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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Creating a Social Media Strategy (But Were Afraid to Ask)

RSSWorldIf your company is using social media, it is VITAL that you have a strategy and plan in place that’s guiding your efforts.  Not only will your efforts be much more successful, but it will save you a ton of time and money since your efforts will be focused.  And it will be much easier to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

So why don’t more people have a social media strategy in place? In most cases, they simply aren’t sure how to create said strategy.  This post will hopefully help with this ALL too common problem.  So if your company is using social media and ‘winging it’ without a plan, please share this post internally.  If you have friends that are trying to get social media efforts off the ground at their company, please pass this along to them.  We will not see REAL growth from companies using social media until more of them get SOLID plans in place that are guiding their efforts.

Let’s get started on making that happen.  Here is a framework for creating a social media strategy for your business.

First, think about what you are wanting to accomplish with social media.  What are your goals?  Here’s some examples:

  • Build awareness for your company
  • Increase sales
  • Increase customer leads
  • Establish thought leadership
  • Use social media as a customer service platform
  • Provide product support for customers
  • Collect feedback on existing or potential products and services
  • Build a place where customer evangelists can connect

Second, think about who you are wanting to reach.  Is it current customers?  Potential customers?  Industry sources?  Potential clients?  Who is your ‘target market’?  Creating a simple monitoring system will help you determine the answer to this question.  By monitoring online mentions, you can get a good feel for where the online conversation about your company is happening, and how active it is.  Want to jump on Twitter?  What if no one on Twitter is talking about you?  Monitoring will help you determine this.  You can use premium tools such as Radian6 or Techrigy, or if you are a smaller business it’s probably fine to go with free tools such as Google Alerts and Twitter search.

Third, what are your resources?  What’s your budget for social media?  How many employees are available to work on your social media efforts?  Will you have to outsource some of your efforts at the start?  Will you have to outsource all of your efforts at the start?  How much time can you devote to social media?

Answering these questions will greatly determine which tactics (blogs, Twitter, Facebook) are best for helping you achieve your social media strategy.  Let me state this again; Getting on Twitter is NOT a social media strategy.  Twitter is a tactic used to execute a social media strategy.  You first need to answer the three questions above and THEN decide that Twitter is the right (or one of the right) tactics to help you achieve your goal(s) for social media.

So let’s say you’ve answered these three questions.  Your goals are to use social media to build awareness and increase sales.  That means you will primarily be targeting new and potential customers.  Now let’s also factor in the answers from the third question about your resources.

On the surface, a goal of using social media as a way to build awareness for your business and increase sales sounds like a great opportunity for your business to launch a company blog.  But a blog carries with it unique time and social media skillset requirements.  That’s why you also need to factor in your resources.  Do you have enough time and people available  to ensure that the blog will regularly have fresh content available?  Do you also have the people available to spend time connecting with readers and potential customers on and off your blog?  If not, do you have the budget to outsource some or all of these efforts?

That’s why you must consider all three questions at once.  And after you have answered these questions and now have your strategy in place, and have decided on the social media tactics you will use, now you have to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.  At this point, don’t blindly assume that more traffic or followers or friends is best.  Make sure that the metrics you measure tie back to your social media goals.  If your end goal for your blog is to sell more widgets, should you measure number of comments per post, or number of referrals from the blog to the widget product page on your website?  Does it really matter that you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, if only 10 of them are potential customers?

Put your metrics on trial.  Make SURE that whatever you measure makes sense in the context of what you are trying to accomplish with social media.  More traffic is great, but what actions are those visitors performing once they arrive at your blog or message board?  If you are adding 100 fans a week to your Facebook page and still can attribute no additional sales from Facebook fans, so what?  (BTW this opens another can of worms, but it could be that your Facebook fans ARE driving sales, but you don’t know that because you aren’t tracking them correctly, or at all)

At the end of the day, you have to have a strategy guiding your social media efforts.  And I know that some CEOs hear the term ‘social media strategy’ and immediately get nervous because they think it means a lot of $$$ and a big commitment.  What it means that you are going to ORGANIZE your social media efforts and make them more efficient.  Just because an intern got you on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t mean you need to be on either site.

Once you get a strategy in place, you’ll save time and money.  You have a strategy driving your other marketing efforts, why should what you are doing with social media be any different?

Thanks to Esther for suggesting this post!

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You can’t evaluate the effectiveness of your social media plan until you HAVE a plan!


Going back to the results from my social media survey, Question #6 asked “What has been the biggest problem your company has encountered in using social meda?”

The top response to this question was “Not sure how to measure the effectiveness of our efforts”.

That probably isn’t surprising to many of you.  But that ‘sounds’ like an ROI issue, and I don’t think it is.

So I crosstabbed the people that said that “Not sure how to measure the effectiveness of our efforts” was their top concern, and looked at their responses to the other questions.

Then I came to Question #5, which asked “If your company doesn’t have a social media strategy, why not?”  The top response to this question (62.1%) was that their company WAS using social media, but did not have a strategy in place.

But a whopping 68.4% of the people that said that ‘Not sure how to measure the effectiveness of our efforts’ was their top concern about social media ALSO said that they do NOT have a strategy in place to guide their social media efforts.

And this is what I think many companies are running into.  They are jumping on Twitter and Facebook (because those are the two sites they hear the most buzz about), then a month later they ask ‘Ok I’m looking at our Twitter and Facebook pages…what should I be seeing?’

These companies let BUZZ determine how they were using social media, instead of taking the time to craft a STRATEGY to guide their efforts.

And yes, I get that some companies panic when you say that they need a strategy behind their efforts.  The hand-wringing begins, because when you say ‘strategy’, they hear ‘commitment’, and to them, that means money.  But the problem is that if you don’t have a strategy guiding your social media efforts, you are going to LOSE time AND money!

Put yourself in the shoes of the average company that has no idea how to get started with social media.  If they don’t create a PLAN for their actions, they will likely decide to jump on Twitter and/or Facebook.  Because that’s what everyone is talking about.

So once they get on Twitter and Facebook, since they have no strategy in place to guide their efforts, how are they going to determine if their efforts are working?  Odds are, they will think they need to get more followers and more friends/fans.  Right?  Because those are numbers and it’s easy to understand numbers and THINK that as long as the number of followers/friends/fans goes UP, that’s a good thing, right?

Of course since there’s no strategy in place, the company has no idea WHO they should be reaching, or even if the people they want to reach are on Twitter and/or Facebook.  So they struggle to determine how to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

So think of the social media strategy as being your map.  Sure, you might make it to your destination eventually on your own, but you’re probably going to waste some time and energy (and money) to get there.

Pic via Flickr user WorldIslandInfo.com

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Twitter and blogs are hot with companies, but they aren’t sure how to measure their efforts

As promised, here are the results from my recent survey on how companies are using social media.  Over 200 of you responded to this survey,  and thank you SO much for doing so!  I’ll be digging into the results and takeaways a bit more over the coming weeks, but for today I wanted to give you a broad overview of what we learned.  Here are some of the key takeaways from the 230 of you that responded to the survey:

89.6% of your companies are currently using social media.

The most effective tool for your companies is Twitter, according to 35.7% of respondents.

The biggest problem concerning social media your companies have encountered is being able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

First, here are the sizes of the companies that responded:

SurveyChart1

As you can see, most of the companies that responded were smaller businesses.  That may also play into the responses given to this question about how much their company spends on social media:

SurveyChart2

The most popular response to the question about your company’s current social media budget was Less than $1,000, which was selected by 35.7% of respondents.  This makes sense, as most of the respondents appear to be small businesses.  What I found fascinating is that 15.2% of respondents said they had NO budget for social media!  Of course 13.5% also said they weren’t sure what their company’s budget for social media was.

Now I think the responses to these next three questions do contribute to each other to a degree, and I’ll delve into this more starting on Thursday.  But for now, I’ll let you mull over the results for yourself:

SurveyChart3When it came to which social media tool has worked best for your companies, the Big Three of Twitter(35.7%), Blogs(21.3%) and Facebook18.7%) led the way, but I was a bit surprised to see that the 4th most popular tool (at 3.9%) was message boards and forums focused on your company’s industry.

Now for a biggie; The biggest issue or problem your companies are having with social media:

SurveyChart4Let me break down the numbers for each response:

Not sure how to measure the effectiveness of our efforts – 33%

Can’t get customers interacting with us – 19.8%

Can’t devote time to social media – 15.7%

Don’t know where to spend our time/focus our efforts – 10.7%

We don’t know how to budget for it in terms of people or money – 9.1%

Can’t see how social media is helping our business – 7.1%

We don’t know what tools to use, there are so many! – 3.6%

We can’t handle more customer complaints – 1%

I won’t get into my takeaways or conclusions of these results till the next post, but it will give you something to think about for now.

Finally, I asked the companies that do NOT current have a social media strategy, to explain why not, here’s the responses to that question:

SurveyChart5Note that 62.1% of the respondents to this question said their company IS using social media, but does NOT have a social media strategy in place to guide their efforts (insert nails on chalkboard HERE).  This is a key stat that I want to really drill down into and see what else is happening with these people.  What is their biggest problem with social media?  Which tool are they using the most?  I’ll get into much of that in my next post.

Finally, 9.1% of respondents said they outsource some or all of their social media efforts, and the form of promotion that companies are spending the most money on besides social media is online advertising (27.4%), followed by print (15.7%), direct mail (11.7%), television advertising (4.8%), radio advertising (2.2%) and bringing up the rear, billboard advertising at 0.9%.  The most popular answer to this question was ‘Other’ at 37.4%, and if I had to do it again I would have added SEO as another option.

So thanks again to all of you that participated, this was my first social media survey, and I was very pleased with the level of response.  BTW I created a short PDF on Handling Negative Comments for this survey, and gave respondents a sneak peek at it a couple of weeks ago, but if you would like to download a copy, you can find it here.

So please let me know what you think of these results, via here in the comments, or by emailing me.  And BTW if you responded to the survey that you are having difficulty with your social media efforts, whether it’s figuring out what to use, how to get a strategy in place, or just to figure out if social media can actually help your company, please email me and I’d love to talk to your company about how I can help you get your social media efforts on track!

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Even individuals need a social media strategy!

CarRearviewOne of the findings in my social media survey from last week was that 18% of the respondents said they were a sole proprietorship.  So this raises the question; If you work for yourself, do you still need a strategy for your social media usage?

Absolutely!

In fact I would argue that it’s even MORE important for individuals to have a social media strategy than it is for companies.  Mainly because if you’re an individual, it is SO easy to let time get away from you (which kills productivity), if you don’t have a plan.

And if you do have a social media strategy, perhaps now is a good time as we head into the Holiday Season, to create a social media strategy if you don’t have one, and if you do have one, to re-evaluate your existing efforts.  That way you can hit the ground running as 2010 arrives!

First, ask yourself why you are using social media.  Be honest here, and really think about what you want to accomplish by being on all these social sites.  What is your MAIN goal for using social media?  If you’re in business for yourself, the likely answer is that you want to get more business.  So there it is, your strategy for using social media is to get more business.

Now comes the important part; Which tactics will you use?  This is where you need to put your time spent on Twitter and Facebook and your blog, on trial.  Do you spend 2 hours a day on Twitter?  Are you constantly checking Facebook?  This again is where you need to be brutally honest with yourself and evaluate if these sites are where you need to be spending your time if you want to execute your social media strategy of getting more business.

Do you spend 2 hours a day on Twitter?  Then you need to be seeing business benefits from that time spent, in order to justify spending that time there.  And this is where Twitter in particular, can fool you.  Let’s say you write a blog post about a topic, say social media consultants.  That topic will probably get you a TON of retweets on Twitter, and a flood of traffic to your post.

At the end of the day you can look at your blog’s analytics, cross your arms and smile big at the nice spike in traffic that resulted.  But if your primary customer base is B2B companies in the Pharma industry, how does getting a lot of RTs on Twitter about a post on social media consultants, really help you?  This is where you need to be careful about Twitter and other social sites.  It’s enticing as hell to see your content being shared via social sites.  To see the RTs pile on and traffic flow in to your blog.

But at the end of the day, if that content doesn’t reach the people that you want to do business with, then ultimately that time spent was personal time using social media, not professional.  This is why you need to put your existing social media usage on trial.  Look long and hard at how you use these social sites currently, and decide if the benefits you are seeing are personal, or professional.  There’s nothing wrong with using social media as a way to…be social.  But if you are spending 3 hours a day on Twitter and Facebook in an effort to grow your business, and are only seeing personal benefits, then you need to either alter dramatically how you use these sites to grow your business, or stop altogether.

Start today by assigning goals to your social media usage.  Goals that help you achieve your ultimate goal for social media of getting more business.  Let’s say you like to spend an hour a day on Twitter as part of your existing social media strategy.  That’s fine, but make sure that you have some way to measure the effectiveness of that hour spent on Twitter.  Here are some ideas specifically for Twitter:

1 – X% increase a month in referrals from Twitter

2 – X number of DMs from current and potential customers

3 – X number of redemptions of special Twitter codes

And set goals for all the existing social media site you are using to drive your business.  Track your results, make changes in goals if necessary, and stop spending time with a particular tactic if it’s not working.

The bottom line is if you are an individual, you need to have a social media strategy just as much as a company does.  Look at where you are spending your time now, and honestly evaluate if that time is best spent with that site.  If you haven’t already, set goals for your existing social media usage, so that time will be put to best use.

If you’re an individual using social media to grow your business, do you have a strategy in place?

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Don’t just be in contact with your customers, embrace them!

AmandaPalmer3

This is the fifth post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here, and part four is here.

Recently I blogged on The Daily Fix about how Amanda Palmer sold $11,000 worth of t-shirts in 2 hours via Twitter.  I think this ‘case study’ is a perfect example of how rockstars and companies differ in the way they view the people that buy their products.

For the most part, I think many companies see customers as people that they ‘have’ to connect with, and that having contact with these people is a ‘necessary evil’.

But rockstars such as Amanda seem to thrive on the interaction with their customers.  They don’t see it as something that HAS to be done, but they WANT that interaction, and crave it.  As a result, it makes it much easier for customers to become fans.

Another example, during my Rockstar presentation at Social South, I mentioned how Collective Soul is using Twitter to connect with their fans, and showed this tweet they had left:

CollectiveSoulTweet

Trey Pennington was in attendance during my session, and immediately tweeted to Collective Soul that I had mentioned them in my presentation.  Within minutes, the band left this tweet:

CollectiveSoulTweet2

See what just happened?  Collective Soul noticed that both Trey and I were promoting them, so they went out of their way to ENCOURAGE that behavior from us, by interacting with both of us and thanking us.

Companies should be taking close notes on what rockstars such as Collective Soul and Amanda Palmer are doing.  They are openly embracing the people that are more passionate about them.  Basically, they are finding the people that are already singing their praises, and handing them a microphone.  Brilliant.

Look at what Cirque du Soleil is doing in using social media to embrace their brand ambassadors.  They are finding the people online that are passionate and vocal about their shows, and are embracing them to help promote them online.  And the results speak for themselves, Cirque’s Social Media Manager Jessica Berlin explains that “The ROI for our social media outreach has been better than for any other form of advertising for us.”

Find your most passionate customers, the ones that truly love you, and give them a microphone.  All of the lessons that we’ve covered this week (Interacting with your fans in their space, Getting out of their way, Tapping into the ‘Bigger Idea’) are about giving customers a reason to become fans, and then when they do, you turn them loose.

And the great irony is, many of the companies that would NEVER consider embracing their most passionate fans via social media, are the same ones that wouldn’t think twice about turning their ‘social media strategy’ over to an intern. (HT – @CC_Chapman)

Thanks for checking out this Rockstar series this week, I hope you’ve enjoyed it!  BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

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Want more fans of your company’s social media efforts? Find the ‘bigger idea’.

This is the fourth post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here.

One area that so many companies are struggling with in creating content is finding a way to make it valuable, interesting and relevant to the people they are trying to reach.  Or put another way, they are struggling to find the ‘bigger idea’ behind their content.

Rockstars do a great job with finding the ‘bigger idea’ behind their music, tapping into ideas, themes and beliefs that trigger involvement and interest from their fans.  The video for the song World on Fire is a classic example of this.  Here’s how the video came to be:

In 2003, Mike Quinn was an engineering student in Canada.  He was working with a charitable organization Engineers Without Borders.  EWB brings together people that want to donate their time and talents to help people in impoverished areas around the world.  In 2003, Mike had been working on severals projects in Africa, and was detailing his group’s efforts via a series of articles.

One of those articles was discovered by Sarah McLachlan, who was about to start shooting the video for her new song World on Fire.  After reading Mike’s articles, and discovering how EWB was impacting so many lives, Sarah decided to take almost every penny of the $150,000 Arista had budgeted her for the video for World on Fire, and donate that money to 11 charitable organizations, including EWB.  The projects that were executed from Sarah’s donations eventually bettered the lives of over 1 million people around the globe!

But there was one problem; Sarah still had to shoot a video for World on Fire, and now she had no money for the video, save $15.  So she took that $15 and bought a video tape.  And she got a crew to volunteer their time to shoot a very simplistic video for the song.  What Sarah did was detailed what the normal expenses for the video shoot would have been and instead where the money went now.  A few thousand that would have normally paid for catering during the shoot for a day, instead bought a few thousand meals for homeless children.  Examples such as this really hit home Sarah’s core message (bigger idea) that by donating a seemingly small amount, a larger number of people could have better lives.  Here’s the amazing video:

And oh by the way, Sarah received a Grammy nomination for that video. So she got to help over a million people AND get a Grammy nomination. Not a bad return on a $15 video!

So how does this translate to companies and how they use social media?

Let’s talk about how Patagonia positions their blog, The Cleanest Line.  Now the strategy for many companies would be to use their blog as a promotional vehicle, right?

But Patagonia doesn’t directly promote their company and products on The Cleanest Line.  Instead, they focus on the ideas, themes and interests that are important to their customers.  The company focuses on the environment, sustainability, and being active outdoors.  Because Patagonia is smart enough to understand that it’s not about their products, it’s about what ‘bigger idea’ is their products a part of?  By focusing on more customer-centric ideas and themes, the content on The Cleanest Line is much more interesting, valuable, and relevant to the blog’s readers.

What's more interesting, the products, or how and why customers use them?
What's more interesting, the products, or how and why customers use them?

Another great example of tapping into the ‘bigger idea’ is what Kodak does with its A Thousand Words blog.  Instead of putting the focus on Kodak’s cameras and printers and film, instead A Thousand Words focuses on photography.  Because THAT is the bigger idea that its customers are interested in.  They want to know how to take better pictures.  If Kodak can teach them how, then they have created value for their readers, and contrast that value being created with a competitor that’s using their social media efforts to directly promote their products.  Who wins?

On Tuesday we looked at how Graco positions their blog as being written by parents, for parents.  But even here, in positioning the blog as being about parenthood, Graco has tapped into the ‘bigger idea’ that their customers are interested in.  Their customers ultimately don’t want to know how to buy Graco products, they want to know how to be better parents.  So that’s what the blog focuses on, and that’s a big reason why it’s been so successful for Graco.

So if you want more fans of your company and its social media efforts, find a way to tap into the bigger idea behind your content.

Coming tomorrow, the fourth and final way that rockstars can teach companies how to kick ass with social media; by embracing their fans.

BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

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Want more fans? Then get out of their way.

When your fans are promoting you, why stand in their way?
When your fans are promoting you, why stand in their way?

This is the third post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here, part two is here.

A few months ago I was doing research for a post on music marketing and found the above site, TheDonnasMedia.com.  This is a massive fan-run site that has audio and video from performances by the band The Donnas.  We are talking everything from late night appearances to full-length concerts from all around the world.  Not only that, but for some of the concerts, custom artwork and liner notes have been created so you can literally burn the concert to CD, then print out the cover art and liner notes and create your own CD.  Thousands upon thousands of hours of audio and video is available, all to download for free.

After poking around and seeing all the content that was available, I assumed it was only a matter of time before The Donnas found out about this site, and their lawyers made the site go away.  As it turns out, The Donnas DO know about the site, and not only haven’t tried to close it, but they actively support what their fans are doing there.  Even to the point of putting out calls to their fans to upload concerts to the site if there’s not a copy currently available.

I was surprised by their stance, and contacted their manager, Molly Neuman, and told her that this looked like the band’s strategy was to sell more music, by giving it away.  She said that was the idea, and explained that “We want our fans to get into the music and also support us by buying our records. We trust that our fans won’t abuse the availability and that makes for a great relationship.”

Note those two bolded words ‘trust‘ and ‘relationship‘.  How many companies have squashed efforts by customers to make their content, even commercials, available on sites such as YouTube?  But The Donnas approach their fans as people that are helping the band promote themselves, and they see them not as adversaries, but as partners.  So they embrace what their fans are doing with TheDonnasMedia.com, and trust that they won’t abuse that trust.

And for their part, the fans that run the site actively police it.  No content on the site is commercially available for sale by the band.  If anyone attempts to upload any song or video that the band is trying to sell, the site’s community immediately flags it and deletes it.  Because they appreciate the fact that The Donnas are trusting them with the site and have empowered them to help promote and grow the band that they love.  They feel a sense of co-ownership in an effort to support and grow the band that they love.  And to The Donnas’ credit, they see how effective their most passionate fans are at promoting them, and are empowering them by giving them more control to do just that.

Let’s talk about how Fiskars has applied many of these same lessons via social media.  Many of you are no doubt familiar with the story behind The Fiskateers.  Fiskars was looking for a way to reach their customers and form closer relationships with them.  The products themselves had little emotional connection with their customers, but Fiskars, in working with agency Brains on Fire, discovered that there was a very active crafting community online, and Fiskars created some of the most popular products for crafters and scrapbookers to use.  So Fiskars decided to position their efforts not on their products directly, but instead on the bigger idea of scrapbooking.

And they decided to reach out directly to people that were active in the crafting and scrapbooking communities to lead their effort, or become Fiskateers.  Fiskars was smart enough to find the people that were most passionate about their products, and give them control over their efforts.  Spike Jones from Brains on Fire explains what they learned:

“I’m blown away. Sure, when we first set out to create a community/movement for kindred spirits for one of our clients, we knew – that with a lot of hard work that involved rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty (in a great way) – that something special would happen. And the key part of the movement was to find those passionate people, give them the online and offline tools and opportunities to talk to one another (and also reach out to potential kindred spirits) and then get out of the way. Sure, we expected a lot of things to happen. But even in its infancy, it’s gone far beyond what I ever imagined.

Now – unprompted – these passionate advocates are creating their own marketing tools. They are stepping up and taking ownership in an international brand. They are personalizing something that used to be institutionalized. And they are coming up with ideas that the brand – or even (gasp!) Brains on Fire wouldn’t have thought of.

And I’m in awe.”

In both cases, The Donnas and Fiskars were smart enough to shift control to their most passionate fans and the people that were most passionate about their products.  And in doing so, their efforts were spoken in a voice that resonated with their customers because it was their own.  Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba had a great nugget in their book Creating Customer Evangelists, where they said that evangelists know your target market better than you do because they ARE the target market!

Why wouldn’t you want your most passionate fans to promote you?

Coming tomorrow, the third way that rockstars can teach companies how to kick ass with social media; by tapping into the ‘bigger idea’.

BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

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Why do rockstars have fans instead of customers? They are fans themselves.

Via Flickr user anirudhkoul
Via Flickr user anirudhkoul

This is the second post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here.

If there is a ‘secret weapon’ that rockstars have in converting customers into fans, this is it.  By default, they are a member of the very community of fans that they are trying to reach.  Since they are members of their community of fans, that means they are much more closed connected to them, and better understand them.  And the fans also feed off this increased interaction, and it makes it that much easier for them to relate to and trust the artists.

Graco is a great example of a company that’s using social media to put themselves in the shoes of their customers.  When Graco decided to launch a blog a couple of years ago, the company invested several months studying the ‘online chatter’ and trying to decide how they would position their blog, and who they wanted to reach.

After doing initial research, the company decided that it wanted to reach parents, and that the blog itself should focus on parenthood, moreso than Graco’s products.  A great move, but what Graco did next was even better.  In selecting the team that would write for the blog, Graco decided that if they wanted to reach primarily younger parents with a blog focused on parenthood, why not have younger parents be the bloggers?  In this way, the bloggers are speaking with the same voice and point of view as the people Graco wanted to connect with!

Graco’s former Social Media Manager Lindsay Lebresco told me that one of the key goals for Graco’s blog was to help “underscore the fact that the people behind the products at Graco are on the same journey that our consumers are on or are headed on.”

That’s incredibly powerful, because in doing so, Graco has positioned its bloggers as a member of the community they are trying to reach.  And what have the results been?  In 2007, 68% of all online mentions of Graco were positive, but by last year, that percentage had increased to 83%, and total online mentions had DOUBLED.  And of those additional online mentions that the company gained after launching its blog, almost 100% were positive.

That’s the power of a well-positioned blog that’s creating relevant and valuable content for its readers. It’s also a great example of what happens when a company puts themselves in the shoes of the customers they are trying to reach.  Rockstars do this every day, and thanks to social media, companies now have a greater ability than ever before to do the same.

Coming tomorrow, the second way that rockstars can teach companies how to kick ass with social media; it’s all about giving up control.

BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

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Why have customers when you can have fans?

There’s a question I’ve been wondering about recently. Why do the people that buy most company’s products look like this:

Customers

And the people that buy the products that most rockstars sell look like this:

Sarahconcert2

Why do companies have customers, and rockstars have fans? This was the key question I posed last month at Social South during my What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media session.  I think the ‘easy’ answer is to say that rockstars sell an entertainment product, and that it’s much easier to create fans for such a product, as opposed to just customers.

But I think there’s much more to it than that.  In my session, I outlined four reasons why rockstars have fans, as opposed to customers.  I also looked at how companies can use social media to replicate the methods that rockstars use to move from having just customers, to having passionate fans.

And that’s what I’m going to do this week.  Each day we’ll look at one of the four reasons, starting tomorrow and running through Friday.

Coming tomorrow: Reason #1 – Rockstars are fans themselves.

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Making ‘The Conversation’ on Your Blog Equal More Than Just Chatter For Your Company

On Monday we talked about 10 ways that you can increase comments on your company blog.  This is an area that a lot of blogging companies need and want help with.

But at the end of the day, how does averaging 5 comments per post versus 3 comments per post REALLY help your business?  How does your business benefit from having more comments on your company blog?

This is a VERY important question, and one that your boss WILL want to know the answer to.

So with that in mind, let’s think about some of the ways that your company could benefit from having more comments on its blog:

1 – More comments increases the chance that more people will read the blog

2 – As the blog gets more readers, it will likely get more subscribers

3 – Traffic will increase, and incoming links likely will as well

Now this list is great, but we still need to work these benefits of comments back to your business’ bottom line, or at least get a bit closer.

But before we go any further, let’s back up and address WHY your company is blogging. What is the main goal?

Is the blog being used as a customer service tool? If so, then you want more comments because they gives you a better chance of interacting with customers on the blog, and helping them.

Is the blog being used as a tool to increase or improve your online reputation? If so, more comments can still benefit, as long as those comments are part of a positive interaction for the reader.

Is the blog being used as a tool to increase online awareness? If so, more comments could increase the chance of getting more incoming links, which increases your search rankings, with leads to greater online awareness.

The bottom line is that you can’t just say that ‘our company blog needs more comments’. You have to tie the need for more comments to a LARGER goal for your blog that ultimately satisfies a larger BUSINESS goal.

For example, do you REALLY want more traffic do your blog, or do you want your blog to send more QUALIFIED traffic to your website, IOW customers that are READY to buy from you? If so, you need to pattern the experience on your blog, so that it encourages this type of behavior from your readers.

At the end of the day, is your boss more likely to want to see 5 comments per post, or five SALES per post? If you want your boss to get excited about you getting five comments per post, then you need to be able to show her how getting 5 comments per post is going to directly or indirectly lead to five SALES per post.

The cold, hard business reality is that ‘the conversation’ still has to lead to ‘the sale’, or at create obvious value for your business. The more you can do to tie ‘the conversation’ back to ‘the wallet’, the more your boss will support your social media efforts. And if you need some help getting a solid blogging strategy in place that benefits your business, please email me so we can discuss how I could help your company.