What do you need to know about your conversation participants before setting up your social media strategy?

As part of J.Boye’s ” Knowledge sharing for digital decision makers” Conference I had a chance to participate in a workshop delivered by Bob Boiko (University of Washington) titled “Social Media and Information Strategy”.

Bob presented his information strategy framework to include

1. Identifying your business goals
2. Identifying your audiences
3. Figuring out the information types you are going to share with your audience
4. Lastly picking your channels to facilitate info. delivery

His info. strategy would follow this basic template

” We deliver the right info (aka content model) to the right people (your audiences) the right way (through appropriate channel/s) to meet our goals (aka business goals).”

The addition of social media conversations revises his strategy template to now mention information exchanges.

“We deliver the right content or facilitate information exchanges for the right people in the right way to help us meet our business goals.”

In a way this strategy building framework reminded me of Forrester’s POST methodology that I have been advocating when helping my stakeholders build their social media strategies at Pitney Bowes (my employer)

Forrester's POST methodology

But what I’d like to share with you here is Bob’s laser sharp focus on better understanding the conversations themselves

Blogging for marketing and communication profs

I recently had a chance to talk to a group of Public Relations professionals about blogging. Although I did multiple “Intro. to Blogging” talks in the past couple of years I needed to pause and really think about this one. PR folks don’t need training on how to communicate (heck, they can be my teachers on this topic), but what they need is a clear understanding on how to adjust their writing style for blogging success including understanding differences in blogging goals, audience, content and most importantly tone.

Blogging vs. marcom writing

Blogging vs. marcom writing - what's the difference?

The anatomy of a blog post (aka writing for the web)

Starting with a great blog post title and finishing with a call to action great blog posts have a specific anatomy. BTW, I’ve used one of the posts from the HubSpot blog  because I believe they are doing a superb job illustrating all of my blog anatomy points AND I highly recommend for great insights about marketing automation.

What’s the “R” in Return on Investment in Social Media

Katie Paine never fails to come up with a cute acronym to illustrate her point. First it was her cruciate to eliminate HITS from our metrics vocabulary. While for most of us measuring hits means tracking the number of times our website’s server is responding to a request to serve a web page, image or any other file, Katie’s definition of HITS = How Idiots Track Success. Nice! I bet from now on you will never use this KPI in your metrics dashboard.

Here comes another funny acronym Katie coned to help us understand the R in Social Media ROI. It’s KBI which stands for Kick Butt Index. According to Katie the beginning of every successful social media measurement starts with identification of your goals (the R in ROI). If we want to “kick butt” we need to know what “kick butt” means. Are we expected to:

• Improve positioning in our specific marketplace
• Communicate key messages
• Increase brand advocacy
• Increase engagement in the brand
• Demonstrate thought leadership
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Improve company’s reputation
• Bring in qualified leads

Have you noticed that the above list of goals has nothing to do with social media? These are business-specific goals. Knowing them and agreeing on which ones are key will help you determine what KPIs you need to measure in social media to prove success. It often happens in large enterprises that these overarching goals get lost in translation or get misinterpreted or misunderstood. Your job BEFORE committing to executing a social media program is to clearly identify what overarching business goal(s) that you will be contributing to and identify your KPIs accordingly.

Monitoring Social Media Conversations for Your Brand

How many times have you heard that the biggest value of social media participation for your company comes from listening? Great, but what does this really mean to effectively listen to social media conversations? What should we concentrate on analyzing while the fire hose of social media conversations continues to drown us in data?

A few weeks back I was fortunate to listen to a panel discussion at the Connecticut Social Media Breakfast meeting with three queens of social media measurements: Katie Paine from KDPaine & Partners, Jenifer Zeszut of Lithium Technologies (former CEO of Scout Labs) and Genevieve Coates from Radian6. (Trust me, the air of the auditorium at the Quinnipiac University was so saturated with insights that it was literaly hard to breathe.) All of these women spend significant amount of time every day coaching their clients how to gain insights from social media monitoring and subsequently how to measure the effect of clients’ engagement to respond to these insights.

Social Media Engagement Journey

During the panel, Jenifer Zeszut talked about five stages of social media engagement that she calls the Social Engagement Journey. The farther you are on the engagement journey the more advanced your social media monitoring and measurement needs are.

all of Jeniffer Zeszut’s presentation slides

It usually starts with the PR department concerned with brand reputation management who ends up to be the first in line to monitor social media to find and fight PR fires.

Blogging is NOT dead

OK, I’ve had enough. No more articles proclaiming that blogging is dead and that the rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter and increasing shorter attention spans of digital content consumer is making blogging obsolete , please.

While we go through changes in the way we create, distribute & consume content online blogging for me continues to be one of the most effective ways to establish and maintain my permanent presence digitally. As such, I would never consider abandoning it in favor of snack-sized content publishing platforms. What I do instead is to look for ways channels can complement one another and work in concerts as part of a well maintained digital hub.

One of my favorite corporate blogging gurus Debbie Weil recently gave a talk as part of the Blogging Success Summit 2011. The topic of her presentation was “Leveraging Your Blog as a Social Media Hub” . According to Debbie (and I agree with her POV), your blog is your digital “castle”, your permanent digital space where you control the content and where you set your own rules. The rest of the social media ecosystem is “borrowed territory” where content exchanges might be more frequent and more real-time, but where they are harder to find and consume overtime.

The trick to your social media publishing success is not to eliminate any one of your digital channels in favor of the other, but to use them in concert leveraging the best features each one has to offer. While your blog continues to be your thought leadership content repository, it only works when others can find it. That’s where other social media channels come in that make it easy for you to draw attention to your blog (e.g. Twitter) and to engage in near-real-time conversation with your digital tribe (e.g. LinkedIn groups).

QR Codes – oh… the World of Possibilities

Last week I attended (and spoke at) the MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Forum, an annual gathering of smart marketing minds who, for this year’s event, traveled to a snowy Austin, TX to explore what’s emerging in the area of digital marketing. This was my 5th MarketingProfs event (I know I am a veteran) which as usual turned out to be a star-studded gathering with Jay Baer and Amber Naslund debuting their “Now Revolution” book and Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman debuting their “Content Rules” book, both of which I highly recommend.

If you’ve ever been to a MarketingProfs event you know that it is a great networking opportunity first and foremost. I took advantage of it and had lengthy discussions with Steve Woodruff about opportunities for social media in pharma and healthcare industries and discussed content marketing strategies with Jeffrey Cohen, the editor of the Social Media B2B blog.

So what left the biggest impression for me at this year’s conference? – you ask. Well, several things including the abundance of QR codes popping up in handouts, callouts, napkins, books pages and other physical objects spotting of which was followed by many conversations regarding how to use QR codes for marketing and customer loyalty programs. And rightfully so QR codes are finaly taking off in America with most recent survey from Mobio showing a 1200% increase in QR code usage in the last 3 months of 2010.

What are QR codes?

A lot of great articles including Jeff Korhan’s recent blog in Social Media Examiner & a an earlier one from Mashable go over the QR codes basics, so I will happily refer you to them regarding the history of QR codes, adoption rates and so on. Here I will just list the basics.

• QR codes (as well as their cousins Microsoft Tags, Datamatix, etc.) are two-dimensional codes that can be generated easily (and for free) and displayed for anyone to scan with their smart phones.
• QR codes  enable easy connections between physical objects and the digital world.
• To read a QR code you must have a special application called a QR Reader.
• By scanning a QR code with your mobile phone you can link to a URL, bookmark (favorite), text, phone number, SMS or a vCard (contact)

Examples of QR code Implementation

Despite a small (but fast growing) adoption rates of consumers familiar with the QR code technology in the US, we are seeing an explosion in creative uses of QR codes to connect consumers to digital content while they are away from their computers, but have access to their smart phone. Here are some I fund particularly appealing

Using Social Media for Events 2.0 at MarketingProf’s Digital Marketing Forum

If you follow my blog entries you know I am a big proponent of using social media for marketing your presence at events and tradeshows. I have experimented in that space for close to two years now which resulted in developing a program for sustainable usage of social media for event activation at Pitney Bowes. I have shared my experiences with you along the way.

What to have a successful event? Engage with new media influencers

Real-time social media engagement the next big thing at tradeshows

Social Media Makes a Splash at PRINT 09

Here is a preview of what my colleague, Lucy Hackman and I will be talking about in Austin Texas on February 4, 2011 during MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum 2011