Foursquare social media strategies

Increasingly, companies are using Foursquare to reach their audiences. Numerous promotions have been successful in attracting new customers and converting existing ones to new ambassadors for your brand, which is the basis of social media. It is increasingly important to interact with the customer and their audience. They are no longer passive bystanders as we know, both for communication and marketing. Today, almost everyone has some sort of smartphone, hence the rise of applications such as Foursquare, which allow you to check in anywhere, find points of interest around your checkin as well as current and potential or future contacts. This provides an excellent opportunity for people to become familiar with a product or to create resonance around it and attract attention, which is usually the objective on an advertising campaign.

The most common approach is to provide a discount to users who check in at one of the store’s branches. Many companies including Gap and Starbucks are renowned for this approach. Jimmy Choo, however, took it a step further by organising a type of treasure hunt in the city of London. Through their Twitter account @Catchachoo they posted specific locations around the city and the first person to check in at one of those locations via Foursquare would receive a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes of their choice for free.

McDonalds is another example of an original campaign. The aim was to increase foot traffic to their stores by 33% in one day by using Foursquare. 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards were used as checkin bait to attract potential customers. The bait also worked to attract attention from the media and resulted in more than 50 articles talking about their so called Foursquare special. The problem with this campaign was the measurement. The blog thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com provides an excellent summary of this.

 

 

 

 

Social media policy

Following my last post, an additional element to consider is the social media policy. A recent post from the Greenbuzz agency makes a valid point about the idea that a social media strategy should include a coherent policy to help employees understand how they fit into the strategy. “Companies can build the most carefully-planned social media strategy, but if employees don’t have specific ‘how to’ guidelines, confusion erupts and hands are slapped in the process.”

Ready to tackle social media policy development? Consider these questions:

1.    Will employees be allowed to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. during business hours?

2.    How much time, or which specific time periods, will be allowed on these sites? Only during the lunch hour and breaks?

3.    Who is the designated spokesperson/people representing your company’s ‘voice’? Don’t designate “anyone” — choose wisely.

4.    What style will be used when posting? Conversational and friendly? Business casual? Professional and formal? Make sure the style accurately represents your company’s culture.

5.    Can employees access sites via company mobile devices? Will this pose a security risk?

6.    Who ‘owns’ contacts made for business purposes? This is an especially important question for companies with sales forces.

You can read more by taking ideas from what others have done in this list of 160 social media policies.

A structured communication plan is the foundation of a sustainable social media strategy

Recently I received several calls from organisations seeking advice about how to establish a presence on Facebook and other social media platforms. Most importantly they wanted to hear about the advantages of social media adoption. My first question to them is always: what is your communication objective? This is usually followed by a moment of silence. In fact, most of them do not have a communications strategy.  Yet jumping into social media without a proper communications strategy seems like building a house without a proper foundation.

Social media may produce immediate results but it also presents an opportunity for a long term communication management. You build relationships, gain knowledge, and participate in and shape conversations. But how do you combine the immediacy of posts, status updates, rss, etc. with longterm objectives and goals linked to a communications strategy? To answer that we should review the elements of a communications strategy. These include a proper stakeholder analyses, goals, objectives, and a proper method for evaluating results.

A stakeholder analysis is essential for any organisation. There are numerous methods that can be used which focus on the identification of stakeholders. The challenge is to decide which stakeholders should receive specific attention. One excellent model that can be used was developed by Brad L. Rawlins which prioritizes stakeholders through a four-step process: 1. Identifying all potential stakeholders according to their relationship to the organization; 2. Prioritizing stakeholders by attributes; 3. Prioritizing stakeholders by relationship to the situation; 4. Prioritizing the publics according to the communication strategy. This model helps an organisation decide how much attention each stakeholder group deserves or requires. If you know your publics you can select which platforms are most suited for your specific objectives more effectively. You might set shorter communications initiatives with some stakeholders while others would require a longterm investment. Social media could be used for both.

In communication we distinguish between goals and objectives, in that a goal is a statement rooted in the organization’s mission or vision and an objective is a statement emerging from the organization’s goals. For example, if your goal is to raise awareness about a certain issue or product, your objective might indicate how much awareness and it would specify a time frame. Once an organisation has set specific objectives and decided on which stakeholders to target, specific channels can be identified. These channels may include a more traditional approach such as print journalism or advertising or they may include social media. One advantage social media offers is that you are able to listen to your stakeholders. Effective communicators implement a two-way approach which requires longterm investment. Just posting a message blindly to reach a maximum number of people will not be effective in the long run.

The final step is then to decide on how to measure your results. Here again the most effective approach is a combined measurement, both on and offline. Some interesting references for measurement are Intelligent Measurement and the Metricsman. They talk extensively about the importance of evaluation and measurement but also about the combined approach implementing both online and offline techniques.

One reference which I think describes this point is from the film Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner’s character hears a voice which tells him to build a baseball stadium. He hears repeatedly “if you build it, they will come” referring to the spectators. And at the end of the film you see thousands of cars approaching the farmland on which he had built the field. But was he ready for all those people? We don’t know because the film ends. In social media it is comparable, you can build your profiles, start posting, commenting, linking and you might generate a great deal of traffic very quickly. But if you do not feed that traffic with quality material they will disappear and it will be counter productive in the long run. Therefore, think and plan ahead. Establish a proper communications strategy before building.

Communication, Chaos, and Control

From the New Yorker, I came across this interesting interview with Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” about how forms o

Socialnomics

Reading a very interesting book about Social Media titled: Socialnomics: How Social Media Transofrms the Way We Live and Do Business, by Erik Qualman.

It summarizes in a very clear manner the basics of social media and their impact on our society. It provides visions into the future, how social networks will evolve and how business can benefit by adapting their strategies. Of course, it also restates many points that we, as early adapters, have already mentioned. Ideas such as the importance of two way conversations with your publics or target audience and the necessity to adjust your strategy according to their feedback. In this book, the author focuses more on the marketing/advertising perspective than PR. In other words how customers have taken ownership of the brands and how organisations can learn from their customers to improve their products and services. That is not to say that the days of traditional marketing and advertising have disappeared completely, they have merely evolved into something more interactive.

There are a number of good case studies in the book such as the Obama campaign, the Budweiser Wassup campaign, the Jetblue crisis response, Starbucks and many other great examples of how organisations and individuals are using social media successfully.

One nice example of proliferation through social media is for a product invented by two young entrepreneurs from Seattle. The product is Bacon Salt. Two friends started talking about how great it would be to have a powder that made “everything taste like bacon. One of them started a MySpace profile dedicated to Bacon Salt. The used the data available on MySpace to look for other people who had mentioned bacon in their profiles and found 35 000 of them. They began reaching out to them to establish their interest in Bacon Salt. They found wide interest and started receiving orders even before having a product. Word of Mouth took over and they sold 600 000 bottles in 18 months.

What is social media – a video

The Internet and human intelligence

A report has been published by Pew Internet presenting some interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet. More specifically, the report explores how the Internet is affecting human intelligence and how information is being shared.

The report was written following a survey conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. It gathered opinions from 900 respondents including prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers.

Results provided perspectives on questions such as:

•Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?

•Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?

•Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?

•Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

If you are interested in these topics, have a look at the full report The-Future-of-the-Internet-IV.

Social media ROI vs. evaluation and measurement

An interesting discussion is emerging about social media return on investment verses evaluation and measurement.  Clearly every PR initiative requires quantification. But how do we quantify results in social media? There is a difference between ROI and actual evaluation and measurement. ROI looks at the monetary figure of a change while evaluation and measurement seeks to measure the degree of change.

Currently, there are numerous tools available that allow you to measure the number of hits on your platform, clicks on your links, the number of retweets on platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, your level of popularity on Twitter, etc. But what does this really mean? These tools may indicate your level of popularity but they neglect to present any accurate insights into actual results. Just because someone is clicking on one of your links or retweeting one of your posts, doesn’t mean that the information is actually being absorbed, let alone provoking any change of thought or action. So how do we measure the actual impact of our social media tactics? It seems that before we think look at potential monetary benefits, we should identify effective tools for measurement and evaluation.

Of all the theories that are circulating in the blogosphere, I found the one developed by Don Bartholomew on his blog metricsman most plausible. He develops a three stage measurement process that combines online metrics (web analytics) with conversations and behaviour patterns. It is about combining online and offline behaviour and actions.

Mr. Bartholomew goes on to present an interesting graph depicting these three stages:

From the left, companies or brands control, own or manage websites – corporate sites, FaceBook pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn pages and blogs by way of example – and create content that consumers may engage with. This zone is measured primarily by web analytics. In the middle are the actual social networks and conversations between individuals. In this zone we are interested in data sets that cannot be gathered solely using web analytics packages. How often is the brand being mentioned in conversation? What is the sentiment of the comments? How often is the brand being recommended and by whom? Content and behavior analysis, including tracking technologies, are the primary measurement tools in this zone. The third zone represents all the real-world, offline transactions that may be of interest. Did someone visit the store or attend or event? Did they buy a product? Did they recommend the brand or product to a friend over coffee? Primary audience research is necessary to address many of the questions, as well as scan or other purchase data in some cases.

He introduces a new model for measurement which considers exposure (the degree of exposure created to content), engagement (who, how and where are people interacting/engaging with content), influence (the degree to which exposure and engagement have influenced perceptions and attitudes), and  action (actions have been taken as a result of the PR/social media tactic).

I think this is an excellent example of a holistic approach to measuring the effects of your social media strategies. This is currently still a major challenge for organisations. As many are frantically trying to get onboard the “social media bandwagon”, they are missing the strategic element of social media. And every strategy must include effective evaluation and measurement.

Marekting 2.0 and Social Media conference

An interesting conference will be taking place on 22-23  March 2010 in Paris. Marketing 2.0 (M2C) will bring together experts and specialists to discuss the future of marketing, (social) media, and advertising, as well as new technology.

If you click on the icon on my blog, add the code: PGM2C2 and receive a discount..

See you in Paris!

Web 2.0

A short video reporting on web 2.0.