In a session “Publishing for Social Media” Jim Bankoff, Chairman & CEO of SB Nation, discussed using social media to drive traffic to generate revenue. It could have been 2005 at AOL where Jim’s content team passed that same message to those of us on the search team. The goal then was to use search to drive traffic to higher CPM pages. Now just change “search” to “mobile” and the story is the same

The first of the two videos is from Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, VivaKi. He spoke about The People Network and the top piece of advice from him when it comes to working with new technologies is to use them.

The other video is along the same path — it’s not a case study, but it goes more to approach. This is from Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreen’s. He discusses choosing partnerships, asking your agency “explain”, and look for a wow factor that can separate your program from your competitors. He cited Walgreen’s program to donate a flu shot for every Foursquare check-in and how that beat CVS to the punch.

Video:
Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at VivaKi
Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreens

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ROI is always important, but I think the issue at this stage of the social commerce experience the difficulties is in identifying the ROI + vs -.

It’s straight forward to do the simple math of how much you took in vs how much you gave away, but there are other numbersthat need to factored in, but they may be tough to qualify.

Off the top of my head, so please add others:
Some positives:
1) After the buyer gets the $X of product for the $Y they spent, did they by more?
2) Did they come back again?
3) How about the publicity of being promoted to all the subscribers and then virally to the friends of the buyer

Some negatives:
1) Need to generate more margin to make up for discount
2) discounts bought by clients who would have paid full price anyway (make it sound like a ‘treat’ for them in the copy)
3) Does discount hurt the brand? Could it turn people into ‘waiters’? That wait until deals come out before they come back?

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Top Tactic in Social Media

Today is the day. The tactic used in social media to stir up interest: The Countdown.  Just like I did to get you here.

First my apologies for using a self-serving trick, but I did so to make a point.  And that is — it works.  Even with nothing really to offer I added 14 new followers in the last 3 days.

The best thing about the Countdown tactic is that it’s really easy. The only challenge is the planning because you have to get out in front of it to give you the lead time.  What should you do:

1. Find a reason — a new product launch; the anniversary of an event in your industry; anything with some relevance and value to your intended audience.
2. Layout your announcements.  I think it’s best to write them up in one sitting, so when it comes time to execute it’s just a matter of paste and schedule.  Remember that these are just teases, so they shouldn’t be too long, so writing up a bunch isn’t that difficult.  I advocate this, rather than write as you go, because it’s tough to stay on topic and on schedule if you write as you go over multiple days.
3. Plan your Twitter posts to hit different parts of the day. Not everyone reads Twitter at 8am, so spread them out at different times to hit different users.

Coming Next Week — Just 4 days until I give you the next most popular tip: What do you think it is?

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Just 1 Day Left

Come back tomorrow. Can you feel it? It’s almost time to learn about the top marketing tactic in social media.

Just 2 Days Left

Come back on Friday, March 25, for my article about the hottest marketing tactic in social media.

Just 3 Days Left

Comeback on Friday, March 25, for my article about the hottest marketing tactic in social media.

Image via Wikipedia

Some people do puzzles to stay sharp, I like to run a marketing model.  The kind where I set up a spreadsheet, make some assumptions and justifiable estimates, and then hope like hell my hypothesis is in the ballpark. From there I usually have to spin it to make it easy to digest.  Good times.

This week an idea came up about the effectiveness of using PR to support a regional project that would cover Central to Western NY vs using a Facebook Fan page.

Here’s some background with the names changed.

About the Newspapers:
Below are the five largest regional newspapers and their circulations that I found by searching around.  The two assumptions that I added are:
a) Views – each purchased newspaper is viewed twice
b) Impressions – I assumed that an article like this would be read by 20% of the buyers.

Bottom Line: Getting an article in each newspaper in the region would be seen by 180,000 people.

NEWSPAPER    Circ     Readers/Circ   Views  Impressions
Buffalo    160,000   
Roch       119,000   
Syr         85,000   
Bing        65,000   
Elmira      23,000   
           452,000           2        0.2    180,800

Now, Facebook:
a) Group size – I used 30,000. I realize that this is a fairly large group, but there is a similar group in the region that already has more fans than this, so it is certainly achievable either working independently or doing a coordinated project with the other group.
b) Impressions – Total impressions are generated by getting “Like” clicks and comments that will then get your post to appear on Facebook walls of non-fans. To determine how many impression a single announcement post would get, I used 5 impressions/fan. This is a very conservative estimate since it is based on the impressions I get for another project that is non-consumer so less viral, but let’s go with 5.

FACEBOOK    
Group Size   Impressions/Fan    Total Impressions
   30,000           5              150,000

Bottom Line: A post to our groups Facebook page would get 150,000 impressions.

From the bottom line numbers it seems like newspapers would still prove the strongest plan.

Intangibles:
If you ever placed a newspaper article, you know how much work it is. Now think about doing that for five newspapers. It’s a lot of work to get thos 180,000 views.  Along with the work, you have also relinquished the message to local writer, so you have lost some control in the message. Now let’s look at the effort for doing a Facebook post.  Once you tweak the voice of your press 

Now let’s look at the effort for doing a Facebook post.  Once you tweak the voice of your press release to talk directly to your buying audience, you can post it right up.  You control the message and you don’t have to do all the follow-up and scheduling involved in the newspaper placement.  For this I estimate 150,000 views.

But still 150K is still less than the 180K for the newspapers, so why is this better. First the work effort is less, but #2 is the big thing — you can do it again next week!!  Why not? Add a few new pictures and an update to the schedule, and bam! Another 150,000 views.

FACEBOOK    
Status Update Imp/Fan Fans: Finger Lakes Wines   
imp/fan 2 30,000  62,821
    
Picture Update 4 to 6 30,000  150,000

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Tim McGraw via last.fm

One of the tricks of country music song writers that are out of fresh ideas is to write a song that does nothing, but drop proper names, such as people (Conway Twitty rhymes with so much), places (Cabo is a fav)  and things (happy hour).  You don’t even need to be a country music fan, and I’m sure you have a jukebox of bad music in your head right now.

Well, I’m going to test one of the worst offenders of this:  a song called Southern Voices that is sung by Tim McGraw and was written by  Bob DiPiero and Tom Douglas — to make sure the blame is spread fairly.   The opponent Zemanta and their semantic web publishing tool.  I’m afraid to paste in the lyrics, because this thing will explode. The song is nothing but a name dropping brain dump in the hope that somewhere ol’ Tim will be able to hit the right note with the music public to make you, yeah you, want to buy this drivel.

(Now, before some heads explode, please note that I am not condemning the names in the song, which range from Charlie Daniels to Jesus. I’m a big fan of these people. It’s the shameless use of their names that is bad.)

Ready… time to hit ctrl-v, and I’ll tag the names that Zemanta finds:

Hank Williams sang it

Number 3 drove it

Chuck Berry twanged it

Will Farmer wrote it

Aretha Franklin sold it

Dolly Parton graced it

Rosa Parks rode it

Scarlett O chased it

Smooth as the hickory wind

That blows from Memphis

Down to Appalachicola

It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well

Come on in I’m

Sure glad to know ya

Don’t let this old goat cross

In this Almond Brothers t-shirt and throw ya

It’s cicadas making noise

With the southern voice

Hank Aaron smacked it

Michael Jordan dunked it

Pocahantas tracked it

Jack Daniels drunk it

Tom Petty rocked it

Dr. King paved it

Bear Bryant won it

Billy Graham saved it

Smooth as the hickory wind

That blows from Memphis

Down to Appalachicola

It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well

Come on in I’m

Sure glad to know ya

Don’t let this old goat cross

In this Crimson Tide t-shirt and throw ya

It’s cicadas making noise

With the southern voice

Jesus is my friend

America is my home

Sweet iced tea and Jerry Lee

Daytona Beach

That’s what gets to me

I can feel it in my bones

Smooth as the hickory wind

That blows from Memphis

Down to Appalachicola

It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well

Come on in child

I’m sure glad to know ya

Don’t let this old goat cross

In this Charlie Daniels t-shirt and throw ya

We’re just boys making noise

With the southern voice

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Southern Voice

I got a southern voice

A southern voice

Now, let it be said that I’m a big fan of Zemanta and their publishing tool is great for making the blogging process easier. However, Zemanta tried, but it was just overwhelmed by the country music hit formula. 10 of the 24 proper name references that I found as ‘in-text links’, but it did much better finding 20 of 24 pictures, and it offered a wide range of related articles to choose from.

To the Zemanta people and power users: If there is a way to request more in-text links, let me know and I’ll send it through again. This song should become the benchmark for all future improvements.

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It was a fun strategic/tactical exercise to roll-out news to each outlet.  The first step was to coordinate website updates to show a co-branded presence. This had to be done before I posted the announcement on our Twitter and  Facebook because  of the immediacy of those outlets, so I had somewhere to link readers.  I also wanted to make sure news outlets had a chance to confirm (because they still do that) and assign the story, so sending out email and faxes (yes, dialed it myself) also had to be sent before the social media postings.  The big surprise was having one of the local TV news stations call so quickly that I had not yet received the fax confirmation.

Here are the steps I followed –
A week early:

1. Create a call sheet – name, email, fax, and Twitter accounts
2. Sign up to follow their twitter accounts – You want to give them time to follow you

Day of the announcement:

1. Update website — In case  news people go there to confirm
2. Send out faxes and emails
3. Post on BlueStorm’s Twitter and Facebook — It’s also good to have some of your co-workers on-call to RT and “Like” so the message spreads virally
4. Post on local third-party or business blogs — The local news site allows the public to create their own blog space, so I posted the release on BlueStorm’s PressConnect page
5. Send direct message to reporter’s Twitter — I only did this to those that I had a prior relationship
6. Good old-fashioned follow-up — This worked great because I found that my local press contact was out that day from her voice mail.  I was able to connect to the news desk and placed a press release based article at the top of the Business section. That would have been an embarrassing miss.

The Results The story ended up in the lead segment of two local news broadcasts, including this report on Newschannel 34.  We also had the Business section headline in the Binghamton Press and appeared on the front page of the Binghamton Business Journal.  The only downside was that the WBNG-TV News interview and Press articles were not posted online even after I called.  My lesson there was that next time I needed to include the web producer on my release list.

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