s remains were cremated and added to shots. These shots were then consumed (knowingly) by patrons at his bar. Others don’t involve Jack at all, but are still funny and worth sharing. The brand doesn’t place itself at the center, but rather hovering in the background, but still noticeable and still in the back of consumers’ minds.

Key takeaway

You don’t have to put your product or service in the spotlight. With interactive content, simply inviting users to share a story from your particular industry can be enough to reinforce your own brand. What stories are your users waiting to tell?

Yoplait shows support to save lives

Every year, Yoplait yogurt donates 10 cents per specially marked pink yogurt lid mailed back to them, to the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation. Yoplait’s parent company, General Mills, is estimated to have donated between $35-50 million dollars since the movement started in 1997.

That adds up to hundreds of millions of lids sent in by customers, all for a great cause supported by them all.

Key takeaway

Support a cause that gets your customers involved too. If it is a national cause, then center activities on your local ones.

People are more likely to recommend your product or service to their friends if they can interact with it (i.e. mailing in lids) or even do so on a social basis (like or share) and see the impact of their action.

Customer relationship marketing … Coca-Cola and social marketing

Coke’s wildly popular “Share a Coke with…” campaign replaced their iconic logo with popular names and invited consumers to share a coke with their friends.

The hashtag campaign #shareacoke on Instagram generated over 340,000 posts and enjoyed a 96% positive (or neutral) customer reception. That is the kind of numbers any brand dreams about.

Key Takeaway

Sharing a Coke with someone isn’t just about enjoying a drink. To Coke and its customers, it’s about capturing a moment in time and building a friendship. That something all social commerce wants to do.

And while you may not be a giant corporation, you can still add a personalized touch through brand incentives.

Ice Bucket Challenge

Much of the viral marketing that happened 2 summers ago surrounded the Ice Bucket Challenge, designed to raise money for ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).

As a result of the ice bucket challenge, the ALS Association was able to raise over $79 million dollars while also spreading awareness and gaining exposure for this little-understood disease.

Of course, one of the biggest pulls were the celebrities who participated – tagging each other to see who would be next.

The virality of tagging pals to participate and video their reaction is what made the challenge so memorable for so many. Plus, it started in the hottest part of the year, so it was natural that people didn’t mind “cooling off for a cause”.

Key takeaway

Of course, you don’t need a major celebrity’s endorsement to start your own viral sharing challenge. Think about something simple, fun and do-able by just about anyone.

New challenges have already sprung up to piggyback off of the Ice Bucket Challenge’s massive success, including the Rubble Bucket, Bullet Bucket and Rice Bucket.

Whether or not they’ll have the same incredible success that the ALS Association saw remains to be seen, but the seeds of promotion have a chance. You’ll never know until you try.

The bottom line

The great thing about interactive content is how quickly it can spread, and how the concentration is on the customer and their response, rather than the brand and its benefits.

Creating such challenges, stories and relationships often involve little other than a great idea and a receptive audience. The direction is up to you.

What are some of the great examples of interactive marketing you have noticed? Have you used it in your own business?

Share your experiences and perspective with us below in the comments and let us know how it has helped you forge even stronger relationships with customers.

EMPLOY CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE — Employ customer experience, yes?

Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

This concept of changing people’s behavior is the basis of this section, and of social marketing as a whole. We will talk about what social marketing is, and why it can be of use to you in your organization for the next best practices.

Then, we’ll go into more depth on marketing, and discuss what is known as the “4 Ps”–the four elements around which all types of marketing, social or profit-oriented, are centered.

Finally, we’ll finish with an overview of the stages someone will go through if their effort is successful.

Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced.

-David Freemantle

It’s a lot of information, and much of it is more conceptual in nature than many other sections of the ToolBox. The next three sections of this chapter, then, will try to ground these ideas more thoroughly, so they can be used in your day-to-day work.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MARKETING?

What does that mean? Well, instead of selling hamburgers, you’re selling a life without heart attacks. Instead of convincing teenagers to buy blue jeans, you’re convincing them to buy the advantages of postponing pregnancy.

Of course, if you are selling blue jeans, you’re still trying to influence behavior–you’re convincing people they need to wear your jeans–either for comfort, or for style, or value. So then, what is the difference between social marketing and commercial marketing?

It’s really summed up in one key point: commercial marketing tries to change people’s behavior for the benefit of the marketer; social marketing tries to change people’s behavior for the benefit of the consumer, or of society as a whole.

“I’m not a doctor,” runs the joke. “I just play one on T.V.” Television and other forms of mass media, it seems, are often highly adept at making complicated tasks look simple.

We’ve been grabbed by a successful marketing campaign. It might seem so simple, that we’re barely aware of it–but it really represents a huge amount of research, design, and testing done by the toothpaste corporation.

On the following few screens, we’ll try to make concrete how you can accomplish many of these details. We’ll start by touching briefly on the importance of social marketing and when might be a sensible time for your group to draw up a social marketing campaign.

WHY SHOULD YOU USE A SOCIAL MARKETING APPROACH?

Social marketing is an approach with a lot of advantages. Perhaps the two most pointed benefits are:

It helps you reach your target audience. Social marketing makes you look at whom you want to influence, and how to sway these people most effectively. And, for this reason,

WHEN SHOULD YOU RUN A SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN?

So when is the proper time to run a social marketing campaign?

It will depend quite a bit on your program or organization, of course, but generally speaking…

This doesn’t mean your organization or program has to have a lot of money to use a social marketing approach. Excellent social marketing can be done on a shoestring budget if people are excited and willing to put a lot of effort into making it work.

But being a whiz on one platform doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be a whiz on the next. A campaign that works on Facebook may not be fair as well on Twitter. It’s important to appreciate the nuance of each platform.

With that in mind, here are three beautifully executed social marketing campaigns.

Ford

The core of the idea is to use Instagram to create one of the first collaborative stop motion animations. First, a 30-second animation was created and individual frames were stripped out of it to create 98 billboards that are going up all across the country.

Anyone can stand in front of one of these billboards, take a picture, and hashtag it #CMAX. A backend system was built to scrape Instagram for these pics and sequentially order them using image recognition software.

What you get is a collaborative animation that is constantly changing as new people upload their pictures. If you live in a big city, there might just be a board near you!

Check out the campaign here.

Nike

Nike has been reinventing consumer choice with NikeiD, a program that lets users design their own Nike sneakers.

Check out the campaign here.

Taco Bell

See the campaign here.

These are just three examples of innovative social media campaigns. Have any of your own? Let us know in the comments

Types of social marketing …what is social media?

Related post: Creative Tips for Stunning Infographic Design

“What’s that word again that you used for stealing content,” my newspaper editor friend asked me? “Curation,” I said, “and it’s not stealing content.”

Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.

For businesses, the shift in web consumerism and an accompanying rise in social media brings excellent opportunity. The real magic lies in the ability to grow lasting and scalable relationships with your organization’s customer base through social media.

Whether your business is listening and engaging or not, customers are having conversations relevant to your operations. It’s better to be part of the conversation, right?

Why does my company need social media?

Social marketing … create community engagement

Social media community engagement? What does it mean to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? We believe it is all of these things.

Have you ever thought about how you should build positive social media community engagement?

So let’s examine our recommended game plan to build a positive social media community engagement:

Social marketing examples …win the first impression battle

What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.

Be human

Humanize your brand. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook. Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of your brand.

Small business social media marketing … Be patient yet persistent

You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right.

Have patience and persistence. Slow down and do it right and at the end of the game, you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.

Connect emotionally

Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on G+, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day and I am replying to posts I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond.

It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card.

Focus on relationships

The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard.

Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge.

Inspire them

Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire, Connect, Achieve. To do this you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience then you can know how you can help them be better.

How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners, and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.

Teach them

What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old, same old you wrote two years ago that is overused and oversold, by everyone everywhere.

Make it easy

People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.

Listen

The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen.

In summary, building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.

Small business social media marketing … use engagement to build relationships

Social media opens the door to deeper, more meaningful conversations; allowing businesses to share meaningful, relevant messages consumers seek and all in real-time.

Before we get to these great ideas to create or improve social conversations, lets first review some frequent misconceptions about social media. Social media is NOT:

About being on Facebook. Or Twitter. Those are platforms and not the end state. The end state is about customer engagement.

About being a big brand. When creating social conversations, the size of the business doesn’t matter.

About being the first mover in adopting new technology. That has value, but is it what you want your customers to talk about? We think not.

In order to create meaningful social conversations, you must first open the lines of communication. Below are 15 ideas for creating social media conversations that captivate and inspire your online community!

Customer retention

It is less costly to keep existing customers than finding new ones. So focus conversations on current customers. They are not all alike either, so watch for your priorities.

Think stories

Think about the stories that you were told as children. They are etched into our subconscious. Use pictures and videos to tell your stories in creative new ways. Ways that will be remembered and talked about. Stories are sticky.

Think service

Always put your priority on your service, not your products.

*Small business social media marketing … u**se engagement to build relationships*