MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

You know, I could tell you about the latest issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal. But it represents three months of blood, sweat, and (virtual Internet) tears for myself and the rest of the MarketingExperiments team.

So my description would be highly biased, full of hyperbole, and probably be along the lines of… “Our latest Journal includes four never-before-published marketing research articles featuring 12 experiments and…well…this Journal is the single most important piece of writing since the invention of the Internet!”

Out of control. That’s why you don’t need to hear from me. Instead, I’ll share what our readers have been telling us about the Journal through email and Twitter. But first, here is your free digital copy…

(click Full Screen to zoom in)

“Wonderful publication!!! Many compliments from Italy.” – Andrea Berselli, Partner and COO at Markeven srl

“Take some time to read this ebook: The @mktgexperiments Research Journal, 132 pages of marketing+science” – @Sparksheet

“Fusing online/offline campaigns for impact (and how not to do it!) – new insight from Marketing Experiments” – @eugenieverney

“This is full of good stuff – ‘The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q2 2010′” –@HomeportCrew

“@MktgExperiments new online journal out. Loads of great content, thorough and readable” – @dotpinkney

We’d love to hear what you think of the latest Research Journal. Share your comments below, email us, or fill out our seven-question survey.

Related Resources

Q2 2010 issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

Q1 2010 issue of the MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

Research Directory

Optimizing Landing Pages: The four key tactics that drove a 189% lift

Landing Page Optimization, Lead Generation, Research Topics, Site Design, Social Media

Social media is essential for promoting content marketing. You might have the Mike Tyson of blogs, but without the Don King of social media promoting it, you likely won’t be discovered and will never even get to step into the ring to prove your mettle. But together, social media and content marketing drive up demand generation like an Iron Mike uppercut knocks out Michael Spinks.

To get some inside-the-ring advice, I turned to the demand generation experts at one of our strategic partners, Eloqua, to learn how they promote their own offerings.

Eloqua CMO Brian Kardon recently created a new role at the company – director of content marketing –  and filled it with an old face – Joe Chernov. Joe was the global director of communications and social media at Eloqua – where he was responsible for analyst relations, press relations, and social media.

In addition to being the marketing automation company’s newly named director of content marketing, Joe co-chairs the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s member ethics panel … so if you like this interview, please tell three friends.

One of your first decisions upon heading up content at Eloqua was to launch Eloqua’s new It’s All About Revenue blog.

When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, English mountaineer George Mallory simply stated… “Because it’s there.” Why did Eloqua start this blog? Simply because it wasn’t there?

Joe Chernov: Hall of Fame football coach John Madden once said, “If you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback.”

We had three quasi-corporate Eloqua blogs – one thought-leader blog, one best practices blog, and one product “how-to” blog – in addition to several executive blogs. Each had its own voice, own look-and-feel, and own (desired) audience.

Early on in my lead communications role, I wanted to blog about the story behind a new social media product we were launching, yet none of the blog owners would accept my “commercial” content. That’s when I realized that we needed a central blog, a resource for Eloqua to talk more broadly about the industry, competition, and our plans for the future.

We launched the blog in April, and we’ve averaged about three posts per week, with the most popular post receiving about 6,000 views. Not a bad start.

Also, it’s become an outlet for news commentary by Eloqua. Within 24 hours of Oracle buying a competitor of ours, Eloqua CEO Joe Payne blogged his analysis. He picked up so much press that super-influencer David Meerman Scott himself blogged about Payne being an example of the importance of executive nimbleness, the value of being fast.

Even though Eloqua is an established company, launching a new blog from zero is an ambitious (and daunting) endeavor. How did you use social media to begin to build an audience? And how do you continue to use social media to promote content and deepen that engagement with your audience?

JC: Here’s an unpopular answer: You have to earn it. For the most part, our good posts generate lots of views, our not-so-good posts generate few views. Believe me, I know: I own the “least viewed” post award.

Now this isn’t to say you can’t effectively promote your own blog. There are a number of practical steps you can take to build an audience:

• Invite guest contributors or interview known figures in your industry – in other words, involve people that have a vested interest in promoting their post to their followers.
• Mix media – video, illustrations, and graphics tend to be hyper-consumable formats.
• Don’t be afraid to stir the pot – Sometimes controversy is a good way to attract new visitors. Everyone rubbernecks, even online. But market at the margins. Your central focus should remain on the quality of your content.

Sometimes content is about clever repurposing, and when you launched this blog you did just that. You took two internal documents and made them public.

Let’s talk about the first one – “The Content Grid.” This really shows how the blog is the hub of your content marketing, right there in the middle, next to Twitter. But how does this awareness and consideration get turned into revenue? After all, “It’s All About Revenue,” right?

JC: We have a long sales cycle. Most prospects that enter our database aren’t ready to convert immediately, so we nurture them over time. So it’s a little early for us to measure the ROI of this initiative.

But the indicators are strong. For example, we know that visitors to Eloqua.com who watch a product demo ultimately convert at a much higher rate than those who don’t. And we know that a disproportionate number of visitors who discover Eloqua.com through our blog view a product demo. We also know that the It’s All About Revenue blog is referring visitors to Eloqua.com at a much higher rate than all of our other blog assets combined. We are confident that in the next quarter or two, we’ll begin to see these leads convert.

There are a couple of media channels that we may inch in one direction or the other in our next rev of The Content Grid, but one change I cannot imagine making is to shift the location of the blog.

The blog is the hub of the content wheel. It allows for immediate posting, direct language, reader engagement, and it feeds traffic to the corporate site.

It’s also a medium that third parties are comfortable pointing to. Could you imagine someone like Jeremiah Owyang tweeting a link to a company’s website? No way. He’d never do it … and with good reason. Jeremiah’s loyalty is to his reader, and readers don’t want to be pushed to websites that are trying to sell them stuff.

A properly executed blog, however, is different. It’s the human voice of the company, and, as such, people are reasonably comfortable pointing their readers to that channel.

If all of your content marketing efforts eventually drive into Eloqua.com as the main place for lead conversion, how have you worked to test and optimize the website, and the entire process, to maximize lead conversion and reduce the potential for leaking leads and therefore revenue?

JC: Content marketing is leaky. We leak out a lot of leads. It’s literally a daily conversation I have with our demand generation director. It’s a Catch-22: You can’t capture leads if you don’t gate content, but your content won’t spread if you gate it. So what do you do? We are experimenting.

We set The Content Grid and Social Media Playbook free, completely ungated. If we sponsor an analyst report, we may gate that – after all, it’s a very specific, and highly valuable, piece of content and one that our audience is used to paying for.

We have some other content planned – topical guides, ebooks that we’ve written – and we may set them free for a finite period of time, after which we could introduce a small gate. Or perhaps we will embrace the channel: if the guide is distributed on the social Web, it’s ungated; if we send it to someone in our database, we may direct them to a landing page where we can collect more information.

We are trying different models. In the end, Eloqua is shifting to the school of thought espoused in the new David Meerman Scott/Brian Halligan book, “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” In the long term, setting your knowledge free is the most direct route to success.

The second key piece of internal content you posted was the Social Media Playbook, and you weren’t shy about it either. The Abbie Hoffman-esque blog post you wrote to promote it is entitled, “Steal Eloqua’s Social Media Playbook.”

I was most interested in the ethical considerations you mention in the Playbook, which seem to be inspired by your role with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. It seems like everywhere you turn there is some flashy/shady social media “evangelist” using black hat tactics.

As you say in the Playbook, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But they can smell a marketer from a mile away.” So what are some key tips for being an ethical social media marketer…both to be a more effective marketer and also simply to be a decent human being?

JC: I am going to take that Abbie Hoffman comment to my grave with me. That made my day.

But the ethical component of social media marketing cannot be understated. The fact is there are federal guidelines designed to protect unwitting consumers from deceptive businesses.

But I think the social Web does a remarkable job at policing itself. I believe what the government has been good at is giving some fundamental ground rules.

For years, marketers struggled to distinguish cunning from deceptive, but now the FTC has done that for us. In their guidelines for testimonials and endorsements, they make it very clear that if there is a relationship between a company and a consumer, and that consumer “speaks” (blogs, tweets, etc.) about that company, then that testimonial is a form of advertising, and therefore must be disclosed.

I don’t think companies realize how far this directive reaches. Frankly, it means that if a staffer at your organization runs a personal blog in which he writes about your industry, then he must disclose his employment. I think many companies are in violation of this FTC rule, not out of malice, but ignorance. I wanted to include a larger section on ethics in the Playbook, but feared it’d come off as preachy.

To sum it all up, what are the main things companies should focus on to drive demand and leads with content.

JC: Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Use your blog as the hub of the content wheel
2. Stop thinking of Twitter as the goal, consumption is the goal…Twitter’s value is that it is a useful tool in directing people to points of consumption
3. Don’t expect the world to find you. Yes inbound marketing works, and your blog should be your hub. But of the 20,000 downloads (in the first month) of The Content Grid and Social Media Playbook, nearly half occurred “in the wild” (SlideShare, Scribd, Facebook).
4. Assume that 50% of your time will be spent in the dialogue phase of content marketing. Creating remarkable content, distributing it broadly and measuring the impact is, together, only half of the battle. Engaging in a dialogue everywhere you publish your content is vital for success. It’s also the best trigger for sustained interest and long-term word-of-mouth.
5. In the end, remember that this is a meritocracy. Good marketing isn’t going to turn bad content into a success.

Related resources:

Marketing Leader’s Perspective: No cogs allowed in social media and content marketing

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps

General, Research Topics, Social Media

In a recent blog post, Andy Mott brought up some excellent points about silos and skewed compensations plans in marketing departments.

I want to take this idea a step further. If only this were just confined within the marketing (or any) department. An even bigger problem is when different groups within the same company have different incentives that jeopardize your relationship with the customer.

Second only to intellectual property, a company’s most valuable resource is its customers. Not just the new customers we’re constantly chasing, but existing ones as well…especially in the age of social media, when your triumphs and foibles are just a click away from becoming a huge sales generator or PR disaster.

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” – Henry Ford

As an experienced business leader, customers = valuable is not a breathtakingly new equation to you. But, why, then, in an era of social media, do so many companies still treat customers the way they did in the early industrial age? In other words, does the mission serve the process, or does the process serve the mission?

Take the airline industry, for example. Customers hate to be nickeled and dimed, yet every major airline does it. They charge fees for checked bags, phone reservations, curbside check-in, and snacks and beverages.

And they have to, right? It’s how they make money. Except…they don’t make money, do they? It is the rare airline that has not been through bankruptcy protection, let alone turned a consistent profit.

That rare airline is Southwest, which charges no fees, yet has been profitable for 37 consecutive years.

Everything is marketing

Those mainline carriers spend millions on advertising, with beautifully shot, heartstrings yanking commercials poetically telling us about how they keep us “United.” But every time someone has to pull out a crisp Andrew Jackson just to get a bag on a plane, how much do you think those ads matter?

To the savvy CEO, everything is marketing. From the fees charged to customers to the accounting department collecting on a late payment. Because even if you’re not promoting it with slick ads during prime time,  your customers and former customers are doing the promoting for you thanks to social media marketing – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.

Instead of going through the litany of social media marketing disasters you’ve probably already read about (and will be to future marketing textbooks what the Nova was to our marketing textbooks), let’s seek to answer the question at the root of this challenge – how do your protect the investment you’ve made in your brand by keeping customers happy while continuing to grow that top-line revenue number?

Make it lucrative and make it possible:

• What gets measured gets done. What gets incented gets done well. – You may say you’re customer-focused, but do your comp plans back you up? From top to bottom, does every MBO (Management by Objectives) document, every incentive plan, every compensation package, every corporate policy put the customer first?

Take a look at the recent financial meltdown. Investment banker compensation was based on fees generated from assembling financial products, not the performance of those products for the customer…

These people contend that Wall Street’s pay structure, in which bonuses are based on short-term profits, encouraged employees to act like gamblers at a casino — and let them collect their winnings while the roulette wheel was still spinning.

Compensation was flawed top to bottom,” said Lucian A. Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on compensation. “The whole organization was responding to distorted incentives.”

– “On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real”, Louise Story, The New York Times

• If everyone is in marketing, empower everyone like a marketer. – Marketers, at the very least, have tools and (in a best-case scenario) juicy budgets to entice, please, and sell customers. Why should other employees be any different? And, besides, if you’re going to make customer satisfaction part of everyone’s comp plan, you have to make it possible for them to reach that goal.

The prima example of this is The Ritz-Carlton. This luxury hotelier puts its money where its customer-focused mouth is. Every employee can spend up to $2,000 to make a guest satisfied. That is a corporate policy that puts the customer first with no questions and no doubt and helps employees live up to what is clearly more than just a cleverly worded motto – “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Yes I know that The Ritz-Carlton is a very high-end luxury hotel that has the margins for this kind of thing. And, while we’re on the subject, yes those robes are particularly fluffy and comfy. But get creative. Anyone can do this on an applicable scale….

• Do you allow customer service reps to solve problems or do you treat them like a 1980s-era teenager trying to make a long-distance call?
• Do you give customer-facing employees an opportunity to share customer plaudits and grievances with product marketing, product development, someone somewhere sitting in a corner office?
• How hard is it for someone in front-line manufacturing or production to stop the process when QA isn’t 100% met?

It’s banal, it’s hackneyed, it’s Businesses 101, and it’s certainly not new to you…however, the best way to protect your marketing investment (and make it thrive) in the age of social media marketing is to remember that the true boss is always the customer.

Related Resources

Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

The Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps: A methodology to move from sporadic to strategic use based on research with 2,317 B2B and B2C marketers

Research Topics, Social Media

Recently, I wrote about a case study that included excellent use of integrated marketing and social media – Facebook Case Study: From 517 to 33,000 fans in two weeks (plus media coverage). The MarketingExperiments community of marketers wanted to get a deeper look at the details, so I figured, why not go straight to the source?

Brenna Holmes, a senior online account executive and strategist at Adams Hussey & Associates (AH&A), was the digital brand strategic advisor on this campaign for her client, the California State Parks Foundation (CSPF). I asked her many questions from our audience along with a few of my own…

Let’s start with your role in this campaign. Social media operations is a huge challenge in itself. We’ll get to what you did in a moment. But first, how did you get it done?

Brenna Holmes: In the case of this urgent campaign, not only did I serve as an advisor, I also helped with implementation for all things social – optimizing their existing Facebook fan page with the custom welcome tab and many personalized Facebook Markup Language (FBML) widgets. Later in the campaign, I started and managed their Twitter account.

CSPF is a very small and tightly knit organization. Their Director of Membership, Greg Zelder, and Director of Communications, Jerry Emory, are my daily contacts and it was (and is) in collaboration with them that we got a full-scale multichannel campaign up and running within one week of learning of the Governor’s proposed budget cuts.

The first thing that catches my eye about this case study is the quick, large Facebook fan page growth that led to positive media stories. But when you explore this success a little deeper, it’s not just a case for social media marketing, but integrated marketing as well. Can you give us more details on how you used multichannel marketing?

BH: At AH&A, we LOVE multichannel integration. As a direct mail fundraising shop that has expanded to include pretty much in-house everything (online, telemarketing, creative, production, and analytics), practically every campaign we plan has multichannel components.

And this case was no different. CSPF had been a direct mail and telemarketing client of ours for many years, but 2009 was the first year that my department began working with them.

Actually…the budget cuts issue made us start our contract a month early! Within 48 hours the organizational website was redesigned to accommodate an Action Center, daily homepage updates, graphic social media sharing links, and embedded YouTube videos made by both the organization and passionate supporters.

The Facebook “Friend Get a Friend Campaign” was launched the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, May 26, (which is when the Governor’s proposal was released) via an update to CSPF’s original 517 fans.

The update explained the imminent threat parks were facing and put a deadline – Friday, May 29 – and a goal – 5,000 fans. “This year’s cuts are ten times as bad, so we need ten times the fans on Facebook.”

Once supporters became fans, they were presented with an action item asking them to visit CSPF’s site to sign an email petition to the California legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger. We also set up and managed CSPF’s paid online advertising on both Facebook and Google to drive supporters to become fans and/or sign the petition. All this Web outreach was supported by an aggressive email petition and donation campaign to the house list and partner organizations in California.

The online campaign was mirrored in direct mail with three “urgent grams” that were in people’s mail boxes by the end of the week – one to high-dollar donors ($1,000+), one to all other members, and one to prospects. All three pieces netted funds and raised more than $200,000 in just over a month. Telemarketing was also excellently leveraged – existing campaigns were halted and new scripts were implemented, raising more than $88,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign.

That whole week in May, Foundation staff members were being interviewed and the story was picked up by SF Gate, Huffington Post, LA Daily News, Frommers, etc. They even made it onto Digg! By early June the Facebook growth was being referenced in mainstream news articles and on other environmental and California-based nonprofit Facebook pages.

Were these other channels used to primarily promote Facebook over the CSPF website?

BH: Facebook was never promoted over the website. Facebook promotion was always either in conjunction with site promotion (general “Find Us on Facebook” links) or as a secondary ask (“Thanks for taking action! If you are on Facebook, click through to join the conversation”).

Other than the specific “Friend Get a Friend” outreach on Facebook and some of the Facebook ads, we were primarily driving supporters to the online Action Center to sign the petition, make donations, and later on, print Save Our State Parks signs and upload their photos from the SOS weekends of action.

When people visit the CSPF Facebook fan page for the first time, they see a pseudo landing page that encourages them to become a fan or go to the CSPF website. I love the landing page, it’s a very clear way to communicate with your audience about the actions you’d like them to take (instead of just showing your wall to new visitors). Why did you decide to send users to a pseudo landing page instead of the wall?

BH: I’m a big fan of introductions, and maximizing the personalization of user experiences online. It’s a pet peeve of mine when sites (Facebook or other) don’t recognize that I’m new to the site.

So much of the online experience can be controlled from the backend to give a more customized experience. In my opinion, it would be silly to not take advantage of that with something as simple as a welcome tab.

We are trying to put the most efficient but comprehensive view of CSPF out there so people can absorb it in the seven seconds we have before they decide to click elsewhere. A cluttered (or worse barren) wall just doesn’t give the right first impression in my opinion.

And the Facebook landing page doesn’t solely encourage them to become a fan, it gives them other options as well.

There are three asks. This allows supporters to choose how they want to interact with the Foundation. The easiest is, of course, to “Like” the page. Then if they want to do more they can take action or join. The vast majority simply “Like” the page and move onto the “Wall,” but we have seen some petitions and new memberships coming in from these source-coded links.

This campaign helped raised several hundred thousand dollars for CSPF. (Congratulations!) How much came through Facebook, and how much came because of the other channels you used?

BH: Unfortunately we weren’t as proactive in source coding all the links on Facebook as we should have been from the very beginning, so the majority of donations do not show as coming from Facebook during that first burst of activity. However, we do know that 60% of our page connections are self-professed annual members.

In late July/August, we launched a social-media-only campaign promoting the Frequent Visitor membership level ($125 to get an annual parks parking pass) on Facebook and Twitter. Social media allowed us to quickly take advantage of the Parks Department halting annual pass sales for almost two weeks. In that campaign, CSPF gained over 700 new members from social media at the $125 level.

I can also tell you that while the entire integrated campaign earned $950,000, almost $300,000 was raised online and 46% of that came from supporters new to the e-file (either joining as annual members or by giving non-membership issue-based gifts). The e-file also tripled in size as the fan page grew and paid membership grew by 10% in the first two months.

We are much more meticulous about this now and see a steady stream of new memberships, renewals, and issue-based gifts coming in from both Facebook page promotions and the Facebook ads. (Stay tuned for this November’s  Yes For State Parks ballot issue get-out-the-vote work on Facebook.)

What was the budget and team size? Social media seems very labor intensive, very manual.

BH: The online team size was only four of us – me, my vice president for strategic brainstorming, along with Greg Zelder and Jerry Emory at CSPF.

CSPF is on a monthly retainer with us, which includes all work except creative development. We have a larger offline staff that works closely with CSPF to get all the other pieces rolling and now CSPF has added another Web person internally to help out, but during last year’s campaign it was all hands for Greg and me in getting the online pieces up and running and properly maintained.

Social media is labor intensive, but if you have an urgent issue like this one, you drop everything to get it done and done as well as possible the first time around.

What is your follow-up plan for all these new Facebook fans that you have engaged?

BH: I’ve been managing the fan page for over a year now and it continues to grow. CSPF has, on average, a 15.5% month-over-month fan “connection” growth.

CSPF’s Communications Director is very hands on with the content generation and they post at a minimum of twice a week – a “feel good park story” every Tuesday and every Thursday there is a post for the new World’s Best Bike Commute blog that chronicles Jerry’s bike commute across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Greg and Jerry are also very good at posting from their mobiles to keep the page updated with pictures and information from the many live events CSPF holds throughout the year. Ideally I’d like to see a daily update to Facebook, but current staffing constraints at CSPF won’t allow for it. We are currently also working on some fun new content that will only be viewable after supporters “Like” the page.

How much are Facebook fans really worth? Are they very valuable? Or do they just “Like” something because they saw that their friends did?

BH: We find CSPF’s fans VERY valuable, whether they are the active donors or not, many are very outspoken evangelists for the cause. We are actually undertaking a much more robust tracking regime to identify the most engaged Facebook connections so we can do some additional personalized outreach.

Lately, the words Facebook and privacy seem to go hand in hand…

BH: We haven’t had any issues regarding privacy so far. Everything we do is on an opt-in basis and we are very proactive in answering fan questions – even going so far as to help a fan organize her newsfeed content so as to not be “overwhelmed” by our updates.

There are now a plethora of invites to social causes on Facebook. How does one cause really stand out from another?

BH: This is no different on Facebook than in other direct marketing media. Donors and activists have more choices of where to spend their time and money now than ever before. You stand out by staying engaged and listening to your base. Encourage them to be part of the process and they will extend your voice a thousand times over.

Can for-profit marketers use the same tactics you describe?

BH: I think that many of the tactics are the same whether the organization is non- or for-profit, and we “steal” concepts from commercial organizations ideas all the time. Typically the defining issue is cost, since corporations tend to have larger marketing budgets than nonprofits they could conceivably get even more value from social media like Facebook.

For the budding social media marketers out there… what applications have you found to be most valuable in engaging Facebook users?

BH: Custom FBML wall widgets and tabs are a must – like the welcome tab and our Get Involved menu of options. If you have a blog, sync it up with the Notes RSS. Sync your YouTube uploads and add as many of the newly released social plug-ins to your website as feasible. You want to engage supporters where they already live online.

I originally found this case study in the brand new Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook. If you’re looking to improve your social media marketing, you might benefit from the Handbook’s case studies (in addition to the one I covered above, there are ten more in the Handbook).

Related Resources

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010 (Social Media Marketing begins on page 51)

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps

Develop Your Social Marketing ROAD Map Strategy

Research Topics, Social Media

Search for “social media marketing” on Google (or Bing) and you’ll likely end up in a black hole of Twitter guides, bit.ly retweets, social media “mavens” and Top 7 Tips for Creating a Facebook Fanpage blog posts. And it’s no wonder everyone sees the need to discuss and “explain” how social media works for the 270 billionth time. With so much discussion on the topic, you need to be a social media expert just to navigate it all.

Yet, one social media topic manages to slip through the cracks. And it’s often the first obstacle companies encounter when they decide “social media” is the answer to all of their problems:

Who’s going to carry out all of these social media initiatives?

It’s the Human Factor – who is going to create the content for that blog? Who is going to reply to all those tweets? Who is going to make sure your Facebook page doesn’t turn into a hate fest? In fact, who decides if you should have a Facebook page at all?

If you’re like many companies, you might think outsourcing social marketing is your best bet.

But more than ever companies are working to keep social media in-house because it requires such an intimate knowledge of the brand and because of the personal nature of social media interactions in general. Customers want to talk to you, not an “outsourced” spammy twitter account. And when you leave them with no choice, they happily take their discussion to your nearest competitor.

Based on the MarketingSherpa Social Media Marketing Benchmark Survey of more than 2,300 respondents in November of 2009, social marketing responsibilities are outsourced less often than traditional marketing responsibilities– meaning you’re more than likely going to need to look internally to find your resources for a social marketing team.

And here’s where I believe many companies get it wrong. Instead of hiring or tasking the best person for the job, whether that’s managing the Twitter account or actively engaging in forum discussions, many companies put their least experienced, least qualified people on an overwhelming number of social media initiatives. Usually this person is in marketing and may be tasked to cover topics or areas of social media they have little or no experience in. But this isn’t the most efficient and certainly not the most effective method for achieving social media success.

But how do you go about identifying who in your organization is best suited to carry out social media objectives? The answer is surprisingly simple. You pick the right person for the job.

For example, don’t send your marketing team to engage users in a developer forum. They’ll stand out like a script kiddie at a Def Con Conference. Instead, encourage your developers to actively engage users in forums related to their industry. Task these same developers to contribute technical content to the company blog. It’s surprising the level of involvement you’ll get from your team when you place a little responsibility in their hands.

Customer service can provide you with your Twitter recruits. In many ways they are trained for the role, just in a different medium. And your Sales department is a great place to find outgoing personalities to run the company Facebook page or handle group discussions on LinkedIn.

The point is that your social media team should be composed of individuals from various departments who can each provide a certain level of expertise by contributing just a few hours a week to social marketing initiatives each week.

To learn more about how you can keep your employees accountable for social media initiatives, check out the new MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Handbook.

Related Resources

Social Media for the COO: How to become the Michael Phelps of implementing social media in your organization

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

MarketingSherpa Social Marketing Training

Photo Credit: Intersection Consulting

Research Topics, Social Media

OK marketer, put yourself in these shoes (they’re more like boots actually). Your state government is facing massive budget shortfalls. Teachers are being laid off. Draconian cuts to vital public services are being announced left and right. And amid this tumult, you are the one tasked with using your marketing prowess to stave off disaster itself.

The above paragraph probably makes you feel better about your own challenges, but think for a second…given the above situation…and very little resources…what would you do?

Social media marketing for a social cause

At the end of May 2009, the California State Parks Foundation (CSPF) found itself in this very position after learning about massive cuts in state funding that threatened to close 220 California state parks.

In response, this nonprofit organization quickly launched a multichannel effort with its agency, Adams Hussey & Associates, that included direct mail, telemarketing, email, and social networking. I want to focus on that last part for this blog post. Because what amazed (and impressed) me the most was that CSPF used Facebook to shape the larger conversation about this topic.

Before I get to that, let’s look at how CSPF used Facebook. They optimized their existing Facebook fan page to promote awareness, discussion, and (hopefully) attract new activists and members. “Find us on Facebook” language and graphics were featured in every email and all over the site.

The “Friend Get a Friend” campaign launched on Tuesday, May 26, on Facebook via an update to 517 fans – “This year’s cuts are ten times as bad, so we need ten times the fans on Facebook.”  The update explained to recipients the imminent threat parks were facing and set a deadline and a goal – 5,000 fans by Friday (May 29).

The second Facebook update was sent on Monday, June 1 at 12:12 p.m. PST, stressing a 24-hour deadline and asking for fans and petition signatures. The California budget committee was scheduled to meet on June 2, so media coverage was at its height.

The Facebook factor shapes the conversation

“The California State Parks Foundation, the lead public organization advocating keeping the parks open, had its fan base on Facebook increase from 500 to 33,000 in the past two weeks, reports Jerry Emory of the Foundation.”

– Tom Stienstra, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 21, 2009

Now this next part is truly impressive. With just two updates on Facebook (and in all fairness very smart cross-promotion through other channels), CSPF created a proof point for keeping the parks open, helping them meet their “promote awareness” goal.

That’s right, the Facebook campaign itself actually entered the public debate. The massive growth of this fan page caught the media’s attention and was mentioned on several TV news spots and in national news articles. They took advantage of a timely and newsworthy story (the California budget cuts were all over the news on- and offline) and created a talking point to meet their communications goals (several news oulets mentioned the Facebook growth as evidence of a grassroots swell).

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, raising awareness wasn’t their only goal. So let’s take a look at some of the other success metrics. Those two simple Facebook updates (aided by the cross-channel campaign) have helped raise several hundred thousand dollars in nonmember, one-time gifts.

In addition, CSPF more than tripled the size of its email list and acquired many new activists that are being converted to donors online and via the telephone.

CSPF is routinely using social media now. A subsequent Facebook and Twitter promotion gained 285 new members in four days, and their Facebook page has now grown to 54,000 fans.

Other success metrics were a little harder to meet. While California’s budget that was passed at the end of July 2009 did not close the originally proposed 220 parks, budget cuts forced nearly 150 to partially close or reduce services.

What you can learn from this case study

Nonprofit organizations are a natural fit for social media campaigns. People (who believe in your cause) want to help, often don’t want to expend much time or money, and want to look good to their friends, family, and social network. A social media campaign lies at the nexus of these three motivations. And, most importantly, it gives your fans an easy way to act.

Of course, the benefit isn’t limited to non-profit corporations. To wit, the Pepsi Refresh Project uses social media to leverage those same motivations. And this isn’t just a side project for Pepsi. They made a strategic decision to use a social media activism campaign as their main 2010 marketing push…instead of the Super Bowl. This is the first time in 23 years that Pepsi has not advertising during the Super Bowl.

So what can you learn from CSPF? When creating a social media campaign, keep a few important principles in mind:

• A tight deadline always spurs action online.
• When supporters can get instant feedback on the effects of their efforts (seeing fan numbers grow) it makes them even more motivated.
• The best campaigns cross pollinate. CSPF didn’t just use Facebook. It also used direct mail, telemarketing, and email in a tightly integrated fashion, including a custom URL for the Facebook fan page. Even better, add other social networking platforms to the mix, such as Twitter.
• Be clear. While social media has grown explosively, not everyone you reach will be clear on every convention of every social media platform (which are constantly subject to change). As opposed to showing first-time Facebook fan page visitors the default “Wall” tab (which has no clear call to action), CSPF created a pseudo “New Fan” landing page that included three simple buttons:
  • “Click ‘Become a Fan’ above to join the conversation!” (Please note, as of last month, Facebook replaced its “Become a fan” terminology with the “Like” button)
  • “Join CSPF”
  • “Take Action”

  

• Institute back-end tracking on clicks and conversions to determine where supporters are coming from (this is one thing CSPF would do differently next time).

Mapping an effective media strategy

I found this case study while perusing an early draft of an upcoming book from MarketingSherpa. To read the entire case study, along with ten other case studies from leading companies and 27 real-world examples of what works, order your copy of the soon-to-be released Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook: A method for mapping an effective social media strategy. If you do so by May 28th, you’ll save $100 and get a free bonus gift.

I want to thank Lead Author Sergio Balegno for letting me take an early look at his research, even though he was still editing it as I poked around. And full disclosure: While Sergio and I are not related, MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa are sister companies.

Related Resources

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010 (Social Media Marketing begins on page 51)

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps

Facebook and Omniture: A welcome step in social media measurement

Please Be My Friend: Taking the first step beyond just being on Facebook

Develop Your Social Marketing ROAD Map Strategy

Research Topics, Social Media