As the year draws to a close it is a great time to review your Social Media Strategy. As with all strategies refinement should happen continuously all year but I also like to do a year-end review:

These are just a few things up for review:

1. Audience – Are you engaging with the right crowd? Are you hitting your qualitative and quantitative targets?

2. Metrics – are you happy with the metrics you are collecting? Have you added new objectives along the way and now need to find a metric that relates to them? Are you getting the most out of your metrics tools- for example Facebook updates their Insights tool regularly but are you across the new components?

3.Listening/Monitoring – we all know we need to do it but are you happy with the data you are collecting? is it meaningful and is it time to review your social media monitoring supplier?

4.Staffing – if you are resourcing social media internally what are your staffing skillset gaps? is it technical? content creation? start a skills matrix so you can start the year fresh knowing what skills you need to buy-in or trainup internally

5.Content – as we know content creation is a vital part of engaging in social media – which pieces of content this year hit the mark? which ones missed and why?

6.Competitors – what did your competitors in the space achieve this year? how will this influence how you refine your strategy for next year.

These are just a few things you can review to ensure you start the new year fresh and on track.

Have a safe, happy and prosperous New Year!

Digital consumers have stronger relationships with brands than non-digital consumers. This was the finding from Millward Brown, who analysed WPP’s BrandZ database recently.

The report compared the brand relationships of digital consumers with those of non-digital consumers across all categories and countries. The findings: that digital consumers have  15% stronger relationship with a typical brand.

For some categories such as airlines they have a 93% stronger brand relationship while others such as soft drinks and fuel (items you don’t usually buy online) both recorded a 5% stronger brand relationship.

The chart below shows the categories and impact of digital on that category to consumers brand relationships.

So what is the BrandX definition of a digital consumer?  This is “someone who has either bought or researched that category online”

Digital consumers were reported to have have stronger relationships in all 24 countries examined.

Key Takeouts from the Report:

• Willward Brown discuss the ‘digital branding circle‘ where consumers are more interested in brands, research online increases brand knowledge, digital purchasing increases brand knowledge further.
• As more digital researching and purchasing takes place the brand relationship gap between digital and non-digital consumers widens
• Some consumers will be digital consumers in some categories and non-digital consumers in others
• Brand managers should examine if their category has a strong digital relationship, examine  their competitors digital relationships and integrate the research into a smarter digital marketing strategy.

(Report Background: The report was compiled using 2008 BrandZ data with a total of 100,000 consumer intervierws and over 8000 brand measurements. Interviews covered 24 countries and an average of 15 categories per country. The report pointed out that the digital relationship difference ” is not a measure of brand equity – it has no correlation with the absolute strength of the brand’s pyramid.)

How do you help build engaged digital consumers?

So how can you build a closer relationship with your consumer and make it easier for them to interact with your brand online?

(A) Search Marketing and Organic SEO can help you answer the ‘visibility’ question ie getting your brand found on the web. There has been much written about the fact that during recessionary times consumers are spending more time researching products and services online (lending more relevance to the ‘Digital Branding Circle’ theory discussed above.  

(B) Social Media Marketing. While search marketing might help you get found on the web social media marketing will help with the ‘engagement’ of those consumers. In fact a study released recently by The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org and Forrester Research found that:

• Amongst retailers that are reducing spending, 56 percent are cutting spending on search engine marketing, while only 24 percent will cut their social media marketing budget.
• Amongst retailers that are performing well (“beating expectations” according to the study), 12 of the 20 will increase spending in social media marketing.
• Further, amongst retailers that are increasing budgets, 80 percent will put more money into search, while 65 percent will put more into email marketing.

Tight economic climate right for building ‘digital consumers’

The recessionary climate where consumers are increasingly researching your products is the opportune time to start engaging with them online.   

Yesterday I joined a swag of Australian online community managers at a roundtable organised by Editor and Com Mgr Essential Baby, Ms Alison Michalk. The group of over 15 of us from all around Australia met at Fairfax the home of Essential Baby to discuss online community management.

The group involved a great mix of online community startups such as Nick Gonio’s SportsPassion, through to the effervescent Ms Venessa Paech from the highly established and well regarded Lonely Planet, large media corporates were representated with Bob Dobson ( Entertainment Community Manager, NineMSN) and Ben Mott (Product Manager, Network Ten) as well as the ever-present and unmissable Scott Drummond – Sports Hydrant (not to mention many many others…)

Key discussion points from the day:

• The role of the Community Manager: leaders, the concierge, party hosts, traffic as well as other many descriptions. Community management is a highly complex role!
• The challenges included: head-count in recessionary times how to do the job well with limited resources; moderation is a continual challenge and technology can be your best friend or nightmare – with all agreeing technology platforms need to be nimble enough to adapt to the times.
• Sponsorship -  how to ensure the bottom line survives; the challenge of securing sponsors and ensuring sites remain objective is crucial.
• Benefits of online communities: a great way to gain insight from your key members, help you spread the word (WOM) regarding your product and brand and help you get a great understanding of your consumer.
• Metrics - lots of discussion on this topic with qual and quant discussed deeply. The usual page impressions etc were discussed and ever-present AVE (pr metric) but this time wearing the web 2.0 hat – is there validity in this metric? most agreed their was, metrics such as sharability and engagement were also discussed.
• Metric Relevance - of note was the point that you will need to look at member metrics vs metrics for sales and marketing these are naturally going to be different. We also discussed the old ‘conversion’ chestnut – that many clients asked. We agreed that as case studies come out we can put some figures to it but in reality conversion may in fact be a long bow to draw (ie sales) and if it happens – it wont ‘happen overnight’.
• Transparency: No surprises here authenticity/trust are the domain of a healthy and hence successful online community.
• Friction is healthy in an online community one com mgr said ‘it is in our real offline lives so it should be online as well’ – it keeps the community real, vibrant and engaged (too much though is a bad thing)
• Marketing your online community ideally should be a mix of social media strategies,offline activities, combined with some ppc (although some disagreed with ppc being of value). Obviously as a start-up without a brand name it is a lot harder to get that top-of-mind position than online branded communities (think Dell etc)
• Size - The interesting question of do you need to be a large site to be valuable arose. The answer was in fact both yes (particularly if monitisation is involved) and no if you are creating a niche(not a lot of breadth but depth re engagement) – the scalability of communities was also a good topic of conversation.
• Staffing of the community provided lots of variety with some online community managers existing with only paid staff and others relying heavily on volunteers – and every combination in between.
• Reporting Lines: So who do the community managers report to? a large range of responses from CEO through to general manager, marketing, global support/km to finance. We discussed the future of reports and how they typically report into marketing but wondered if it will always stay that way because online communities were providing tangible benefits to ALL areas of the business.
• Privacy is a continual issue for community managers and we agreed that some technology platforms simply don’t have the flexibility with functionality to allow for subtle privacy changes. One manager mentioned the importance of letting your members ‘grow’ with the site and that may in fact mean their privacy settings would need to change from teen/adult etc
• De la Soul -  the question was raised is there a magic number for getting traction within your community? the answer we all agreed was in the 50-80 range because at that point the community starts to run itself which is the ideal scenario (with the com mgr in the background)
• Technology was a source of frustration for many managers that had bought into systems that were not nimble enough to adapt to the times. Many believed that open-source systems were indeed the future.

My interest in community management was sparked when I was moderating online research communities for companies such as Kelloggs, Weight Watchers and Sara Lee. While the nature of my work has a research bent manyof the above issues regarding technology, resourcing, engagement and moderation still applied.

Today I am keen to stay in touch with the online community management field as Forrester’s Five Eras of the Social Web indicated communities are going to continue to have an impact on the social web and hence brands.

If you are an online community manager or company starting up an online community based in Australia feel free to join our Facebook group

P.S. Came across this memo to New York Times staff regarding the appointment of their social media editor (who has some com mgr responsibilities) it makes interesting reading.

Yelp

I recently read a fascinating  interview from econsultancy with Laura Nestler, Community Manager of Yelp. Yelp is an online review site that started in the US in 2004 and recently launched in the UK with new features. It is interesting to see how the site has been continually developing and adding new elements over the years.

The most interesting aspect of the new version of Yelp is the additional functionality that gives business owners the opportunity to respond to reviewers favourable or unfavourable reviews.  This is a key development and I believe much overdue. The ’two way dialogue’ model that forms the foundation of Social Media needs to occur to ensure continual dialogue and transparency.

So what else is new for Yelp? as with many online applications they have now launched our most recent iPhone application – Yelp for iPhone – and they expect to roll out further apps for other devices in future.

Review Sites in a Tight Economy

As the economy tightens consumers are spending more time on the internet researching product purchases before they buy.  Online product review sites are one of the leading types of user-generated content on the web today and their role will become increasingly important.

The following figures show the significance of review sites for consumers.

Does your website have a review element?  it might be a great way to start engaging with your customers today.

Review Statistics

Article of note: Tips on building your review site

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy .  Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed