The Social Media Budget Question

One of the questions coming up a lot these days, is what kind of budget a company should be investing in a social media program. The answer to this often dictates how - of if - a brand builds out a program.

One good starting point is to look at the rest of the marketing spend. A company with $5 MM in revenue is probably already spending $250-500k in marketing and promotion. Taking 5-10% out of that budget provides about $15-50k for social. Now remember, social is a way to extend marketing programs, not replace them. So going line by line thru the budget should enable you to identify campaigns with lower response rates, so that you can spend resources adding a social component to the effective ones. Also, some of these costs include soft costs and salaries. Looking at your employees' task lists should help you fins a spot where they can re-allocate some of their time.

Now let's say you are a company with around a $10MM Marketing budget. Does that mean you should be spending $500k-$1MM on social? Well, you have to look at what "social" really means. Building applications on Facebook or for mobile may seem to fall into the social bucket, but they are really just traditional online marketing vehicles in a social channel. In fact, I'd argue that trying to build "viral videos" (a term we laugh at) is simply trying to build a TV commercial in a non-traditional medium.

So what's "social" then? We'd say "social" is the engagement part of marketing. And that engagement involves listening and talking. So if you are asking how much money you should dedicate to "social," what your really need to look at is how much time you need to spend on publicly interacting with your consumers and industry influencers. This involves man hours, both amongst current employees and new team members. And it's going to involve content creation. Finally, it's going to involve monitoring and listening tools, and people who know how to effectively use them.

At the end of the day, what number does this equal? Not to sound squishy, but it varies. An effective social campaign is going to stimulate conversation, and facilitate the sharing of content between customers. So you need budget for monitoring tools, budget for content, and budget fro people. The amount of that budget is based on your goals, market size and the size of your customer base.

Give up on the idea of a balanced right/left brained marketer!

Here is my view on why large organizations should stop spending too much time looking for the perfect marketer and focus on the enlightened marketer that knows their limits and appreciates them because it allows them to find meet or get to know their “better-half” in the work world.

Over the last 10 years web analytics has struggled w/ the concept of how to inform decision makers w/ the data they need to make judgment calls on projects and programs that are designed to drive specific business outcomes. Typically the web/business analyst "crunches-the-numbers" and then delivers a report that has a most likely outcome scenario built to prove or disprove a given idea.

More recently analysts have been charged, by good business, managers to deliver positive outcomes by providing a wide variety of options rather than single minded best “chance” solution. It is my belief that business managers are providing this direction because they are learning that they don’t always have the best ideas, and they are getting more comfortable w/ looking at things from another point of view, and thereby want insight not reports.

The mandate that analysts deliver insights not reporting means that the analyst must start considering options not delivered to them in the analytics brief or directly by their manager, and w/o being omniscient this means that the good analyst will begin building deep relationships w/ program managers, creatives, project leads, and CSRs on a regular basis, so as to get more perspective on how to view the massive data sets that they are required to collect, filter and qualify.

In the last year what I've seen start happening at least at the enterprise level is the abandoning of the idea of a balanced right brain/left brain in a single person and more of the concept of building a good marriage between the analyst and the marketer/creative/designer. I think this is the future of the enterprise and most forward thinking organizations.

Today, technology has made it is easier than ever to implement specialists in a collaborative workforce. I think we will begin to see more and more teams begin to deep relationship in the work place where analysts and creative sit next to each other and volley ideas back and forth or problem solve together where each party follows a commonly held ideation process, but is charged or even to approach the task in a uniquely different way.

While applying the word “renaissance” to the new filed of digital-social-collaborative marketing may get a few cheeky gins cast my way, remember the reason the "real" renaissance was able to happen in the first place was that technology started a trend toward the division of labor that allowed specialists to have the time to hone their craft and appreciate the life they have chosen for themselves, thereby freeing them from the task of being a one-man-band.

We need more specialist nows, not more generalists

- X

What is required to be a good social media analyst?

Here is a short list of concepts, credentials, potentials and requirements that I’ve used to build and train Social Media Analysts over the last 2-3 years. If you’re thinking about social media analysis as a profession, I’d recommend checking off all the readings on this page and then building or reflecting these potentialities and capabilities in your resume.

Checklist for a solid SM Analyst

1. Must understand social networks and have a general understanding of the basics of network theory that anyone w/ a life sciences background would have picked up in a university level Biology or O-Chem class.
2. At least 6months to 1 year working as a SEO Marketing tactician (and should have a firm grasp of what drives activity in the long tail)
3. Should be a life-long-student of Psychology or Anthropology and specifically have a high interest in the relationships between digital technology, communication and epistemology.
4. Have some background in User Experience Testing, or Digital Marketing or Online advertising.
5. A high level of curiosity and some of your own well developed insights about the evolving web (mobile, semantic web, augmented reality) and where these are headed over the next 5-10 years.

Love to #mobil, #social, #lbs? - We're hiring

If you are a power user of one or all of the following: Gowalla, Foursquare, Twitter and Yelp we want to talk to you!

Social3i is seeking a highly motivated individual to help us develop and manage social media and mobile marketing programs for one of our clients. The successful candidate will serve as the client's mobile marketing resource for #mobil, #social, #lbs #location solutions.

Check out our Jobs page for more info.

Cleaning Up vs Starting Over

A continuing theme on this blog, as well as in our service offerings, is that social media is no longer new. In fact, many companies are on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th CMO's since someone launched the first social page for the brand.

As a matter of due process, we encourage our clients to do a comprehensive listening and monitoring exercise before getting started on a social program. We like to find out where the brand already has influence, fans or at least a presence. Once those presences are identified, the people who are now "officially" in charge of the social program need to determine what to do with them. You can embrace these rogue presences, blow them up, or figure out how to make them an extended part of an overall campaign.

Consider a few case studies from the past.

1) The flagship product of a huge technology company decided to start a Facebook page. Lo and behold, a young man in Europe had already started a page, and had more than 7,000 fans. The brand could have shut him down. They could have called Facebook directly. But instead, we did the smart thing, and worked with the young man. He was thrilled that he had been noticed. He didn't want money or product. He just wanted access - and to be "part" of the program.

Starting a 2nd page to compete with him would have been a time intensive effort. Shutting him down could have been a PR debacle. But honestly communicating with him allowed us to partner together, and use his 7,000 Fans as a starting point for a Page that will soon eclipse 100,000 Fans. Over time, the original Fan lost interest, and the Page is now cared for by a host of other agencies and community managers.

2) Chex Mix is not and has never been a client. But a while back, I wrote about a very clever Twitter account, in which @Chex_Mix had become prolific in his/her tweeting about what is basically a very boring brand. Later that week, I received an email from @Chex_Mix who confessed he/she did not work for General Mills or Chex. He/she just liked the snack and wanted to be part of the extended team. Soon, General Mills reached out to him/her. He/she was willing and ready to work with their team. But then communication stopped. It appears General Mills will go out and hire some social media coordinator to try to replicate the role that they already have someone volunteering to do. Why not bring @Chex_Mix to the payroll, provide some guidance and coaching, and leverage this opportunity? Seems to me that Gen Mills is being pretty silly.

Rogue presences:

Now what about the less successful presences? Suppose somewhat has hijacked a url and has 14 people and 23 bots following you. I don't think it's brain surgery to suggest rounding up all of those presences and trying to blow them up. You might start by asking the owner for log-in credentials, sweetening the offer with a gift card or something just to be respectful. If they refuse to reply, you might try to go directly to the channels. You'll need to show you are an official representative of the brand. In most cases, the channel has no reason to allow a dead profile to take up valuable real estate on a url that you want to drive traffic to. A side door in these situations is the ad sales team. Few people in the world are more motivated to help a marketing person than an ad sales rep who is one favor away from a deal. Sure, it stinks that you need to sink some money into it, but consider it your "slow tax." If your company was on the ball 3 years ago, you'd have locked down the profile. Sometimes it's good to save the brain damage and lawyers fees and just buy an ad.

We'll add more case studies to this post in the future. Let us know if you have any stories of you own.