social marketing strategy Archives

Remembering Robin Carey, founder of Social Media Today

I had the good fortune to meet Robin several years ago when I began serving on the Social Media Today (SMT) Advisory Board to help her advance engagement with Social Business Leaders and extend the Social Shake Up event programing to feature such leaders. It’s hard to believe what she was able to accomplish in such a short number of years. Always on the vanguard of what’s new and emerging in the industry that was coming of age. Robin was not only brilliant; she was fun and incredibly interesting. She was sincerely interested in knowing you, as a colleague as well as a friend.

She loved her boys and was so proud of their accomplishments. She joyfully shared updates on their progress as any doting mother would. She was open about the reality of building a business while balancing the demands of being a Wife and Mother. She had a special knack for helping aspiring women. I was a beneficiary of her generosity, for which I’m forever grateful. She was the quintessential Master of Ceremonies, bringing business leaders together from all over the world to advance the Social Media industry through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

No one could host an event and make it fun like Robin. She would light up a room with her energy and elegance. She knew how to prepare the “run of show”, she owned the stage with her glamorous style. So many times she’d break into dancing to her favorite tunes in between event segments. She embraced good times and welcomed all to join in … and we did. She made you feel special for being a part of what she was building. Always giving with her time and intellect, she was a connector from the heart.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 7.01.42 PM — Robin Fray Carey visits IBM Design Lab in New York

She shared the stage with so many. Not just the event stage, the editorial stage. She wrote incredible pieces highlighting bleeding edge work from brand leaders who were in the trenches making it happen. She wrote this post featuring the work of my IBM team, showcasing how we were using Agile practices to transform marketing as well as featuring the foundational work of the IBM Select program that I championed.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 10.34.46 PM — Employee Advocacy Summit 2014 Left to Right: Jeanne Murray, Constantin Basturea, Tammy Wagner, DeShelia Span, Denise Holt, Liz Bullock Brown, Sabrina Stoffregen, Michael Brito, Susan Emerick, Michael Ambassador Bruny, Chris Boudreaux and Robin Fray Carey

I’m especially grateful for all that she did for my co-author Chris Boudreaux and I. From hosting a book-signing event for our book launch in 2013 to allowing us to share the W Hotel venue to launch the Employee Advocacy Summit in 2014 as a half day pre-opener to the Social Shake Up.

The most moving post she wrote was this one about our book The Most Powerful Brand on Earth. While I was moved by the accolades she included and the hard hitting facts on the integrity of our content … that wasn’t what moved me most. It was the date that it was published and how I came upon reading it that really moved me. You see, Robin had a sixth sense. She knew that my mother was dying and I was her primary care giver. We talked a lot about our Mothers over the years and the kinds of role models they were to us and how we hoped our children would reflect on our legacy some day. So it was … the morning my Mom passed, as I was walking out of her room, a notification appeared on my phone of a new SMT post. When I opened it, this was the post she wrote. It was postmarked the same date my Mom left this world, January 27, 2014. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of Divine Intervention that my Mom was proud of me, while at the same time, so was Robin Fray Carey.

Thank you Robin and the SMT Family. We’ve created a movement, together.

SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B

I just returned from SXSW Interactive, it was my first experience attending this event and I was thrilled be a part of it. If you’ve heard from others that it has to be experienced to be understood, it’s true – I’ve never seen anything like it. There was an incredible vibe from the massive amount of high energy innovators who are all on a quest to lead the future of digital & social innovation. Representation ran the gamete from small start-ups to well established global brands leading the way and shaping this exciting period of our history.

I had the privilege to represent IBM Social Business leadership by participating in a panel: SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B #SMB2B in which we discussed many of the pressing issues of implementing social media programs and leveraging social media as a competitive advantage from a leading B2B brand perspective.

Melissa Chanslor from Text 100 Moderated the panel. Participating along with me were marketing leaders Duane Schulz – Xerox, Jeanette Gibson – Cisco and Shanee Ben-Zur – NVIDIA.

6978068783_39b928c399-300x224 — Left to right: Melissa Chanslor, Shanee Ben-Zur, Jeanette Gibson, Duane Schultz and Susan Emerick – Photo courtesy of Text 100

Here’s a summary of key points I shared based on our IBM Social Business leadership initiatives:

– Conduct social listening research to better understand how and where your constituencies are participating in social and apply insights gathered from the research to your marketing planning process and tactical execution roadmap.

– Deploy subject matter experts (SMEs) to build relationships with key influencers and those that follow them based on your understanding of the social ecosystem. This approach will position limited, high value resources strategically to drive business outcomes.

– Support SMEs to build their personal as well as your brand’s reputation by implementing employee enablement programs that support high value thought leaders to engage in the right place, at the right time in a secure way. Set clear priorities for engagement.

– Help SMEs understand the many benefits of committing to sustaining engagement by sharing examples of other leaders like them who’ve successfully established a position of authority as a trusted topical thought leader.

You can listen to the panel on the podcast on demand to hear the honest dialogue and many great recommendations shared amongst the team. Thanks to Constantin Basturea you can also read a summary of the Twitter steam on Storify

Increasing social proficiency to build influence

Developing the Social Influence Plan
The foundation of a successful social media marketing engagement strategy is dependent on recruiting the right subject matter experts (SMEs) and each individual’s commitment to participate in sustained on-line engagement for the long term to achieve the program objectives. When building relationships, online or off, each of us is inherently different and therefore our participation is unique. While there are various techniques that lend themselves effectively to building social influence, there isn’t a guide book or manual that works for everyone.

Committed SMEs tend to be early adopters that experiment to find what works for them. However, not every one is an early adopter, and even those who are would benefit from enablement support. This is why I’m currently piloting a “Social Eminence Program”, to help SMEs utilize their time more efficiently where it will drive desired outcomes.

Start by gathering input
Realizing that not every approach will work for every person, I’m starting by taking the time to get to know the SMEs through a thorough assessment of their digital footprint, eco-system of connections and researching how they currently communicate in social. By evaluating these activities and those of similar personalities within the same area of expertise, plus utilizing insights from social research, you can help SMEs set priorities.

Building on-line relationships takes time and effort

Increasing social proficiency drives influence — Social engagement progression path

Build a social influence roadmap
With this baseline of understanding, you’re on your way to providing recommendations and tips on the best approaches to reach key influencers, engage more effectively and build stronger relationships. Provide SME’s social intelligence to help them focus their engagement where relevant conversations are happening, in venues of most important, and which key mavens they should connect and nurture relationships with.

Recommendations should be designed to help them prioritize and evolve current behaviors, approaches and tools that they’re using. Doing so will assist them in achieving the ultimate goal of building influence over time.

Using Social Intelligence to Kick-Start Your Social Marketing Strategy

While social intelligence plays a critical role in developing an effective B2B social marketing strategy, many marketers make the mistake of instead rushing to deploy tactics and experiment with new tools first.

Don’t make the mistake of overlooking the importance of gathering social intelligence before you develop your social marketing strategy.

The foundation of a social marketing strategy begins with social research. It’s imperative to understand the social eco-system relative to topics important to your business priorities, the on-line behaviors of your target audience, and your brand’s current or relative position and opportunities within it.

Slow and steady wins the race.

The first step to building your social marketing strategy should be taking the time to gather as much social intelligence as possible and harnessing insights from it to build an informed engagement and tactical execution plan. I refer to this first step as “Listen and Learn” of formulating a data-driven strategy and consider it to be foundational to informed strategic decision making. Some questions that may help you frame what you seek to learn would be:

• Where are conversations happening?
• In which venues and domains?
• Who’s leading the conversations?
• Have are these individuals earned a stature of authority on the topic?
• Who’s following and contributing to the dialogue?
• How often are they discussing key topics?
• What is the natural language used?
• Is your brand mentioned? If so, by who? Your customers? Your competitors?
• Are you or your employees a representative voice within these conversations on behalf of your brand?
• What is the sentiment around your brand mentions?

The second step is to create Understanding, this is accomplished through mining and analyzing on-line conversations from social listening and monitoring and primary and secondary research. Building a baseline of understanding from patterns such as topical themes, keywords and phrases that are most used, trends over time, as well as prominent and/or influential people and their connectivity across the social web eco-system. Using insights from analysis allows you to develop informed data-driven strategies, establish new or refine existing goals, identify publics, and determine the need to develop unique strategies for key groups. In this phase, practitioners frequently analyze and evaluate:

• Target Publics (audience segments) to obtain information on decision makers, these could be a mix of current customers, prospective customers, and influencers.
• Market segmentation is the process of dividing a group of potential consumers into different clusters based on characteristics. What a company is then left with are sets of consumers that should respond similarly to marketing strategies.
• Determine if additional social listening and monitoring, and primary or secondary research is necessary to better understand audiences, trends, by conducting additional market analysis, to further examine opinion, behaviors, and attitudes.

Harness the findings, then use them to inform your social marketing strategy and the best mix of tactics is considered the third phase and is focussed on planning. Using the understanding of the natural language expressed in social dialogue, attributes, behaviors and buying patterns of target audience ascertained from the previous learn and understand phases, identify the specific target audience(s) that must be reached to achieve the goal and objectives of the plan. Each target audience will have specific messaging, strategies, channel and communications preferences that must be considered and applied to the tactics developed. You may develop primary messages or secondary messages for each audience. Also, this is a good time to set benchmarks. Then use them for measuring relative change over time as you implement and evaluate the effectiveness of your tactical execution plan.

Finally, evaluate the tactical execution to determine content performance in terms of the content types and the channels in which the content was distributed, will determine which channels reached the target audience more effectively and once reached which content forms attained higher engagement and re-sharing. This is also the time to focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the execution and engagement led by influencers, employees, and brand advocates who were equipped to share information across all channels. Which of them is performing most effectively? Which is accomplishing the goals aligned to the strategy? Are any under performing? If so, what remediation plan needs to be instituted?

It is important to determine a cadence for harvesting insights, conducting analysis and reporting results. Providing a summary of and clearly articulating performance is key to helping stakeholders understand results. This is also your opportunity to gain their confidence and support to continue optimizing your data-driven strategies. Here’s an example of KPIs that you may construct to demonstrate program performance: