social3i

New Facebook Opportunities

2010-11-10T12:43:00.001-08:00

Facebook recently added some new services such as "Places, Questions, and Groups" and expanded their services on "Photos and Likes". Mashable also does a good job of explaining their new services in this article. Here are a few of our ideas on ways to leverage these updates and services, and create value.

1) Photos
Photos are an integral part of Facebook's value. As Facebook continues to upgrade their photo offering and sharing features, there will be more opportunity to expand your brand and engage your customers and advocates. Photos also help bring your companies Facebook page to life. Businesses should not overlook the interaction power and sharing opportunities that photos can create between you and your customers. Video falls into a similar category as photos.

2) Groups
You can read more in this previous article on facebook's new groups in a weekly recap. The new group features allow for live chat, and can be used for business purposes by creating more targeted customer focus groups or event oriented groups. Be aware though, when using groups you must have a definitive strategy regarding who you invite, and the purpose of the conversation.

3) Questions
Facebook Questions is an area that will continue to evolve and shape the boundaries of social search. Businesses can take advantage of Facebook Questions by answering these questions as a business and/or thought leader or expert in that particular field. It is also important to tread carefully with this and use as soft sell approach when asking questions as a marketing or informational tool to your community. It is important to note that all questions are open to everyone and live outside of your community, so this needs to be remembered when asking and answering questions.

4) Places
If your business has a physical store or location, than Facebook places is another utility (Foursquare) that can help increase foot traffic, by encouraging people to check-in. An "I was here" message gets delivered to the friends and posted to the place page. So go claim your page, because Facebook has 500+ million users, which means most the people that come into your business are on Facebook and have a network of friends that you can easily reach out to.

5) Likes
Some consider "likes" and "fans" as the end all, which I disagree with. A smaller but more targeted fan base can be far more effective than a large number of likes by unqualified people. However, having more people that "like" your company or page creates a larger distribution network, and therefore has incredible marketing power. There are many creative ways to drive people to "liking" your company, however the most effective way is to have a strategy and be persistent... which I'll save for another post.

7 pages every business Web site must have - Office Live Small Business Community

2010-11-03T21:31:00.000-07:00

7 pages every business Web site must have - Office Live Small Business Community

Facebook Pages Update

2010-11-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

Facebook recently released a new Admin Panel for Facebook Pages. The new panel is designed to make your Facebook Page easier to control and more intuitive than the previous setup.

Now when you click "edit page" under your Page's profile picture it will take you to a screen that looks like this:

The red box indicates the new "top level" admin menu as a column on the left hand side with a "help" link at the bottom.

John Hayden does a good job explaining the changes in further detail HERE.

Social3i on the Road

2010-11-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

It'll be a busy couple of weeks for the Social3i team, and you can find us in a few alternate locations.

Monday 11/1, we'll be at the University of Washington, taking part in a panel discussion for the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship's "Entrepreneur Week."
Wednesday 11/3, we'll be at Williams-Helde Advertising, running a Northwest Entrepreneur Network "eIQ Session" on "Social Media for Startups."
This weekend, our Sports Division heads to LA to participate in activities around the U.S. soccer community and the 2022 World Cup bid.
Next Friday, 11/12, we'll be all over the Northwest Entrepreneur Network's "Entrepreneur University" at the Bellevue Hyatt. Xavier will be moderating a panel entitled, "You Get What You Measure" featuring Rand Fishkin, Galen Ward and Kabir Shahani. It should be a great event. (And don't miss Cranium founder Richard Tait, as he takes the stage for a keynote speech about lessons starting his newest project that launched last week.)

Social Media can Improve your SEO & SEM

2010-10-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

A common question that decision makers ask when referring to a social marketing strategy is a very simple and appropriate one: Why?

Although we are starting to see more and more concrete examples around the ROI of social programs, it has still been a struggle for people to quantify the value of a good social media strategy for brands. Companies are used to seeing the value out of a good SEO or SEM program, because of the direct data analysis that corresponds with them. So here are few reasons of how a good social marketing strategy can affect these more understood initiatives.

Search is becoming social. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is changing and will have to change around the social graph. The reason for this is that the goal of Search Engines is to deliver the best result based on any given search. SEO strategy plays off of this by structuring & optimizing your content and links so that the SE's can read it. However, content is changing from static content to real-time social content. So SEO will have to change around social because the Search Engines are having to change around social media. Bing recently announced a deal with Facebook, where in the Search Results you will see Facebook likes from your friends related to the results. You can imagine the benefit to those companies that have a large or targeted fan base. Google has been testing other social elements, including "tweets" within the results based on keywords. The web is being rebuilt around people and dynamic real-time content, and therefore the strategies for your brand must adapt as well.

As search becomes social, naturally Search Engine Marketing (SEM) will be affected. Aside from the obvious benefits if SEM platforms start adding social elements within the ads or delivery context, there are other benefits. "Trust Elements" such as Badges, Testimonials and Word-of-mouth conversation are some of the most important factors when building quality landing/conversion pages, therefore they can have a significant impact when measuring SEM conversion rates. As you pay to drive clicks to a certain landing page, showing that you are engaging with current customers via social channels can be a statistically significant influence on your conversion rates for this traffic. In past SEM campaigns I have run, I saw conversion rates jump by over 30% by clearly showing we were actively social, and allowing clients to read the natural conversation taking place around our brand and products. We also included 'twitter testimonials' on our conversion pages with the twitter handles so people could validate the claims, because the conversations are live on the web.

So not only will social marketing add tremendous value independently of Search Engines, it can also add measurable value to the current programs you have in place within the more understood "search" environment.

Busy Seattle Technology Marketing Week

2010-10-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

If you're in technology marketing and advertising, this is going to be a busy week.

Tuesday: Social Media Club October Event "Building Ambassadors Using Social Media" at The Canal in Ballard, 5300 34th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107 (6-9pm)

Wednesday: TechFlash Meetup at Spitfire Grill, 2219 4th Avenue Seattle, WA (5-8pm)

Thursday: NWIAG.com October Event at Havana's Social, 1010 E. Pike St, Seattle, WA 98122. (5-9pm)

See you all there.

The sFund and Space Travel

2010-10-22T15:15:00.001-07:00

This week's Headlines in Social Media

The big story of the week is the announcement that Kleiner Perkins, Amazon, Zynga, Facebook, Comcast and others are all betting on Social.

"Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy." -KPCB Partner Bing Gordon

Together these giants launched the 'sFund' this week, which will be a $250 million dollar fund dedicated to funding entrepreneurs and companies delivery social applications and advancing the social web. Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg says:

"The Web is being rebuilt around people"

It is great to see that companies of this magnitude and are combing their resources to drive further innovation in the "social web". One of the first investments for the fund is "Cafebots" which is in stealth but is being dubbed as a "Friend Relationship Management" service with the goal of helping users make better use of their social graphs. This gives an idea of the next generation of companies that will add value to the social web.

Foursquare

An Astronaut checked into Foursquare from outer Space today which is a first in the realm of outer space social media. It kicks off a partnership between NASA and Foursquare helping to promote other NASA venues that the rest of us may be able to check-in to.

This Week's Headlines in Social Media

2010-10-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

According to a recent study, Social Media is now more popular than email on mobile devices (based on the amount of hours spent daily). The article from Mashable also goes on to state that social media is more popular in rapid growth markets worldwide, and takes up more of their time on PC's than email does. Overall it is just another reminder of the tremendous growth of Social Media worldwide.

Facebook & Bing Partnership

Facebook and Bing have announced a new partnership to integrate "like" data and profile search to Bing. This article from Mashable does a good job of describing some of the advantages and unique ways that these companies are leading the innovation in social search.

Measuring Social Media - Eventbrite's Internal Case Study:

For Eventbrite Social Media = Real Dollars. When someone shares something on their event ticketing site they have been able to break it down to real dollar values. They also go on to state: "The hyper-relevancy of the social graph breeds deeper engagement, greater sales and stickier audiences."

So what is the actual value of the various platforms? According to Eventbrite:

"Our most recent data shows that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through our ”email friends” application equals $2.34. On an aggregate level across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and our email share tool, each share equals $1.78 in ticket sales. We’re seeing this number improve every week with the most recent four-week average equaling $1.87."

Here is what the social commerce cycle looks like for them:

Event ticketing made social through Eventbrite

Keep in mind events are inherently social and are directly engaging their users to an ecommerce transaction, however statistics like these are great to see the value that social media can bring. Eventbrite also states that Facebook has surpassed Google as their #1 site for referring traffic, and that one share on Facebook brings on average of 11 visits back to Eventbrite.

Learn how Eventbrite went about quantifying their data and building this social commerce case study.

Weekly Social Recap

2010-10-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

Facebook

This week Facebook unveiled "Groups" which gives users a place to participate in various activities such as document sharing, chat, photo-tagging and email lists with a select group of friends. Other than the name this is very different than their previous "group" functionality. This was built internally by Facebook with an effort to mirror "real-world" groups, allowing users to control the distribution of their messages, and build them around multiple contexts. Zuckerberg promises, something “so simple that everyone on the site will want to interact with it.”

Here is good demo & overview from Mashables' Ben Parr:

Twitter

For many of us Twitter's new User Interface or User Experience (UI / UX) was implemented this week. Twitter has been busy rolling out it's redesign over the last few weeks. The redesign integrates multimedia into the stream on "Twitter.com" taking elements from many of the third-party applications available. So far the response has been positive, and likely the redesign will help create stickiness on the "Twitter.com" website versus sending their users elsewhere across the web. This also opens a new world of revenue and advertising opportunities for them.

Interesting uses of Social Media

Staples

Staples is a great example of a big brand using their social media channels in creative ways. They use their Twitter Page for community updates, customer support, and overall feedback. With several writers under various tags (^MO) they have managed to give the brand a personality and even mix in some humor. They have also devised a creative way to create new followers, like donating a dollar to charities of your choice for each new follower.

Staples has also had success with their Facebook Page. They created an app that lets you digitally shred or edit Facebook photos of yourself, they highlight their weekly deals, have a download button for their iphone app, have fun facts about the company, and offer other creative engagement strategies.

Social Media Strategies at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts

2010-10-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

Social Media Strategies, a course we've taught close to 10 times now, is tomorrow at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts. Past classes have included folks from ad agencies, retail firms, broadcasting companies and more, so it's always a great day of discussion. Thanks Larry Asher and Linda Hunt for continuing to invite us quarter after quarter. See you tomorrow.

Reviewing Paper.li

2010-10-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of semi-useless social media tools out there. One that we are liking more and more is Paper.li.

In a nutshell, it takes your Twitter feed, and distills it into a front page of a newspaper, so you can scan all the important topics you care about in one shot. It even splits them into categories like Sports, Media, Politics, Technolgy, etc....

Now, it only grabs feeds from the people you follow, so if you are one of those "uber important" types that only gets followed themselves, then it's not going to be much good. And if you follow a bunch of people that tell you about their sandwich, then you'll have a boring paper.li as well.

Here's part of the Monday morning grab from http://www.paper.li/social3i

Job Openings - Social Media / Community Leads

2010-09-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

We're getting ready to roll out some job descriptions for a couple of Social Media / Community Leads. But before we put together a formal document, we want to get some referrals from the Seattle social media community.

There are a number of roles to fill, and they vary between placing people with clients, having folks join our team, and having some specialists help with some freelance project based work. So let us know if you know anyone who fits one or more of these skill sets:

Video production and editing (Non broadcast quality)
Bi-lingual (Spanish and English) writing skills
Graphic Design and light Web coding
Experience driving application downloads
Mobile marketing campaign experience
Sports Retail / CPG experience

Send inquiries to andy@social3i.com

New Favorite Social Media Tool - Flavors.me

2010-09-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

Nothing revolutionary here, and I may be a little late to the ballgame on this one. But I'm having a lot of success working with Flavors.me as a super simple, 10 minute way to build out nice looking web properties.

There's nothing genius in the concept, but the execution is unbelievably quick and easy. In about 20 clicks, you can aggregate together all your social feeds, upload background pictures, change the font colors, and - if you choose too (I haven't yet) - grab a custom url. So if you publish for multiple blogs, in theory you could grab all the rss feeds from those blogs, and suck them into your single Flavors.me page.

There's real value in the system if you are struggling with clients who have multiple locations, and can't decide if they should have different url's, different Facebook pages, etc... This gives you a nice aggregation capability.

For personal branding, I can't think of anything much easier. Get your resume, photos, designs, feeds, reading lists, etc... all dragged into one place for an employer / client to look through, and save them the hassle of google.

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

2 Weeks With the iPad

2010-09-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not necessarily a gadget guy. I like the toys, but I'm generally towards the tail end of the early adopters. For me to spend a lot of money on something, it needs to be good enough to justify replacing the time and energy I've already invested on something else.

I usually get pushed over the edge when I see that someone I respect has adopted the technology into their everyday life. So a few weeks ago, after I watched one of our clients taking notes on his slick little tablet, I went forth and joined the iPad nation.

Here are some notes now that I'm two weeks in:

- Super solid notetaking device. Easier and less intrusive than a laptop. Easy to share notes with everyone in the room.

- Love Keynote. Easy to make presentations on the fly. In fact, I was even able to build a quick soccer field in order to diagram some plays and show my youth team the starting lineup and subs.

- Love Flipbook. Super cool app for turning my Twitter and Facebook feeds into a mini-magazine.

- Haven't downloaded spreadsheet apps yet. This is a glaring hole so far, as I'd love to quickly run numbers.

- Netflix is fantastic. It's the easiest way I've ever seen for me to just quickly turn on a device and catch up on whatever series I happen to be watching all the way thru.

- Also, when I'm at my desk I find myself just using it for monitoring email and Pandora, so I don't have to bother with having it open on my desktop.

I haven't really gotten into games or anything yet. Also, I can't say I use the browser or email any differently that I'd use my iPhone, so that's not a real differentiator. And I'm just starting to get into the speech recognition stuff, but I haven't really nailed that yet.

Overall, it feels like there's a decent learning curve between making the device a really cool photo album and a fully functional work device. More to come.

The Social Media Budget Question

2010-08-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-08-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-08-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

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.

The Social Marketing Choice - Retainer Based Agency Vs In-House

2010-07-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

I think we can all agree that adding Social to your Integrated Marketing Strategy is no longer a question of "If" but rather "How?" But unlike TV or Print ads, Social is a funny animal. It really doesn't fit in one department. In Comcast's world, it's all customer support. Dell uses it for Product Development. And Starbucks leverages it for pure Marketing.

For smaller companies, it's hard to justify a full headcount OR retainer based agency fees going to manage Facebook. Now if you are really lucky, like Ben Bridge Jewelers, you have someone uber-talented who just steps up and takes it over for you. What's more likely is that you have someone uber-talented that doesn't step up. So while your Marketing geniuses are struggling with the build vs buy decision, someone down in Purchasing has 24,000 Twitter followers and is known as a Seattle Restaurant guru.

So, since a "Social Media Marketing Coordinator" can be a tough position to define, many companies just punt the whole thing and go the retainer based agency route. So what's right for you?

Consideration 1: Budget

Yes, the world is dictated by money. Sad, but true. And if you are a big company and don't have $5-$10k a month to spend on an agency, this is probably not your route. Now, if you run a few coffee shops or a winery, there are folks who will execute your Facebook and Twitter feeds for $1-3k a month. This can be a good deal. But if you fall in the world where you are a big company with no social budget, the agency route is tough. You are going to pay an agency the same type of hourly rates you'd pay a copywriter or designer. It's simply a necessity of them having to cover the overhead and turn a profit on the role. And if it's taking away from a media spend, they need to make the same margin as they would have on the media. So it gets pretty spendy.

Consideration 2: Interaction

There are two ways to look at social. One way is to say that every Tweet, Facebook post or blog comment is simply a text version of an ad banner that is an announcement to some community, The more effective approach is to consider your copy a conversation starter or enhancer. If you were at dinner, you wouldn't start a good story, then sneak away for the bathroom and never come back. You'd start the story, get to the punchline, then continue to converse as others joined in. If you want the latter, unless you have a nice budget, you probably want to train your folks in-house. 10 hours a week of engagement from an agency will not get you very far.

Consideration 3: In-House Talent

You probably have employees who you've deemed to be accountants, laborers, tech staff, support, design, etc...Do any of these employees have the chops to run a cross-department social program? It's possible they do. One way to find out is to simply look across Twitter and Facebook and see if any of your folks have a strong presence. Or, do a google search and find out if anyone has a prominent blog. We worked with one company who did an influencer identification report, only to find 3 of the top 10 influencers in the blogosphere on that topic worked for the company, and were already writing in their spare time.

Consideration 4: Strength of Community / Expertise of Product

We put these together because they kind of come with the same qualifiers. Hiring an agency is great when you have a somewhat generic stream of consciousness that you can fit creative copywriters into. It's also fantastic if you have heavy turnover, as you don't want the face of your social media changing every 3 months (unless you make that your plan.) But if your community demands to speak to a Product Manager or executive, or is asking questions about how to make repairs to a flux capacitor, then about the best an agency can do is act as traffic cop and route the interactions to the right place. This is an excellent of resources if you have significant budget, but harder to do on a shoestring.

In the end, expect a robust presence to require 20-40 hours of dedicated time across multiple people. Figure an agency at between $75-$125 per hour for engagement, management, account teams and any kind of tracking. In-house, you'll be pulling 5-10 hours away from 2-8 people, so figure out what the opportunity cost of that time is. Finally, consider the cost of initial training vs the cost of keeping the expertise outside the walls over the long-term.

10 Upcoming Posts for Companies Expanding their Social Marketing

2010-07-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

Large or small, one tactic we advise our clients to pursue is developing and publishing against an editorial calendar. This helps different people in your organization prepare thoughtful insight in a well-organized fashion, in addition to simply commenting on the topical industry news of the day.

So, as we weave our way through the rest of the 3rd quarter, we thought we would practice what we preach, and lay out the roadmap for our primary content. After speaking with clients and potential clients, this list seems to cover most of the questions facing folks who are just starting to own their company's social marketing programs.

We'll be publishing about 1x a week, and using stories and examples from local companies. If you want to add an anecdote or experience, please email us.

1. The Choice - Agency vs In-House
Social is no longer a “nice to have” part of your Integrated Marketing Plan. The first important question departments have to ask is whether they have the talent in house, or do they need to outsource community management to an agency. Here are some things to think about, and how a couple of companies have made that decision.

2. Cleaning Up or Starting Over

By now, almost every company has some sort of presence somewhere online. Here are some things to think about when learning about your existing presence, and deciding whether to consolidate the channels or just blow everything up and start from scratch.

3. The Budget Question

Everyone has a CFO to explain the spending to. Whether it’s headcount, ad agencies or creative development, you need to come up with a reasonable estimate for how much to ask for. Here is some guidance for that deck for the person with the checkbook.

4. Picking a Starting Line for Your Program - The Initial Audit

The old saying holds true - If you don’t know where you are, you can’t get to where you are going. Here are some expensive, moderate, cheap and free tools you may want to look at.

5. The Training Process

Seminars, agencies, consultants, blogs, etc... Everyone has an opinion on what you need to know to be a successful social media marketer. Here's what to look for in a community management team, and what you need to teach them.

6. The Planning Process - Where to begin?

You wouldn’t show up for a TV shoot without a script, so why start a social campaign without a blueprint? We’ll go through some things you need to think about when integrating social into your overall marketing plan.

7. 57 Channels and Nothing’s On

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Slideshare, Flickr, etc....How do you possible choose? We'll go through a few tips for prioritizing.

8. Generating Momentum Internally

The beginning of every program relies on buy-in from your own employees. Here are some ways other companies have gotten internal involvement from day one.

9. Creating Benchmarks

What does progress look like? How do you know if you are attracting the right fans? We’ll go through a few ways to develop metrics and evaluate your success rate.

10. Harnessing the Love of your Customers

Whether you realize it or not, you have super-fans out there. Here’s how to find and reach out to them.

If you have other topic suggestions, or want to contribute your own experience, just let us know.

Doing more with less... seriously!

2010-07-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to @jess3 for showing us this video from an architecture student in Hong Kong who, because of the space and apartments being so expensive, decided to design a 344 sq. ft. apartment that has 24 totally livable rooms. This kind of focused-highly-analytical-thinking is exactly the kind of thing that sets our brains on fire. After watching this I'm thinking in a totally different way about 300sq of poorly used space in my basement. :-)

Who is Social3i

2010-07-16T15:07:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation for the complete story.

Social3i company info

View more presentations from social3i.

Mixing Social Marketing Into Your Email Program

2010-07-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Our colleague Travis Young, who does a ton of email marketing, alerted us to this upcoming announcement from Mailchimp. As social marketing evolves from the fringes of the budget, and becomes even more integrated with all parts of the marketing mix, we expect to see more features like this move into programs and services you've been using for years.

Mailchimp's upcoming release involves social marketing features that you would have had to add by hand yourself before, if you even thought to include such integration. So, this release is unique in the blending of social features with all the rest of the stuff they already do – and the changing the expectations of interacting with email marketing. Microsoft’s new Outlook 2010 features, and existing plugins already focus on the social aspect of knowing those you email with.

The main point may be their quote, "There are real people behind all those email address on your mailing list, and MailChimp's new features will help you get to know them.” Let us know if you are using email programs with similar opportunities to integrate social with email.

75 million reasons you should be considering mobile marketing programs

2010-07-08T14:22:00.001-07:00

There Are 75 Million US Adults On The Mobile Internet, More Than Half Of Them Daily. So says new Pew Internet Study.

Here are a few relevant data points from the report:

82% of Pew survey respondents said they owned a mobile phone. That translates into roughly 187 million, out of 228 million US adults overall.
38% – 40% of that population goes online from their handsets, or about 75 million people (for 18-29 yr olds that number is 65%)
55% of mobile Internet users are online via their mobile phones at least once a day and 43% are access the mobile Internet “several times a day.”

Just for fun - The LeBron Sweepstakes Takes Social Center Stage

2010-07-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

Who's the big winner in the LeBron sweepstakes? No, I don't mean what city - what YouTube video is getting the most views for it's enterprising young artists? Any favorites?

Social Marketing Resources for Businesses

2010-07-07T17:12:00.000-07:00

It's taken a few years, but the social media argument for companies is no longer about "If" and more about "How." For good or for bad, articles are popping up everywhere and it's hard to know what's coming from someone with experience, and what is written by someone trying to hit SEO keywords.

Well, this collection of social media resource links is pretty solid. It was aggregated by a group called Social Beach Training, based in the UK. We don't know these guys at all, but I hope when I'm in England this year, I'll be able to stop by and say hi. If you have more resources to share, send them on to us and we'll include them.

Join Us Next Week at NWEN's eIQ - Social Media for Start-ups

2010-07-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Next week, we'll be at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, for an event focused on coaching entrepreneurs, authors, small business owners and designers on how to leverage their social marketing presences. We've been asked to cover the following topics, and will likely go a little deeper since this crowd is generally pretty advanced.

• The basics: key terms, the players, and success stories.
• How companies can build and manage their reputation through social networking sites.
• The role of blogs (your own and outsiders’) in spreading news about your organization.
• Why and how to put together your own audio/video content and build an audience for it.
• Measuring the success of your social networking efforts.

When: Wednesday, July 14 , 3:30 - 5:30pm | Where: Williams-Helde Marketing Communication 711 Sixth Avenue North, Suite 200 Seattle, Washington 98109.

Hope to see you there.

What Social Channels Do I Need to Be On?

2010-07-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Slideshare, Twitter, etc.... the list of social media channels you or your company can participate in goes on endlessly. So if you are an established business, start-up, or individual entrepreneur, how do you know where you need a presence?

Simple answer: There's no simple answer. Each one of these channels has features that cater to specific audiences. Some of them even frown upon signing up as a business. But while it's impossible to try to maintain an active presence in more than 3-7 places, there are a few good reasons for owning your brand name on as many pieces of online real estate as possible. First, there's the SEO benefit of owning the url's of your brand name. But even more importantly, it's a good way to defend yourself against nefarious people or unhappy customers who want to develop their own "presence" on one of these channels. Another thing to remember is the power of joining forums in your industry. Getting your brand name, or your CEO's name, known as a thought leader in the places you are already reading, is a strong way to build influence.

As a social marketing consultancy, it's important for us to test just about everything out. So we probably have a broader presence than a normal person or company needs. But we need to understand what channels work best for retailers, organizations, charities, authors, B2B companies and more.

Now, this process can become pretty unwieldy, so we like using DandyID to keep track of everything for us. In addition to consolidating all of our presences in one place, it also has some pretty nifty widgets if you want to install your list directly into other channels.

So, we of course have a robust presence on LinkedIn:

But here are a few other places we've been setting up and testing lately. Not all of them have content yet. Keep up with our DandyID spot to follow where we add more channels.

Let us know what else you think we should be testing, and we'll give it a whirl.

How Much Should I Be Spending on Social Marketing?

2010-07-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

(Part 2 in our series on "Getting Started in Social Marketing")

Over the last year, just about every brand has accepted and embraced that Social Marketing is a “must have,” not a “nice to have” program in their marketing arsenal. But one aspect that still faces boardroom controversy is how much to actually spend.

Remarkably, while any simple google search can return 3500 articles on “How to make social media work for you,” there are relatively few resources that give you hard data to take to the CEO. Based on our experiences, and a few pieces of data we’ve pulled from research reports, here’s at least a framework you can work around.

The Top Line Overview

On a very high level, social marketing has moved out of the “Discretionary Spending” or “Special Projects” line item of the overall budget and garnered its own classification. Qualitiatively, we hear people spending around 5% to 10% of the advertising budget on something that involves “social.” Some reports, such as this one from Avenue Social claim 3-6% of overall ad spending. (Note that the number is 3-6% of ad spending, not marketing spending.)

Now it’s hard to decide how much that number is changing in 2010, since a Coremetrics report about 2008 spending found, “78% marketing professionals saw that social media marketing was a way of getting an edge on their competitors. However, just 7.7% percent of their total online marketing spend was allocated to it compared to 33 percent to online advertising and 28 percent on online promotion design and implementation.” Also notable, is the statistic that
just 10% of companies are not engaging in any social media activity whatsoever.

Comparison to Your Overall Marketing Budget

One thing we can’t forget about is the size of your company’s overall budget. In 2008, the average cost of TV production for a 30 second spot was around $303,000 just to create it. If this is the scenario in which you market, it’s pretty easy to cut development of one spot and suddenly have $25k per month to spend on staffing an internal social marketing team.

Some companies are paralyzed by a lack of resources, accoriding to this report at Marketing Charts. The report says that more than half of companies (54%) say resourcing is a significant problem, and 9 out of 10 businesses (90%) say social media is taking up more time internally than a year ago. This indicates that before launching a social media program, some sort of staffing and training initiative is necessary.

The ROI Question

The research at Marketing Charts also found, “That many companies are experimenting with social media without yet reaping any measurable benefits. Only one-fourth of companies say that they have gained “real, tangible value” from social media, whereas 60% say that they have gained some benefit but nothing concrete.”

But the Econsultancy study found that, “More than half (52%) of companies who are heavily involved in social media marketing say that they have gained real value, compared with only 13% of companies who have “experimented but not done much.”

One way to interpret this data, is that companies need to spend money tomake money, and those that invest and make Social Marketing a real part of the budget are rewarded.

Brands of All Size Increasing Budgets

Forrester estimates at least give a perspective, if not actionable insight, to what the market as a whole will be doing.

They say, “B2B interactive marketing spending will climb to nearly $4.8 billion in 2014 as interactive channels continue to grab a larger share of the marketing pie. B2B marketers will continue to invest heavily in paid search but will also begin to invest in display advertising and emerging marketing tactics such as social and mobile marketing. In order to make the most of these investments, B2B marketers should focus on creating online customer interactions — not just driving leads — and develop a central team to direct emerging media strategy.”

So with all these considerations and estimates, at least 2 companies are coming out and talking about what kind of bets their placing. Australian Discount Airline Jetstar says it will direct 40% of its marketing budget to social media. “We’ve conducted some very successful marketing and PR campaigns via social media in the past 18 months, including YouTube and Twitter, and the response has been phenomenal,” said David May, Jetstar’s head of marketing.

While the top marketers in the world aren’t going to go up to 40%, their increases are becoming significant. Ad Age reports that Unilever says, “In the U.S., where people are spending 25% of their time in some sort of digital engagement, then you should be proportionate. ... You will find that we will be in the 20% areas in markets like the U.S. And you will find we'll be in the single [digits] in markets that are less developed. The company spent only 4% of its $864 million in measured media last year on internet spending, according to Kantar Media, and even doubling wouldn't get it to 20% this year.” However roughly 8-10% spend on digital indicates significant dedication to social. Likewise, P&G, which also doubled its measured U.S. internet spending last year to $100 million, estimates digital is above 10% of its marketing budget.

The Net Net

In conclusion, it’s become fair to estimate that an established company with integrated marketing campaigns, will be spending from 3-10% of their overall marketing budget on social marketing. That number may encompass full-time employees serving roles in community management, the licensing of analytics tools, and application and mobile development. But the good ROI tracking that comes with significant budget outlays should drive crisper, more efficient budget analysis in 2011.

Your 10 Slides When Pitching Social Marketing Internally

2010-07-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

(Part 1 of our series: Getting Started in Social Marketing)

I love the end of June. The dog days of summer bring a combination of family vacations, kids home from school, and weather that makes it hard to stay locked underneath uv lights. Budget wise, it also means the end of Q2, or even more importantly, H1. This is the time companies look into their crystal balls and decide where to scale back, and where to increase spending.

We’ve heard the same question for the last few years at this time. It always starts somethng like, “I know we want to do something in social this quarter, but I just don’t know what. And I don’t know how to free up a huge amount of budget for it.” The biggest difference between 2007 and 2010 though, is by now SOMEONE inside your organization has likely launched a Facebook page or Twitter profile. The number of employees actively blogging about your industry is significantly larger. And the press has caught up, joyfully adding employee blog and twitter feeds for their background research.

So if you are looking for some simple message points for a powerpoint deck to take control of your social marketing, here are a few sections I'd go with.

1) Where are we? It seems like such an easy question, but I’ve gotten solicitiations from people asking us to “start” a social medi aprogram for them. Meanwhile, they haven’t gone thru the due diligence to check all around the web to see where the company or its customers already have an official or unofficial presence. Start with the audit.

2) Who are we? Locked in the file cabinet in every employee’s office is the official positioning statement and messaging of the company. It’s great that everyone internally has a vision of what they want the company to stand for. But then there’s what the public thinks your message and positioning are. If these two things are wildly divergent, it’s a good place to start the process.

3) What are our competitors doing? Is this an area where you are losing market share by not paying attention the same way your arch enemies do, or is it a place to gain market share by leaving them in the dust?

4) Who do we copy? Let’s face it. Even by stealing money from print, radio or TV, you’re still going to be hard pressed to find 6 figures to put into a quarterly social program. So before handing the keys off to an agency, why not peruse the efforts of these agencies and see what works for you. For example, check out Comcast and Alaska Air for customer support, REI is integrating social and traditional advertising, and Starbucks is taking customer feedback and trying to make a multi-national company feel like the coffee shop next store. Then there are your own local pubs, wineries, taco trucks and snowboard shops making this look easy. Put together a list so your bosses can show that this isn’t such a scary proposition.

5) Who SHOULDN’T we copy? The real trick in budget requests is finding that number that doesn’t seem luxurious, but also allows everyone to sleep at night. Find examples of companies that are completely blowing it, either by a lack of quality, or an obvious excess amount of time being spent on negligble return. Two quick eamples – search for “Nestle Facebook” or “Motrin Momy Blogger.”

6) Who wants to own this? Social marketing isn’t easy. If you are doing a good job, you should get overrun with comunication from your influential customers and those who want to evangelize. So where should this live, should be it cross-functional, and how senior should the leaders of the program be? Getting the effort spread across the company turns this from a marketing campaign to a corporate philosophy. Also, you probably wouldn’t ask a 21 year old intern to shoot your TV campaign, so why would you put them in charge of your forward facing communication with customers? And who cares what division someone is in if they are the happiest, most dedicated employee in the company. Find the people who care most, then figure out how to set them loose.

7) How we know we’re successful? Every company has a set of metrics that go deeper than sales and expenses. And there are now more than 50 tools to measure the level of conversation about your brand in social channels. If you can get a little eductaed about what these tools can tell you, you can tell the powers that be exactly what you want to get measured on.

8) How does this fit in our current Marketing Plan? Your company has been marketing for years. It’s been successful, or you wouldn’t have a job. So don’t ask social marketing to go live in it’s own silo, away from the talented folks who have been driving messaging, positioning, campaigns and advertising for a long time.

9) How much is it going to cost? Is this a $500k annual project, or can it be done with existing resources and some consulting help? Do you have creative people to throw at the project, or is this going to take a whole new development shop? Can you manage the community aspect with current people, or will you need to bring in and train up a set of Engagement Leads? If the questions above have been well-answered, this kind of falls out pretty easily.

10) Selling the dream. End the deck by showing what the future looks like. Happy customers evangelizing the company, insightful employees supporting their employer, a thriving marketplace where creativity and ideas reign supreme. Unfortunately, most people start with this slide and never sell the details.

Nike, Hyundai, ESPN Leveraging World Cup for Increased Buzz

2010-07-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

According to Adweek, Nike has continued to leverage their World Cup commercial, "Write the Future" to generate an increase in the amount of buzz about their brand. Again, they have been able to do this without the expensive need to actually sponsor the World Cup.

Table is from Adweek.com.

It's interesting to surmise whether Nike is interesting in continuing trying to leverage the ad, or if it's now just riding a wave on the downhill side of the curve. With just 4 teams left, and the U.S. eliminated more than 10 days ago, buzz for the entire event has scaled back to the soccer enthusiasts and interested Germans, Uruguayans, Spanish and Dutch.

The most pain next week will come in meeting rooms at both the ad agencies and social media firms hired by Adidas. What would otherwise be an impressive showing and reason to celebrate must have come at a price exponentially higher than the price paid by Nike.

If you aren't one of the 18,000,000 people to have seen the 3:00 version of the ad, which Nike cleverly launched on YouTube first, check it out here: