The Five Must-Haves of Building an Integrated Social Media Plan

So how do marketing professionals take the reins and steer a cohesive, integrated social media marketing plan? I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of local marketers at a recent IABC Phoenix Luncheon on the topic of building a cohesive social media marketing plan. Here, I lay out five must-haves when building an integrated social media plan.

You start by understanding your marketing and content marketing model well enough to integrate social media practices and tools into the overall program. That takes good internal planning. My “5 Must Haves of Social Media Marketing” will help you get there. These must-haves are:

1. Shifting + Controlling of Consumers and Audiences

2. Planning with Internal + External Customers in Mind

3. Aligning + Orchestrating Integrated Content Strategy

4. Executing as a Team

5. Measuring Impact to Business with Focus

Quit Blogging and Just Go With…Facebook?

Blog originally posted in BtoB Magazine – BtoB Blog: Quit Blogging and Just Go With Facebook?

Wayne Usie (@waynejusie), SVP of Retail at JDA Software, recently shared a USA Today article with me titled, “More Companies Quite Blogging, Go With Facebook Instead,” by Roger Yu. According to the article, more companies are replacing blogs with nimbler tools requiring less time and resources, such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

Why? Nora Ganim Barnes, professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, stated in the article: “Blogging requires more investment. You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation.”

This article raises an interesting question: Should companies quit blogging and just go with a nimbler tool because it’s less risky and requires less time and resources? Anything related to social media is risky; it’s not just limited to blogs. That is why you should have social media and blogging policies in place.

Corporate blogs fail when companies don’t understand why the blog exists as part of their brand extension. They fail because their content is there solely to promote their products and services. Why would people read your blog if they can just visit your website for that kind of information? Blogs should be written for the reader – to educate and inform as well as to gather insight from the readers. Here are my recommendations for building a successful blog:

Establish Intent

Establish your intent first. Is it to build thought leadership and expertise in the industry? Is it to educate your customers and prospects and help them improve their performance? Is it to articulate industry issues and help your readers address fundamental challenges?

Then Go All-In

Commitment is key. When you start a corporate blog, you need a long-term strategy to carry out the intent in every piece of content you produce – but it takes commitment from the top down and dedicating proper resources to feed the content engine. Further, you should always have a plan to regularly promote your blog internally and externally – across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google +.

Unique Content is King

Companies invest a lot of time in whitepapers, webinars, videos, bylined articles and podcasts. When you create different content for all of these marketing initiatives, you spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Develop a content marketing strategy – and use the blog as a way to launch some of these topics to a more in-depth piece such as a whitepaper, webinar, etc. (Check out Altimeter Group’s blog for a great example.) Always be thinking: How can I create one piece of great content and optimize and repurpose?

Blogger Buddy Program

Develop a blogger buddy program where you identify your key bloggers who will be contributing content on a regular basis and pair them up with folks on your marketing or social media team. Establish goals and metrics for the bloggers so they understand the cadence for your blog and the frequency for posting content.

Bloggers should represent a wide spectrum of your business so that you can create content across a broad range of topics that will interest your readers. Then, educate them on blogging best practices, content strategy and ways to engage with the readers. This program is successful because you’re working closely with your bloggers to develop content strategy, plus you can feed them information on industry news and topics that people are talking about. Invite them to respond or comment on that topic to keep the conversation flowing.

Integration

Your success also hinges on your ability to integrate your blog program with PR, marketing and communications. Silos don’t work in today’s world. It’s about integrating your blog content with what the rest of the marketing team is doing, campaigns they’re driving, webinars they are promoting. Work closely with your marketing team on the content development and strategy to support your key topics, campaigns, messages, etc.

Also, work closely with your PR team to help drive visibility and coverage. Remember, if you have the right content strategy, PR can pitch to the media and blogger communities to reuse that content or commentary to gain additional coverage. Why create a separate byline when reporters and bloggers can work off of the blog content?

Scott Monty, head of social media at Ford Motor Company said it best in the article when he stated, “Still, engaging blogs can serve crucial marketing goals – especially executives out to establish expertise in their industry.” I believe blogs can serve crucial marketing and corporate goals if done right. What do you think? Do you agree that blogging is dead and companies should move on?

The Next Big Thing: Integrating Social Data for Customer Engagement

Blog Post Originally Published in BtoB Magazine 

I recall three years ago, a colleague bet me $100 that Twitter would go away by the end of 2009. Well, I won that bet. But what’s surprising is even today, I hear from marketers that social media is just a fad. What a big mistake. If anything, social media will continue to penetrate more businesses—big and small. Recently, I was asked by Joseph Manna of Infusionsoft to moderate a panel at Social Media AZ (SMAZ) titled “Driving Results with Social Media for Growing Companies.” While the panelists did a great job of painting a holistic picture, what was alarming was that a majority of the audience did not know where to take social or even how to get started.

Remember, we’re moving at lightning speed so if you’re not there yet, you’d better learn how to get there–fast. For the rest of you, here are three major areas to consider for 2013.

Social becomes a lead gen tool

Corporate social media teams may be focusing on monitoring, listening and engaging, but the focus will likely shift, with executives demanding greater ROI from social media marketing. To make this happen, social media teams need to have the right tools, processes and strategy in place. When you’re budgeting for 2013, think about what single platform will help you tap into specific conversations about solutions, services, competitors, etc. (such as using specific keys and tags). The key here is the ability to identify opportunities, create workflows across the organization and work with sales and business development to convert those conversations into demand.

This is a huge undertaking, meaning social media strategists have to put on their sales cap. What is the sales team looking for? What are the conversations that are relevant, and what defines a lead (from a sales perspective)? You will also need to understand how to bring sales and the rest of the marketing organization into the process.

Integrating social profiles with CRM

In 2013, it will be about understanding where your customers and prospects are in their social engagement and journey. Doing an extensive social profiling of your user base will be crucial— to help sales, support and marketing connect the dots and understand how active they are on social media, what their profiles are, and how they can follow and listen to their customers’ conversations independently.

Scalability will be a big task when it comes to your social platform. You’ll need the ability to scale across the organization to identify social profiles, automatically input that information into your CRM system, and create alerts or workflows to notify your sales and marketing teams. Start small: Identify a tier 1 set of targets to start the profiling process and understand who they are, where they are, how active they are and what information they’re sharing. This will help you understand whether you’re investing in the right channels.

The all-in-one data

Next year, companies will want to integrate relevant social conversations from prospects and customers into their existing CRM system. Why? This gives marketing and sales as well as the executive team a holistic picture of all relevant social activities from your customers and prospects. By tapping into these conversations, sales can respond directly to those conversations.

Social media marketing teams no longer need to flag every opportunity, as this becomes very time intensive. By automating this process, information is captured within your CRM so when your salespeople look at an opportunity or contact, they can see exactly what their prospects are talking about. Radian6 and Salesforce allow this via their marketing cloud, and you can bet more players in the space will offer the same in the coming months. This is something all social media marketers need to start thinking about.

It’s time to start thinking of ways to move the needle on truly utilizing social data to drive your business forward, and I believe 2013 will be the year where social marketers will be put to the test on how they can successfully integrate across all respective functions to derive value inside and out.

How Brands Use Social Media

There is nothing like getting in front of college students to talk about social media marketing. I’ve had my fair share of speaking at various industry events but this one was special. Being able to get in front of the students at WP Carey class at ASU to share what I’ve learned over the years was special and I’m thankful to Bret Giles (@bretgiles) of Sitewire for giving me the opportunity to do just that.  Note, Bret happens to run the WP Carey class at ASU centered around social media.

All jitters aside, it was an opportunity for me to speak openly with the students about the realities of social media in the business world – gaining adoption, educating the troops, integrating social into the very fabric of the business, and getting buy-in from the upper management team. I also shared examples of the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to social media.

Of course, there are similarities and differences between personal social media interactions and those that are commercially or brand motivated. My presentation focused on how companies are using social media to humanize their brand, amplify their voice and engage with their audience. Examples of these brands highlight how they are integrating social into their overall business objectives. Feel free to view the presentation and share your comments.

Demand Generation for the C-Suite: How to Hit the Right Spot

Blog Post Originally Published in BtoB Magazine

Marketers are constantly under pressure to prove value by bringing in leads for sales. This in turn creates a vicious cycle where marketers will cast a wide net in hopes of bringing in as many hand-raisers as possible. It’s not always a win-win, as oftentimes those don’t turn out to be quality leads. Today, it’s a different ballgame: We need to shift to a more targeted accounts-based approach, which means creating content and messaging to support the many buyers and influencers throughout the buying process—especially C-suite. Let’s face it— the holy grail of marketing is to get to the influencers— the C-suite—who have the ultimate say in how an organization invests its dollars.

I recently spoke on a panel titled Demand Gen for the C-Suite, sponsored by Loop Demand, alongside C. Edward Brice (@cedwardbrice), senior VP-worldwide marketing at Lumension Security.  I’ve summarized some of the interesting tips from that panel in a two-part Q&A blog series with Ed. Here’s part one:

Why is it important to target the C-suite in your demand-generation efforts?

Brice: Let me first say that my point of view comes from what we observe in the buying process as an IT security software company. I believe that the C-suite is more involved in the operational side of the business than in the past—and maybe even more than what has been traditionally perceived. I suppose there could be a few C-level executives locked away in the mahogany halls of the ivory tower somewhere, kept away from all the dysfunction of the day, but I haven’t encountered that in my own environment or in our customers’ environments. I find that most C-level leaders are either searching for answers to operational problems or researching best practices, strategic issues and emerging trends.

The C-level isn’t going to take a cold call or enthusiastically sit through a sales-oriented or product-centered webcast, so make sure your demand gen efforts are holistic by developing content across key topics that these individuals will find relevant, and deliver that content through appropriate channels.

How does this differ from your traditional demand-generation marketing campaigns?

Brice: Here’s an example: In our annual program planning, we identify key problems or scenarios. Then, we develop content, which is based on the context of a buyer’s journey, that’s designed to help drive inquiries and convert those inquiries into opportunities to support our sales cycle. We don’t intentionally target C-level folks with these messages, because they really aren’t our primary target audience. We then have thought leadership topics that we consider the industry’s hot topics, and we develop content related to these topics, which may be targeted to C-level roles. The objective with this content is to educate and to deliver our point of view on these hot topics, and to provide recommendations for company execs to consider in developing a strategy.

CEOs and other C-level executives are guarded by many gatekeepers. How can you pierce those corporate shells and get to the right people?

Brice: A few years back, Sirius Decisions did an interesting study that identified three major roles that a C-level leader plays across a buying cycle: Champion (guides the buying process); ratifier (validates and signs the PO); and influencer (advises throughout the buying process). I think in most cases it may be more effective to focus on producing relevant content across a buyer’s journey than spending 100 percent of your effort on trying to reach the C-level. It’s likely that they are part of the process anyway, but may or may not be driving the process. There are times, of course, where you’re trying to educate the market on a very new and innovative strategy, and that might require a more C-level-targeted approach.

In my next blog, I will write about content marketing for the C-suite.