Jumping into the social conversation without drowning

On May 29, 2008, In Technology, By John

You have seen the writing on the wall, and you know it is time to join the social media revolution.  It is easy to jump into the social media, however, it is an entirely different task to do so without drowning in the sea of social media.  Perform has written 12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media.

BEFORE YOU START

1. Establish Clear Business Objectives and Metrics
2. Reframe Your Notion of Marketing Communications
3. Clarify Your Positioning

RAMPING UP

4. Identify the Influencers
5. Listen Before You Launch
6. Integrate Social Media With SEO

DIVING INTO SOCIAL MEDIA

7. Engage Your Audience
8. Engage Your Employees
9. Engage Your Customers
10. Be Honest and Authentic
11. Define Metrics According to Business Objectives
12. Fail Quickly. Fail Cheaply.

For each of the 12 tips, there is a detailed explanation.  If you’re serious about jumping into the social conversation without drowning, the paper is a must read!

Key ideas that I took away from the paper include:

Marketers need to see themselves not as owners of market share but as members of a market community, and their communications not so much campaigns as conversations with the market.  Whereas the typical marketing program begins wrapping up when a campaign is pushed out the door, that’s where a social media program begins. It’s all about authentic engagement with the market community at every stage of the customer life cycle, not just during lead-gen and loyalty campaigns.

How very true.  In the past it was sufficient to push out a marketing campaign and wait for the market to react.  Now it’s become important to take the campaigns to the next level and engage with our community.  It is as simple as “authentic engagement” and networking with all members of our community.  It’s about being transparent in all our dealings.

It’s important to recognize that influencers are not always your customers, but their impact on your revenue stream can be significant. They may be former customers who have become disaffected; they may be champions of a competing product; or they may simply be agnostics with a strong market perspective that challenges your own. Being able to see beyond the scope of your own customer base to understand how your market is influenced is one of the most important advantages of a social media program.

How very true.  The conversation is not always influenced by our customers, and those “other influencers” have incredible impact on our revenues.  We need to look beyond the trees (our customers), and see the forest (the influencers of our market), to provide a revolutionary product or experience that will positively impact our revenue stream.

The combination of continually fresh content, extensive page inventory from individual blog posts, content expansion through comments and trackbacks, and incoming links from other blogs far surpasses the optimization potential of almost any static website.

The days of static webpages dominating are over.  In order for our company to flourish, we must push beyond the static model of other companies, and embrace the dynamic “continually fresh content” approach to websites.  Not only will it drive traffic to the website, but it will engage the community, and enable us to join the ranks of influencers.

One of the most promising areas of social media is the opportunity to bring your customers into the marketing process by allowing them to provide their own ideas and feedback about your products and programs…. [I]t’s important to recognize that your customers are a fertile source of new ideas and innovations, and social media makes that source more accessible than ever.

The trick is to engage the customers into the process.  The scary part is the engagement, and fear of rejection.  When I initially designed our website, I considered allowing comments on all auctions, real estate listings, and updates.  This idea was brushed under the table.  However, the more and more I think about the matter, I think it has great merit.  Think about going to a real estate/auction website and being able to leave comments on the listings and auctions.  As auctioneers and real estate agents, we’d be getting instant feedback on properties, and while we may not agree with the feedback, it’d be real and honest.  I think it may even give us credibility within the community – I know the comments are being made, it’s just I’m not there to hear the comments or respond to the comments.  I think this has real merit.

Social media is here to stay.  In fact, it will and is reshaping how businesses interact with their communities.  The key is to be an early and savvy adopter of the technology, and engage the customers.  In my industry (auction), there are few companies that are pushing the envelope and exploring social media, and its impact on their revenues.  However, one must push forward in hopes of creating an open dialogue with our clients, and in return reap the rewards of engaged customers.

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67% of your customers prefer to communicate by email

On May 28, 2008, In Technology, By John

Marketing Charts has an interesting recap of a recent Habeas study concerning consumer preference for email. It was interesting to note “67% of respondents prefer email as a communications channel over other online vehicles, and 65% say they believe that will remain the preference in five years.”  However, of great interest to me was the sections on “Online Reputation Management Best Practices to Build Trust” and “Online Business Practices to Avoid.”

Online Reputation Management Best Practices to Build Trust

  • More than 88 percent of respondents said they would like organizations to give them more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive, including options on advertisements, special offers, articles, newsletters, white papers and other specific content options.
  • More than 80 percent of participants favor doing business with organizations that use opt-in permission to send them email.
  • Monthly emails and content and frequency options positively impacted a company’s reputation.
  • Three of every four respondents prefer engaging with organizations that exhibit strong privacy practices.
  • Only 12 percent of respondents acknowledged making one or more purchases from businesses they did not know.

Online Business Practices to Avoid

  • As many as one in four respondents lose some degree of faith in an organization that is unable to deliver email reliably.
  • Daily email messages ranked with pop-up advertisements as the most damaging online tactics to a company’s online reputation.
  • On average, about 80 percent of respondents are not comfortable with businesses sharing their email address.
  • Internet users believe that about two thirds of companies are likely to share their email addresses with third parties.
  • More than 80 percent feel that a business’ reputation is negatively affected if it shares customer email addresses with third parties.

There are some excellent lessons to be learned from this information.

  1. Trust the client to know what they want and when they want it.
  2. As discussed in my previous post, use of an opt-in mailing list is a business advantage.
  3. If you don’t already, have a strong privacy policy on your website.  Our website has a privacy policy that is linked on all pages of the website – while it’s not viewed very often by visitors to the website, I have often referred to the policy with customers requesting information about how we handle their private information.
  4. Do not share your customer’s email addresses.  Plus, when you say you will not share their email addresses, don’t!  Even if you think it will help your business, it will only hurt your reputation!

Are you dealing with your customers via email?  I’m aware of several auction companies that regularly dissuade customers from contacting them via email.  If you’re not, you are forcing your customers to interact with you in ways they would rather not, and in the end you are likely losing business.  We have several customers that we interact with solely on an email basis – several of them are our largest auction buyers who we have never met in person much less talked to on the phone.

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Marketers continuing to increase online advertising

On May 27, 2008, In Auction, By John

MediaBuyerPlanner has the breakdown of the recent 2008 State of the Marketer report.  Highlights include:

Online advertising spend is expected grow at a rapid rate, with 90 percent of marketers saying they will continue to increase their direct online advertising budgets – and 15 percent saying they will “radically” increase online ad spend.

Moreover, some 78 percent of marketers say they will increase their social media spend; 74 percent say they will increase their direct email spend; and 65 percent say they will increase their mobile texting/SMS spend.

Overall, more than 40 percent of marketers have radically increased their budgets for online advertising from three years ago.

If you haven’t already figured it out, big business is moving online in a big way in the next half decade.  What this means for the traditional marketing mediums of newspaper and magazine, I’m not sure.  However, I do know it means our marketing of auctions and real estate needs to continue to evolve towards an increased online presence.

While we’ve added a facebook page for our company, and have discussed a regular blog feature to our website, we’ve not yet begun to spend significant amounts in direct online advertising.  We do include our higher end properties in large targeted online marketing campaigns, and our smaller projects all feature targeted online marketing.  However, In order to stay competitive, and ahead of the curve, it will increasingly become important to move our marketing dollars from newspaper and magazine mediums to online mediums.

To illustrate this point, our website has received over 18,000 unique visitors in the past 9 months.  Of this traffic 30% came directly to the site.  The other 70% came to the site either by a search engine or referral from another web site.  In fact, our top five traffic sources are: Google (31% of all traffic – with 8 of the top 10 search words our business name or an iteration of the name); direct traffic (30%); midwestauctions.com (5% – an online auction portal where all our auctions are advertised); kstp.com (5% – a television story in which I was interviewed concerning the auction of the Armstrong-Quinlan Mansion); and oldhouses.com (4% – an online ad campaign for the Armstrong-Quinlan auction).

If we spend 70% of our marketing dollars in print media that drives 30% of our online traffic, and 30% of our marketing dollars in online media that drives 70% of our online traffic, what would the results be if flipped the spending?  Would we drive the growth of our business?  Would we reach an entirely new clientele that would sustain our growth, and push our company to the next level?

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