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Social media marketing: Where to start

Most business owners rightly feel they have better things to do than play around with social media.

At the same time, it’s not an exaggeration to say social media has revolutionized marketing. It allows any business to engage in “content marketing” – essentially developing its own audience at little or no cost, and engaging with them to drive interest in sales. To ignore this is to ignore the behavior of your customers and prospects.

But with so many social media outlets, it’s often hard to know where to get started or what to do next.

Every social media site has its own peculiarities and best practices. Learning the nuances of each, takes a certain amount of time and commitment. So I recommend getting involved in one platform at a time. Start with Facebook, for instance, and work it until you’re comfortable about how it adds value. Only then should you look to add another platform.

At the same time, understand that social media outlets are like ingredients in a sandwich. A piece of ham tastes good, but it’s not lunch until you put it between slices of bread and add tomato, cheese and mustard. With social media, you may need to layer 3 or 4 different sites before you have a program that actually drives revenue to your business.

As an example, most of my social media clients combined Facebook and Twitter – and in some cases a third relevant site – before they gained traction at building audience.

Here is a basic overview of the major social media outlets and what each one brings to your marketing. All are trying to find services you’ll pay for, but they can still be used effectively for free.

Facebook

What it’s for: The foundation of any social media marketing – particularly if your products/services are targeted to a consumer audience. Use it to aggregate an audience of people who are interested in what you sell or do.

Strengths: A billion users. Easy and low-cost advertising. Integrates with many other prominent social media outlets (i.e., when you post on Twitter, for example, it’s easy to have the Tweet automatically post to Facebook as well). Finally, the best adoption in mobile computing – allowing you to easily capitalize on the astoundingly fast migration to mobile devices.

Weaknesses: Constantly changing. Noisy, commercial and often unpleasant to use. Takes commitment to feed it with content.

Nuance: Don’t use your personal page for business. Set up a business page; you’ll look more professional and once you have 30 “likes” it provides you with valuable data to improve your marketing – still for free.

LinkedIn

What it’s for: Social media networking specifically for business. If your products/services are targeted to a business audience, start here instead of Facebook.

Strengths: Many ways to find and engage relevant audience.

Weaknesses: Doesn’t integrate well with other social media. It’s also become so rich with features that it is becoming difficult to use. Further, some of the best features are now reserved for paid users.

Nuance: Despite the negatives, it’s still the largest and most robust business-to-business networking tool available. You’ll want both a personal page and a business page.

Twitter

What it’s for: Broadcasting headlines. Use it to let people know you have new content to share – whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, your own website or anywhere else.

Strengths: The accepted standard for deploying brief messages. Also strong on mobile platforms.

Weaknesses: Low signal-to-noise ratio. You need a lot of followers here to count on your messages being seen.

Nuance: Because Tweets are so brief, you’ll want to shorten any website links that you broadcast with a free utility like tinyurl.com, bitly.com or goo.gl. Also, the fastest way to gain an audience is to automatically follow anyone who follows you. There are a number of tools that help with this, such as TwitterAutoFollowback (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) or Twollow.

YouTube

What it’s for: Everything video. If you’re going to use video, then you want to use YouTube. Even if a video is posted on your website, you should put a copy of it on YouTube as well for the visibility in search.

Strengths: The accepted standard for all things video.

Weaknesses: It’s not much good for anything else.

Nuance: If you’re going to post multiple videos, create a channel for your business and promote it on your website, other social media sites and in your marketing materials.

Slideshare

What it’s for: Posting presentations of all kinds. It’s owned by LinkedIn and integrates well with it.

Strengths: Easy to use and well-known in business-to-business environmenbts.

Weaknesses: Doesn’t integrate well with sites other than LinkedIn.

Nuance: Load it up with whatever presentations you have – technical materials, sales presentations, workshops and anything else you do. It’s surprising how much time people spend browsing through presentations once they’ve found the one they’re looking for. Also, upload presentations as PDFs to assure broadest accessibility to your information.

Google+

What it’s for: Even social media experts will tell you that they don’t really know what Google+ is best at. It’s intended as Google’s answer to Facebook. It is often appreciated for being less commercial and crowded than Facebook, but if you’re beginning a social media program, that can be a disadvantage. Facebook may be noisy, but it has tools designed to make marketing easy. Success on Google+ demands more sophistication in social media marketing.

Strengths: Google’s most powerful attribute is search, and the promise is that anything you post using Google+ will be easier to find on the world’s best-used search engine.

Weaknesses: No sense of place. Facebook is a destination. Google+ is a concept.

Pinterest

What it’s for: Creating online bulletin boards filled with images. If your product or service is visually oriented, use Pinterest to create relevant collections of photos and show them to your audience.

Strengths: Easy to use and integrates well with other sites. So you can feed content to Pinterest and have it automatically post to Facebook and Twitter.

Weaknesses: Typically viewed as a site for women, though that reputation is fading.

Nuance: Pinterest is a social platform in itself, and it wants you to gather followers. But you can use it to organize and display photos while focusing your “audience development” efforts on Facebook and Twitter.

Instagram

What it’s for: Very much like Pinterest. But it originated as a photo-enhancement app for smart phones and it maintains that heritage today. While Pinterest is about organizing collections of images, Instagram is more about taking, dressing up and sharing photos (and now, short videos).

Strengths: Integrates with other social media.

Weaknesses: How many different ways do you really need to take a picture or video?

Foursquare

What it’s for: Geographic social media; people check in to places they visit. By encouraging people to check in, you create visibility on the Foursquare network.

Strengths: Creates attention to storefront businesses that rely on heavy traffic.

Weaknesses: Not much buzz about it these days.

There are plenty more social media platforms, but if you’re not already deep into social media, don’t go beyond what’s contained here. Pick an appropriate place to start and then get comfortable using it.

Social media doesn’t have to take over your life, but if you want people to know about your business, it should be at least a regular part of it.

The economics behind the media meltdown

What really happened that caused traditional media to shrink so much over the past decade – and why are so many still struggling to come back?
That’s the subject of this presentation, which I’ve given several times over the past few years.

Why the media meltdown from Bob Rosenbaum

Make sure value-added really adds value

Value-added is the currency of the new economy. The idea is this: You do business by giving people what they pay for, but you gain and retain customers by adding a little something extra on top.

When the Eat ‘n Park restaurant chain gives each child a free Smiley cookie after dinner, that’s value-added. When UPS and FedEx provide tracking numbers so you can follow the progress of your package, that’s value added.

But beware of providing value-added that fails to add value. That can actually harm your business.

Here’s an example from the business-to-business world: On behalf of a client, I recently placed some small advertisements with a local media outlet. Ever since, I have received a weekly e-mail letting me know that my online customer profile has been established and that if I fill it out I will receive a free listing in some under-explained and over-complicated online system. They call it value-added; I call it extra work with dubious benefit for which I won’t be paid. But ignoring it leaves me with the inescapable knowledge that maybe – though not likely – I am shorting my client on some meaningful opportunity.

Here’s another, from the business-to-consumer world: The pharmacy placed four automated calls to my house the other day.

One was important; it directed my daughter to call the store about a question on a prescription she had transferred from another location. Over the next few hours she called several times and nobody ever answered the phone. In the end, she drove to the store and waited in a long line to speak to the overwhelmed pharmacist.

While she was there, I asked her to pick up another family member’s prescription that had been submitted electronically the previous day by the doctor. Not only wasn’t that prescription ready, nobody in the pharmacy could find any evidence it had ever come in. But 20 minutes after my daughter got back home, another robo-call arrived to announce the prescription was ready.

That phone call was intended to be value-added, but instead, it emphasized that the pharmacy is understaffed and has flawed processes – resulting in the inconvenience of another trip to the store.

By the time I returned home, there were yet two more calls – “courtesy” reminders that it was time to refill some maintenance medications.

I never asked for these reminders. In my household, we have a better reminder system: When the pill bottle is close to empty, it’s time to reorder. But the pharmacy decided its calls would add value, and opted us in to receive them.

I’m sure there is a way to change the settings for these automated calls. But why should that be my job? I didn’t ask for all this value-added in the first place. Aside from the momentary pharmaceutical chaos in my household, we’re basically healthy and view our business with the drug store as a transactional necessity.

This, of course, is what the pharmacy corporation hopes to change. By offering all this value-added service, it hopes to turn our transactions into a relationship.

It’s having the opposite effect; rather than figuring out how to change my preferences, I simply seethe in the background while the answering machine records each call.

The lesson is this: If you’re going to offer value added, make sure it really adds value. Otherwise you’re just spending money on something that actually harms your business.

First things first: What game are you playing?

Strategy before execution. This should be simple.

But it’s human nature to jump right into doing stuff before sweating out the big questions.

For example, a couple prospective clients have put off small, closed-ended projects that I proposed to help them align operating strategy and marketing. This in turn would help them answer such daunting digital communications questions as how to deal with social media, and what capabilities does the website need to offer?

It’s my suspicion that what they’ll really learn is the organization doesn’t actually have a unifying operating strategy. But in both cases, the reason given for delaying the little strategy project is that they first have to devote all their attention to the big website project.

I understand that building a new website is daunting. But it’s even harder if you don’t know what purpose the new website is supposed to serve. It’s like getting ready to knock the ball in the hole without knowing whether you’re playing billiards or golf.

That’s why strategy always needs to come before execution. Strategy tells you what you’re trying to do. The website will help you do it. But only if you tackle them in the right order.

Image courtesy of James Barker/Freedigitalphotos.net

The time has passed for revenue-enhancing digital products

A small B2B media company contacted me to talk about enhancing revenue by adding some new digital products to its portfolio. The company already offers a digital edition, business directory, email newsletters, web-seminars and a number of other digital B2B staples. Non-monetized but just as important, it has a reasonable Twitter following, a large group on LinkedIn and a Facebook page that is basically just a placeholder.

I’m sure there are more products the company could implement. It doesn’t have any mobile offerings to speak of, and its website represents first-generation internet thinking – a source of information but not of engagement and interaction. With a little bit of study and a few billable hours I could have made some recommendations.

Here’s what I told them instead: The opportunity to increase revenue by adding digital products has largely passed, and simply adding new products will probably hurt the business by:

spreading the editorial staff even thinner;
raising digital development costs;
over-running the sales force’s competence;
stressing customers, who don’t have more money to spend on new products and will be forced to decide which products to support and which to ignore.

In essence, trying to invigorate the company by adding more digital products is just going to lead to more fatigue for everyone – and at best provide only incremental revenue gains.

The real opportunity – and the only real option – is to use digital tools to increase the organization’s footprint and prominence.

Here’s the argument:

In B2B media, ad revenue and unit yields have been stagnant for a decade, and there is no reason to think that’s going to change for the better. As hard costs continue to rise, print circulations have been on a forced retreat. Publications that have maintained controlled circulation levels are doing so by cutting in other areas or – more likely – by winning market share and profits from other, lesser competitors. Neither is sustainable.

Given that it’s not economical to add print readers, the real value of a digital strategy is to present the brand to new people – either by expanding outside the magazine’s traditional market (taking a step upstream, toward the advertisers’ suppliers, for example) or its traditional geography (i.e. international).

That doesn’t mean simply launching a digital or iPad edition. These are passive – cool media in Marshall McLuhan’s lexicon.

But extended audiences demand hot media. They need to be actively engaged; they need learn for themselves how a media brand is valuable to them. Engagement at that level means creating a different kind of relationship based on interaction with community, expansiveness of content, and flexibility in the way content is applied. These are the strengths of digital tools – when those tools are skillfully and strategically applied.

In the real world, it probably means a pretty significant website overhaul and, more significantly, redeployment of staff and restructuring of sales compensation.

Editors have to stop thinking in terms transferring knowledge from experts to the readers – instead becoming moment-to-moment conduits for peer-to-peer communication. Less like network news anchors and more like a highly specialized cruise directors.

Sales strategy has to evolve too. It’s less about products and more about platform – how the media brand provides a fluid and organic conduit between the advertiser and the market.

These are not small changes to make, and this is not a short-term project. But it represents the difference between relevance, growth and prosperity on one hand; and retreat into a niche position or extinction on the other.

Outside the marketers’ echo chamber, print lives

According to B2B magazine, ABM, the trade association for the business-to-business trade press, held a series of panel discussions recently in which participants declared that print isn’t dead.

Wouldn’t we expect them to say that? Of the four pro-print souls mentioned in the article, three of them still make their living by running, editing or selling for print magazines.

I’m not arguing their point either; I believe print is a vitally important communications vehicle and somehow will remain so in the future.

What’s notable in this discussion is the reasoning offered by the fourth panelist, Bob Drake, who runs Drake Creative agency. He said that a recent ad campaign that included a print component succeeded. He’s quoted by B2B as saying, “It goes against everything we’re hearing, but we can engage people for a long period of time (in print) and they stay engaged.”

I don’t know Bob Drake, and I don’t mean to pick on him. But if he’s hearing that print doesn’t work, then he’s talking to other marketers and not to marketees.

Marketers are abandoning print because it’s harder to measure as a marketing vehicle than Internet-based technologies. This is undeniably true. But at some point, that legitimate objection got simplified to the assumption that print is broken, which has been simplified even further to the notion that print is dead.

But if you ask readers, that’s not even close to the truth. The same article cited a poll by Roads & Bridges magazine (conducted by Internet, ironically enough) that indicated a strong preference among its audience for getting information via print. This is consistent with every bit of research and opinion I’ve ever seen. People prefer reading words on paper – especially glossy paper with charts and pictures.

The point? Like everyone else, marketers are susceptible to the echo-chamber effect. Print isn’t in trouble because it doesn’t work; it’s in trouble because shorthand communications of marketers obscure the nuance that is the truth.

IBM study paints not-so-pretty picture for B2B media

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value concludes that the troubles faced by traditional media aren’t going to go away when the recovery picks up steam.

The study, according to a report by BtoB magazine, concludes that as more and more people move online to get their information, advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much to reach them. Why? Presumably because these prospects become easier for the advertisers to reach – a conclusion that’s hinted at by the study’s other finding: that advertisers are willing to pay some kind of premium based on context and relevance of the audience.

This is nothing new to readers of this blog. But it’s a big stick in the eye for B2B media types who still think their future will be secured simply by providing great content.

A morale-boost for beleaguered newsies: E&P lives

Editor & Publisher – was shuttered in December by its owner, Nielsen Business Media – has been sold and will continue to publish, according to a report by Folio: magazine. E&P is more than 100 years old, and has been the leading trade publication of the newspaper industry for most, if not all, of its history. Its demise was a blow to the gut to journalists everywhere, who for the last few years have watched the apparent meltdown of their industry’s fundamental business model.

The new owner is Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., based in Irvine, CA – a white knight that rides in, not on a horse but on a powerboat. Duncan McIntosh is a consumer marine media company whose properties include Sea Magazine, The Log newspaper and, most notably, Boating World.

There’s no deeper meaning to this. It’s just nice to write about a company that sees the value in a storied brand, tradition and a franchise that serves the media industry. No surprise that the company isn’t one of the diversified media giants, for which earnings multiples are the only meaningful metric.

R.I.P. E&P

Add another surprise that’s not a surprise to the long list of publications that died in 2009: Editor & Publisher, the No. 1 title serving the newspaper industry itself, is folding at year-end.

E&P was such an institution – it’s been around since 1901, but existed under a different title since 1884 – that it’s hard to imagine a media world in which it doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s closing is so surprising.

On the other hand, The Nielson Co. had been trying to sell its media publications group, including E&P, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. Most of the group was just sold; E&P was not included in the deal.

I don’t know anything about E&P’s finances, but you don’t need an MBA to understand what that means.

Trade books that cover the media industry are chronically short on advertisers. They all live a subsistence existence. E&P’s folio has been razor thin since I first saw it in the early ’80s.

If E&P ever made good money (high margins), it never made big money. And in times of recession, small-money magazines do worst in the effort to maintain their margins.

I’m sure E&P is in the red, and that any forecast in which it could become proftable again doesn’t deliver enough earnings to justify the turnaround project.

And with the dire condition of many newspapers, E&P’s expiration is a symbolic event that was probably inevitable.

In that context, that E&P should die broke and alone isn’t a surprise at all.

I’m sorry to see it go, and feel for everyone on the staff. It was a great institution right up until the end.

The startling drop in audited circulation

According to AudienceDevelopment.com, audited circulation levels are declining at historic rates.

This actually points to two trends — one economics related, and one customer-induced.

The first is that publishers are cutting circulation in order to reduce cost. AD states that “183 publications decreased circ 5 percent or more compared to 142 a year ago and 101 the year previous. Conversely only 41 publications increased circ five percent or more compared to 76 the year previous.”

OK, so publishers are cutting circulation to reduce printing and postage costs. It happens in every recession, and it won’t come back much, if at all, following this recession because advertisers won’t accept rate hikes in exchange for a larger rate base. There’s simply no money in sending more publications to more people.

But the second trend is bigger and more meaningful to advertisers and publishers – and it could put the auditors out of business. That is that publishers are dropping their audits altogether because the audit process provides decreasing ROI.

AD states: “Departing titles far exceed newly audited titles. A record 69 titles were discontinued or ceased being audited and only 23 titles were added to the audited ranks. The total number of audited “consumer magazines” fell from 545 a year ago to 499.”

More and more advertisers are changing their perspective from wanting to reach a verified audience to wanting to achieve a measurable response from whoever they reach – a painfully fundamental change that I’ve previously addressed, and which most publishers – especially in the glamorous consumer world – are still trying to tiptoe around.
A hundred valid responses from an unaudited audience is worth 10x more than 10 valid responses from an audited audience.
From a publisher’s perspective, if you can deliver the responses, the audit becomes irrelevant.

Based on this, the audit bureaus ought to be frightened.

And while abandoning your audit is still a bold step in the magazine business, I assume that most publishers who do so are reinvesting in products that deliver the kind of results their customers really want.

The parties I’m most concerned about are the publishers who haven’t talked about leaving the audit behind. Because if it hasn’t occurred to you, then you clearly haven’t been listening to what your customers want. And this is one of those watershed times when the only security is to be so close to your customers that you can feel them breathe.