Quattro motivi per cui i Social Media sono essenziali al proprio Business ed i 5 Places da cui iniziare!

Sicuramente avrete sentito parlare di Social Media, avrete letto “Follow us on Twitter” da qualche parte e probabilmente sarete iscritti a Facebook… Proprio nel caso in cui non foste ancora convinti dell’enorme cambiamento attualmente in corso nel mondo del Marketing e della Comunicazione, investite un paio di minuti per vedere il video nell’head di questo sito ;) – Social Media Revolution di Socialnomics, autore Erik Parrot – e poi tornate a leggere questo post.

By the way, the video, only a few months old, as great as it is, already has some outdated stats. If Facebook were a country, for instance, it would now be the 3^rd largest in the world, not the 4^th as the video suggests. So now, you know how big social media is, but what can social media do for your business? Does it really matter to your bottom line that so many people are using social networks to connect and share? Here are 4 reasons it does matter:

1) Your customers and prospects are there already, waiting to talk to you. You can either join the conversation, or let them talk about you and your competitors, the good, bad and ugly, without responding. If you don’t believe me, go to http://search.twitter.com and search your name, your company’s name, and your competitor’s names. Or search for keywords describing what you do. You’ll be surprised at what you find.

2) It’s low-cost marketing. No, not free, as some mistakenly believe, but low-cost – compared to traditional vehicles such as tv, radio, print, direct mail, and outdoor advertising. Most of what you pay for is time- your staff’s time or a company such as our firm’s time. But the time and money you invest now can directly correlate to future success – as long as you use social media to engage people, not spam them.

3) It’s way more than just marketing. Social media can help virtually all aspects of your company – obviously marketing and pr, but also sales and business development, customer service, operations and human resources.

4) Done well, social media marketing is word of mouth, on steroids. Word of mouth is the oldest and purest form of marketing. I like to joke that it’s been in fashion since Eve said to Adam, “You’ve got to try this apple.” Surely your business has grown thanks to referrals and positive word of mouth. Now imagine your happiest client sharing how much they loved working with you with 100 Facebook friends, Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections.

Once you make the decision to invest your time and your company’s time and money in social media, it can still be a daunting process. With thousands of social networking sites and tools available to businesses and people, where do you start? Here are my 5 recommendations and why:

1)      Facebook: The world’s largest social media site boasts 400 million+ users and a growth rate of nearly 1 million users per day. More important, its users are your customers and prospects. Don’t believe me? There are over 6 million people in the United States alone on Facebook – that are age 60+. Facebook features individual profiles, groups and fan pages. You’ll want to set up a Fan Page for your business and/or customers. Then, share engaging content on a daily basis. Here are a few more tips for your Fan Page. You may want to consider Facebook ads to help populate your page. Because Facebook has data on 350 million people, the targeting options render the Facebook ads system as the best ad targeting mechanism in history. For example, a business attorney can target accountants in Great Neck, or an architect can target real estate developers in the Hamptons. Last Valentine’s Day, I took out a Facebook ad targeting 33 year old married employees of theKbuzz in New York. The ad copy read, “I love you Carrie” and the ad was seen by only my wife.

2)      Twitter:  The world’s fastest growing social media site may only have 50 million users, but your ability to tap into what your customers and prospects are saying right now on Twitter is unparalleled. Once you begin, you’ll want to follow thought leaders in your industry and people tweeting about you or what you do. As with Facebook, and really all social networks, you’ll want to share lots of great content – not necessarily your own, but articles and links your customers would want to read and would find helpful. Twitter will take a lot of time, but most of our clients on Twitter not only find it to be rewarding for their business, but actually personally rewarding as well.

3)      LinkedIn: The world’s largest professional social network has 55 million users and is still seen as the safer choice by some professionals and high level executives. As an individual, you should make sure your profile is complete and use LI to network, learn and share. As a company, you should make sure you have a dynamic company profile, and use LinkedIn to showcase great content and  find new employees and partners.

4)      YouTube: The world’s largest video-sharing site and 2^nd largest search engine, YouTube should be the host of any video content you can create, or better yet, have customers create. I’m NOT talking about slick tv spots – a flip cam is usually enough to film a 60 second How-To video,  or an interview with an executive, customer or partner. Don’t expect to produce the next “viral video sensation” – as long as you create and share great content, it will find an audience.

5)      Blog: While most corporate blogs are unread, if you can use a blog to consistently create and share valuable content, it can search as the lynchpin to your social media strategy. You don’t have to give away the farm – but do create enough value to showcase yourself as the expert – and make people want to share your content. Great blogging software options include WordPress, Posterous, and Tumblr.

via http://blog.thekbuzz.com

Il 2010 sarà il sesto anno dell’era “Social Media”.

Entrambi i momenti sono simili in un certo senso, e allo stesso tempo molto diversi, perché questa volta non vi è alcuna bolla finanziaria, o almeno, se vi fosse una bolla finanziaria, Internet avrebbe comunque già avuto a che fare con essa.
È per questo che il 2010 sarà l’anno del Social Media, il momento in cui le aspettative saranno al massimo livello, l’utilizzo vicino al suo potenziale picco, e quelli che sapranno sfruttarlo, potranno raccogliere i frutti di ciò che hanno seminato.

Altri segni dimostrano inequivocabilmente che questo è ciò a cui andremo in contro: è difficile imbattersi in un marketing manager di questi giorni, senza che parli di Social Media, anche se potrebbe non saperne molto sull’argomento. Questo è un chiaro segnale.Allo stesso tempo, tutto questo sarà anche una sfida, un momento in cui gli esperti in Social Media dovranno essere ancora più attenti al loro codice di condotta.

Qui, 10 consigli per prepararsi a questo Social Media tsunami:

1. Mantenere il vostro codice di condotta.

As social media moves into the mainstream, there is going to be a huge risk for traditional marketing managers to seize this opportunity and try to recycle old recipes which already stopped working a long time ago. At best, traditional methods will lead to failure when transposed to social media; at worst, there will be attempts at “infiltrating social media”. As I have pointed out many times, this is an absolute no-no. More than ever, it is time to remind people of the fundamental rules of disclosure, of which Andy Sernovitz and SMBC are rightfully so fond. Besides, the FTC is now ensuring that this kind of malpractice is made illegal (in certain Eureopean countries like France, “infiltration” techniques have already been deemed illegal, online and offline).

2. Strutturare il tuo Team.

There has been a natural tendency to work with limited or even very limited social media teams in the past. Indeed, Social Media initiatives have most of the time been started as grassroots types of projects but they are now endorsed much more broadly and officially by Management. Besides, before moving to the next phase, Social Media had to prove its effectiveness first. Now is the right time to change some of your teams’ jobs descriptions slowly but surely, in order to industrialise what you have just started.

3. Evitare la dispersione dei Social Media e farla finita con le iniziative sporadiche.

As Social Media is becoming more popular, it seems that everyone else wishes to create one’s twitter account. But how many twitter account does a company need? More than once, I have seen such efforts fail anyway, because communities aren’t created without effort and one has – as Tara Hunt would put it – to work on one’s whuffy first. Those who forget about these fundamentals are bound to fail anyway. They will also cause aggravation and havoc amongst social media enthusiasts and there will be a price for this.

4. Dalla presenza all’engagement.

For the past few years, many enterprises have experimented with social media, even if it only meant that they were carefully dipping a toe in cold waters; whereas it is okay for an enterprise to create content and develop its community online and initiate debates, there will soon be a requirement for them to use social media to move beyond top-down approaches in the very near future and foster community feeling and engagement. Social media users demand engagement and not old-style marketing, as the recent demise of the Eurostar has shown. Once again, this is an area in which well-meaning Social Marketing initiatives could suffer from traditional, badly managed approaches.

5. Alzare gli standard qualitativi, in particolare VOD e UGC.

More or less every sensible enterprise has experienced with video in the late 2008 and 2009. 2010 will also be the time for us to move into a more mature way of producing videos. Similarly, resorting to UGC videos will soon become easier and easier thanks to the introduction of new generation HD hand-held cameras such as the Flip or the Kodak Zi8. As long as sound capture is improved dramatically though…

6. Dal video alla radio.

As pointed out by Cisco’s John Earnhardt in late 2008 at a blogwell conference, vlogging (i.e. video blogging) introduced a new and easier way of delivering original content at a very reasonable cost. Yet, if videos were easier to produce than blog posts, certainly radio content is even simpler. Mainly, with tools like Blogtalkradio or Saooti [Fr] or for instance. This is even more true for those companies which are spread across continents like Orange Business Services: recording a video with an expert in Sydney and another in Vienna is utmost impossible. Web radio studios make that type of fresh new content available to all; not having the picture is only a minor hindrance. Should we name that rlogging? I’m not sure about that, there is probably a limit to silly 2.0 compound names.

7. Essere pronti per l’ascesa di Facebook nell’impresa.

2008 and 2009 have been great years for Facebook. Usage has soared, and their business model is being fixed. There is only one thing wrong with it – notwithstanding its quirky interface – and it’s the fact that Facebook can not be seen behind firewalls. This is not just bad for b2b players who would want to use Facebook for Marketing, but also for b2c players (where do office workers get to consumer websites during the day if not behind their company firewall?). Gradually, US corporations are opening to the use of social media in the workplace. I expect it to happen in Europe as well. Little by little, MIS admins will lift the ban on Facebook usage and this will enable greater reach for enterprises and social marketing. The next step is to then hone one’s social media marketing skills on Facebook, therefore preparing for the future of marketing and learning by doing. Facebook marketing for dummies by Paul Dunay is a good place to start in order to grow these online business skills and prepare for the rise of Facebook in the workplace.

8. E’ tempo di tornare a ragionare sulle metriche di redditività dei Social Media.

This is a subject on which we have already touched quite a few times in the past (here and here again for instance), social media ROI or ROE dashboards (I definitely prefer the return of engagement approach because it emphasises these things that weren’t possible before) will need to be created or improved so as to demonstrate a proven benefit. Apart from the traditional and less traditional analytics tools which let you measure visits and popularity, I also suggest social media managers emphasise the amounts of money that they have been able to save thanks to User Generated Content (UGC). As far as I am concerned, my assumption is that UGC has made it possible for Orange Business Services to generate something in the regions of $300,000 worth of content in 2009. I would have never been able to develop that much quality content without social media and the UGC approach. That’s what I call ROE (return on engagement).

9. La gestione delle community deve essere migliorata e industrializzata.

Community management is also high on the agenda although I believe that most agencies and clients have the wrong ideas about it. Community management is in my eyes much closer to old-fashioned application coordination and facilitation than hiring armies of staff in offshore companies to send more or less standardised responses to comments (as a matter of fact, Tara Hunt is even more radical as she declares that she is torn on the question of whether enterprises require community managers at all). Much of community management has to be in-sourced I believe, in order to make it real because clients are fed up talking to robotised helpdesk agents. Social Media should be about real people and real engagement. What is certain is that Social Media teams and the other people working with them cross-organisationally will have to learn by doing as well as get more and more professional about this function which is a cornerstone of Social Media activities.

10. Attenti alle previsioni – inclusa questa – e sii preparato per cambiamenti e innovazione … senza esagerare!

In this day and age, new social media stuff appears on a daily basis, if not more. Yet, shrewd marketers have a sixth sense for knowing when to and mostly when not to jump on a bandwagon. New social media tools are being created every day or so, but it doesn’t mean that all social networks would be should be tried. Be selective, and yet open-minded.

Nota: Questa è una versione estesa ed adattata di un post pubblicato originariamente in http://bnet.co.uk da Yann Gourvennec. Via: http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com (Photo stuartpilbrow cc2.0)

Visualizza il documento integrale, qui.

Negli Stati Uniti il 76% degli utenti attivi in internet sono presenti anche nelle reti sociali; in Italia la percentuale non supera di poco il 50%. Sempre in US, il 93% di questi si aspettano di trovare ( e di poter interagire ) con il propri marchi, prodotti o servizi online.

Un semplice e completo documento che identifica i 10 passi fondamentali per una presenza consapevole nel mondo dei “Social Media”.

Di Sally Falkow, pubblicato da Expansion Plus via ValoriPrimiLab