A Social Media Love Story, Starring The Four Seasons

I love finding social media love stories. It warms my heart to hear about a brand and a customer making a sincere connection through the web and starting a beautiful relationship of mutual advocacy forever and ever, Amen.

Here’s my new favorite story: Thomas travels a lot for work. Thomas tweets Four Seasons. Four Seasons tweets Thomas back. Four Seasons also leaves a handwritten note in Thomas’ hotel room.

Thomas thinks this is very cool. Thomas tweets about how much he loves his room’s sweet bathroom. Four Seasons sends Thomas a bottle of bath salts and another handwritten note.

Thomas is completely impressed and blogs about his experience, even suggesting Four Seasons to his readers. The whole thing goes viral, and Thomas and Four Seasons live happily ever after.

This story isn’t just warm and fuzzy – it offers tons of lessons for those of us who manage social media for brands. Here’s a few of ‘em:

They recognized that social doesn’t just mean digital. When businesses first discovered the potential of web 2.0, engaging with customers online  made an impression. Now, online interaction is becoming expected. Four Seasons cut through the din on Twitter and made a lasting impression by going offline. They took the time to write a note and send a personalized gift – something that is even more appreciated these days when a tweet is a dime a dozen.

They met him where he was at – maximizing the WOM. Four Seasons seamlessly integrated Thomas’ Twitter experience with his real life experience at the hotel – offering him restaurant reservations and special requests via Twitter, for example.  I’m sure it’s easier for the Palo Alto hotel to do that stuff offline — but meeting Thomas where he was at sent a clear message that Four Seasons is all about their guests’ comfort. The bonus is that when Thomas tweets a request and Four Seasons meets it publicly, the word-of-mouth potential is exponentially greater than if it had taken place over the phone.

They built a relationship with an influencer. While I am sure Four Seasons goes above and beyond for all their guests, it’s fair to assume that some strategy came into the picture with why Thomas Marzano got the red carpet treatment. The guy has over 16,000 Twitter followers and is a prolific blogger. He’s influential in a circle of professionals who probably also travel for work often. His awesome experience made him an ambassador for their brand right in the midst of their target audience.

As Thomas said in his blog post, “People talk to people, not brands.” Really catering to the needs of a consumer and making them feel special is half the battle to creating a memorable experience that they’ll share. Influencer marketing works, and is most successful when you simply practice good business, and mean it.

The Future of Social Media: What’s Next?

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the 3rd Annual Digital Night, hosted by the American Advertising Federation of Baltimore. As a Digital Marketing Manager, it was obviously important that I was there to be part of the discussion of where digital marketing was headed in 2011.

Things in the digital marketing sphere have changed drastically over the past year. In 2010, organizations were struggling with the placement of social. Where would it live? Who would control it? Do you do it in-house? Hire a boutique agency or a large one? But over the past year, people have moved past the beginning stages of social and now are asking, “What now?”

This year will bring more specific questions than “how to.” As this form of advertising becomes more and more legitimate, there is going to be a stricter level of accountability on brands, companies, and agencies alike.

ROI & Metrics

Have we beat this one over your head enough? Metrics will become more and more important, and not just the number of fans and followers or the amount of site traffic garnered to your site. Think bigger picture – maybe how having a social media community in place can save you some dollars on a PR budget, or how your cost per lead has decreased since adopting word of mouth marketing tactics.

Consistency

Companies will start to focus on making their branding extend across multiple channels. With that taking place, we must focus on providing a consistent message or brand across those channels. Sure, the tone might be different from one platform to the next, but at the end of the day, each must feed back into the identity of the brand.

Experiences and Interactivity

Static ads or messages won’t cut it anymore. We have to involve the consumers in our ad messages. We are already attempting this on social networks by making our audiences part of the conversation, but 2011 will require marketers to step up their game. We’ve got to make the actual ad an experience. Think Tippex.

E-Commerce on Social

Facebook has become the hub for consumers everywhere. We all know that their ad network is great, and that if you break away from the norm, it can be a place for brands to live and interact with their consumers. But lately, we’ve seen actual purchases on Facebook. Marketers are beginning to understand that people are comfortable on the Facebook platform, and will bring online merchandise to them in that sphere.

What do you think? Are these the future of online? Where do you think digital marketing is going in 2011?

Facebook Moderation Isn’t Just About Customer Service

Just last week, we tweeted a pretty sweet blog post from AllFacebook about “How To Manage A Facebook Wall In Any Situation.” It was chock full of great tips boiled down from BuddyMedia’s Facebook moderation 101 report. Some of my favorites: Address each poster by name. Use language that reinforces positive feelings about your brand. Don’t be afraid to apologize and be honest.

But there’s one bone I have to pick that I’ve been mulling over. It’s a piece of advice I’ve heard time and time again in the social media realm that I just plain don’t agree with – “Reply as quickly as possible to complaints posted on your wall.”

Now, don’t get me wrong – I definitely think there are times when you should swoop in ASAP. If there’s a question that needs answered by your brand, then of course. Or if this is a “problem child” who needs special attention, obviously.

But I guess I get a bit touchy when people start treating social media efforts like it’s just a branch of customer service. Customer service skills come in super handy when you’re wearing a community manager hat – I’ve already told you about that. But that’s not always the answer.

I get it. It’s easy to panic when there’s a mean ol’ post on your Facebook wall. It’s understandable, because negative sentiment about your brand online can be detrimental. But can we expand our tactics for creating a more positive community about and for your brand beyond rapid-fire responses?

If your business views Facebook as a platform to create and amplify advocates of your brand, the end goal should not be to squash every gripe, but to empower advocates to counteract the grumblings, too. That way, advocates feel valued, complainers feel like they got genuine feedback rather than PR mumbo jumbo, and the whole community is functioning as just that – a community, not a public 1-800 number.

What’s your take on Facebook moderation?

Target Audiences: Keeping Them Engaged

The suits have been talking a lot about target audience over at Deep Ad Thoughts. How to know your target audience, find your target audience, and how to get your target audience to act. What is there other than that? Well, a lot.

We WOMmers happen to know a lot about how to leverage the web to keep your target audience engaging with you and your brand, getting them to act over and over and spreading the word about you while they’re at it. Here’s six ways to do just that.

1. Campaigns and Promotions

Don’t be on social networks for the sake of being on social networks. Don’t just create online ads for the sake of creating online ads. Sure, there is some value in being present for brand exposure purposes, but at some point, it will get stale. Creating a campaign for your online efforts, just like you’d do in the traditional sense, can help break up the monotony of daily engagement. It will dictate tone and voice, new types of interaction, and creative media shared. The point is — you’ll always offering your audience stuff that’s fresh rather than recycling the same old messages. Bonus points if it goes hand in hand with some offline element.

2. Rewards, duh!

I love free stuff. You love free stuff. We all scream for free stuff. Reward your audience for paying attention. Maybe it is something as simple as a coupon, or maybe it’s a huge giveaway like an iPad or another free product. Your audience will be more apt to participate if they know they might get something they want out of it. But remember, don’t make participation too complicated. “Post your comment for a chance to win a free iPad” works much better than, “Click like, share with eight friends, retweet twice, and move to Alabama for the chance to win a free iPad.”

3. News and Resources

Use your online platforms as a way to help inform or educate your target audience. Bring new industry insights. Share insider news about your brand or things that interest them. Be generous with tips, tricks and best practices. If want you provide your audience with online are things they want and can actually use, they remember you, and keep coming back for more.

4. Fun

Mix it up. Humor goes a long way. On our Chicken Facebook page, we’ve found that people love recipes, but they love lighthearted posts even more. These posts tend to get more impressions, likes, and comments.

5. Customer Service

Part of keeping your target audience engaged is to help them out. Think ComcastCares. If you pay attention to your consumers’ issues and complaints, and then take steps to actually FIX the problem, your consumers will come back time and time again. Not only to have their questions answered, but just to interact and talk with the online face of your brand.

6. Reverse Interaction

Don’t just post every few days on your page. Your online presence isn’t a billboard. Ensure that you are responsive to people participating on your networks. Got a blog with comments? Answer them back. Someone posting on your Facebook page about how much they love you? A ‘thanks’ can go a heck of a long way. Showing some love on the regular is how you turn your target audience into brand enthusiasts.

100 Ways to Measure Social Media Success

During my daily morning Internet perusal, I came across a list of 100 ways that companies can measure social media. One. Hundred. Ways. Holy schnikies.

Since we are always trying to convey the importance of metrics and ROI of word of mouth marketing, I did a little dance (something of a shimmy, mixed with some hair tossing and a quick head nod) to celebrate my discovery of this wonderful list. I even added the number “100″ into my win column for today. So what if the post I found was from 2009? I understand that this makes my “100 wins” more like “99 wins,” but the best posts have longevity, right?

Since it was first posted, I can almost guarantee that this list has grown, but these 100 are a great way to get started. I’ve included some below. These are the ones we leverage most often. I can only encourage you to go read the entire article and put it into the framework of your company, clients, or marketing objectives.

1. Amount of buzz generated
2. Growth rate of fans, followers, and friends
3. Site Traffic / Page Views
4. Increase in searches due to social activity
5. Shift in sentiment before, during, and after social marketing programs
6. Clicks
7. Number of interactions
8. User generated content created that can be used by marketer in other channels
9. Volume of customer feedback generated
10. Impact on sales (online OR offline)
11. Leads generated
12. Products sampled

Via Media Post | Social Media Insider.

A Software Developer Shows Us How To Do Viral Marketing

iPhone development team taptaptap posted a run down of 10 more useful iPhone tip & tricks on their blog last Friday. They were really good tips. Even as a self-professed iPhone nerd, I didn’t know some of these tips.

I know what you’re asking, “Ok fanboy, what does any of this have to do with social media?”

Well honestly, what’s better than a list of awesome tricks? Even jaded iPhone “experts” are commenting on the post saying it’s the best list of tips they’ve seen. It has almost 650 tweets. That’s pretty decent traffic to the blog of this modest indie developer. taptaptap even took it one step further and integrated little pitches of their own apps into the list.

For each tip, taptaptap included iPhone screen shots showing how the trick works. This is one for the built in Apple camera app:

And then twice they followed the Apple app screenshot with a screen shot of one of their apps and how it it improves on the features of the build in app. This one shows taptaptap’s app, Camera+, and how it differentiates from Apple’s built in camera app:

The integrated pitches were very tasteful, never overbearing and didn’t dominate the post. taptaptap did a great job compiling information they knew was unique and would get people to pass the post around, driving traffic to their site and getting eyes onto their products.

Social Media to Blame for Bland Online Brand Identity

I’m an advocate of keeping up on social media news. As a professional in the industry, I take it upon myself to be aware of all the newest toys, most up to date strategy ideas, creatively executed campaigns, etc. But lately, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to find inspiring social media news. The churning wheels have slowed, and it has become official: social media is no longer trendy. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Here at Cyphers, we’ve always known to count social media as just another tool in our arsenal of marketing skills (we’ve nearly given sermons on integration). Had all marketers been this realistic, they would have seen that social media would eventually become conventional and commonplace. All you have to do is look at the past, seeing how the ad world has changed. Each new fad or medium spurred creative growth, so why count this one as any different (history repeats itself, right?)?

So here we are, at the crossroads of trendy-meets-routine, and it seems that “everyone is doing it” these days. But just taking part doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything super special. In fact, it seems that the excitement and talk of all the things that social media can bring to a brand has simply boiled down to brands replicating each other on social networks. I’m not blaming brands. In fact, I think it becomes twice as difficult to be creative when you are working in an entirely new space with an entirely new set of rules. It becomes hard to think outside of the box when you’ve barely seen inside it.

But each day, month, quarter, year, brings a deeper look. As marketers, we must challenge ourselves to use social media in ways that aren’t confined to just Twitter and Facebook. Let’s not allow social networks to infringe on our creativity. Let’s take risks and be game changers for our clients. Let’s be those people who competitive brands look at and say, “Damn, let’s do it like them.” Let’s use strategy to bring value to our clients’ consumers in ways that no one has thought of before. Let’s give our clients’ consumers a reason to pay attention. Because, with a little strategy, creativity, and social media knowledge, these things can actually happen.

Do you accept this challenge? Get to it.

The Doctor Is In: Social Media Q&A

We’ve all had burning questions. While Jocelyn and I love to give advice, we’re not really qualified to help you with your relationship problems or etiquette dilemmas – but we do know a thing or two about word-of-mouth marketing and social media.

So if you’ve ever had a burning question about advertising in the digital age (and really, who hasn’t?) it’s your lucky day. Soon, we’ll be vlogging our take on what you’ve been wondering about.

So let us know what you want to hear us talk about – and we’re game to talk about (almost) anything! Tweet at @adsattca using the hashtag #PnPQandA, or post your question as a comment on this blog post. Oh, and you can email us too. Keep an eye out for our vlog sometime soon!

Word of Mouth Toolbox: Ambassador Programs

Blog post theme of today: back to basics! There are a few things that we’ve got in our word of mouth toolbox that are tried and true tactics, so we thought we’d revisit some and share them with you. One of our most powerful tools as word of mouth marketers is the creation and implementation of an ambassador program. We’ve seen it in action, helping create some serious online buzz for a number of clients.

So what the heck is it?

An ambassador program is a way to leverage the very idea behind word of mouth marketing: the passing of information from one person to the next. Ambassadors in and of themselves are people who speak on behalf of a brand. Sometimes they are celebs, but most of the time they are normal folks. It has been said time and time again that the most powerful recommendations come from friends and family, so enthusiasts’ opinions obviously matter to marketers. Ambassadors will talk about their love for a brand or service on their own, but it is our job to find those people and magnify their voice. We bring structure and organization to a group of enthusiasts, encouraging them to do a number of things, which include posting positive reviews online, attending offline events, and passing along coupons or news.

Think about it. Some of the most potent brands are chalk full of people who will go to the ends of the earth to show their love. Apple. Starbucks. Whole Foods. Harley Davidson. Coca Cola. Louis Vuitton. You can’t escape those enthusiasts. They are in your face whether you like it or not.

Let’s go get those brand ambassadors!

The thing about brand enthusiasts is that they are passionate for a reason. It could be the strength of the product (Apple), the value of the service (Whole Foods), or the way the brand experience makes consumers feel (Starbucks or Louis Vuitton). It is important to have a great offering in order to have enthusiasts. You can’t fake brand love. Great brands like these reward their enthusiasts up front, regardless of if they write a positive review online or tell someone about a new product. And even more so, its important to build relationships with your enthusiasts before asking anything of them.

Well, okay! Now what?

Consider what you’ll need for an ambassador program. Each is drastically different, and should correlate with a larger campaign idea or a set of objectives you’d like to accomplish. The main thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that ambassador programs should be designed to be mutually beneficial. Participants must find a reason to be a part of the program.

Why should they sign up? In an ideal world, just telling others about their love would be enough, but most often, it isn’t. Make them feel special by letting them in on breaking news, asking for their opinion about new products, providing them with coupons or free products, or giving them VIP access. Then, provide them with ways to help you: direct them to places online where they can review you, lead them to your Facebook page where they can “like” and share their opinion, or have them talk to a potential customer about why they love you.

The main key to a successful ambassador program is to locate your enthusiasts, and reward them upfront for their love. Then, make it easy for them to share their thoughts, and reward them for that, too.

Here are some general things you’ll need:

• Objectives – What are your goals? Do you want event attendance, positive reviews, general feedback?
• Outreach Plan – How many enthusiasts are you going to need? How are you going to reach out to them? Communication is KEY here.
• Timeline – How long will the program last? Is it a 6 month campaign or a lifetime program?
• Tasks - Exactly what will you have the participants “do”.
• Rewards & Incentives – The most obvious part: thanking people for their love.
• Tracking – Know what your ambassadors are up to!

Ready to take the leap? We’d be happy to help you locate your brand enthusiasts and build some meaningful relationships with them.

Strategists First, Community Managers Second

I came across this awesome image while wandering the Internet the other day, and right away I was nodding and laughing. “Yep, that pretty much sums it up,” was my thought. Behold, the inner workings of the minds of folks like me, revealed!

The discovery of this kick-ass (and scarily accurate) infographic came on the heels of a conversation I’d just had with The Cypher’s Agency’s Bearer Of All WOM Knowledge, Jocelyn, about the title “community manager” and if it can be synonymous with what we do as word-of-mouth marketers. Finding this illustration just cemented what she and I had concluded: yes and no.

There’s no question that in any given day, our Push-n-Pull team serves as concierges, traffic cops, and yes, even pinatas for our clients’ customers online. We are always at the ready to smash spam and crush trolls to keep communities positive and unpolluted. And there’s certainly a customer service aspect to what we do – we pride ourselves on using online platforms to solve problems for our clients’ customers, or connecting them to someone else who can. But we are way more than Web 2.0 robots sweeping up and spitting out announcements online.

Building, monitoring and engaging an online community to share your message with is vital and does require playing the many parts shown in that awesome graphic. But we are strategists first, managers second. Why we are doing what we do always factors in to how we engage in and shape conversations online. The work we do is much more than just crowd control – its always driving toward the overarching marketing goals for our clients.

When I first started out, I marveled at how cool it was that little ol’ me got to sit in on planning meetings. I had expected to be handed my social media tasks and shuffle along to do my social media work. Now, I understand the serious value of our agency’s approach. Bringing in the digital marketing minds from the beginning means that the “community management” we’re doing will be in a facet of an integrated marketing plan.