The Power of Influence

CMOs at the recent Forbes CMO Summitrecognize that social marketing affects nearly all forms of digital marketing, including e-mail, advertising, search and Web marketing. It shouldn't be treated as a silo. Even so, there's confusion about how to develop a solid strategy. Here are some suggestions for how they might do that.

Social Marketing Affects All Digital Marketing Channels
CMOs must think of social marketing as a horizontal effort across all of their digital marketing assets--not as an independent experiment.

Most consumer brands, including Skittles, Best Buy and Dell, have integrated social marketing into Web marketing efforts. Yet beyond traditional Web marketing efforts, social technologies have implications to other digital channels. For instance, e-mail providers Silverpop, StrongMail and Responsys already have social marketing integration by encouraging consumers to share e-mails with their social contacts in Twitter, Facebook and beyond.

More dramatically, Google and Microsoft's Bing announced partnerships with Twitter, promising to integrate tweets in search results. Eventually, tweets, blogs, and Facebook wall posts will influence these search results. The effects on paid search marketing are unpredictable.

Customers Don't Care What Department You're In

Not so long ago, flare-ups around customer support issues could be swept under the rug. Now, customers have a soapbox from which to tell everyone how they feel about your brand. From shabby employees at Domino's embarrassing the company on YouTube to off-brand (if catchy) music videos like United Breaks Guitars', customers are yelling back at brands--and sharing their opinions with millions of people at the same time. Search engine results about your brand are affected by this Web chatter. For example, searching Google for "Dell Support" results in links to blog posts about less-than-stellar customer service. Customers just want their problems fixed; their gripes can cause a lot of problems for a brand.

Technology Is Cheap, Yet Soft Costs Are High

As marketing budgets have been cinched, efficient channels like word-of-mouth are more attractive than ever to CMOs. Social tools are inexpensive, if not free. According to a recent report from Forrester Research, most social marketing budgets make up less than 5% of companies' overall interactive marketing cost centers. The most expensive solutions available to maintain community platforms or brand-monitoring solutions may cost $100,000 a year.

The tech tools are cheap. What's expensive: education, roles, processes and agency costs. Getting a department ready for an entirely new way of conducting marketing takes patience--and resources.

Develop A Pragmatic Approach
Marketing leaders should get their organizations prepared for social marketing with the following three insights:

Dedicated social roles should be enablers, not controllers. We now know that social technologies are pervasive and affect all digital assets. Yet to be successful, CMOs should appoint dedicated staffers to coordinate efforts. Success will require these people to teach, provide resources and select technologies on behalf of multiple business units. Take, for example, Intel's Social Media Center of Excellence, which is a team that trains, helps, and enables other business units with this new medium.

Provide customers with a holistic experience. CMOs face a threat and an opportunity: Customer support issues are quickly cascading through the Web and affecting marketing efforts. Despite the risks, this is an opportunity for marketing to demonstrate leadership and provide a holistic experience across all customer touch points.

Marketing should work with support, as well as other business units such as product development and field teams, to determine ways to respond to customers using social technologies. Start by hosting brown-bag sessions where different business units can come and share, learn and talk. Then provide best practices, education and resources that help other business units beyond marketing.

CMO Insight: Social Marketing Affects The Whole Organization

Tying it all together, CMOs must first change their mindsets when it comes to social strategy. These technologies are pervasive and affect every digital marketing asset. Furthermore, every customer touch point in the company--from sales to support--can now be read online on the Web for everyone to see, share and comment. Armed with these insights, CMOs should approach social marketing as a culture shift within a corporation and align the proper resources.

 

 

Me being interviewed on ADOI TV

A little while ago I spoke at the MMC09 - here is an interview done by the team just after the conference.

In the interview I cover the relationship between WoM and Social Media and how my company (Vocanic) approaches the planning of a campaign with its Groundswell(tm) methodology.

Here is a post by Andy Sernovitz, the ex head of WOMMA, who is now off doing his own thing called Gaspedal  and authoring books  and writing his Dam, I Wish blog

What I loved ( and got his permission to repost, thanks Andy) was the simple way he got rid of lots of the confustation (new word ...like it?) that is being weaved around WoM and Social Media.

To put Andy's sentiment into our own (Vocanic's) parlance .... its all about earning the recommendation.

Big Hairy Idea #1:  It's Not ALL About Social Media

Social media is an incredible tool.  It enables fast conversations, it enables widespread conversations, and it connects people who would rarely see each other.  It gives speed and scale to word of mouth.

But social media is not word of mouth marketing.  It's a tool we can use for the online portion of word of mouth.  But it's not even the main tool there. I would argue that more recommendations go by plain old-fashioned email than all the social networks combined.

On top of that, offline word of mouth is so much bigger than online word of mouth.  A tweet still doesn't beat a personal recommendation from a close friend.

So why are we talking about social media so much?  

1.  Because real word of mouth is hard.  It requires big ideas, long-term commitment, and an honest dedication by a company to earn the respect and recommendation of its customers.  You can't just call your agency and order up some WOM.

2.  Because social media gives us an action step.  It's fairly straightforward to do a campaign on Facebook or Twitter.  You can call your agency and order up a social media campaign.  And your agency, who is totally freaked out by this WOM stuff, can deliver a pretty good campaign.
Then you can show the results to your happy boss.  Everyone feels good and gets paid.

Except...  we completely miss the point.

The point of word of mouth isn't ecommerce; it isn't to count clicks and CPAs.

The point of word of mouth is to be a brand worth talking about.  To be a company that people are proud to tell their friends about.  It's to replace paid marketing with personal connections.  To replace cash with love.  To be fantastic.