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Companies Encouraging Employees to Use Social Media is Increasingly Popular Heading Into 2016

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16034335445_0ba754b746_zA new article from eMarketer sheds light on how popular Social Employee Advocacy Programs are becoming.  These are programs where employees are encouraged to promote their brand via social media.  You can immediately see why it would be popular with many companies.

In crafting such programs, it is important for the company to also create guidelines for any employees that decide to participate.  These include such things as letting the employee know what type of behavior/conduct is expected, identifying themselves as representatives/employees of the brand when they create content that promotes it, etc.

Also, such programs should be offered as an option, not as being mandatory.  Just as you wouldn’t require every employee in your country to deal with customers directly in a retail setting, you shouldn’t ask all of them to do so online.  The last thing you want to do is make employees feel obligated to engage in a task that they don’t want.  Instead, you want to attract the employees that love your brand and who are already singing your praises online.  Their voice is authentic and their ability to attract others to your brand is far greater than the employees that feel ‘forced’ to participate in a program that they feel isn’t worth their time.

Pic via Flickr user MSLGroupGlobal

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Stop Listening to Social Media Experts (Or At Least Be More Careful When You Do)

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16224910474_93e761cc3a_zA few years ago I took my Acura to a Honda dealer to have them change the oil and rotate the tires.  About an hour later, the service manager comes out with a clipboard and I ask him “How’s everything look?”

“Ho boy!”, he exclaims.  “You’re going to end up on the side of the road soon if we don’t repair all this as soon as possible!”

Now I’m not a mechanic, but I do know a (very) little about working on cars.  With a skeptical eye, I took a look at his laundry list of items that all needed to be fixed immediately, or according to him I was “going to end up on the side of the road soon”.

I looked at his list, and immediately notice several items that either didn’t need to be fixed or were actually due to be replaced according to the mileage of the car and a ‘suggested maintenance schedule’.  “Ok”, I explained, “I just replaced the distributor cap and the wires, and the plugs were changed 3,000 miles ago so they are fine as well.  So out of what’s left, what needs to be fixed today?”

With a bit of a frown he looked at the list and sighed “Well…I guess the only thing that you need to worry about right now is the rear motor mount, it’s in pretty bad shape.  But everything else can wait at least another 6 months.”

So in 2 mins I had gone from a dozen or so items that all needed to be fixed that day if I wanted to make it home, to there actually only being one item that needed immediate repair.

I was recalling this conversation when I recently sat down with Kerry Gorgone to record Marketing Profs’ year-end episode.  One of the recurring themes that Kerry’s guests mentioned was that they wanted to see less criticism of brands, especially when it comes to digital marketing.  And for brands, don’t take that criticism to heart, and consider the source.

When I say ‘consider the source’, keep in mind that a lot of the criticism that’s being leveled at brands using social is coming from consultants and agencies that have a vested interest in selling these brands social media consulting services.  It can sometimes be a case of “You suck! But that’s ok, because for a low monthly retainer, I can teach you how NOT to suck!”

Not all consultants and agencies that provide digital marketing advisement to companies are like this, in fact most reputable ones are not.  But it’s truth that many of the people that are criticizing your brand have a vested interest in doing so.  Either they are hoping to sell you consulting services, or maybe they are piling on with the latest brand mishap in a race to get out a new post every day.

Use Social Media Experts and Thought Leaders For Advice, Not Instruction

One of the key pieces of advice you will hear as a blogging company is that you need to blog regularly.  That a regular stream of good content that benefits your audience is imperative.

Recently, I was talking to a fellow consultant.  He was telling me about how well his year was going, and I lamented the fact that I needed to find time to start blogging regularly again.  He said “Mack I haven’t written a blog post in 6 months. I just don’t have time.”  Here’s a consultant that’s having an excellent year, yet he is so busy with work that he goes months sometimes without blogging.  But obviously it’s not hurting his business!

The point is that just because everyone says you should do something, doesn’t mean you should.  The best way to leverage the advice of experts is to listen to multiple ones, and look for trends.  And then approach their advice as being a suggestion for you, not an order.  Your business is unique, I can tell you what will work for a business like yours in general, but until I sit down with you and we discuss the unique goals and challenges associated with your business, I cannot give you customized advice on how to improve your efforts.

Listen to the experts, but don’t discount your own intuition and knowledge.

Pic via Flickr user GotCredit

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You Will Share This Post, But You Won’t Read It

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I check my Twitter notifications way more than I should.  Recently, I checked Twitter and didn’t see any new notifications.  I did some other work and came back just a few minutes later and was shocked at what I saw.

25 new notifications on Twitter.  That meant in just a few minutes, literally dozens of new notifications had come in.  I got excited, hoping this meant that someone had shared one of my posts, and then their followers had shared it, and then an avalanche of traffic would fall on my blog.  It would be glorious!

Sure enough, an ‘influencer’ had RTed one of my posts, and almost immediately, their followers started RTing the first RT, and within 10 mins, I had already gotten 25 people either RTing my post, or Liking it.

Excited, I rushed to my Google Analytics dashboard to check my traffic to see how many clicks this flood of RTs was sending to my blog and I was stunned at the number.

Zero.

Over 20 RTs within a 10 minute period had sent a grand total of zero people to my blog.  Something is definitely wrong.  We were all sold on the idea that sharing is caring.  That we want to see our content shared, because when its shared, that translates into more traffic.  And when you read a blog and see a post with a high share count, that means more people are reading it.

But is this really the case?

Research into the impact social sharing has on blog traffic has come up with a startling conclusion: There’s little to no relationship between social shares and a change in blog traffic:

A widespread assumption is that the more content is liked or shared, the more engaging it must be, the more willing people are to devote their attention to it. However, the data doesn’t back that up. We looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content.

So if we accept that the relationship between social sharing and traffic is weak at best, what true value do those social sharing numbers really have?  Are they a true signal to readers that a piece of content is more popular (and thus more worthy of your attention), or is this another case of social media numbers being worthless?  Further, if we believe that social sharing numbers aren’t credible, what external factors can we use to judge if others find a piece of content valuable?  Comments seem like a likely starting point, but with more and more blogs turning off comments, that is increasingly being taken off the board.

What if you had no external signals to tell you if a piece of content was viewed by a larger community as being valuable? How would you know, would you have to (gasp!) actually read it?  Perish the thought!

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How to Create More Social Media Content For Your Business

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For years, the big focus in social media marketing was finding ROI.  It still is, to a great degree.  But as more companies bought into using social media, a new problem developed: How do we create more social media content for our business?  Scratch that, how do we create more social media content that is USEFUL to our customers, that also helps our business reach its goals.

It’s tough, it’s damn tough.  I was talking recently with a fellow consultant about balancing doing client work and creating a steady stream of content that helps us get more client work.  It’s a struggle for us, so I know it’s probably a struggle for your company as well.

The good news about content creation is that the more you do it, the easier it becomes.  So the first step, is to address content creation from a time standpoint.  We want to make the process easier and more efficient so that you can create more content in less time.

One of the main reasons that businesses explore using social media is because they want to build awareness for who they are and what they do.  Social media doesn’t excel at driving sales directly, but it can be a great channel for driving awareness.  It can also be a great channel for positioning and branding.  So if we attack our content strategy from the awareness/positioning/branding angle, we can accomplish multiple goals at once.

Remember the plant your flag approach to content strategy?  It means you ask ‘what do we want to be known for?’  If you were to explain your business and why its relevant in 30 seconds at a cocktail party, what would you tell someone?  What terms and ideas do you want to own?

Once you know who you are and why your business is relevant, you want to create and share content around those ideas.  Red Bull creates and shares content focused on extreme sports and extreme sports athletes.  Pedigree shares content focused on happy and healthy dogs.

So as you are keeping up to date on your industry and market, look for ways to share some of that content with your network.  At first this can seem counter intuitive; Why would you promote content that’s not about your business?  Because if it’s content that’s related to your business, it helps identify your business as being associated with those ideas or that industry, or that concept.

Plus there’s this: If someone isn’t aware of your business, they also aren’t aware of why they should pay attention to your business.  One way to increase the chances that they will pay attention is to associate your business with content that they DO find interesting.  For example, if your business is a hotel chain, sharing content that helps customers plan a road trip can increase the chances that they will pay attention to you.  The content on planning a road trip is interesting and relevant to them, so if you share this content, they will pay attention to it, and by extension they will be more likely to pay attention to you.

So start by identifying sources of relevant content for your intended audience.  If you want to reach single moms that need help cooking quick and healthy meals for their children, think about where they would get this information.  Then you want to find these sites, and share their content.  You are providing a service for them, and in the process you are giving these single moms an incentive to pay more attention to you.

So if you want to create more useful social media content, start by staying up to date on your industry and market.  When you can, share relevant content from sources that your audience trusts.  Just doing this can easily double the content you distribute via your social media channels.  As an added bonus, it also makes those sources more likely to want to promote your content.  I’ll talk about this more in Thursday’s post.

Pic via Robert-Couse Baker

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SEC Social Media Fan Experience: The Tennessee Volunteers and South Carolina Gamecocks

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Every week through the start of the college football season on September 5th, I will be profiling how SEC teams are leveraging social media channels to connect with its fans.  Last week I looked at how the Florida Gators and Vanderbilt Commodores are using social media, this week I’ll show you how the Tennessee Volunteers and South Carolina Gamecocks are leveraging social media to connect with its fans.

How The Tennessee Volunteers Use Social Media to Connect With Their Football Fans

When looking at each SEC team, I start by seeing how many social media accounts each team has that are dedicated to just the football program, versus ones that are for the athletic program as a whole.  Tennessee has dedicated football accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It looks like these three platforms are going to be very popular with SEC schools as all three are great channels to share visual and video content that will be popular with fans.  Plus, the content itself can remind SEC fans of the calendar:

As I’m going through this series, I’ve decided to not look ahead on what the other SEC schools are doing.  This is purposeful because as I’m doing the series I am going to comment on what I’d like to see the remaining schools do with their social media efforts.  For example, last week I mentioned that moving forward, I was going to be paying close attention to whether or not the remaining SEC programs gave fans a backstage pass via its social media channels.  One way to do this would be to give fans access to Fall camps, which are starting right about now.  I was delighted to see that Tennessee is doing exactly this, by leveraging Periscope to give fans special access to the Vols’ Fall camp. IMG_0572 LOVE this!  Looks like the Vols are going to use Periscope to give fans coverage of Fall camp as well as the head coach’s press conferences after each practice.  The bar has been raised, if the other SEC schools aren’t doing something very similar to this, they should be. Tennessee is doing a great job of creating photos from Fall camp, and then using those photos on multiple channels.  Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even using the photos via Exposure, which is a service I hadn’t heard of before this.  So kudos to the Vols for understanding how important visual content is to its fans!

Not a lot of video content (where are the hype videos?), but there’s such a feast of photos being created by the Tennessee social media accounts that it’s hard to quibble.  The Vols are doing a great job of leveraging Fall camp as a content stream for its social media platforms.  As we continue through the series it will be interesting to see if the other SEC teams can match or exceed what Tennessee is doing.

How the South Carolina Gamecocks Use Social Media to Connect With Their Football Fans

Now let’s venture to the Palmetto state and look at how the SC Gamecocks are using social media.  South Carolina has a dedicated Twitter and Instagram account for the football program according to its main site here.

South Carolina is creating a lot of photos from Fall camp just like Tennessee did, but I noticed they are also creating video content from Fall camp such as this video posted on Instagram:

29 days til kickoff! Day 2 of practice in the books, full recap on GamecocksOnline.com. #SCCamp15 #HereSC #Gamecocks

A video posted by Gamecock Football (@gamecockfb) on

Also, I noticed something interesting with this tweet, see if you notice what I did:

They are using the same video that was posted on Instagram, so they are re-sharing content among multiple channels.  But what I love about this tweet is notice they add a call to action that asks fans to go back to GamecocksOnline.com for the full recap.  I *love* that because they are leveraging social media to move traffic off Twitter back to their website.  This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is.  Once SC moves fans back to its website, then they can sell them merchandise and tickets.  Anytime you move traffic from sites you don’t own to sites you do, that’s a win and you can’t do that without that simple call to action.

South Carolina also has uploaded a ton of videos devoted to coverage of Fall camp from its main YouTube channel for its athletics programs.  These are great and easily shared via other channels like Twitter and Facebook.  You can see all the social media accounts related to the South Carolina athletic programs here.  Also notice that 3 of the football coaches have their own Twitter accounts listed, but unfortunately that doesn’t include the Ol’ Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier.

Even though South Carolina only has a Twitter and Instagram account dedicated to its football program, they are creating both visual and video content from Fall camp at a pretty healthy clip.  Again, this is ‘behind the scenes’ or backstage content that fans love.  I also love that they are sprinkling in calls to action to move fans back to GamecockOnline.com.  Very smart.

So that’s this week’s look at how the Tennessee Volunteers and South Carolina are leveraging social media to connect with its fans.  Last week we looked at Florida and Vandy, so that means we’ve covered 4 teams from the SEC’s Eastern division so far.  Next week we’ll move out West, and look at how the LSU Bengal Tigers and the Mississippi State Bulldogs are using social media to connect with their fans.  See you next Thursday!

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