Social Media: The Five Steps for Long Term Success: The Event Mechanic! Maturity Model
I have been doing a lot of research in the past year on social media. In that time, I have been trying to figure out how to separate the ‘sizzle from the steak’ and come up with a clear road map to help people who are starting out in social media, or perhaps those who are floundering and don’t know how to rescue their effort.
1) Philosophy
In order for social media to work, you’re going to want to subscribe to the following:
1)you want to connect people(not just to you);
2)you want to know more about your customers, their customers and what they need the marketplace to provide;
3)you need to be in this for the long term;
4)you need to be consistent in your content provision( every day, three days a week, etc.);
5)you have to provide valuable content for free without hope for immediate return;
6)everyone is invited, you might treat certain people in your sphere, but everyone is welcome to join;
7)you have to interact if your audience actually engages with you;
8)you must be authentic in your goals.
Hopefully the main tenets of your corporate mission and values meet some or all of the above. If none do, social media will not work for you.
Take some time to evaluate the above before proceeding to the next step.
If you don’t know your customer base intimately(come on by honest with this one), do detailed market research on what information the customers in your marketplace need and how(and when) they want to receive it.
2) Knowledge of Customer
Next you are going to need to build an audience to whom you’ll target your content efforts. These ‘straw men’ are called ‘target personas’. And what exactly is a target persona and how do you develop them? Part of this is a repeat of a past article I wrote earlier, but it’s worth saying again:
A target persona is a model of an ideal customer which incorporates primary research and data, such as income and gender, with personality traits, such as goals, attitudes, behaviors and interests. All of this is put together in a short statement which describes the ideal customer’s personality as it relates to your business.
Let’s get started on how to develop your target personas:
• Start with three types of customers who you’d like to develop into target personas;
• Go into your customer data. Once you have chosen three types of customer, answer as many questions about them as you can, using the information you already have. Look at averages and aggregate data to get some of the basic information about your personas—age, income, shopping habits, average spend and frequency of visits to your site. If you don’t have all of the information, use what you know to fill in the blanks. Make sure you update this information as you learn more about your customer segments;
• Write a summary for each target persona. Aggregate what you’ve learned from your customer data and what you have observed or instinctually know and use this information to write a summary which describes this “perfect customer.” Include his/her likes and interests, goals and motivations, interactions with your site and other relevant information. Keep the summary interesting and brief and write it as if you’re describing someone you know. Give your personas names as well as pictures to make them real;
Creating your target personas will help you better understand your customers and what influences their interactions with you. You can improve your customer’s online and offline experiences much more easily, and help people throughout the company have a uniform understanding of your customers, their needs and wants. Your target personas allow you to develop more tailored marketing strategies meant to reach people, not data. Continually updating, modifying and adding to your personas as you learn more about your customers and your target audience will keep your marketing fresh, relevant, personal and effective.
Remember to do this both for current and future customers as they may be different.
3)Strategy to meet Philosophy
Assuming you have found out what your customers want, now is the time to build the strategy. It should be assumed that to ‘reach the dark corners’, that you will need to show evidence of your expertise in the market which is not product centric. You’ll therefore need to become a content producer through blogs, e-books, articles, have experts contribute to industry publications, etc.
OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the four major elements:
Content strategy
Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.
You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.
As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.
In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.
Search Engine Optimization strategy
This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).
Pay Per Click strategy
One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.
Inbound Link strategy
Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.
Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.
4) Tactics to meet the Strategy
Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.
Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.
Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.
5) Measurement
In order to be able to know whether you are successful at this social media effort, you are going to need to set up some benchmarks by which to measure your progress.
Examples you might use are:
Members of a LinkedIn or Facebook group
Followers on Twitter
Google ranking for your top 30 key words
Number of inbound links to your content pages
Number of average comments per blog post
And the ROI driven ones:
Number of new customers
Amount of revenue generated by new customers
Remember that your effort may take six or months, so don’t make your measurements too severe you may fail before you start!
Also remember that the ROI case is what you will need to do to get resources for the plan above, so make sure you can argue the case in front of your boss to get money and people to help you!
1) Philosophy
In order for social media to work, you’re going to want to subscribe to the following:
1)you want to connect people(not just to you);
2)you want to know more about your customers, their customers and what they need the marketplace to provide;
3)you need to be in this for the long term;
4)you need to be consistent in your content provision( every day, three days a week, etc.);
5)you have to provide valuable content for free without hope for immediate return;
6)everyone is invited, you might treat certain people in your sphere, but everyone is welcome to join;
7)you have to interact if your audience actually engages with you;
8)you must be authentic in your goals.
Hopefully the main tenets of your corporate mission and values meet some or all of the above. If none do, social media will not work for you.
Take some time to evaluate the above before proceeding to the next step.
If you don’t know your customer base intimately(come on by honest with this one), do detailed market research on what information the customers in your marketplace need and how(and when) they want to receive it.
2) Knowledge of Customer
Next you are going to need to build an audience to whom you’ll target your content efforts. These ‘straw men’ are called ‘target personas’. And what exactly is a target persona and how do you develop them? Part of this is a repeat of a past article I wrote earlier, but it’s worth saying again:
A target persona is a model of an ideal customer which incorporates primary research and data, such as income and gender, with personality traits, such as goals, attitudes, behaviors and interests. All of this is put together in a short statement which describes the ideal customer’s personality as it relates to your business.
Let’s get started on how to develop your target personas:
• Start with three types of customers who you’d like to develop into target personas;
• Go into your customer data. Once you have chosen three types of customer, answer as many questions about them as you can, using the information you already have. Look at averages and aggregate data to get some of the basic information about your personas—age, income, shopping habits, average spend and frequency of visits to your site. If you don’t have all of the information, use what you know to fill in the blanks. Make sure you update this information as you learn more about your customer segments;
• Write a summary for each target persona. Aggregate what you’ve learned from your customer data and what you have observed or instinctually know and use this information to write a summary which describes this “perfect customer.” Include his/her likes and interests, goals and motivations, interactions with your site and other relevant information. Keep the summary interesting and brief and write it as if you’re describing someone you know. Give your personas names as well as pictures to make them real;
Creating your target personas will help you better understand your customers and what influences their interactions with you. You can improve your customer’s online and offline experiences much more easily, and help people throughout the company have a uniform understanding of your customers, their needs and wants. Your target personas allow you to develop more tailored marketing strategies meant to reach people, not data. Continually updating, modifying and adding to your personas as you learn more about your customers and your target audience will keep your marketing fresh, relevant, personal and effective.
Remember to do this both for current and future customers as they may be different.
3)Strategy to meet Philosophy
Assuming you have found out what your customers want, now is the time to build the strategy. It should be assumed that to ‘reach the dark corners’, that you will need to show evidence of your expertise in the market which is not product centric. You’ll therefore need to become a content producer through blogs, e-books, articles, have experts contribute to industry publications, etc.
OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the four major elements:
Content strategy
Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.
You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.
As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.
In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.
Search Engine Optimization strategy
This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).
Pay Per Click strategy
One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.
Inbound Link strategy
Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.
Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.
4) Tactics to meet the Strategy
Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.
Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.
Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.
5) Measurement
In order to be able to know whether you are successful at this social media effort, you are going to need to set up some benchmarks by which to measure your progress.
Examples you might use are:
Members of a LinkedIn or Facebook group
Followers on Twitter
Google ranking for your top 30 key words
Number of inbound links to your content pages
Number of average comments per blog post
And the ROI driven ones:
Number of new customers
Amount of revenue generated by new customers
Remember that your effort may take six or months, so don’t make your measurements too severe you may fail before you start!
Also remember that the ROI case is what you will need to do to get resources for the plan above, so make sure you can argue the case in front of your boss to get money and people to help you!
Labels: maturity model, social media, the event mechanic
posted by warwick at
10:34 AM
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