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!

Nice summary here for Forrester subscribers and a list you may also find valuable of key marketing articles:

Surviving Disruption in the Age of the Customer by Josh Bernoff, Advertising Age feature
The Post-PC Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think by Sarah Rotman Epps, Forbes feature
Facebook Won’t Become E-Commerce Force, Analyst Says, The Wall Street Journal feature
How CMOs Are Adapting For The Future, Marketing Week feature
Can Mobile Apps Save Customer Loyalty Programs, CRM feature
Where’s Your Company On The Social Maturity Scale? by Sean Corcoran and Josh Bernoff, Forbes CMO Network feature
Why CMOs Must Learn to Understand the Customer-Experience Ecosystem by Kerry Boudine, Advertising Age feature
Marketers Failing Interactive Part of Interactive Marketing, Advertising Age feature
Are You Prepared For The Intelligent Enterprise? by Tamara Barber, ESOMAR feature

Forrester has released a new report, Accelerating Your Social Maturity: How To Move From Social Experimentation To Business Transformation.

The report identifies five key stages from Laggards through to Innovators.   You can read more on the Forrester Blog

A fortnight ago I taught a Social Media course in conjunction with Net101.  Along with working for a range of clients I also teach a Masters Communications subject at UTS called Rethinking Media (essentially about the changes that Social Media is bringing to the communications professional). In  both these environments I am always interested in hearing what is happening within organisations regarding the integration of social media into the business.  These are some of my observations from both large corporate and SMB empoyees:

• Communication Manager’s are overloaded with their job responsibilities that now extend into Social Media
• IT departments are still to come to grips with giving staff access to the tools they need to do their job
• While many are well versed in the concepts the practicalities (hands on) of how to do the tactical work is still difficult for many
• Underresourcing is a huge issue with social media elements given to juniors who have hands-on skills but no business acumen
• The c-suite (many of who are mid 50s and up) still don’t get it - forcing in some cases good comms managers to look around for businesses that will embrace social media so they can get experience in this area
• The pace of change - many are overwhelmed by how fast the platforms changes – think Facebook competitions t/cs and many worry they will be caught unaware in this environment

What observations can you make about what is happening within offices in Australia?

Recently the Harvard Business Review  surveyed over 2000 companies to examine the way they are currently using social media. While they found that uptake was high for many companies use was still experimental. These are just a few of the findings from the report:

• 31% do not measure effectiveness of social media
• Less than 23% uses social media analytic tools
• 7% integrate social media into existing marketing activities
• 12% identified themselves as effective users of social media
• 75% said that they did not know where there most valuable customers were talking about them.

Interestingly two-thirds of the companies are convincinced their use of social media will grow. For further information please Download the full HBR report free 

In a recent study by Digital Brand Expressions, 52% of social marketers are operating “without a game plan,” similar to the 50% found in April 2010 by R2integrated this was discussed recently in an emarketer article.

The following image shows the activities that organisations are currently participating in indicating that many organisations are clearly at the beginning of their social media journey building the foundations for more sophisticated activities.

The study also showed that the creation/maintenance of social media communications plans are being created predominantly by marketing and corporate communications which is to be expected.

It would however be interesting to know how many other departments had a seat at the table when the social media plans were developed.  For example, developing a thorough social media policy alone would need input from HR, IT, marketing and others gaining that buy-in from the majority of departmental areas is critical if you are (a) going to get the strategy off the ground and (b) gain the ROI that you need.

Today I came across a great booklet regarding WOM by GasPedal called

Word of Mouth Crash Course

It was created by an artist called Mike Rohde and  it is like a comic book filled with ideas on how to get people talking. Some of the topics include:

• The 5 Ts of Word of Mouth Marketing
• How to deal with detractors
• How to create content that travels

Even though I have been immersed in WOM for some years now you can never stop learning!

You know the drill up at 11pm on Twitter, a quick jump over to LinkedIn and don’t forget to add some videos to your YouTube platform. Sound familiar?

After consulting to a variety of organisations on social media strategy one of my first questions is resourcing. While many believe social media to be inexpensive it is important to highlight that it needs to managed and that does take time.

On that note I came across a great articled by IMedia Connection called How to avoid Social Media Burnout while the recommendations are not earth-shattering they are a useful reminder. The following is a summary of tips:

1. Have a social media strategy – if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve it is going to be difficult to get there in a time efficient way

2. Share your strategy internally across a range of business units- get group buy-in, share the load and reap the rewards

3. Avoid bandwagon jumping – don’t just jump into the latest technology unless you know it is right for the business. How do you know? check out your social media strategy (point 1!).

4. Keep an eye on consolidation – be sure to watch the social media marketplace regularly. Which tools are consolidating is this useful for your organisation? how can you take advantage of this?

An article in NMA today caught my eye.

The article reported that P&G recently launched product rating and review functions on its Head & Shoulders and Ariel (clothes washing detergent) brand websites as part of a strategy to engage consumers with its brands.

Users can now submit a review of a product with a star rating with P&G among the first of a major FMCG company to go down the ‘review’ path.

Interested to see how many people have the time or inclination!  to review washing detergent I was surprised to see over 6000 reviews on the site – and predominantly positive.

The site itself was well executed apart from the exceedingly long download time (but then again if you have time to review washing products maybe you have time to kill).

P&G have been innovators for quite some time in the marketing space. Back in 2001 they took their market research online and this year they have been utilising predictive analytics to get a greater understanding of their customer. Incorporating a review component to their product websites may seem like a logical step. But will it engage consumers?

Research over the past two years has shown that consumers are spending more and more time researching products online before purchase. This makes sense in a tight economy and particularly for items such as cars, house insurance, mortgages etc –  but does it hold true of smaller FMCG items? 

Will consumers spend time researching the less expensive items? or will only a Stepford Wife care enough to review her washing detergent?

I was recently interviewed by Stephen Byrne of Diffusion regarding brands and the impact of Social Media on them.

I started thinking about the famous quote from ad agency founder David Ogilvy’s definition of a brand:

“The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, price, its history, its reputation and the way its advertised“ 

If we dissect each of these elements we can see the influence of Social Media within all these attributes.

Name – right this minute Vegimite is crowdsourcing for a new name for its new range

Packaging- last year Pepsi sent key influencers their newly launched can design

Price - music has been known to be sold online for the value that ‘consumers think its worth’

History -  consumers can mashup historical marketing collatoral – to help create the future for the brand

Reputation- every minute consumers are commenting on brands and services from simple product review sites to more complicated UCG including Dave the musician  with his song about United Airlines damaging  his guitar

Advertising -only an advertising man would isolate advertising as a brand attribute.  I dont  think it is an attribute.  It is a distribution vehicle to promote the other attributes of the product even so there are a myriad of examples of Social Media particularly UGC forms of advertising. Recently the US Govt held a competition for the public to create best Public Service Announcement regarding Swine Flu behaviour guidelines.