WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T
If these are some of the questions you’ve asked yourself, then you’ve come to the right place. Because this is a book designed to answer your questions about social media. More specifically, it’s a book that’s designed to help you set up, launch, and run
a social media campaign that makes money. After all, what’s the point of running a social media campaign if it doesn’t drive revenue?
Social media is a big, complex subject, but before we take a look at the new world of social media, let’s take a look at the old world of traditional marketing. By looking back before we look forward, we’ll have a better sense of where social media is going to take us in the future.
MARKETING HAS CHANGED MORE IN THE PAST 5 YEARS THAN IN THE PREVIOUS 100 COMBINED
It’s hard to believe, but more marketing changes have occurred in the past 5 years than in the previous 100 years. For perspective on this, let’s look back to the starting point for modern marketing. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden made the world’s first radio broadcast. Fessenden sent out a short radio program from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, that included his rendition of “O Holy Night” and ended with a reading from the Bible. And with little more than that, radio was born. Suddenly, companies such as Sears, Coca-Cola, and Ford had the capability to send their advertising messages to millions of people at once.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
More than 20 years later, the first television station launched in Schenectady, New York. That station, owned by General Electric, was able to broadcast images as far away as Los Angeles. By September 1928, the station was making four broadcasts a week, although the general population wouldn’t widely adopt television until the 1950s.
Then for the next several decades, nothing happened. Sure, there were a few leaps forward (such as the advent of cable TV), but the media used to connect companies to consumers didn’t change
in any quantifiable way for the entire twentieth century.
Fast-forward to today, when new media appear online monthly or even weekly. What’s driving this rapidly changing environment? Put simply, it’s the combination of broadband Internet and the wide adoption of personal computers, smart phones, and content tablets such as the Kindle and the iPad. These technological leaps forward have changed the way consumers both receive information and interact with the brands they love.
With change comes opportunity. But if you don’t know how to harness these changes, you won’t be able to take advantage of the opportunity.
Do you want to learn how to make money with social media? Would you like to find out how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of a social media campaign? Or would you like to see a road map to help you integrate a social media campaign into your existing marketing plan?
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T
To do these things, we start by giving you a deeper understanding of what social media is. And the best way to understand social media is to start by talking about what social media is not. After all, social media is defined in many ways, so let’s zig while other people are zagging and talk about what social media isn’t.
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T
Some people will tell you that social media is a “here today, gone tomorrow” fad, but those are the same people who are waiting for the eight-track tape deck to come back.
No, social media isn’t a flash in the pan. In fact, it’ll just keep evolving into something better, which is exactly what happened when personal computers (PCs) first came on the scene.
When PCs first arrived, word processing was about the only thing they were really good for. But then someone figured out a way to connect a few of them. When people started connecting them into expanded networks, they began to understand the true power of the technology.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
One of the first services to try to leverage large-scale computer networks was CompuServe, which experienced relatively stable growth during the 1980s and 1990s. CompuServe plugged along fine until America Online (AOL) came along. AOL was the first company of its kind to leverage the power of a user-friendly interface. Thanks to that strategy, AOL grew from 10 million subscribers in 1996 to 27 million subscribers by 2002.
But things didn’t last for AOL. When people realized that it was merely an add-on to the Internet, they decided to plug in directly. When that happened, the power of interconnected PCs really began to take off. First came early brochure-ware sites; then came blogs; then forums; then bookmarking, tagging, photo sharing, podcasting, virtual worlds, widgets, and ... well, you get the point. Things started to change. And they changed in ways that we couldn’t even imagine
when the personal computer first came around.
That brings us back to our point: The evolution of the personal computer from a simple word processor to a complex web of interconnected minicomputers is similar to the evolution of social media from simple networks to the Web 3.0 technology it’s becoming today. Both technologies continue to morph and evolve. And both technologies are here to stay.
With all that in mind, let’s keep talking about what social media is not.
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T
Social Media Isn’t Traditional Marketing
As we’ve mentioned, traditional marketing is about having a monologue with your customers and prospects. Social media, on the other hand, is about having a dialogue. When you have a dialogue with a customer or prospect, the communication is much more fulfilling (and much more profitable).
In the old days, marketing was handled out of a single location (usually called headquarters) where a central authority analyzed customer research, sales trends, and demographic information to arrive at a unique selling proposition (USP).
Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company invented the unique selling proposition. The idea was that, by identifying a single, unique point of differentiation for your brand, you could separate your brand from the competition. Reeves used this technique to create a campaign for Anacin that tripled its sales and, during one seven-year run, generated more revenue for Anacin than Gone with the Wind had generated in a quarter of a century.
The Big Idea
Traditional marketers focused their energies on what people thought about their brands. Contemporary marketers focus their energies on how people engage with their brands—online, in stores, at home, and through other channels.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
For most of the twentieth century, traditional marketing was pretty simple: Figure out your USP, get the creative people at your agency to come up with a good TV commercial, and run the heck out of it during prime time.
Given how simple marketing was back then, it’s no wonder the guys on Madison Avenue had time for three-martini lunches. They didn’t have much else to do.
But social media is more complex and more fluid than traditional marketing. And it requires an entirely new mindset.
That brings us to our next point ....
Social Media Isn’t Just for Young People
A recent study indicated that the fastest-growing segment on Facebook is women older than age 55 and that the largest demographic on Twitter is the 35–49 age group. So, no, social media isn’t just for young people. It’s for anybody who is interested in using new technologies to grow their sales and revenue.
However, people older than age 35 do take longer to adopt a new technology. Part of the reason is that most humans don’t like change, but another reason is that the neural patterns in their brains are already structured for traditional technologies. New technologies require rewiring the brain. So let’s keep going. What else is social media not?
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T
Social Media Isn’t a YouTube Video
We can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard someone say, “Sure, our company does social media. Just last month, we uploaded our CEO’s annual speech onto YouTube.”
For starters, let’s get something straight: The only person who watched the CEO’s annual speech on YouTube was the CEO and, perhaps, his or her family members. Nobody else tuned in. We’re serious. Sorry to break the news to you.
Second, just because someone uploaded a YouTube video doesn’t mean it’s a social media campaign. Social media is about communicating across a wide variety of channels for a sustained period of time. It’s not about tossing up a Facebook Fan Page or completing a LinkedIn Company Profile. It’s much more than that.
A social media campaign is similar to a marriage. You can’t expect to have a good marriage if your primary means of communication is a single conversation for ten minutes every morning. (Trust us, that doesn’t work—we know some people who have tried.)
What does work is a prolonged, sustained, two-way conversation across multiple channels that enables both parties to feel as though they’ve contributed and they’ve been heard. When you can accomplish that, your social media campaign is in very good shape.
Did You Know?
A recent University of Massachusetts study indicates that 22 percent of the Fortune 500 have a blog.2 Social Media Isn’t Always Online
For many of our readers, social media implies some form of digital social media or communications enabled through online technology. However, we can’t forget that a great deal of social media marketing happens offline—after people have turned off their computers.
In a recent study from the Keller Fay Group and OMD, offline communications are still the predominant mode of marketing across a variety of age groups. This study indicated that word- of-mouth is considered to be “highly credible” more often than online conversations.
Despite these trends, we believe numerous experts exist in the area of offline word-of-mouth and that a number of strong books in this area have been written. Therefore, for the purposes of this book, we focus on digital tools and techniques reflecting the booming growth of online social media demand.
Social Media Isn’t Something That Can’t Be
Measured Okay, we’re giving our editors heart palpitations because we used a double negative in this heading. But that doesn’t mean
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA ISN’T
it isn’t true. Social media can be measured—and, depending on whom you ask, you can measure it in a dozen or even a hundred different ways. (Hey, look! We said whom instead of who.)
The great news about social media is that, when you take the time to measure it, you might discover that it is a significant source of profits. Significant profits can make you rich. And we can all agree that money is the only important thing in life.
Okay, that was a joke. Money isn’t the only important thing in life. But you get our point—if you measure social media, you can track your ROI. If you track your ROI, you can increase profits. And that’s certainly not a bad thing.
We could go on and on about what social media isn’t, but then the title of the book would be What Social Media Isn’t, which doesn’t strike us as very appealing. So let’s keep the ball moving forward and dive into the topic at hand, which is how to make money with social media.
ENDNOTES
1. Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television.
2. See http://centerformarketingresearch.wordpress.com/2010/ 05/18/social-media-continues-to-be-used-with-higher- education-recruitment/.
THE OWNERS OF THE NEW RED’SPORCH,1 LOCATED IN A REFURBISHED FIRE STATION IN A TRENDY PART OF TOWN, HAD A BRILLIANT IDEA. THEY WOULD USE THE VIRAL POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA TO GROW VISIBILITY AND AWARENESS OF THEIR NEW RESTAURANT.
THE EVOLUTION OF MARKETING
Their idea was simple, elegant, and oh-so-viral. They would send tweets that they’d provide a free drink extravaganza at their restaurant if they could get just 100 Twitter followers by the following Monday.
Free drinks. Open bar. No charge.
IN THE WORLD OF MARKETING, THERE ARE TWO SURE-FIRE PROMOTIONS
The first sure-fire promotion is to give away free money. The second is to give away free alcohol, which is exactly what the members of Red’s Porch intended to do.
The promotion was so bold and so viral that the biggest concern was not whether it would work, but whether it would overheat the fledgling restaurant. After all, the mainstream media had written stories outlining the success of social media programs such as the one Red’s was about to conduct.Perhaps the best known of these success stories is the one about Dell Computer. Dell had designed a Twitter page called DellOutlet to provide special offers exclusively to people who followed the company. The Twitter page was so successful that it garnered more than 1.5 million followers and generated more than $2.0 million in incremental revenue for Dell.
A typical tweet on the DellOutlet page might read like this:
HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
15% off any Dell Outlet business laptop 11z, 15-1545 or 17-1750 laptop with coupon!
Enter code at checkout: PZMKKWHQG7DMM.
If you were an IT professional (or anybody interested in buying a computer), Dell’s offer (available only to DellOutlet Twitter followers) was too good to miss.
Given Dell’s success, it wasn’t surprising that the owners worried that giving away free alcohol would overheat Red’s Porch. The fastest way to kill a good restaurant and bar is to drive too many people to a location, which leads to an overworked wait staff and customers who are frustrated by long lines and a backed-up kitchen.
The owners were a little anxious when they sent their first tweet:
Help us grow our Twitter list. If we get 100 followers by Monday, we will invite all to a free drinks party. OPEN BAR!!!
They followed their initial tweet with several more tweets, all promoting one of the most bullet-proof promotions in the history of marketing—free alcohol. During the promotion, the owners checked in periodically to find out how many new followers they had generated.
Did they generate 1,000 new followers? 5,000 new followers? Perhaps 10,000?
Nope. They generated 23 new followers.
THE EVOLUTION OF MARKETING
What happened? For starters, they didn’t have something that we call social media magnetism.
With social media magnetism, your brand is so powerful that people are attracted to it the way metal is attracted to a magnet. Your brand is so powerful that people go out of their way to be affiliated and associated with your company because it gives them a sense of style, cache, and panache.Brands such as Nike, Apple, and Harley-Davidson have tons of social media magnetism, which is why you see people wearing Nike sweatshirts or putting Apple logos on the rear windows of their cars.
(Think about it: When was the last time you saw a sweatshirt with a Joe’s Plumbing or Nanci’s Florist logo on it?)
How to Tell If Your Brand Is a Social Media Magnet
1. Does the general public wear your logo on their sweatshirts? ___ Yes ___ No
2. Does the general public put bumper stickers with your logo on their cars?___ Yes ___ No
3. Does the general public wear hats with your logo on them?___ Yes ___ No
If you answered “no” to more than one of these questions, your brand does not have social media magnetism. Welcome to the club.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
The good news about social media magnetism is that, if you have it, you can grow your social media program organically. People actually want to be affiliated with brands that have social media magnetism. They want to have your logo on their car. They want to wear a sweatshirt with your logo on it. And they want to be a fan on your Facebook page.
To be a social media magnet, you usually have to spend millions of dollars and put in hundreds of thousands of man-hours. Nike, Apple, and Harley-Davidson didn’t just happen. They were part of a concerted effort to build brands that had social media magnetism. And building those brands took decades, not days.
The second challenge our friends at Red’s Porch had was that they were under the impression that creating a promotion was the first step in a social media campaign.
But it’s not the first step—it’s actually the second step. The first step is to use traditional media or word-of-mouth advertising to drive awareness and traffic to your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, or MySpace pages.
The Big Idea
Brands with social media magnetism attract people to their social media campaigns more easily than brands that don’t have social media magnetism.
THE EVOLUTION OF MARKETING
Sure, if you have social media magnetism, you can easily skip the first step and jump to the second step. But if you’re like most of us, you’ll have to use a lot of the traditional methods to drive awareness. Those methods might include print, radio, and TV (if you’re a large, well-funded brand); or e-mail, public relations, and word-of-mouth (if you’re a small, underfunded brand).
All this leads us to one of our key points: You can waste a lot of time and money in social media if you don’t know what you’re doing.
This is where we come in—it’s why we wrote this book. Our goal for this book is to give you a tested road map designed to help you make money with social media. Nobody is doing social media because they want to be social. They’re doing social media because they want to do any combination of these three things:
1. Acquirenewcustomers
2. Get existing customers to buy again
3. Generate referrals from both new and existing customers
But hang on a second. Before we go much further discussing how to use social media to grow your sales and revenues, let’s take a quick look at where marketing has been during the past 150 years and where it’s headed today. By doing that, we’ll have an even better sense of how to set up, launch, and run an effective social media campaign.
Show Konversi KodeHide Konversi Kode Show EmoticonHide Emoticon