Inner Architect’s focus is Social Direct Marketing

You are a COO, Marketing Director, or business owner and you are in charge of creating, executing, and maintaining a social media marketing plan. You understand the following challenges in executing this task:

• Time: you do not have the time to execute and maintain your company’s social media marketing plan
• Expertise: you do not have the expertise to leverage Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogging, or mobile applications
• Expense: you do not have the budget to hire, train, and pay benefits to  new employees to execute your marketing plan

What Are You Getting From Your Social Media Consultant?

What are you getting when you hire a social media consultant to run your company’s social media marketing efforts?

• Goals: have you identified your goals? Do you want to drive traffic to a brick n mortar? Are you looking for ecommerce online store traffic? Is your firm interested in protecting brand recognition and reputation? Are you tasked with growth?
• Strategy: do you have a specific strategy that you want the consultant to execute?
• Plan of Action: did you receive a written plan of action from your consultant on how they will achieve your desired goals?
• ROI Measurement: is your consultant explaining how he/she will measure their efforts within the chosen social networks to provide a clear picture of the ROI for your investment in their services?
• Progress Reports: has your consultant set up a schedule of regular reports detailing their progress?

Are You Ready to Participate?

Are you ready to provide the critical cooperation and help to your consultant to ensure success? Are you ready to authorize:

• Employees: allow your consultant to brief participating staff on your social media action plan
• Measurement: require your staff probe brick n mortar visitors or online visitors to understand which channel provided the motivation for their visit ie. Twitter, Facebook, mobile, email, postal literature, telesales, catalog
• Database Integration: are you ready to bring your chosen data points such as  eCommerce, telesales, email, Twitter, Facebook. Google+, mobile all together in order to create life-time value for your consumers in each marketing channel?

Conclusion

If you are not receiving the services and planning from your consultant then consider your options. Review and use this article as a check list for what you should expect from your marketing consultant and from your organization. Be willing to take responsibility for your organizations’ willingness to compel employee participation, if agreed upon, in the social networks. The most successful company social media marketing programs begin with a top to bottom buy-in of social media, willingness to spread the word, and understanding of what is at stake in today’s digital landscape: company growth, reputation management, customer engagement, and brand perception.

Social media marketing is being defined in a number of ways and continues to change as social networks evolve, new networks emerge, and mobile devices begin to transform and dominate  our future. But what is social media marketing? Wikipedia defines it as “. . .  the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.” Although succinct, that definition seems less than complete. Other definitions include the idea of using social networks to promote your brand to gain more fans, followers, click throughs, likes, and a plethora of other social currencies. Although these all seem to have a place in social media marketing’s definition they don’t capture the true essence of social media marketing: 1:1 communication.

Social Media Marketing vs. Marketers

Although Augie Ray suggests in his title “Social Media Marketing is Broken” he is correct in citing marketers as the reason why many social media marketing programs are ineffective or fail. Many marketers focus on the following “tactics”:

• Repetitive ads
• Sweepstakes
• Freebies
• Hard sell press releases
• Twitter ‘bot broadcasting
• Social currency exchanges (I’ll like your page if you like mine)
• Flash sales
• Deal of the Day websites

Although some of these tactics work to a certain degree, they only work in the right situations and at the right times. Rarely are any of these tactics effective for a continuous ongoing marketing program.

Traditional Marketer’s Mindset: Scale

All of the above listed tactics have one thread in common that happens to be the biggest problem marketer’s face every day: scale. Scale or scalability is the idea that a brand’s messages will receive exposure to the  largest number of  potential prospects and current clients as possible. What is driving marketers in today’s social media marketing world to utilize old, less than effective, traditional marketing tactics? One answer is the pressure from their superiors or clients. Another, just as prominent, is the fact that many marketing professionals’ backgrounds and experiences were based in traditional marketing tactics.

What’s the Answer?

The answer is not scale as the end all be all for your marketing program. It is not blind, traditional marketing tactics that do not engage the prospect or customer. And the answer is definitely not doing the same things when those things are not creating effective results. Engaging 1:1 marketing tactics within a comprehensive marketing strategy is the answer. Stay tuned as we will outline this idea in our next post.

It has always been our vision

With the evolution of social media changing the way that business is done, social media skills are needed to land many jobs today. We want to do our part to support others in developing skills that increase job marketability.

Program Details

The free training program will be offered in a webinar format on the first and third Friday of each month, beginning January 20, 2012 from 11 AM to noon. Sessions will be recorded and made available in segments on our website.

Topics will cover all platforms that are now becoming essential for business, including blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. We will begin with the very basics and take the training to more advanced levels as the program evolves. Homework assignments will be provided at the end of each session to guide participants to apply and practice material covered.

How to Sign Up

A session topic schedule and sign-up form are available on our Social Media Training page.

Hope to have you on board!

Any questions?

Courtesy Wikipedia QR Code

Do you plan to utilize QR codes in your marketing program? If you do the following are some solid steps to consider when implementing your QR code campaign into your marketing mix.

7+ Questions to Consider Before Launching QR Code Marketing Program

1. Security: more articles are being written about malware that has been designed to completely disable your smartphone. Before creating your QR code campaign, research QR code security so that you can assure your consumers that they will remain malware free

2. Plan Your Goal(s): what do you want your QR codes to do for your business? Do you want them to showcase your products or services , videos, photos, ecommerce store or are you providing a buying incentive through a coupon?

3. Call to Action: once you have your purpose aka goals in mind what is your call to action? How are you going to get your prospects, consumers, clients, affiliates, and friends to perform an action you wish them to take?

4. QR Code Design: it has been called “robot barf” but what do you want your prospect to see when viewing your QR code? Is a standard code enough or do you need to find a designer QR Code theme?

5. Mobile Landing Page: if you think that you will simply link your QR code(s) to your website’s pages you are in for trouble. There is nothing more annoying to a consumer who takes the time to load a QR code than to get to the point of reading the information and realizing that it is not optimized for smartphone consumption. Simply put, unless your prospect-consumer has X-ray vision he/she will never be able to read your message.

Creating a mobile landing page that is optimized, allowing a smartphone user to read the text, is the key to any QR Code campaign. Without this component, don’t bother trying to utilize QR codes.

6. QR Code Analytics: Mashable’s Hamiliton Chan nails it when he identifies the most important analytic for you to concentrate on measuring:

“The most important metric of a QR campaign should not be the number of daily scans. Rather, the length of engagement time that your code is generating should be a marketer’s primary indicator of campaign success.”

As Hamilton states “having a low number of scans should not discourage the advertiser. . . “

7.  Social Media Analytics: are you broadcasting your use of QR codes on your Facebook page, Google+ page, blog, website, YouTube account, and other social network sites? If you are making the effort to broadcast your QR code campaign are you tracking the analytics from these efforts?

Over the past few years

We discovered that Salesforce.com has recognized the needs of it’s clients who have adopted social networks by enabling CRM integration with Twitter and Facebook via the Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook app from Force.com. This powerful app led us to our current partnership launch.

Why the Salesforce Platform for our Business?

We highly recommend the Salesforce platform for managing social marketing. Salesforce’s ability to integrate with Twitter and Facebook enables businesses to:

• Keep track of engagement with social connections
• Schedule and manage social networking campaigns
• Measure and analyze results
• Hold historical conversational data at the record level
• Use social data to leverage efforts in social networking
• Use social data to leverage efforts in other marketing channels

Inner Architect Partners with Red Cote Consulting Inc.

Business partnerships are often the lifeblood of any successful organization. It is with that thought in mind that we are extremely excited to announce our partnership with Red Cote Consulting Inc.. As a certified Salesforce.com partner since 2003, Redcote Consulting Inc. has worked with a broad cross section of businesses from small startups to medium sized organizations successfully completing over 300 Salesforce.com implementations/integrations. Red Cote’s range of services include:

• QuickStart: This service rapidly has a business up and ready to utilize Salesforce.com.  Red Cote helps customers configure the application with a brief Business Process Review followed by configuration of the application. This can be done online or on site. In conjunction with configuration, Red Cote offers JumpStart Training, online or on site training, to ensure users have the necessary skills to begin using the application effectively.
• Customized Consulting: This service is for customers who have completed the basic installation of Salesforce.com but need additional ongoing support for more complex functionalities that are more iterative in nature.

Purpose of Inner Architect-Red Cote Consulting Inc. Partnership

There are many advantages to our partnership with Red Cote Consulting that all support the purpose of this collaboration: to provide a unique opportunity for businesses to harness social media networks as powerful new channels that produce quantifiable returns on investment.

Inner Architect’s purpose and role in this partnership is to provide Red Cote Consulting clients and partners with services designed to help them understand, implement, and track successful social network campaigns that create positive results. We accomplish these goals offering the following:

• Businesses with Marketing Staff: we offer comprehensive consulting and training which enable the business to learn how to develop and manage effective social marketing programs from the Salesforce CRM
• Businesses without In-House Marketing: we offer full prospecting, customer marketing, and content development services provided by seasoned professionals at the fraction of the cost of hiring your own staff.

One of the ways we at Inner Architect give back to our community

Challenges with adoption

We started speaking at Marin Pro in the fall of 2008 with a program we called “Blogging to Employment” which we delivered to a very skeptical audience. Although the group seemed intrigued, they challenged us pretty hard about the power and practicality of the tool we said could be leveraged as a vehicle for standing apart as a job candidate. Faces in the audience were looking at us like we were a couple of early adopter geeks evangelizing a passing trend.

Over the last three years, the skepticism has waned, although the group has generally remained uninspired to adopt. I am thinking that perhaps we’ve begun to see the beginning of change in the group that sat in on our presentation earlier this week as a number of heads were nodding in agreement as we gave rationale about how social engagement can open doors.

Social engagement success story

I shared a story of how one particular fan of one of our law firm clients has gotten on the radar of the managing partner simply by liking or commenting on their Facebook page 2-3 times a week. I shared that this fan has never asked for a favor, but if she did we (the people behind the firm’s logo) would roll out the red carpet to help because we are so grateful for all her support.

One more reason to adopt

I do hope to see more of my friends at Marin Professionals adopting social networking and digital media. We’ve all heard the hard facts about finding a job if you’re 40, 50, or 60+.  Don’t we all seem more youthful if we’re doing stuff that many people think is only for kids?

The viral benefits of social media networking for brands today

4 Steps to More Viral Sharing of Your Content

When consumers and companies begin to recognize your brand’s content via the Retweet,  try the following steps:

• Curate Content: write a solid article and showcase it with a succinct tweet:

• Thank You Tweet: write a tweet thanking the person-brand that RT’d your content. Do not cobble your thank you at the end of their RT of your content. Instead, honor their kindness by thanking the person-brand first:

• Copywriting: after completing your thank you copy, describe (“adoption & measurement”) the post you are referencing. By referencing and describing your post, you help your RTing partner to remember their RT of your content easily. More important is the fact that this description may be viewed by Twitter users who may have missed your article when it was originally tweeted and subsequently RT’d

• Link: remember to add the original shortened link at the end of your Thank You tweet. This completes the strategy by giving those Twitter users who missed your original tweet or the subsequent RT the opportunity to click through to your content

For many C-level executives, statistics are often the basis of “proof”

Social Media Usage

• Small Business: the use of social media  has grown in recent years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently Search Engine Watch
• Facebook Users: the ubiquitous social network of our times, so far, now has 750 million users Techcrunch
• Google Search: Google handles over 11 billion queries per month comScore
• Social Media Advertising: spending for advertising will quadruple from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion in 2015 Direct Marketing News
• Buying Habits: online users say they are more likely to buy from a brand that answers their questions on Twitter Techcrunch
• Mobile: 40% of US subscribers regularly browse the internet on their phone 60 Second Marketer
• Mobile Purchasing: 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions will be performed on a mobile phone by the end of 2011 60 Second Marketer

The revolution of social networking is exploding on a global scale with new technologies allowing us to connect on a scale never seen before in history. Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Stone, Dorsey, Williams, Mullenweg, and many more young lions are the architects of the social revolution. And with the daily onslaught of news about new social networking IPOs, new technological breakthroughs, new start-up successes, and millions of online adults adopting social networking there remains one demographic that continues to drive  marketer’s: Millennials. Yet, there is a surge in online adoption, participation, and advocacy coming from older demographic groups which is important data not to be ignored.

Millennial Online Habits

According to the Pew survey (chart at bottom), Millennials are “more likely to access the internet wirelessly with a laptop or mobile phone.” In addition, they still clearly surpass their elders online when it comes to:

• Reading blogs
• Use of instant messaging
• Use of social networking sites
• Using online classifieds
• Playing online games
• Participating in virtual worlds
• Listening to music

Shared Online Interests Across Demographic Age Groups

Yet there is a continuing change taking place as both Millennials and their elders are beginning to share some of the same interests in a way never seen in the past. The following are online activities that are becoming “uniformly” popular across all age groups:

• Email
• Search engine usage
• Searching for health related information
• Getting news, breaking news
• Travel reservations, purchases
• Buying products, services
• Performing online banking
• Seeking religious information
• Giving to charities
• Rating products, people, services
• Downloading podcasts

5 Reasons Marketers Must Attention to Older Generations

Older adults’ participation in online communication and entertainment activities represents some of the areas with the fastest rate of growth for online usage. The Pew survey reveals some very compelling statistics for marketers to take into consideration before launching a one size fits all social network marketing campaign:

• Internet users 74  and older are the fastest growing users group of social networks. Since 2008, usage increased from 4% to 16%
• Online video viewership jumped 14% from 52% in 2008 to 66% in 2010
• 51% of all online adults listen to music online compared with 34% in 2004
• 53% of online adults have used a classified ads website (Craig’s List) compared to 32% in 2007
• Searching for health information is the 3rd most popular online activity for adults 18 and older

Marketing Opportunities

Companies should be considering the implications of these statistics as they continue, or begin, their social networking marketing efforts to consumers. The changing habits across older demographic groups signals the need for a segmented marketing plan that takes into consideration the age variables of their online audience. In addition to segmentation, direct marketing principles like testing are critical to finding the best methods to communicate with this age variable audience. Without segmentation or testing, firms invariably will miss opportunities to connect with older segments of the online population that are utilizing the same social media channels as their far younger counterparts.

Pew Survey Chart

We at Inner Architect believe that one of the most influential and entertaining social media “scientists” is Erik Qualman. His site Socialnomics.net is a wellspring of social media information, analysis, and future predictions. It is a resource based on the economics of social media, the revolution that is social media, and the revolution of communications. Erik sums up his mission best in his description of socialnomics:

“The intent of providing short social stories, statistics, studies and surprises.  The term Socialnomics also has a double meaning in that as the success of this site grows the more social good we hope to accomplish/give back.”

Socialnomics and Social Media ROI

The continued quest is to measure the effectiveness of social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, LinkedIn and others to sell products and services. One of the first white papers on ROI using social networks was performed by Inner Architect. As more marketers apply direct marketing principles to social media marketing, the quest for ROI will be met through testing, documentation, and continued refinement.