A few days ago, Stratégies magazine (in France), has published a summary of Marketing 2.0 Conference, I have cowrited with Cathy Leitus... Since many of the participants and speakers are not fluent in french, please find below the english version of the article :
Social Media Marketing Evolves ... But is It Maturing?
Social media marketing has arrived in its strategic phase. We have to completely rethink the significant influence users have, and will have, on organisations. That’s the basis of what was touted by digital heads of large international brands at Marketing 2.0 (#M2C2011) Paris this year.
Is social media marketing dead? That question served as both the title and the provocative theme of Marketing 2.0 Conference, which took place in Paris on the 28th and 29th of March at ESCP Europe, organised by general director Nils Andres of the Brand Science Institute (BSI) with support from agency Vanksen and in partnership with media magazine Stratégies. Experts from international brands provided a state of the industry up to this point. We examined use of social networks, successes and failures, mishaps and disillusionments.
The resulting picture was both varied and sobering. Four in five enterprises plan to invest in social media in 2011, representing over two billion dollars, according to eMarketer; but 87% of businesses felt that the social media marketing campaigns they launched in 2010 were failures, per the BSI, which polled 187 global brands that represented over 15,000 consumers and around 50 agencies.
But why? Because when it comes to social media, the conventional notion of a “campaign” is passé. It’s no longer enough to organise a short-lived promotion; now we need long-term relationship strategies on an array of social platforms.
And major advertisers remain lost in the noise. Only 19% of polled companies have a clearly-defined “social media strategy,” and just 16% of organisational heads were able to define what social media is.
The absence of guidelines, clear roles, scripts and canned responses likely plays a part. Social media is too often perceived as the mere launch of a Facebook account, managed by an intern or young upstart -- or worse, at the advice of generalist agencies that can’t help a vulnerable brand in the face of bad buzz (consider KitKat, BP, the Gap logo debacle...)
“A Facebook page with no tomorrow is like a one-night stand with your client,” as Andres so aptly put it. First and foremost, social media demands serious personal reflection on the culture of your company, its content, and its relationship with users and fans. But it also demands process, guidelines, the acquisition and diffusion of competencies (either through recruitment or education) -- not only the right platforms and technologies. At M2C, these topics were addressed in three stages.
1/Produce a strategy that fundamentally changes the organisation
If M2C 2010 focused primarily on existing tactics (buzz, viral, UGC, Facebook, Twitter), 2011 was more the year of “social media strategy.” Those company reps with a mature understanding of social media confirmed that the experimentation phase has passed, and success is now tied to a true reorganisation in the management and diffusion of change within the enterprise. “Evolve from an organisation of silos to a connected organisation,” said David Armano, SVP of Edelman Digital USA, who talked about “social business planning.”
This is about redistributing power, means and autonomy to employees (creating the “empowered employee”) in a thought-out way, the better to serve Consumer 2.0 (the “empowered consumer”), who’s also retaken power. The acquisition and evaluation of expertise also requires education and recruitment of specialist profiles - the infamous “community managers” - at the operational level and at the strategic level.
According to Philips in the Netherlands, social media initiatives are organised in seven stages (the “social media stage gate system”): business and social media objectives, targets and uses, confirmation of insights through buzz monitoring, definition of a strategy and criteria of performance, a deployment plan, guidelines, and the measure of ROI.
For social media and community director Richard Binhammer of Dell, “It isn’t about control anymore; it’s about influence.” So it’s important to think strategically about the enterprise ecosystem, its internal and external communities. From product development to client support, to marketing, comms and sales, social media’s been integrated at all levels within Dell. This was only possible with the collective effort of all members of the organisation, and thorough education: principles, governance, workshops and tools. Over 4,000 employees were retrained to become “customer-connected employees,” making social media less of a tactical tool and more of an integral part of all company activities. This improves quality, credibility, reputation, support and conversion -- not to mention quicker development of products better adapted to client expectations.
2/Evolve from message-diffusion to producing relevant and useful materials
Unlike traditional media, social media demands that you listen to users. MRM France, a marketing services agency within the McCann Group, talked about “customer utility.” Per general director Jocelyne Kaufman: “To play a significant role in the lives of clients, a brand should be interesting, useful or recreational, letting clients participate in the life of the brand itself.”
Examples abound: General Mills’ recipe site bettycrocker.com serves two million unique visitors per month, five million opt-in members, and saw sales rise from 19% the year of its launch. Meanwhile, MyStarbucksIdeas has received no less than 60,000 user-generated product ideas and improvements. Some have been rolled into development.
The more interactive and engaging an experience, the more original (with buzz potential), the more useful and personalised, the more contagious it will be, said agency Vanksen.
For content that isn’t merely messaging, but is actually useful to users, it’s often necessary to be attractive -- a quality that merits real investment. What’s more, brands underestimate how much editorial work it takes to keep Twitter and Facebook accounts running smoothly. Accustomed to a few PR soundbytes a year (through publicity campaigns), they must rethink their overall communication strategy to ensure that content is diffused to their targets at key moments. They can lighten this load a bit with “curation” (the buzzword of 2011!), the act of aggregating existing content in a qualitative and human way.
When brands understand that their users users (rightfully) demand respect, support, an added-value presence and the possibility to participate, they benefit by creating true ambassadors, positive buzz and recommendations (“earned media”).
3/ROI is king, but not without measures of effectiveness and a realistic budget.
The issue of measuring the effectiveness of social media became a recurring theme throughout the conference. For Binhammer of Dell, though, the question was less about ROI (return on investment) and more about the creating value and business over the long-term. Dell’s efforts generated over $6.5 million in sales on Twitter alone in 2009, so this isn’t just about building “brand awareness.” And at Xbox US, the Twitter support team (10 people) is today entirely financed by money saved from fewer calls to the tech support hotline.
But let’s not forget the other ROI: the “return on ignoring,” or the cost of not getting involved, a point raised by social media manager Madlen Nicolaus of Kodak. In 2010, Kodak generated 343 million impressions -- the equivalent of $2.4 million dollars in media spend -- on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. But let’s not avail ourselves to the temptation of swearing by our number of fans, often more attracted to sweepstakes than by the brands themselves. Criteria for measuring social media performance should be clearly identified well before launching an operation. Without this security measure and quantifiable data, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the budget to go further.
Finally, for brands that wish to fully exploit the potential of social media (notably in CRM), it’s crucial to have a realistic vision of users’ expectations. An IBM study recently found that customers don’t engage with brands to feel connected to them; they just want to take advantage of certain benefits (discounts, special offers). A little pragmatism to approaching the virtual world doesn’t hurt.
From these 2 exciting days, here are 3 very interesting examples of brands already embracing marketing 2.0 :
Domino’s Pizza Chicago: the king of Twitter buzz
Ramon de Leon has piloted six Domino’s Pizza sales points in Chicago. His intensive use of Twitter and Facebook has made his pizzerias veritable tourist destinations. With one restaurant, located on a collage campus, de Leon has also been able to track, then quickly adapt, use habits and new tools used by students (online sales in ’98, AOL’s instant messenger service in ’04, Facebook in ’05...). In 2005, he even registered at university just to be able to open a Facebook account, then reserved for students!
His goal: to surprise clients and generate a maximum of conversations per day: surprise promotions on Facebook, Twitter contests, evening pizzeria invitations to special “guests.” He also takes photos and videos with clients. Finally, never forgetting there’s a memorable person with a name behind each Tweet, the Domino’s menu includes top tweets and client testimonials with their Twitter handles. Whenever there’s a problem, de Leon apologises on video, generating thousands of views each on average.
Nokia: from social media marketing to social business
Nokia is among the most experimental brands in the social media realm. Seven years ago, the Finnish mobile firm launched e-reputation monitoring and actively courted influencers (bloggers, forum members) worldwide. Since, it’s launched a number of buzz and viral campaigns, aggregated user opinions on womworld.com/nokia, blogged (in Chinese, even!) on conversations.nokia.com, and launched a promotions program on Facebook and Twitter. More recently it opened an intranet 2.0 for employees with help from Socialcast, and produced http://betalabs.nokia.com, where users can collaborate on and conceive new products.
This work of collaboration and integration between communications, support, R&D and marketing, successfully managed around social media, can only be accomplished with support. Beyond the production of “social media guidelines,” employee education is key for proper understanding and diffusion of your messages. At Nokia, each country and department is responsible for becoming “social compliant” over time, as opposed to putting the responsibility on a handful of experts. Incentives to motivate teams, a community for sharing best practices and producing applicable models, is also important. Beyond these, a mastery of social media demands a serious commitment to change.
Samsung: content and “brand utility” services
South by SouthWest (SXSW) is the biggest digital conference in the US, with 40,000 participants who invade the city of Austin over the course of a few days. To stand out in this crowd of technophiles, in 2011 electronics firm Samsung decided to implement a “brand utility” strategy mixing content creation and curation, not to mention online and offline relationship development with participants.
So instead of plastering its logo around, Samsung launched a hub, http://www.samsungsxswi.com, a veritable message board that provided useful services to participants, who were actually able to better exploit the conference because of its existence. It included top tweets from attendees, videos, interviews, expert analysis, infographics, maps of the most popular areas of the conference, all in real-time. Participants were invited to share content and favourite locations. A giant screen (the “media wall”) enabled them to visualise content when they were offline.
Beyond tech, Samsung also implemented a relationship strategy: the presence of a social media manager who responded to tweets in real-time, thanked contributors of photos or other selected content, and welcomed visitors to the “bloggers lounge.” The result: Samsung was placed at the center of conversation and became one of the most-cited brands -- in the positive sense -- on Facebook, Twitter and blogs during the event.
“The medium is the messenger,” concluded social media manager Esteban Contreras.
Join us next year for the 2012 edition of Marketing 2.0 Conference
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