Every company, every marketer often dwells on the ROI for social media, and there’s a popular misconception that relevant metrics are lacking.  While it’s true that standard metrics are evolving, there are many ways to measure the impact of social media on a company’s marketing performance.

You can benchmark and track changes in the amount of conversations about themes or content relevant to your company.  You can track the number of inbound links to the company’s Web site or blog, and thus track your online influence.  You can track the growth of engagement in the company’s social media programs.  You can track the increase in traffic to the company’s Web site after engaging in social media programs. And of course, you can measure participation in cross-channel marketing programs simply by establishing tests against a control campaign without social media components.

What you are looking for is the beginning of a measurement dashboard and “report card” - a standardized data presentation that you can build and sustain, and that you and those on or around your team can use to direct the social media program. 

Take a look at the fundamental metrics and how they relate to the elements of influence, engagement, and more.  Starting with the most basic measurement - page views, click patterns, and referrers, for example - you can track and create a trend for unique visitors to the company’s social content in the same way that you would do with any Web asset.   Below is a chart that links together metrics that you very likely already have - or could have relatively easily - with the kinds of questions that are of particular interest to you as a marketer:

Many of the metrics you are likely to have at hand are related to both conversion and the number of people expressing intent versus the number who actually convert.  Add to this direct observations of social media: reviews, increases in audience, recommendations, posts on Twitter, and similar social forums, all of which provide guidance in understanding the role that social media is playing in driving (or dissuading) conversion.  Look to your Web and commerce analytics tools, your reviews or review platform, and of course the company’s Google Analytics to determine trends over time.

Don’t let the pressure for accountability turn ROI into a barrier against innovation.  There may not be a ready-made dashboard to filter up top-line metrics to your C-level management, but that doesn’t mean relevant measurements are not available.  Get involved in defining what business outcomes are relevant for your social media program, and look for ways to measure progress toward the goal.

You should never move off the starting mark without clear and measurable business goals.  Measurability doesn’t always mean revenue, but that’s always a good place to start.

When Maples Communications was asked to build a communications program to help build awareness for Maxwell Technologies, one important aspect of the program was to create a place for Maxwell to share thoughts, ideas, news, and opinions on the company and its products. That place is the Maxwell blog site launched last week.

When tasked with building the blog, Maples decided on a customizable WordPress template that was edited to closely match the Maxwell home page. The cost and time associated with building the blog from the template was considerably less than attempting to create a custom blog from scratch, but still allows for creativity. Once loaded we added the following plug-ins to further customize the site:

• Add to Any - allows readers to share your information
• Akismet - stops spam in the comments of your posts
• All in One SEO Pack - Optimizes your blog for search engines
• Google Analytics for WordPress - Adds analytics capabilities
• Tweetmeme - Gives readers the option to “Tweet” a post on Twitter
• Twitter Widget - A sidebar widget showing recent posts from Maxwell

Now that the blogs are public, they become another tool in the communications program for Maxwell. Not only are the blogs a place for educating stakeholders, they are also a “hub” for any information Maxwell wants to publicize. They are linked to all of Maxwell’s social media properties and each new post is promoted through those properties. This way each post gets Tweeted, posted on Facebook, and shared with other relevant social networking sites.

The idea of a company starting its own blog is not new-in fact it is almost old-fashioned in comparison to some of the new social media tools and platforms available today-but it is still a core part of any communications plan. Here are just a few examples of the power of a blog:

1. A blog allows an organization to become its own publisher 
2. Nine out of ten members of the media are turning to blogs to get information for stories
3. Blogs are timely and give a company the ability to respond instantly
4. The regularly updated content that blogs offer increase a site’s SEO
5. A blog is a place to share all the information that happens between press releases
6. Companies can humanize themselves by putting a personality to their brand name
7. Blogs give companies a tool that allows them to direct traffic to wherever they like
8. If your product is unique, a blog can become an education resource
9. A blog gives your customers a chance to comment on your organization
10. Posts written in a blog are easily sharable across social media platforms

With regular posting, a blog will become a repository of dynamic information about the company, its products, and the industry. It often becomes the single most visited page on the company’s Web site, and pays dividends in attracting and informing target audiences.

And finally, if you do use a WordPress blog, remember to check the most important setting!

This is the fourth step in a series about creating a social media program for your business. If you’d like to read the previous steps, they can be found here.

Walking into a ballgame, you are likely to hear someone shouting, “Program!  Get your program! Can’t tell the players without a program!” 

I can’t think of a better analogy for developing a “best practices” social media program: its all about nailing down - in writing - who you need to connect with online, what you are trying to achieve with them, and knowing what to measure so that you will know if you have achieved your goals. 

Knowing what to measure - and indeed what social media channels and tools to apply - begins with your business objectives and your audience.

Step 4: Take Your Business Objectives and a Definition of Your Audience and Add Your Social Media Touch-points, Feedback Cycle and Tie the Initial Program to the Goals.

In setting up your plan and framing it, you will reach back to the earlier steps and think through the approach that you want to take in developing a program.  Start with what you already know about your business and slide into social media.  The points for your program:

• Review your corporate and product positioning.
• Use your positioning to define relevant keywords and phrases.
• Track social media content relevant to your market.
• Use your keywords and phrases to identify social media influencers who are driving conversations about the market, your company and products, and your competition.
• Read the social media content of top influencers in your market to understand the tone, direction and drivers of the current dialog.
• Pick your channels where the conversations about your industry and/or company are taking place and develop your objectives. Defining your channels provides you a starting point in terms of knowing where to focus your efforts. Think about your audience:
       - What do they want to know?
       - What do they need to know?
       - Where do they go to get their relevant information?
       - What social media tools do you need to apply to engage in the conversation?
       - How do you measure the feedback to adjust your positioning and messaging?
• Create relevant, shareable content for your audiences. Whether through blogs, multimedia content, or ratings, reviews, and recommendations, your audiences will be creating and sharing a lot of information.
• Continue to explore other niche-specific properties such as forums, wikis, bulletin boards and other social media applications.
• Track your engagements with influencers and review the related responses and metrics of attention to them.

Social media is a game-changer that is reshaping marketing.  Marketers must avoid the temptation to leverage social media as a new technology to manipulate word-of-mouth messages.  Such tactics are regularly exposed by consumers and typically cause more damage to a company’s reputation than any short-term gains. 

Instead, marketers must develop a social media plan to build trusted relationships by tracking market conversations and engaging responsively in a two-way dialog. 

Whether you call it social media, digital media or new media, there’s no debate over the accelerating popularity of Internet sites and forums where customers are gathering to share opinions and experiences about every product and service imaginable.  The question is, when are you going to engage in the conversation about your company and products?

The hype around Twitter is coming full-circle. Last year it seemed like you couldn’t escape hearing or reading about the greatness of Twitter, and as a result the inevitable backlash has started. A recent article in the Guardian stated “Far from delivering a ‘wisdom of crowds’, social networking sites have created only a deafening banality.” This falls in line with an older study stating that 40% of Tweets are “pointless babble”. So is there value in Twitter, or is it just a wasteland of updates about what people are eating for lunch?

What if I asked - is there value in television, or is it just a bunch of mindless entertainment? I think most of us would agree there is value in television AND at the same time most TV is also mindless entertainment. My local cable company gives me almost 1000 channels to watch. Once you take out the duplicate channels (regular and HD), foreign language channels, and pay-per-view channels, you’d probably have between 100 and 200 actual television channels to choose from. For me, I’d be happy with 10-20 of them because I never watch the rest. Give me Discovery, Food Network, Fox Sports West (I need my L.A. Kings fix), and a few other channels and keep the home shopping and reality TV channels.

The same goes for Twitter. Sure there is a lot of pointless babble - but that doesn’t make all of Twitter pointless. And even though some of that “babble” might be pointless to me, it might not be pointless to the restaurant I just tweeted I was eating at.

Another example is that last week I was going to take the family to Disneyland and I was able to see how busy it was by monitoring people Tweeting from the park. So while a Tweet like “At Disneyland and its packed!!!” might be pointless babble to most, it was helpful for me to change our plans. Instead of going to Disneyland with 70,000 other people, we were able to enjoy a nice day at Irvine Park here in Orange County. And the great thing about Twitter is that unlike my cable company, Twitter allows me to pick and choose the feeds I want to receive, and who I want to receive it from. My cable company makes me buy “Tiers” of channels.

If you’re a company monitoring Twitter for leads, it can be much more cost-effective than another trade show spend. Sites such as Search.Twitter.com, Twazzup, or TweetBeep can let you track mentions of your product/service or someone looking for a product/service in your company’s category.  We hear a lot of naysayers, but you can’t dismiss it until you’ve actually implemented a Twitter monitoring and response program.

When looking at the value of social media tools like Twitter, we need to realize the real value isn’t the tool itself; it is the information the tool has to offer. Writing off Twitter as being worthless because of the value of some of the Tweets is like writing off television because of Geraldo Rivera. If you take the time to learn, listen, and look at what Twitter offers, you can find some value to you or your company.

In my previous posts I talked about the first two steps you should take when creating an effective “best practices” approach to social media:

Before you start, establish clear business objectives and metrics. Refrain from bringing old marketing skills to a new game. And clarify your value proposition.

The next meaningful step of engagement is to identify where conversations are taking place that are relevant to your market community, and who is shaping those conversations.  This can lead to some interesting surprises for marketers who are used to targeting their customers and their influencers based on segmentation and profiling.

Step 3: Know and listen to your customers, their influencers and the market before launching a social media program.

Now that you’ve defined your business objectives and resisted using a traditional “push” marketing strategy, it is time to understand your customers and their influencers.  Knowing what they do online - reading, creating relevant content, commenting or offering reviews, or doing nothing at all - is essential in developing a social media program.  So, just how do you find your customers and community conversations? There are a number of tools, both free and paid: 

• The first, and easiest, step is to use Google search. Type in a phrase or keyword related to your company and see what the results are. To stay informed, set up a Google Alert to send you updated results on a daily basis. Also, Google now has real-time search, meaning you can see what people are saying on Twitter in real-time.
• TweetBeep is a free service that is like a Google Alert specifically for Twitter. Enter in your search terms and you will receive an e-mail any time those terms appear on Twitter.
• BlogPulse is an analytical social marketer’s best friend - it allows you to quickly see the trend in the occurrence of specific words or phrases. For interesting results, search for a product your company recently launched, your company name or that of your fiercest competitor.
• An excellent - and free - profile tool that provides a quick snapshot of your audience with regard to its use of social media can be found at Forrester’s Groundswell Web site:
• BackType is a nice tool for monitoring what is being said in comment sections of blogs and on other social networks.
• Paid tools for social media monitoring include Radian6, ScoutLabs, Buzzlogic, and Trackur.

These are just a few of many tools that can be used to monitor social media. Use them to find out what your stakeholders have to say, how it is relevant to you and your markets and seeing who is saying it.

Some tools, like Buzzlogic, are designed to allow the tracking of keywords and phrases through a complex trail of links through blogs and other social media avenues, in order to identify and rank key conversation influencers on any topic.  The effect of seeing how opinions, attitudes and even rumors are shaped around specific centers of influence is invariably an eye-opening experience for marketers, and often challenges entrenched assumptions about their market.

It is important to recognize that influencers are not always your customer, but their impact on your revenue stream can be significant.  They may be former customers who have become disenchanted, they may be champions of a competing product or brand, or they may simply be agnostics with a strong market perspective that challenges your own. 

Being able to see beyond the scope of your customer base to understand how your market is influenced is one of the most important advantages of a social media program.

The most important point is to listen before you speak.  In any conversation, a smart communicator spends time listening to the dialog before they engage.  It’s not just about knowing what’s being discussed, it’s about getting a feel for tone and style, and getting a sense of the people driving the discussion.  Nothing stands out more than someone spouting off completely out of rhythm with the flow of the conversation. 

Your market community will be distributed across numerous social media channels, and while the members of the community may be the same, the issues and attitudes can take on a very different cast from one blog or forum to the next. Here at Maples Communications, we spend time reading the work of a journalist before pitching them a story.  A good social media approach is not any different, it includes reading the posts on a blog or forum before weighing in-and it requires a sense of timing.

If you steamroll through every blog in your market community posting the same content and just flogging the issues you think are important, you’ll quickly be marked as an outsider.  A better approach is to use the available tools to keep your finger on the pulse of conversation, and work your way into the natural flow.

If you missed my earlier posts on executing best practices in social media, you can find them here.

For all the novelty of social media, successful execution invariably hinges on an age-old fundamental concept-a clear and consistent value proposition across all business touch points with impactful message points.  If the company is going to achieve and maintain a brand value using social media, it will need to first understand the company’s stake in the marketplace and the value it offers to its customers.  The value proposition is all about the customer.  What matters to them and how you can deliver value that differentiates you from your competitors.  The questions you need to ask are: 

1. What benefits will a customer receive from your company?
2. What core competencies do you offer?
3. Can you identify and satisfy unmet needs of your customers?
4. What do your customers want most from you that you can provide better than your competitors?
5. What is important to your customers?
6. In reviewing the needs of your customer, what are the common denominators?
7. What are your competitors’ weaknesses, and how might you exploit them?
8. What changes do you need to make to succeed?

In social communications, the company’s value proposition is no longer confined to what’s printed on your Web site or brochures, and it’s no longer static.  Everything said in blog posts, comments, wikis or forums is part of the value proposition fabric, along with everything the company does, from how it promotes products or services to how the delivery driver behaves in traffic.  If everyone is not crystal clear on what the company stands for, what it believes and how it behaves, at best you’re setting the stage for a diffused and ineffective program, and at worst a public relations nightmare.    

Every company needs to understand that every employee is a brand ambassador.  By amplifying word-of-mouth, social media makes adherence to that principle even more critical.  Before you launch a social media program, you should clarify your company’s value proposition and product or services positioning, as well as any relevant vision statement, and make sure everyone involved in the initiative understands it.  You don’t want employees quoting from a script every time they engage with the market, but you do want them to be able to authentically and consistently representing what the company stands for.

In summary, you want to develop a value proposition and key message points that address: (1) Why should someone care? (2) Why should they be interested?  (3) What’s in it for them?  and, (4) What impact will your company have on the marketplace?  The end result is to have a value proposition on what the company stands for and how it is differentiated in the marketplace with four or five compelling reasons why someone should buy your products or services.

Social media is word-of-mouth on steroids in reaching customers and prospects in new and meaningful ways.  It is critical for everyone to be on the same page in delivering the company’s messages.  Spread the message wide, but keep it consistent.

As you execute your social media program, your customers and prospects will comment and share their impressions about your brand and products at the various touch-points instantly validating or bashing your value proposition and message points.  Being a part of the conversation allows you to modify the value proposition and create new message points and content to meet the information requirements of your customers.  In the social media era, it is almost a prerequisite for the value proposition and message points to be dynamic according to the marketplace.

One of the NFL’s biggest sponsors, PepsiCo, sent a shudder through the broadcast industry last month when it said it was benching its soft drink ads after 23 years and tens of millions of dollars of air time purchased during previous championship games.  Instead, Pepsi is planning to spend $20 million on a long-term social media goodwill initiative called The Pepsi Refresh Project.

Pepsi gets it!  Its decision to sit out the Super Bowl, once deemed a “can’t miss” showcase for major advertisers, underscores how social media and the Internet are reshaping marketing by providing companies better ways to convey their messages to customers who might be likely to buy their products. 

Social media is the real deal.  It gets used by people who are thinking about buying your products because it was created by people who have already purchased your products or services.   Social media is utilized in the conversations that occur between your customers - conversations that you may not even know about and certainly will not be part of unless you are present and listening.  Pepsi realizes they need to be an active participant of the conversation.  As a contemporary brand aiming for long-term success, not participating is not an option.

Social media also levels the playing field for smaller companies to compete with larger competitors in building brand and consideration for their products or services.  Social media cost less and has greater impact than most traditional marketing channels.

Keep in mind, however, that all of your other channels still exist - social media is a complementary extension of all your other marketing efforts.  It has always been our recommendation to approach social media as if it is a natural extension of your traditional marketing efforts.

So how do you influence a crowd?  You listen to it.  You tap into it.  You learn from it.  And then you engage.  One of the characteristics of social media is that you can listen, measure and track your success over time.  You can use what you learn to modify and improve what you offer, and in so doing influence the online conversation.

Social media is characterized largely if not completely by the content trail - ratings, reviews, comments, and much, much more, giving you clear feedback on what customers think of the content.  Like never before, companies have a measureable “pulse” that they can use to guide their efforts in real-time.

Pepsi’s decision to integrate social media into its traditional marketing efforts uses the power of the Internet and “word-of-mouth” to reinforce its current customers on why making the same choice for Pepsi products again is a good idea. 

Super Bowl ads are expensive and great for building awareness if you have the right product and the right message.  But word-of-mouth is increasingly manifesting itself through social media, where it spreads both farther and faster.  And a trusted fact affirmed by a recent research study, word-of-mouth is considered to be a more trusted source of information.

My question to any company executive is, “Are you going to be a leader in joining the social media revolution or are you going to wait for your customers to pull you into the conversation?” 

Integrating social media into your traditional marketing efforts will make you more efficient and effective with your budget, and help develop a more trusted relationship with your customers.  Just ask Pepsi.

In a recent post, I offered some advice on the first step in starting a social media program.  To complement that first step, I want to address an equally important concept that many companies fail to understand. 

In executing a social media program, you need to refrain from bringing old marketing skills to a new game.

Many marketers stepping up to embrace social media are bringing their old “push strategy” skills to a new “customer pull” reality, making a critical miscalculation.  The social media phenomenon is not just a new set of communications vehicles for your company to broadcast its value proposition and messaging to a target market.  It is about customers wanting and needing relevant information to make better decisions and to share with others.  Over the years they have become jaded by the packaging and spin that typifies most marketing and advertising campaigns.

Customers, whether B2C or B2B, want the straight scoop on relevant information, and they want it from a trusted source-primarily their peers.  When the customers control the story line, marketers inevitably lose some control of the message.  But that does not diminish the capability of good marketers to communicate effectively with their target customers and their influencers-in fact, it can create a significant competitive advantage.  It just takes a different approach.

Marketers need to see themselves not as owners of market share, but as members of a community, and their communications not so much campaigns as conversations with the community-customers.  To join in on the conversation, you need to listen to what is being said by the community.  No one likes being talked at, but everyone is interested in talking with.

Many typical marketing programs are event driven and begin to wrap up when a campaign or a product launch is pushed out the door.  Social media is an ongoing process that starts the discussion long before the campaign and really kicks in after the launch.  It’s all about authentic communications with the community, not just during lead-generation and loyalty campaigns.

To encourage new skills and thinking, social media should not just be a silo within the marketing department; it should become a separate but equal partner that interacts with the entire organization.  Making a real change in the culture of the company is necessary to meet social media’s demand for more openness and less control over conversations with customers.  Developing these skills and way of thinking takes time and focus.  This is why every marketer should be moving into social media to start the process of building the skills and making broad cultural changes needed to make social media work.

In my next blog post, I will talk about clarifying your company’s positioning and key message points.  For all the novelty of social media, successful execution invariably hinges on an age-old fundamental-a clear and consistent value proposition and message points across all business touch points.

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times from B2B marketers.  “You know, I talk to a lot of my business customers and they don’t have time for this social media stuff.  They want to get their information in a more traditional manner-their trade publications.”

In many respects, I too like the traditional manner of getting my information.  I still read my newspapers, business magazines-Forbes, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Entrepreneur, etc.-and my client’s industry publications.  Oh, don’t let me forget my golf magazines.  But if you haven’t noticed, these publications are getting thinner and thinner and many are going out of business or are only publishing online.  So, until we find a fix for this traditional print model, what is a B2B marketer to do?

In the Web 2.0 world, everything starts with “search” and those search results are becoming more and more real-time. Marketers can take advantage of this by instantly participating in the conversations related to their particular marketplace, rather than attempting to continue using the traditional, and slower, approaches to branding.

B2B social media marketing is all about developing a two-way conversation between the company and its markets.  And many B2B marketers, especially those closely aligned with their sales forces, fully understand the vital importance of listening to the customer.  B2B social media marketers have imbedded in their DNA the need to not only sell but to listen, understand and react.

As a B2B marketer, you know that business buyers, with the use of search, have just as many choices regarding the kind of products or services they buy as do consumers.  Business buyers just buy more.  A whole lot more.  And so business buyers will search out more information before making a purchase decision than will a typical consumer.  Consequently, B2B marketers are quite familiar with the growing expectations on the part of customers and prospects to be treated as a partner, as opposed to a lead.

In a series of surveys, Forrester Research asked more than 7,000 North American and European enterprise IT decision makers about the sources they turn to for information about products and services.  More than eight out of 10 respondents said word-of-mouth recommendations or testimonials are the most important sources when making buying decisions.  Obtaining these recommendations and testimonials becomes easier when B2B social media practices are put into place-turning your customers into brand advocates.

We should be celebrating the opportunities B2B social media marketing has brought to companies.  Social media is a way to participate in those peer conversations by monitoring them, engaging in them, and managing them through peer-based communities.

B2B social media marketing programs have created the opportunity to reach out and touch individual customers and prospects in unique ways.  As budgets tighten and pressures rise to show value, customer relationship programs with solid B2B social media marketing capabilities can enable companies to achieve more customer engagement with less effort.  By combining B2B social media marketing to support a comprehensive marketing program, and capturing data to expand your knowledge of what makes your customers and prospects tick, you will generate a substantial return on investment from your marketing dollars.

As the B2B buying landscape continues to evolve, the relationship between the buyer and seller has to be mutually beneficial.  By taking steps to ensure you connect with prospects in the fashion they prefer-providing the information they want, when they want it-you’ll build company credibility and brand loyalty. 

The traditional media cannot publish every press release you write.  You need to become your own publisher to provide your customers with relevant information about your products and their applications. Let me know if you need more information on how to start your B2B social media marketing efforts.

I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Howard Schmidt on his appointment as White House Cybersecurity Coordinator today, the nation’s top cybersecurity post.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Maples Communications has worked with Howard for several years in his capacity as both a board member and spokesperson for our client (ISC)², the largest organization of information security professionals in the world with over 66,000 members in over 140 countries.

In addition to being a big day for Howard, this is a big day for (ISC)² and all infosecurity professionals. 

When Maples started with (ISC)² nine years ago, membership was less than 3,000 and the first paid employee had just been hired. In those early days, an information security professional couldn’t get the attention of the IT manager, much less the President of the United States. Getting the attention of the media regarding information security was a very tough task as well.

But through the years, and by working closely with great people at the organization such as Jim Wade, Randy Sanovic, Pat Myers, Howard and many others, including current Executive Director Hord Tipton, we slowly but surely made headway. 

Now a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) has a seat at the table of the highest office in the land. To me, and to many others I’m sure, this means the profession and the organization have arrived. 

All the issues that these top professionals have diligently been working on for years will now have a voice in Howard and will hopefully get our country implementing cybersecurity best practices in every business, government agency and household. To go along with his obviously deep understanding of security, Howard has an uncanny ability to bring people together and is a tremendous communicator who’s generally fearless to the task at hand. He will be an asset to the country.

And just as Maples Communications worked hard with its client to see this day happen, we look forward to working with any infosecurity company that has a solid new approach that needs to be heard.