Case Example: Social Media Marketing Campaign

Glen Allsopp / 5 Comments / November 8th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

I don’t think there’s enough commentary on the web about SMM campaigns and how companies who offer Social Media services really go about doing it. Therefore I thought I would put up this post as an insight to how I personally do things, the approach I am using here has been done effectively for many companies and I know similar campaigns worked well for a huge motor company.

Knowing Your Goals

If you are going to do a Social Media campaign for a company, you have to find out what they hope to achieve, whether it’s branding, whether it’s for links in order to increase Search Engine rankings or just to build a known communication hub for them.

Only when you know what you want to achieve can you start to do research into your market, knowing that is crucial. One of the most popular requests or reasons for companies to engage in Social Media is not in order too increase website traffic but to have a voice. Have somewhere online where people can see you are human, you acknowledge what is being said about you and you try to give back to the online community.

Dell did this with IdeaStorm, they allowed their users to have a voice and also gave themselves one at the same time. By no means are all these operations successful as you will learn about Walmart in our post about Social Marketing failures but when done properly they can work.

How we would give ______ a voice

There are thousands of companies out there who are yet to really embrace online communities and increase brand awareness via social mediums, therefore this case study could apply to any one of them.

Have a Platform

Having a platform does not mean that one has to be on a companies own website, a platform could include a video sharing site like youtube but most commonly it is an application on their own domain. Blogs are a very popular choice, and that is because they work. They allow a company to get information out there and they allow users to give feedback, no longer is it a one-way conversation but it allows companies to show they are ready for the two-way channel.

Cadillac have a blog that updates very regularly and has been around a few months. As you can see from post’s like this people want to get involved and want to be able to ask for information. This allows GM to know where they are failing to give out information and what they can improve upon. Without asking in a human manner for this kind of feedback how would they have known?

Lesson: Not allowing direct feedback may work for some, but overall it’s not a good idea. Social media is about having a conversation and allowing others to interact. Blog comments can be moderated and you should let a company know this, and inform them that they shouldn’t try to ‘control’ the conversation. Anything irrelevant however can be controlled unlike a platform such as a forum where this becomes more difficult.

Give someone passionate, Control

When working with a company on getting involved in Social Media, you wan’t to make sure they don’t treat a site like a press release. Blog’s are there to be easy going, not corporate. People don’t want to read press releases but they do want to read about something they are passionate about from someone who is passionate about it.

People who tend to best suit the role aren’t necessarily the CEO’s or the Directors but people who have been with a company for a long time just out of the love for doing what they do or who they do it for. This ’someone’ needs the permission to be honest and it needs to be explained to a company that being so open can lead to both negative and positive feedback. It’s in their best interest to use their voice to deal with the negative and expand on the positive.

Lesson: Companies sometimes need help in understanding why they can’t just release press-like news and why giving someone who knows the company well, the opportunity, is important.

Learn How to Listen

Using Dell as a further example, they started off their Social Media journey with an absolute nightmare.

Last Thursday, Consumerist.com posted a list of tips submitted by a former Dell sales manager that told, among other things, how to get the best deals and even get a free laptop replacement at the end of a warranty cycle. This kind of stuff is Consumerist’s bread and butter - and Dell one of its favorite targets - so the site gleefully ran the secrets, along with commentary from a current Dell rep.

Dell must have been ripped, but it then threw gasoline on the fire. On Friday, Dell sent a corporate lawyer after Consumerist with a cease-and-desist notice. What a boneheaded maneuver that was. Naturally, Consumerist posted the lawyer’s threat along with a response. The exchange made the Dell lawyer look clueless, particularly since she never disputed the accuracy of the Consumerist information

(via)

Dell learned how to listen and created a platform to help them listen specifically. Of course not everyone has the money and / or brand recognition like Dell so for smaller companies you can be a little different. Personally I like to use ‘Buzz Monitoring’ tools and then feed these through to the company directly. This is often a combination of services such as Google Alerts for news in the blog-o-sphere or using Serph to find information on the likes of Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us as well. It’s a good idea to scour search results to see things that have been said in the past that may be noticed by regular searchers that may want ‘pushing down’ in the SERPs.

Listening out for your brand doesn’t even have to be automated, simple search queries like “brand” “forums” allow you to see discussions of your company that have been made on a public forum. I’ve seen many examples of some big companies interacting with people via message boards and receive a lot more respect from members for doing so.

Lesson: Teach the company how to do this themselves or give them the option for you to do it for them. Make both options clear and explain why listening is important if needed. Using Examples such as the Dell case here tends to help companies understand where they are going wrong.

Audience Engagement

Just simply giving your visitors the opportunity to engage, it certainly doesn’t mean that they will. Theres a few ways to ‘get involved’ in Social Media, some of my favourites include linking back to other bloggers and joining in ‘their conversations’. For companies who have received a lot of cricism I would even go so far as to tell them to respond to it in the open and let people continue the discussion on their site.

Just like any form of online engagement you want to encourage people to take action and do something. Tell people that their comments are likely to be heard, responded too and make an impact on your decisions. Other engagement possibilities could inlude adding a rating system on products / services to make it easy for people to get involved and give you feedback in the simplest forms.

If you plan on taking part in online conversations or starting ‘hot topics’ yourself then make sure it’s kept up, there’s nothing worse then a fly by showing and then nothing coming from a company

Lesson: Make engagement easy and encourage it. Nobody wants to take part if they think they are talking to themselves or their views aren’t going to be heard. One step further from linking to other bloggers is responding to criticism or comments directly on your blog to show you are listening and to show you are ready to answer. Too many companies are afraid to take these risks but they have a lot to learn.

Check the Results

If somebody really did take the time to go out there and work out what they want a company to gain, find out whether it’s being achieved. If not work out what strategy ideas were thought up at the start of the process, where they may have went wrong and how they could have been changed. I recently showed how not all attempts will work successfully, but as in personal life you learn from mistakes and come back with something better.

Some of the things you might want to look back over are:

Engagement
Website Traffic / Branding
Monitoring what is being said
How much of the feedback and ‘noise’ has been answered
How is the current system working out

Lesson: Realise that not just having goals, but regularly checking to make sure they are working is important. This allows for fast changes that don’t need business meetings to be put into place to improve the conversions and effeciency in which the desired output can be achieved.

Summary

This is just one example of a full Social Media Marketing campaign. Just brand monitoring can well be a huge full-time job for a large company, analysing what is being said, working out what needs attention first then getting then continuing the conversation out there on the web.

We don’t just perform SMM services but if you are starting to get into them yourself, I hope this gives you an idea of how some go about it, and how you can consider going about it aswell. Look out for other posts of ours relating to viral content creation and distribution.

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