the really useful guide to social media

8/14/2019 The Really Useful Guide to Social Media

1/11

SocialMedia

Timeline

Howgood

areyouatSM

?

Top10

SMTools

SMStrate

gy

Planning

Top5SM

Campaigns

Future

SocialMedia

TheReally

UsefulGuide

to

SocialMed

ia

SEO SOCIAL MEDIA PPC AFFILIATES DISPLAY ONLINE PR IN 10 COUNTRIES 30 LANGUAGES


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Abrief

historyandevolutionarytimeline

WHATISSOCIALME

DIA?

Whereasindustrialmedi

asuchastelevision,

radioandnewspapersco

stapackettosetup,

withsocialmediathecos

tsofentryare

extremelylowandanyone

cantakepart.

Thatcoversaworldofw

ondersincludingblogs,

microblogs,social netw

orks,forums,instant

messagingnetworksand

multimediafile

sharingsites-anywhere

thatuserscreateand

shareinformation.

When eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn and Rupert Murdoch's

Newscorp snapped up MySpace for $580million in 2005,

people suddenly began to think that there really might be

something in this online communication thing.

Then in 2007, when Microsoft handed over $240million for a tiny 1.6% stake in the social

networking site Facebook, a lot more businesses started getting excited about the idea oftalking online.

But it was in 2009 - when twitter topped 55 million users and became a key battlegroundin elections everywhere from the United States to Iran - that the full mind-boggling

potential of social media suddenly became abundantly clear.*

The internet has always been about communication and sharing. The first electronic

bulletin board service launched in 1979. Commercial online services offering onlinecommunication and chat such as Compuserve began to proliferate in the 1980s and by

the end of the decade, dozens of modem based services were competing to provideusers with a conduit to the burgeoning electronic talking shop.

The early 90s brought the web, and almost immediately as they logged on users flockedto Usenet - the original home of online conversation - which by 1995 was habituated by

millions of users worldwide. As the phenomenon grew the talk spread across a proliferatinglabyrinth of forums and chatrooms, and it became clear that one of the main things people

wanted to do online was communicate, collaborate and share.

As the 21st Century approached people began working on ways of p ulling these

conversational strands together and the first social networking site as we know them today,Six Degrees.com, opened its doors in 1997. It shut them again in 2000, but by then the

genie was already out of the bottle. Within a year the professional networking site Ryzehad begun reaching out to the business community and was soon to be followed by a rash

of new ser vices including Friendster, LinkedIN, Orkut and, eventually, Facebook.

Social media had arrived, and it wasn't long before the commercial world began looking

for ways to exploit it. Marketing activity using the new channels began to grow rapidly,and in 2008 commercial interest in online conversations reached a tipping point with the

Beijing Olympic Games, which saw Panasonic, Samsung, McDonalds, Volkswagen, Nike andPepsiCo launch simultaneous campaigns designed to cash in on the phenomenon.

Today, with the world's biggest brands now enjoying social media success, the marketshows no sign of slowing down. Coca-Cola regularly communicates with consumers via its

3.7million member Facebook group, Ford has chosen to push its new Fiesta range byhaving 100 recipients of free cars record their every move on YouTube, Flickr or Twitter and

Dell sells direct to the public via its own customer blog and a range of online tools.

Nobody can tell you exactly what the next 12 months holds for social media, much less the

next 10 years, but what is clear is that whatever form the phenomenon takes on next,every successful business will need to be at the heart of it.

*Thiscame asa bitof surprise to many.Nobody knowsquite why,because it doesn'tseem particularly remarkable thatpeople shouldwantto talk to otherpeople in the the first

place,butthat'swhathappenedanyway.

EvolutionaryTimeline1997SixDegrees(firstSNsite)launches1999BlogplatformLiveJournallaunches2000FriendsReunitedLaunch

es

20

02

Frie

ndster

Launches2003

L

inkedINlaunches

2005

YouTube,Bebo

&Faceboo

klau

nche

d2007

1.6%

shareo

fFaceb

ooksellsfor$240million 2008 Beijing Olympics sees launch of social media campaigns from McDonalds, Panasonic & Nike 2009 Social Media goes nuclear


3/11

(and your company)are

at

Think youve got social media covered?

Run through our 5 minute checklist to see if youre

maximising the benefits and avoiding the potential

dangers of the online revolution

YES

TOTAL

NO

Do you know what your competitors are doing with social media and is itworking?

Do you run a corporate or personal blog?

Do you promote your blog by reading similar sites and engaging with theiraudience via comment boards?

Have you signed up and cus tomised your Twitter account?

Are you using Twitter to distribute information about your products andservices, or to engage in industry discussions?

Have you set up a profile page, fan page or group on Facebook to helppromote your products or services?

Have you established a profile on leading alternative social networkingsites such as LinkedIN, Plaxo, Bebo or MySpace?

Are you syndicating your online content and channelling traffic to your siteusing popular social bookmarking sites like Sphinn, Reddit and Digg?

Are you maximising your Google profile by distributing audio-visual mediaon sites such as Flickr and YouTube?

Are you taking advantage of any of the myriad of the available free moni-toring tools such as Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, and Backtype.com?

How do you measure up?Award yourself one point for every time you answeredyesand rate your performance against our scale below

Have you created a clear set of policies for responding to enquires andcomments arriving via social media?

Youre missing out onmyriad opportunities topromote your brand tomillions of peopleworldwide. Go back toquestion one and startmaking some changes!

but theres still work todo. You need to spend alittle more timedeveloping your socialmedia strategy tomaximise its benefits.

Youre well on your wayto mastering socialmedia. Just fill in anygaps and remember tokeep at it - the bestcampaigns are longterm.

1 - 4 5 -8 9 -12

Oh dear Not Bad... Congratulations!

Do you have a good understanding of the way social media is being used inyour market sector?

how good you social media?


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Social Mentionhttp://www.socialmention.comGet an instant overview of your social media profile. Search multiple social

channels such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and Digg, then

access detailed statistics and sentiment analysis

Tweet Deckhttp://tweetdeck.comDesktop based Twitter client with many options to customise your Twitter

experience.

Google Blog Searchhttp://blogsearch.google.comGoogles tried and trusted blog search tracks down and archives virtually anysite with an RSS feed.

Board Reader http://boardreader.comStay in touch with what people are talking about in your sector by searching

for key phrases across multiple forums.

BlogPulse http://www.blogpulse.comProvides excellent, up-to-the-minute trend graphs tracking blogging

volume and activity.

Backtype http://www.backtype.comSearches through blog comments.

Blinkx http://www.blinkx.comSearch all the top online video sites from a single site.

Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alertsSetup alerts for every time your keyword is mentioned

Twitter Search http://search.twitter.comTwitters very own search engine. Find out what people are saying about you

about right now.

Yahoo Pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipesMerge RSS feeds from the above tools using Yahoo pipes to create your own

custom monitoring tool.

10 topsocial media

tools3

2

5

4

9

10

8

1

76


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Research your online landscapeThe first thing you should do is research. Where do you stand at the moment? Where isyour audience, where are your customers, your potential customers and your competitorscustomers? What are they saying about you and your competitors? Are they angry, happy,

passionate or just seeking answers that they cant get from you?

StrategiseOnce you know your landscape, you can begin to set up a strategy. Work out what youwant to achieve through social media. Do you want to:

Provide customer support?Add traction to your offers?Build brand advocates?Talk to your customers?

Once you have established your objectives, use your landscape research to determinewhere you want to position yourself. Dont just jump on every social network out there.Firstly that is bad practice and impolite. Not every platform will be useful to your brand oryour objectives. There is no point being in places where no one will listen to you.

And lastly do not become involved in areas where it may require resource andmanagement that you have not accounted for. If you try to communicate through manyplatforms at once and you do not have the time or resource to keep track, monitor, analyseand respond you will be unsuccessful.

Create contentWhat are you going to give your audience? Why would they want to interact with you?Work out how youre going to add value for your audience. Dont go out to create a viral.

The best virals go viral by accident, and so cant be artificially produced. It starts withexcellent, engaging, entertaining and downright useful content.

Maybe you are providing a useful tool, providing advice or giving support. Think aboutwhat you are doing /offering and how you can promote it.

ResourcesMake sure you have the resources to be in social media. Being successful in social mediatakes patience and dedication. You need to be dedicated to writing that b log, or answeringyour customersquestions and you need a superstar that is passionate about your brand tomanage your social media presence.

MonitorMonitoring is vital to evaluate the success of your social media campaign. Monitoring willhelp you gauge the pickup of your campaign, how many people have been interactingwith you? How far have your messages gone? It will also provide insight into where youcan tap into industry conversations that perhaps you should be part of.

planning evaluating

Take time to look back at what youre doing to see if there is anything you can refine.The best campaigns and communications plans are reviewed on an ongoing basis asconversation evolves.

The ideal metric for many brands may well be a public opinion survey before and after the

campaign. The challenge is surveying the same demographic as the social mediacampaign is likely to reach.

Perhaps the simplest evaluation metric is t he online equivalent of column inches; howmuch conversation did the campaign produce? To make this measurement you need to beable to discover where conversations about the subject that interest you are occurring andsome way to measure their inch space.

Free sites likeAlexa.com and Compete.com offer a rough insight into the popularity of awebsite and the Technorati blog authority metricis also freely available. Conversations onpopular sites could be considered more significant than conversations on niche sites.Sites can be graded for appropriateness or desirability. Downgraded sites might be subjectto a reduction in their effective popularity. Upgraded sites might be treated as twice orthrice as popular as the freely available web metrics suggest they are.

Paid for web metric utilities like comScore, Forresterand Hitwise offer a better level analyticinsight. These tools are frequency costly but many brands already have access to thesetools via their Search or Display digital agency or in-house team.

In some instances traffic itself is a measure of success. It may not be appropriate tomeasure the impact of a social media campaign by counting the web traffic but it may bepossible to measure the impact of tweeted headlines by calculating clickthrough ratios oreven tallying clicks.

Brands involved in user engagement mapping or click path analysis for their searchcampaigns may well notice that shoppers tend to visit the site many times before making apurchase. This is especially true if a wou ld-be customer needs to convince themselves thatthey have found the best place to make a purchase.

Brands that are still building up their reputation and might not be well known to theconsumer are particularly prone to this. A successful social media campaign, one thatreaches a broad demographic, may shorten this click path as users are quicker to maketheir purchases from brands they are familiar with.

In this scenario the user engagement analysis can be compared before and after the socialmedia campaign, the average CPC factored against the average click path length, and thedifference between the two benchmarks be used to produce a monetary value success metric.


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Social media success is hard to come by. It takes time and effort,constant attention and patience. But when it does work, and youcan see your message spreading as people start talking about andengaging with your brand, you can begin to see what a powerfuleffect a social media campaign can have.

The most important thing to remember about social media is thateveryone makes mistakes - even the experts. Heres a couple ofexamples of companies that got it wrong so you dont have to.

In 2010, Ford will launch their highly successful Fiesta in the US for the first time. As we allknow, our friends stateside are not the biggest small car fans, so Ford had their work cutout to show them just how good the all new Fiesta is.

Ford launched an initiative called Fiesta Movement. A national campaign to recruit 100Agentswho would each be given a Ford Fiesta for 6 months with one objective to blog,twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook their experiences of the car to the world. Over 4,000people applied to be a Fiesta Agent but the lucky 100 were chosen and set off sharing theirexperiences and completing monthly missions to show the US what experiencing the FordFiesta is all about.

Why is this so successful?

Ford has used the power of the crowds to promote the Fiesta for them. By providing alarge amount of advocates with a car to use for 6 months, they are guaranteed a constantstream of conversation about the Fiesta, coming from the people who their targetaudience really trust.The numbers

To date, the Fiesta Movement Facebook fan page has 1,706 fans and their Twitter accounthas 4,470 followers. The reach of their campaign is huge due to all of their 100 Agentsbeing active influencers on either Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr or in their own blog.

Blogger outreach - Ford found 100 relevant and influential bloggers to act asadvocates for the brand.

Researching the social landscape - Ford carried out research to determine whichchannels would be successful for the Fiesta Movement use.

Engaging in community participation - Ford manage the Fiesta Movement Twitterpage and Facebook page where their marketing and comms team engage with theiraudience. Additionally, every agentis engaging in community participation onbehalf of Ford.

Press releases Ford are posting press releases announcing the progress of thecampaign as well as each challenge that t he agentshave to take part in, helping toraise the presence of the campaign.

Providing incentives Ford provided each agent with a free car for six months.

Who could turn that down?

Ford fiesta movement

The Beijing 2008 Olympics may have been at the centre of a marketing whirlwind, but itwas computer manufacturer Lenovo that walked away with the gold medal for sheerinnovation.

Voices of the Olympic Games brought together 100 athlete bloggers from 25 differentcountries and connected them the world as they blogged their way to the 2008 Games.Over the course of the event Lenovos Athlete Bloggers published more than 1,500 postsand received over 8,000 comments from fans around the world. Supported by a globalsocial media campaign the strategy was judged a huge success and demonstrated thevalue of using real, unfiltered voices to reach consumers.

Lenovo

Launching a concerted social media marketing campaign using Facebook and Twitter hashelped Starbucks establish better communication w ith its consumers. The worlds mostrecognisable purveyor of hot coffee now regularly announces news, introduces promo-tions and answers enquiries via Social Media. In addition to using both platforms to launch

sales initiatives the company also provides regular updates from CEO Howard Schultz onthe corporations commitment to corporate social responsibility practices worldwide.

Starbucks

In perhaps the most famous example of a social media fail, Habitat used Twitters hash-tagsand trending topics to advertise their products. This would be perfectly fine and rathersavvy if the hash-tags were about chic furniture or interior design, however tweets aboutthe totally desirable spring collectionwere popping up in searches for the politicalsituation in Iran. This caused a public outcry, especially when Habitat simply deleted t heoffending tweets and slunk off for a few days to draft a response.

Think less traditional public relations, think more live stand-upcomedy: theres no time to sit down and figure out a response tohecklers. You must be on the ball, quick, and ready with the perfectanswer.

Habitat

By this point youve got the picture: social media is all aboutinteracting with and understanding your audience. But beforeinviting the general online public to get involved with your brand,make sure you really think it through. In a bold move, Skittlesreplaced their official website with a Twitter search page show-ing, in real time, every Tweet mentioning Skittles. This seems like

a cool idea until you consider the deadly cocktail of cheap broadband, short attentionspans, and hunger for internet fame. Soon the page devolved into racial slurs, profanities,and suggestions for crude new slogans. Needless to say Skittles soon resumed regularservice.Although there are ways Skittles could have filtered the results to exclude vulgar language,its probably wise not to replace any official page with one that can be edited by the greatunwashed.

Skittles

and mistakes

REMEMBER

Peoplewanttoconnect

withother

peopleonline,notbrand

s.Dont

hideyourtrueintentions

,but

remembertobearealhumanbe

ing

firstandcompanyrepresentative

second.Therearespecia

lplaces

onlineforpitches,butso

cialmedia

isntoneofthem.

hot campaigns


7/11

Predicting the future is never easy, particularly when it comes to the web - where phenomena can arise, buildmillion-strong audiences and then wither away to nothing within an extremely short timespan. When it comes toplotting your company's course through the online media minefield it's easy to get confused, but the trick is not tobe too distracted by the mass of unknowns, instead focus the bulk of your energies upon the technologies you canbe sure of while k eeping a weather eye on the latest emerging trends.

There are some things, after all, that we know WILL happen in the future. Mobile devices will continue to play anincreasingly important role, with the iPhone, Google's Android phones and a developing range of smart handsetsplaying a key role in the shifting patterns of how people communicate, search for information and buy goods online.

Rising on the back of the smart phone revolution, another buzzword that's gathering pace is "Geo-aware".Applications that deliver information specific to the geographical location of the user are becoming increasinglycommon, and you can expect to see a rapid proliferation of interest as companies begin directly reaching out toconsumers with location aware devices based on where they happen to be at any particular time of day.

With so few definites to comfort them, it's no wonder that manyorganisations hesitate when it comes to planning their socialmedia strategy. They worry that any plan they come up with mayfall victim to changing fashions almost as soon as it has begun,quite naturally, and consequently do nothing while theircompetitors make hay.

So how do you get around this? Simply by cutting through thechaff and concentrating on the cold hard facts ...

That irrespective of which platforms or services dominate the social media arena, online conversations will continueto happen, people will keep sharing information and businesses will do their level best to wring competitive advan-tage out of being part of that process.

So in the end it doesn't really matter whether services such as Twitter stay the course or fizzle out. What's important isthat wherever online conversations take place, your organisation is waiting, listening and ready to contribute wher-ever and whenever it's appropriate.

Social media has evolved from emerging trend to mainstreamcommunications channel in a remarkably short space of time.Yet despite the increasing prominence of platforms like Twitter,until recently there has been no solid data available on howcompanies are using it and the benefit s they are deriving fromthe practice.

Because were interested in hard facts rather than hype,bigmouthmedia and Econsultancy teamed up to conduct theUKs first extensive survey into the commercial use of SocialMedia and Online PR.

A selection of the key results from t he research, which providesthe most detailed data yet available on the extent to which UKcompanies have embraced social media, are included here.

If youd like to know more about what we learned - and how toapply that knowledge to your company - get in touch byemailing [email protected].

Question: Facebook, Twitter or both - which platforms will last?

Fact: People want to talk & share online

Fact: Use of social media continues to grow at an exponential rate

Fact: 64% of businesses (including your competitors) say they plan to increase spending on social media

online PR andsocial mediasurvey

What we know:

What we dont:

So what does this tell us?

INTHEFUTURE

Whatdoweinvestin?

Is itallaboutFacebook?

WillTwitterlast?

Didn'tweblowasmal

lfortune

buildingvirtualofficesinS

econdLife?

Whatifthiswholesocialm

edia

thing isjustaflashinthe

pan?

thefuture ofsocial media


8/11

benefits ofsocial media

personal attitudeto social media

It is interesting to note that softbrand benefits are seen as more significant than harder financial

advantages such as increased profitability. Increasing brand awareness is seen as major benefit of social

media, according to just under three-quarters of company respondents. This is followed by increased

customer engagement (71%), better brand reputation (66%) and increased communication with key

influencers (62%).

Social media offers numerous benefits, and the results show a clear pattern in terms of order of priorities.

Reputational and brand-building benefits are top of the list, followed by increased traffic, and then salesand lead generation. Approximately half of companies say that increasing direct traffic (56%) or indirect

traffic (46%) to the website are major benefits of social media. Getting new leads and increasing sales are

seen as a major benefit of social media by 43% and 29% of companies respectively.

A third of companies (34%) say that social media offers no benefits in terms of increasing profitability.

The majority of companies are still struggling with monetisation issues, which may explain why so few

respondents see this as a major benefit. There is a lack of case studies that demonstrate the hard financial

benefits of social media.

Nearly two-thirds of company respondents (61%) say that social media provides tremendous opportunities

for the business. Some 12% understand say that social media presents major risks and challenges, while

over a quarter of respondents say that they are open-minded but are not fully convinced about the value

of social media to the company. Despite claims that social media is over-hyped, it is interesting to note

that none of the respondents said that social media is just a short-term fad.

Which of the following most closely describes your personal attitude to social media in the context of

your business?

Response: 391

Response: 392

Company results

What do you see as the main benefits of social media activity?

Company results

online PR and social media survey


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Has the amount of money your organisation

spends on social media increased or decreased in

the last year?

Response: 352

Response: 338

Company results

Has the amount of money your clients typically

spend on social media increased or decreased in

the last year?

Agency results

social mediatactics employed

annual change insocial media budgets

Twitter and microblogging is now the most widely used social media tactic, according to 78% of

organisations and 74% of agencies surveyed. This is closely followed by social network profile creation

and management, as reported by 65% of companies.

Video has been a hot topic in 2009, and it heartening to see that more organisations are creating and

distributing video content. Some 60 % of companies are using this channel, while 54% of agencies say

that their clients are using this social m edia tactic.

It is surprising to note that nearly three-quarters of agencies (72%) say their clients are using corporate orbrand blogs, while fewer than half of comp anies (47%) say the same.

Just under two-thirds of companies (64%) have increased the amount of money they spend on social

media since last year, compared to a third (34%) who say spending has remained the same.

According to the agency results, 81% of respondents say their clients have increased their sp ending on

social media in the last year, compared to 17% who say spending is the same, and just 2% who say

spending has decreased.

Response: 340

Which of the following social media tactics does your organisation use?

Company results



10/11

metrics for assessingsocial media success

satisfaction withagency knowledge

Direct traffic to website is, overwhelmingly the metric most commonly used to assess social media activity,

as specified by just under two-thirds of responding companies (64%). This is followed by brand awareness

(39%), customer engagement (38%) and indirect traffic (27%).

Even more agencies say direct traffic is an important metric, with 72% citing this as an important tool

for social media.

Sales are deemed to be significantly more important by agencies than companies for assessing social

media activity. Nearly a third of agencies (30%) said this was important, whereas only 22% of companiessay this is one of the most important metrics.

Since last year, there has been a significant fall in the in the number of companies who are very satisfied

(21% in 2008 to 13% in 2009) with the level of their agencys knowledge, but this has been counteracted

by a significant increase in the numbers who are moderately satisfied. Some 42% of respondents are

moderately satisfied with their agencys level of online PR knowledge, compared to 29% for last years survey.

More than a quarter (27%) of responding companies are dissatisfied, with 16% "mildly dissatisfied" and

11% very dissatisfied.

How satisfied are you with your

agencys level of social media

and online PR knowledge?

Response: 338

2009 results

How satisfied are you with your

agencys level of social media

and online PR knowledge?

2008 results

Which are the most important metrics when assessing social media activity for your organisation?

Company results

Response: 336



11/11

www.bigmouthmedia.com

Tel: 0845 130 0022

[email protected]

The Really Useful Guide to Social Media was lovingly crafted by bigmouthmedias dedicated social media team,with special shout outs to Andrew Girdwood, Leanne Rinning, David Law, Jemma Porter, Iain Bruce, David Hardy & Heather Leach.

Oh, and thanks to Red Bull.

This booklet (apart from the survey) is copyright of bigmouthmedia.We are very happy (and flattered, actually) for you to quote or reproduce the content as long as you source it to big mouthmedia

and you dont reproduce it for any commercial purposes.

SEO SOCIAL MEDIA PPC AFFILIATES DISPLAY

ONLINE PR IN 10 COUNTRIES 30 LANGUAGES

the really useful guide to social media

Documents