May 13, 2013 | Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Creating content, the stuff that engages people, preferably customers, potential customers, and influencers of these two groups people (otherwise why are you doing it?) is a real challenge, but one that successful use of social media demands is addressed. There are plenty of resources out there offering tips and templates, but they do not get the job done.
When you have addressed the challenges, and have great content, if nobody reads and shares it, why bother?
SEO tools also abound, just behind the seeming hordes of people offering to lift your Google ranking, for a fee. It seems to me that SEO has spawned a host of shysters matched only by the easy money opportunities emanating from Nigeria.
So where do you go in all this? How do you make the tough choices about how to allocate scarce resources? SEO or Content?
A couple of general thoughts that I have offered to clients over a while now, and which seem to work.
- Have very clear objectives. An investment in Social media is like any other investment, the first step is to be crystal clear about what it is you are trying to achieve. Setting out to get to the top of Google requires a different set of activities to engaging existing customers, building a position as an industry expert, or creating a sales pipeline. These objectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but using SEO strategies that build general awareness when you are looking for specific outcomes such as increasing your share of existing customers wallet, is as appropriate as taking the family car to a competitive hill-climb.
- Use analytics. Facts should always be the basis for decision-making, and the facts are there when you go looking for them. Marketing for the first time in its history as a profession can be held accountable to metrics that accurately measure outcomes, rather than just activity. It can be a daunting task, data analysis often can be to many, but there are free resources and tools available that offer an unprecedented accountability and transparency of marketing investments. A Google analytics dashboard at the very least should be compulsory. If you need a resource to assist your thinking, the very very, best is the Occum’s Razor blog written by Avinash Kaushik. A really good strategy is to take your device on holidays, and spend the week reading and understanding the stuff that Avinash writes. It is gold!
- Be prepared to experiment. Social media is a bit like the finches in the Galapagos, many may look the same at a fleeting and uninformed glance, but the detail of the evolution, the way individual groups have evolved to maximise their effectiveness in a specific environment is extraordinarily different. This has happened to the Galapagos finches over millennia, but is happening as we speak to social media tools and strategies, and the only way to leverage the specific circumstances you find yourself in, is to be completely agile, and committed to responding positively to changes in the environment and new information.
- Remove the rules and barriers to customer engagement. It can be confronting for many (particularly older, and dictatorial managers) to consider allowing personnel who actually interact face to face with your marketplace to have the authority to make decisions and respond on the spot to needs and opportunities as they emerge. Whilst there needs to be some general rules of engagement, that reflect the business model and values of the organisation, empowering employees can be remarkably effective.
- “Social” implies interaction.” Social media is a two way beast, whilst there is enormous potential to build value, the flip side is that the risks of social media becoming a problem are very real. The immediacy of the potential negative impact of social media needs to be recognised, and there needs to be very clearly understood strategies to deal with any such outbreak of negativity. If you cock up, social media can destroy you, particularly if you try and cover up the cock-up, and there is also the opportunity for malicious and competitive attack. This risk also needs to be acknowledged, and ideally “war-gamed” even if in a small way.
- We are stuck with Social Media. The final thing to remember is that Social media will not go away. We have seen it before, when Guttenberg got his press working, the world of the printed message changed forever, and it has happened again. Hoping it will go away, that the impact will not reach you is fantasy land, so get with the program, with all its challenges.
May 7, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Small business, Social Media
You choose
Lets talk about social media for a moment, it is on the mind of most running SME’s. and it is the object of lots of “hype” by snake-oil salesmen.
There is a huge amount of very useful verbiage, and mountains of plain crap out there, as well as the “idiots guide” type stuff, but it at its core is really simple.
Remember what it was like as a kid in a new playground, you didn’t know anybody, it was lonely amongst a horde of other kids.
Slowly, one short sentence at a time, you got to know some, some you liked, others you did not want to get to know better.
The “liking” evolves over a series of small, at first disconnected interactions, slowly, the interactions become connected, and slowly, the network widens, as you start the interactgion process with others.
At some point, you ask another kid to come home and play, great if he can, but sometimes they can’t, you ask again, if they cannot a second time, with no apparent reason, you probably will not ask again, This is the “law of reciprocracy” at work. Relationships of any type are reciprocal, otherwise they are not relationship.
Just the same in social media, you need to give something before yuy can expect anything back, but get something back, and you reciproicate again, and you have the beginning of something, maybe. It takes work. You need to spend time at the other persons house, want to spend more time with them, be comfortable with what they do, think, and say.
No different in social media. All are different, are able to deliver you an outcome that varies from each other, you just need to understand clearly what you want, otherwise you will spend your limited time poorly. None of nthem, despite the hype are all things to all people. You choose who you like.
May 3, 2013 | Small business, Strategy, Uncategorized
Yesterday I did a presentation to a group of owners of small businesses, people who seemingly compete against the odds from a point of weakness, as almost everybody is bigger, better resourced, has better technology, and are more connected, than them.
As a basis for the presentation I used Simon Sineks great TED talk, that articulated the ” Why How What” model, one I have been able to use quite often as a means to assist SME’s sort out what is really important, and what just seems to be important, as they try to navigate the competitive challenges they face.
Just after I had delivered my thoughts, a great post from Seth Godin popped into my feed, and it added a further perspective to the challenges. For these small business people, working as hard as they can, trying to be “picked” by their potential customers, from amongst the baying crowd of potential suppliers is confronting and often disillusioning. How do they stand out from the crowd?
Seth’s point is do not be a part of the crowd of supplicants, do not wait for others to pick you, pick yourself by being different, useful, and interesting.
This is as true for the SME around the corner as it is to the huge multinational, but when you think about it a bit, the elephant is pretty hard to persuade to change direction, to be sufficiently agile to respond quickly, whilst the little bloke is far more able to turn on a sixpence.
It just takes the will, vision and balls to be different.
May 1, 2013 | Communication, Innovation, Social Media
20 years ago yesterday, April 30 1993, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear research, the developer of what has become the W.W.W. announced that they would open it up, making it free to all by posting the codes on what became the worlds first website.
A computer based communication system had existed since 1985, when the first “domain” name had been registered, but it was the private property of individual universities and research organisations.
To my mind, this single action by CERN management in 1993 was the catalyst for the revolution we have undergone in the last 20 years, and which is still continuing, and this revolution (I am looking for a stronger word than just “revolution”) is at least as significant as the realisation that steam could be used to drive machines, and you could set up a system to mass produce the printed word.
In a number of TED talks over the years, there has been some extraordinary contributions to our understanding of the impact this decision has had.
Clay Shirky has mused about the brainpower released, the cogitative surplus, by the web, Kevin Kelly makes observations and predictions about the development of the web, and Ray Kurzweil wonders at the continuously accelerating pace of innovation that is occurring. All have made the point that the world has changed.
Tim Berners-Lee, now Sir Tim, was the man. He wrote the protocols that underpin the web HTML, et al, while working as a software engineer at CERN. The project was a part time indulgence, a side project, but then it went public.
To my mind, this is almost equivalent to the Big Bang, the day the world started, anew.
Apr 30, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
You can no longer win by shouting, there is always someone who can should louder, longer, and more effectively.
You win today by being genuinely useful.
Those on the receiving end will tell others, who will tell others, and so it goes.
My kids call it social media marketing, I call it common sense marketing.
