Eggblogg

Social media marketing isn't about the numbers game

One of those marketing tenets I often still hear is that people typically have to see your marketing message nine times before they'll act on it.

I've never been entirely happy with this. If a marketing message comes at me nine times (and I still haven't bought), all I can think is that the company concerned hasn't bothered to get its targeting right. And in the case of email, I'll have unsubscribed by then anyway.

It all reeks of the old-style numbers-game marketing that says the more people you hit, the more often, the better - because then you only need 1% of them to succumb and you're laughing. Imagine a huge upside-down pyramid - millions of 'prospects' at the top and a handful of conversions at the bottom. Which is of course how spammers operate.

I wonder if social media marketing is turning the old pyramid on its head. Better to have one conversation with someone who's interested in what you're selling, then allow/encourage/enable her to talk about it in her network, and her friends in theirs.... than to tell her nine times about something irrelevant. (And have THAT talked about.)

Forresters reported on this over two years ago, questioning the received wisdom of the purchase funnel and noting that the internet was making engagement into the new key metric for marketers. And this well before the current social web frenzy took hold. But you'd hardly know it - as recently as last week, Mark Ritson in Marketing magazine blustered about 'pointless' name-changing and how we need to get back to 'the four Ps', as if the last 10 years never took place.

Ritson is well-respected and influential - in his own words he 'trains the next generation of MBA students who aspire to a career in marketing'. But how are marketing qualifications to be taken seriously if they are still based almost entirely on theories from pre-internet days?

Favouriting tweets so as not to miss them...

Yes, it's another grammatical mashup, but there's no denying that 'favourite' is now a verb.

I'm always seeing interesting tweets with links to articles  I don't have time to read immediately, so when this happens I 'favourite' them. It means I can easily find and read them later, rather than have them disappear into the 'Tw-ether' (yuk!)

Here are some that I've favourited over the last couple of weeks:

How to build a Facebook community (by John Haydon via Sandy Guerriere) - a really useful article made better by loads of very clear screenshots

Audioboo brings instant podcasting to your browser (via Wonderful Creative) - an overview of the new web version of Audioboo and how it can be used as an easy podcasting tool

A short video on how Google Wave works (from Documentally) - yes, I tried to watch the original 80 min video from Google but didn't last the course... this is really worth watching for an 8 min review of the main points

15 suggestions for marketing your iphone app  (via Alice Elliott) - An in-depth piece with a lot of online marketing ideas that don't only apply to the promotion of apps.

I find I prefer 'favouriting' to bookmarking, because the tweets are there staring at me in Tweetdeck until I read them, so I don't forget.

Interesting idea: use Twitter to research best email send times

Deciding on the best time of day or day of the week to send your email newsletter is always tricky. I advise clients to test it, as it depends on so many factors that it's hard to say what works for one will work for another.

One of my clients has found that sending on a Saturday morning works well - but then she is selling lovely home accessories and decorative items to a consumer audience, and maybe the weekend is when they are doing a spot of relaxed browsing and shopping.

B2B clients tend to avoid Monday mornings when inboxes are crowded and people are busy.

I thought this was an interesting way of researching the best time to send - by setting up a keyword Twitter search RSS feed: find out when people are talking about the stuff you're selling, and adjust send times accordingly.

My only comment would be that ideally you would want to survey only your customers/prospective customers, not the whole Twitter population, plus you'd have to allow for some 'false positives' as with any kind of keyword (as opposed to semantic) search. Worth trying though, it costs nothing, and it's a great idea!

Who were the early internet 'thought leaders'?

I've recently had the pleasure of discovering some excellent and thought-provoking people writing on the subject of social media and the future of the internet.

It's made me go back and look again at some of the earlier internet 'thought leaders' who had such a great influence on me in the late 1990s, such as Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. His 1995 book 'Being Digital' was one of those reads that sent my head spinning - so many ideas and possibilities of how technology was to change the way we communicate.

I went on to read Esther Dyson, another great web visionary. She foresaw the role of peer recommendations, content sharing and co-creation long before social networking was around. Similarly, Sherry Turkle's pioneering work Life on the Screen was a huge influence on me when I was first drawn to the idea of online community.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was another internet milestone that set the scene for the advent of social media. For me, this publication signalled the beginning of the end of traditional marketing. This has a poignancy as it came out at the same time that I left corporate, 'offline' marketing for good and moved onto the internet. I admit I don't remember the authors' names, but you'll find that out if you follow the Wikipedia link.

Going much further back, I must mention an article I only came across in 1999 although it had been written in 1945 - 'As We May Think' by Vannevar Bush. I can't describe how thrilling it was to read this for the first time. Bush was a US scientist at the time when technology was being developed for one purpose only - to wage war. This paper is his call for scientists of the future to apply new technology to non-military purposes, for the good of all, and in so doing he conjures up a digital future that is visionary, extraordinary and elegant.

Do you agree? There have been so many waves of internet pioneers in its short life. Who were the ones who influenced you? I'd love to know.

Also, who are the exciting thinkers of today, those who'll be remembered, not just for being the biggest names, but for their vision and influence? I have my list! But I need to stop reminiscing now and do some work. So that's for another blog post.

Photo: Grace Murray Hopper, early computer scientist and inventor of COBOL. Credit: Computermuseum.li

UK small business social media case study no 3: Curved Vision

Is it important to have a plan before starting to use social media in your business? The textbook answer of course would be 'yes' ... but the reality for many is that it evolves in a far more organic way. Trial and error, suck it and see, whatever you want to call it.

One UK small business that has adopted an unstructured approach to social media, but is seeing a tangible return on its investment is Curved Vision, a presentation skills training firm based in the North East.

Director Simon Raybould first started embracing the world of online forums some five years ago, joining a business networking group that gave him some good contacts, although he's since moved on. Having joined Twitter in early 2008 he went through the classic stages of Twitter adoption - starting off enthusiastically, then wondering what the point of it all is. "It was really only 6 months ago I started to use Twitter regularly," he explained. "It has definitely resulted in sales, not to our immediate followers necessarily, but to their followers."

Every couple of months, Curved Vision produces a useful article or resource which it gives away for free, and enquiries come off the back of the quality of these pieces and the number of retweets. Sometimes the enquiry simply happens when one of their followers mentions them to others. 

But Raybould doesn't simply use Twitter as a broadcast medium. He estimates his tweets break down into 40% social/fun/conversation/helping people, 40% tips/information and 10 - 20% (max) out-and-out promotional. This wasn't planned, but it's a balance that seems to work well.

A key part of Curved Vision's promotional activity is the company blog where they are currently taking part in a BT Tradespace initiative to post one blog post a day, every day in November. In the two years it's been going, the blog has grown into a vast source of information. Raybould reports an interesting effect: although the number of speculative enquiries has dropped, the conversion rate of those they do get is far higher than is used to be - close to 90%. In other words, the blog acts as a filter to qualify prospects, so saving the firm time on phone calls and proposals that go nowhere.

When it comes to keeping in touch with current and past clients, Raybould turns to Facebook where he has a regular profile page, not publicly viewable. All his tweets show up on there, but Facebook updates are not tweeted. "My contacts on Facebook already know me, and it's not like Twitter where anyone can follow you, so I can be a bit less guarded about what I say." The purpose of the Facebook presence is more about encouraging recommendations and keeping the brand in people's minds, not selling as such.

For those just starting to use social media for business, Raybould has some good advice: take your time to get to know the community - they're all different. It might be couple of weeks of watching and reading before you start to chip in, and when you do, make it something helpful. "It's easy to get people's backs up by asking something of them too soon or not respecting the etiquette of the place."

As for finding the time, one of the typical cries of the small business owner wondering about all this tweeting, posting and blogging...Raybould's attitude is to go for consistency rather than frequency. "Two or three tweets a day isn't a huge commitment - even if you're out of the office you can do it from a mobile phone."