October 2011
Social media demands personality. Yet most companies and brands are uncomfortable with personality. Marketing consultants – like yours truly – have been encouraging them for years to temper personality in favor of staying on message.
If your brand is in social media, you may want to rethink that balance.
Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media wrote a phenomenal post about the problem that causes most brands to commit social media suicide: they act too big and miss the opportunity to connect with users.
“I don’t care how big your brand is,” Barone wrote. “You need to act small because that’s what attracts people.”
Social media is unlike any other media because individual consumers own it. They represent their own interests and have different expectations for the way they interact with brands they support.
Treating social media like any other media is a sure way to waste your time, resources, and money.
Can you fix the big brand personality problem? – Outspoken Media
October 2011
www.raventools.com
Nashville-based Raven Tools helps companies better manage and report about their online marketing campaigns. The software brings together more than 15 different forms of data, such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media, website analytics, and email campaigns. Users can add events, such as product launches, to see how those events affected online metrics without having to remember the dates of each event.
Atkinson PR spent tons of hours collecting data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email campaigns for reports about the Red White and Food campaign we managed the last four years. Raven Tools would have simplified that to a few minutes.
August 2011
Four applications continue to dominate the social media landscape. The following are some key statistics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn:
- Facebook — 70 percent of the 149 million U.S. users log in daily.
- Twitter — Americans spend 2 hours and 12 minutes per month on Twitter.
- YouTube — YouTube accounts for 86 percent of U.S. online video watching. Hulu, the No. 2 site, receives just 7 percent.
- LinkedIn — LinkedIn exceeded 100 million users worldwide in February and went public in March.
Social media’s impact is far more than its rapid expansion or its staying power. It has changed how consumers communicate with one another, extended networks of friends, and brands.
Companies are just now beginning to measure how social media affects consumer trust. That will be a real metric worth watching.
August 2011
By Brian Eisenberg
Google and social media have given consumers greater access to information and changed what they expect from the brands they buy.
Waiting For Your Cat To Bark focuses on how brands need to evolve to meet consumers’ new expectations.
Author Brian Eisenberg argues that when media was limited, brands could simply ring their bell enough times and consumers would come running, much like the dogs in Pavlov’s famous experiments. The conditioning worked.
He believes today’s limitless media has caused consumers to act more like cats, who will respond if and only if they feel like there is something in it for them. “Smart merchants know the secret to success is not to make it easier for the seller, but to make it easier for the buyer,” he wrote.
Information is the key to solving the new marketing dilemma. Eisenberg offers a formula called the “persuasion architecture” that answers three key questions:
- Who are we trying to persuade to take action?
- What is the action we want someone to take?
- What does that person need in order to feel confident taking action?
The persuasion model has several steps that anticipate the buyer’s needs and tries to make the right information available at the right time when buyers are ready. We wish he had explained the model in more depth, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s overall impact.
April 2011
Companies often ask us what’s the best policy for responding to negative blog posts and comments in social media.
What is most helpful is the categorization of negative posts. The Air Force identified four of them:
- Troll – a post dedicated to bashing and degrading others
- Rager – a post that is a rant, joke, or generally satirical of the Air Force
- Misguided – a post that features erroneous facts
- Unhappy customer – a post that is a result of a negative experience
The Air Force only responds to posts falling in the last two categories. They recognize that nothing the Air Force says will influence the first two and choose to monitor rather than respond.
The final piece is crafting an effective response. The strategy focuses on transparency, sourcing, timeliness, tone, and influence.
Written originally for blogs, the policy could certainly be adapted for other social media.
December 2010
Social Media Examiner
The volume of information about social media can be overwhelming. Heck, we have a hard time keeping up, and we’re in the business. Social Media Examiner is one of our go-to sources of social media news and tips. The website is organized in eight easy sections, such as case studies, research, and expert interviews. And, if you’re trying to figure out if social media is for you, check out the Getting Started section, which touches on all the basics of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging.
