New Source for SMM Best Practices

Recently a social media marketing colleague asked me for a good source for best practices information in this space. When you know that question is coming from a small business that probably cannot afford much subscription research, it’s hard to answer. It’s information that many businesses are willing and able to pay for, so it’s usually paid content.

I had already used and cited the usual suspects. Marketing Sherpa does good executive summaries of its benchmark reports, Forrester releases some information on its blog, and Altimeter is following an open research policy. I’m sure there are others, but for the type of information I’m looking for, those are my usual go-to sources.

Consequently, I was pleased the other day to get a notice—blogger outreach, I assume!—of a new venture that is going to operate in that space. It’s not social media per se as best I can tell. Gleanster says it “benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives.” That would seem to include any aspect of Internet marketing and quite possibly some initiatives that play out in the physical world.

Their early publications suggest considerable focus on the social media space. For readers of this blog the summaries of their Social Media Monitoring and Online Customer Communities research are well worth downloading. The communities paper contains a case study of Best Buy that makes my point about their focus. I’ve written about Best Buy and its retail Twelp Force campaign which uses Twitter to provide customer support for their retail customers. More detailed paid reports are the basis for these summaries.

I’ve been tagging posts with “best practices” when it’s relevant, so I hope I’m making a contribution to this important discussion. Maybe a good resolution would be to make more best practices posts; it’s a topic of concern to all of us!

What Is Your Social Media Hub?

Sergio Balegno, Research Director for Marketing Sherpa, is a recognized thought leader in Internet marketing best practices. He gave a superb guest lecture in my social media marketing class last week. There was one thing in particular that he articulated much better than I’ve been able to do. It has to do with organizing your ‘traditional’ Internet and social media marketing around well-defined hubs.

It’s clear that any Internet marketing effort needs to have an activity hub. In the early days—before social media—it was equally clear that the hub was the website. All marketing efforts, PPC and display advertising—pointed there and Internet marketing objectives were achieved there. Objectives might have been driving traffic to retail stores, providing content for customer acquisition and retention, conducting ecommerce, or others as appropriate for the enterprise marketing strategy. Whatever the Internet marketing objective, the website was needed to achieve it.

Enter social media and our efforts to understand how to integrate these networks effectively into our marketing strategy. What is the correct centerpiece of for this marketing element? Social media efforts can point back to the website, and sometimes that may make sense. But often the efforts on public networks are best pointed back to the corporate blog. Sergio used as an example the Cisco Collaboration program that I wrote about last week.

Why should social media point to the blog and not to the website? The main reason is that blog content can—and should be—updated frequently with content that supports the social media efforts with precision. By its very nature, website content is updated less frequently and often is less precisely targeted to particular user segments and/or interests.

That led me to a second ‘ah-ha’ moment--the importance of recency in achieving prominence in search engine results. I hadn’t updated my thinking from the era (a couple of years ago) when things like keywords, number of incoming links, and number of clicks were only determinants of rankings in organic search. Here’s a summary of rank determinants; click through for a mind-numbing list from seo experts. With the addition of things like news, images, and videos search results pages provide the most current as well as the most relevant content. Search any current event and see for yourself!

The take-away is this: Your website is the hub of your ‘traditional’ Internet marketing. To be direct, it’s where you can sell things or acquire sales leads. An increasing number of the people who become leads or customers are going to find you, learn more about you, and develop trust in you through social media. The blog provides timely content and connects to activities like your YouTube channel and other social networks. It points readers to your website for conversion when their time is right. Their time, not yours! That makes your blog the hub of your social media marketing.

There’s still a lot of work to do in integrating all this activity. But a clear understanding of this key principle is necessary to an efficient strategy with marketing effectiveness!

Customer Experience Counts in All Channels

Forrester recently completed its 2010 customer experience ranking. Data was collected from 4,653 US consumers in November 2009. The full report is available only to Forrester clients, but Bruce Tempkin released key summary statistics yesterday.
His summary of the findings, much of which is displayed in this chart, is interesting:

• Retailers take 12 out of the top 20 spots. I’m happy for them, but I also wonder why retailers appear to think that customer experience is more important than do other types of businesses that sell things—B2B or B2C, products or services?
• Healthcare, Internet and TV services dominate the bottom. Quelle surprise! We all have our stories. My most recent one is yesterday. I called a physician’s office for an appointment instead of her competitor whose office’s customer service was dissed on local ratings services. So far, so good—the appointments secretary was nice to me on the phone!
• There was very little excellence. Again, not news to most of us. Excellent customer service, and it’s outcome, excellent customer experience, is a sustainable competitive advantage. Why? Because it’s hard and it requires upfront investment.
• Liberty Mutual improved the most. Interesting. I’ve actually paid attention to their “responsibility matters” TV advertising. I wondered how that fit into their ability to improve customer experience, so I decided to look around.

What I expected to find was some trade buzz that Liberty Mutual had really been working on its customer service. Maybe they have, but that’s not what I found. I found The Responsibility Project. Business Week had an article and video interview with Stephen Sullivan, senior vice-president, communications services at Liberty Mutual. Sullivan talks about the challenges the firm faced in 2008 as it tried to expand market share in the face of competitors who could outspend and customers who didn’t trust. He says:

"It's a wonderful thing to say that we do the right thing, but it's also a more difficult message to get across to consumers because so many people want to say that," says Sullivan. "What we wanted to say is 'We recognize that personal responsibility is one of your core values and if this is true, then you will like doing business with a company like us because we share that value; in fact, we celebrate it on your part.'"

That view is the core of The Responsibility Project. TV is the responsibility of Hill, Holiday. PR comes from Ketchum, which describes the project as follows:

The Responsibility Project, created by Liberty Mutual, uses entertainment content to create a forum for people to discuss personal acts of responsibility. Through short films, online content and television programming, The Responsibility Project is a catalyst for examining the decisions that confront people trying to “do the right thing.”

Take a look at the project website. The entertainment content is obvious with short films from Liberty Mutual and “responsibility partners” including NBC, Slate and BeliefNet. I was interested in the box that describes their outreach to bloggers at the summer BlogHer conference. The site is reasonably interactive with a blog and an opportunity to post stories, vote on issues and make comments.

Individually, the pieces are impressive. More impressive is the degree to which Liberty Mutual integrates the “doing the right thing” into all its messaging—from the blogger outreach this summer to the career pages on its website. In the Business Week interview Sullivan made the point that employees had to believe in the message in order to be able to deliver on the promise. That starts with hiring the right people, as they are obviously trying to do. One assumes that management at Liberty Mutual is behind the program in both word and deed. Otherwise, the results wouldn’t be showing up in customer experience rankings.

Where did this all start? Liberty Mutual, of the 133 organizations in 14 industries that Forrester surveyed, improved its customer experience rankings the most. That means it supported its words with actions in a most impressive way--another best practices example.

Social media is nice. However, marketers have to use all their channels and use them in an integrated way. If the message doesn’t resonate and the experience is not satisfactory, all social media can do is to reflect customer discontent. If social media is to reflect a strong and trusted brand, business actions are going to establish the foundation. Getting the message out is important, but the actions of employees and the everyday experiences of customers are the ultimate test of strategy.

Tracking Coke on Social Media

While doing research for the best practices article yesterday, I noticed that Starbucks had pushed Coke out of first place in one of the listings—engagement, I think. I don’t pay much attention to the “who’s on first” kind of lists; I’m interested in looking for strategy. Coke, though, seems even less amenable to online social media than Starbucks, although I did write about an experiment they did in Second Life quite awhile ago. In any event, I checked it out.

The first thing I found was that there are over 1,000 Coke pages on Facebook. Lovely for them, but I was looking for their official fan page. I found it, and it’s impressive in design and content; clearly not a DIY effort! They have 4,107,432 fans, which sounds like a pretty good second place! More interesting is the integration of customer effort into their Facebook presence. Coke marketing people were paying attention to what customers were saying—and the rest is history. Check out this video for what they did and how they did it!

Again, lovely for them for co-opting their customers into their own marketing, but I looked a little further. It didn’t take much effort to find that they have a year-long promotion, launched in Madrid on New Year’s day. The three winning adventurers are already off on Expedition 206. The header pretty much says it all; the mission is to seek and share stories of happiness.


It’s worth spending some time on this site. The three young people are delightful and seem to be having a wonderful time 3 days into their excellent adventure. I was especially interested in the ways to follow it. The last similar thing I followed was a National Geographic deep sea project; those reports came to me by email, which suits my lifestyle. No email here that I can see. You can download the widget, which looks like fun. You can get posts on 4 of the major social networks; MySpace and Twitter are obvious; don’t know where Yahoo! puts it, although the link took me to my account sign-in. If you’re not a fan of Facebook Connect, you should click on the Facebook link and see what it tells you. See how fan pages can get a lot of fans quickly?

There should be a word on Facebook privacy (or lack thereof), which has once again been in the news recently. Facebook Connect brings in all your friends. When I went directly to Coke’s Facebook fan page, I got an interesting privacy notice from it. By clicking through to the page I gave Coke permission to access my Facebook information. Ok, but I do appreciate being made aware.

You have no privacy on Facebook; “get over it.” As individuals, be aware of what information you are putting out there for the world to see. As marketers be aware of what you are asking your customers to do—and be transparent about it! As long as you don’t put data or content out there that you wouldn’t be happy for your mother—or your best customer—to see, this is good fun!

Ok, so most of us aren’t Coke, and we can’t do a 206-day global promotion (actually, most of us probably don’t need to!). Is your business doing something that you’d like for people to know about and to follow—a green project is a good candidate these days. So is an event you sponsor. As is a cause you partner with.

On a smaller scale, I’m willing to bet that most of us have things we should be sharing with our customers—good things, innovative things—things that build our brand, whether it’s global or local!

Social Media Best Practices for 2010

As social media marketing matures, there’s a continuing stream of firms and non-profits that are doing significant things. I looked back over 2009 to find some of the ones I had characterized as “best practices.” If you look down the list, consumer products companies appear to be underrepresented. I’m not sure whether that’s a reflection of reality or just a reflection of what I pay attention to. Stay tuned for some additions to that list!

Legal Zoom applies consumer marketing techniques to legal services marketing and does so in a way that supports instead of devaluing devalue the professionalism of their offering. A lot of the posts to their Facebook page continue to promote their contest, but there’s a cool New Year’s Resolution app. They don’t appear to have a blog, so the posts are more than blog feeds and the they seem to have a number of employees involved. Worth the attention of non-lawyers!

Starbucks gets a lot of votes in best practices lists. I think the “Listens—and Acts” phrase pretty much sums it up. The My Starbucks Idea site is still going strong. A lot of the current ideas are about products; notice how many of them would make Starbucks greener.

Kraft is another skilled social media practitioner that might be seen as unlikely, since their products are sold through channels to consumers at retail. However, they’ve found ways to engage their customers and to reach them at the point of purchase with the iFoodAssitant iPhone app. Their social media efforts are well done, one reason being that they understand the needs of their customers.

One of my favorite social media initiatives is the Pickens Plan. I’ve written about it several times including a late 2008 post that describes their community monitoring efforts. You only have to look at all the activity on the site to understand how much effort it takes to start a community—even more, to keep it vibrant. Think also the Christmas card post from the Obama campaign office. When I finish this post, I’m going to replace the simple badge on this blog with one of the Plan’s interactive widgets. That’s the sort of community fuel that keeps it running (pun intended)!

Finally another of my favorites is the McKinsey Journal represented on the blog with the McKinsey marketing content widget on the sidebar. I find the widget useful; I hope readers do. Since I’ve written about their social efforts (and got an almost immediate comment—very social!), they have added a “What Matters” page. It’s a thought leaders page and not overly social, although it does appear to be built on a blogging platform. Perhaps more important to the McKinsey Journalit provides additional content that supports the McKinsey brand.

The most impressive thing about these five examples is that all of them are keeping up the momentum; most have added new activities since I wrote about them sometime in 2009. That's a sign of commitment to social media. It also reminds me of some rants I've read lately about it not being "social media campaigns" or "social media programs." Ok, how about social media initiatives? Just as long as there are measurement milestones!

If you search “best practices” on the blogger search bar you’ll get others, both recent and older. All are nourishing food for thought, and I have no doubt that 2010 will produce more!

Are Lawyers Going Social?

I was aware of the website LegalZoom through its TV ads featuring celebrity attorney Robert Shapiro. That was all until a student pointed out their other online activities, which I found quite unusual for a legal firm—thanks, Fiesal!

The current centerpiece of the online strategy is a contest, just concluded, that allows customers to upload videos about their experience with LegalZoom. Here’s their YouTube video. The embed looks like nothing special, but play it all the way through—the 40 seconds is worth what you find at the end. When the video finishes you get thumbnails of customer videos that have been submitted. I don’t know how to do that, but it’s very cool and it makes the point that people are entering the contest.

That brings me to my favorite question: how did they let customers know about it. I’ll bet there were outbound communications, through their corporate newsletter probably. I have visited the site several times recently, and I didn’t see a notice about the contest. It has its own separate website, which links back to the corporate site, but I don’t find anything on the corporate site that links to the contest site, although entries to the contest have been closed for five days now, giving them enough time to remove a notice. Given the care with which they do other things, and the fact they are lawyers, I doubt that is an accident. That guess is supported by the fact that the winners are not scheduled to be announced until December 20—5 days from now. CPG sites would be hyping the winner announcement.

Ok, there is a separate website; you still have to get customers to that website. They have a very active Facebook page; I’d recommend it as a “best practices” business Facebook page. It’s active; there are a lot of informative links. They have only 1,197 fans at this point, but they used the Facebook page aggressively to promote the contest. The screen capture shows 2 posts announcing the contest. There were others throughout the contest. The last entry I saw was on December 7, promoting the last chance to vote on the contest.

They do something else I love. Each week they welcome “New Zoomers;” new fans, presumably. How nice is that??? They also had Halloween picture contests. Perhaps most important, their strategy jumps out of the Facebook page at you; you can see it on the website, but it’s not as evident. Their primary segment is small businesses and they are providing all sorts of content and encouragement to them. Definitely best practices! They are also active on Twitter; I’m guessing there’s a feed between the two, but I didn’t take time to trace the posts/Tweets. In addition, a search turns up a lot of PR activity surrounding the contest.

Finally, I can guess how they got the idea for the contest. According to the website of their interactive agency, they have been using client testimonials in their advertising for at least a year. That shows a clear, sensible evolution of online strategy.

It would be a great integrated program for any large corporation. For what’s essentially a website-only business model for services, it is striking. For a group of lawyers it is simply mind-blowing!

Kraft Celebrates Football Season with Social Media

When I wrote about the Kraft iFoodAssistant widget recently, I realized that Kraft had more going on in social media and resolved to look into it. When you look, you find all the usual blogs pointing out coupon availability, which is ongoing for most CPG brands. It certainly is a new way of distribution though; and therein lies one social media impact.

What you also quickly see is two seasonal promotions for Velveeta cheese. Tis the season for tailgating or football on TV, and snacks made with Velveeta cheese are a seasonal item. The Kitchenistas blogger promotion has been going on since September; here's the microsite. In fact, today is the last day of activity for the five compensated “Mommy bloggers” who have participated in the promotion.
How does this kind of promotion affect sales? Velveeta brand manager Sherina Smith admits they don’t really know:

“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals. We know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”

All this context seems to create warm fuzzies for the brand, and that may be all we can say at present. I’d love to know the ROI of a low-cost promotion like this, incorporating real people, compared with the ROI of, say a traditional television commercial. Yes, I’d like to know, but what is the dependent variable—brand awareness, favorable brand attitudes, what? We’re back to the difficulties of measuring attitudes and their impact on behavior. Marketers have operated on faith that positive brand associations do matter for a long time, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

Enter the Big 10 promotion, also for Velveeta and also tied in with football season. Here’s the Big 10 Conference home page for today. Note a banner ad at the top by Rotel with a dish of cheese dip beside it. You probably won’t be surprised when you click through and find that most of the featured recipes feature Velveeta cheese. Rotel is a ConAgra brand with a non-corporate-looking website that pushes recipes and attitude.
Note that on the Big 10 home page there’s a square box pushing a contest for bowl tickets, again featuring Rotel. At the bottom of the page there is another banner that makes the Rotel Velveeta partnership more explicit. It’s all quite integrated—and hard to miss!

Kraft’s website, the iFood Assistant, and one guesses its relationships with bloggers will go on. Promotions for various brands, many of them seasonal, can also be expected to continue. What do you suppose they have on tap for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Stay tuned!

Engagement Lessons from Successful Brands

An interesting customer engagement study has been sitting on my desktop since late summer and it’s long since time to pay attention. The study, by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group ranks the top 100 brands in terms of customer engagement. You can see the ranking and download the full report here.

Starbucks and Dell are number 1 and 2—no surprise there. They interviewed some other high-ranking sites, SAP at 9 Toyota at 21—about best practices, presumably to get a perspective from different industry sectors. Each of the highly engaging brands has several best practices to suggest and they are worth reading the full report. I picked out one from each that struck me as universally applicable:

Starbucks identifies people throughout the organization to be the liaison with the social media program—to monitor and to take action on customer issues and ideas. At the same time, they maintain tight central control over content and the engagement of individual baristas in their many outlets.

Toyota says you have to be in it for the long haul. No surprise there; social media is an investment of time and energy that will only pay off over time. That’s a disappointment to many who are looking for immediate returns.

SAP makes a practice of engaging in new channels where people already are. That makes it easier to listen and understand; they also encourage employees who are already active on newer channels like Twitter.

Dell points out that you have to be conversational from the start. Again—not a surprise, just really hard to do, especially for newbie brand practitioner.





























The Wetpaint/Altimeter group links customer engagement to financial performance and argues that it is a more powerful driver that traditional measures of customer satisfaction. Gallup consulting agrees, and has their own measures of engagement that allow them to group firms by level of engagement. You can read their full report here.

While researching this post, I also ran across a recent article in Forbes that argues for the importance of engaging customers while admitting that engagement is hard to measure. None of this content could be judged as totally unbiased because all the marketing services/consulting firms represented have a stake in creating or measuring engagement.

For me, it’s hard to refute the arguments. You should make your own judgment!

Social Media Marketing Best Practices

I found the link to the Beeline Labs best practices white paper on a post by Lois Kelly on iMedia Connection. It’s a good post, with strategic advice that closely parallels the findings reported in the white paper. I’d encourage you to download the entire white paper from the site.

I was most impressed with two sections; Biggest Surprises and Most Common Mistakes. Those are especially important, and I’d like to recap them briefly.

Biggest Surprises:

• Customers want to advocate. People love to talk about experiences they’ve enjoyed; make it easy for them to talk about your product, your website, whatever.
• The value of early warning and speedy response. The sooner, the better. Otherwise, the damage may have already been done.
• Better planning. Get customer insight and incorporate it into planning and decision making.
• “No bad experiences.” Here’s what the report says, “Almost all companies said they were surprised at how few, if any, negative experiences had occurred from engaging in social media. While legal and management are often concerned about “what if someone says negative things about the company,” this has rarely been an issue.” Hear, hear!

Most Common Mistakes:

• Ill-defined purpose. That’s a tactful way of saying that companies start social media programs with no clear objectives.
• Disconnected silo. Social media isn’t a scary animal that needs to be isolated. It needs to be integrated with all other communications programs.
• Denial. Refusal to believe what is being heard in social media. Management wants “hard data.” By that time it may be too late. . .
• Just another “channel.” Their point is that social media should not be seen as just a new way to push out content, it should be seen as a way to reach out--to create and sustain relationships.
• Not using the right talent. This is a serious marketing (and pr) activity and should be treated as one.
• Listening but not acting. Need I say more???
• Over-engineering a process or workflow. Use automation to make the processes more efficient, but don’t let it separate the human beings from the social content.

Now that you’ve read this, don’t you want to read their Advice for Suceeding (pages 16 and 17)? Some of you might also find their advice for working with your legal department (p. 9) helpful.

It’s good news that there are enough companies with enough experience to contribute to the establishment of best practices. Now more of us should be practicing them!

McKinsey 'Gets It' in New Media

That’s true in a number of interesting ways. One of my students highlighted the article from their global survey that tracks business adoption of Web 2.0 techniques. If this were about the data, I could pretty much leave it at the title of the first table, “Greater Knowledge and Better Marketing.” For me, that sums it up! From that data, eMarketer (September 16, 2009) has a nice chart that point out that different Web 2.0 technologies work better for different purposes/audiences. That’s important too.



















But what I’ve enjoyed watching over the past several months is McKinsey’s own efforts to make its content interactive and push that content out on several Web 2.0 platforms.

• Look at the article itself. It has an interactive chart that is a nice way to portray their three years of tracking data. There’s also an audio discussing the results (see the right bar). Now step back and look at the page. It has a variety of ways of drawing you into the article and a variety of ways of reader sharing. At this moment it has 53 recommendations—pretty good! It has a big Facebook logo.


• They (technically, “they” is the McKinsey Quarterly journal, not the consulting firm) have almost 40,000 fans on Facebook. This is from my page today. They keep it up; people respond—51 people like it and there are 12 comments. Also good!

• I don’t follow them on Twitter, but they are active. It seems to be a combination of feeds as they publish new articles and manual Tweets that point to certain articles or information. They have over 15,000 followers.

• I just added their marketing content sidebar to this blog; look on the right sidebar. It caused the one failure I found; the automatic post to Blogger didn’t work, although the usual copy embed code did. I needed to work on the sidebar anyway (hate to do that), so it didn’t make much difference. I think I first noticed the widget in February when they asked Facebook fans to give them feedback on it. All very good!

It’s not just being on the social networks; it’s using them consistently and for the appropriate purposes.

It’s about making your stuff work.

Most of all, it’s about having a consistent strategy across platforms—from your website through all the social networks you choose to use.

McKinsey gets all of this!





P.S. I couldn't resist adding this; it came in about an hour after I made the post. Another good catch by McKinsey!