Just returned from a great social media panel entitled “Leveraging Social Media to Accelerate the Customer Lifecycle“ put on by Red Door Interactive, one of the newer additions to Denver’s digital marketing scene. Red Door has built a strong presence in San Diego and opened a Denver office a year and a half ago to bring their approach of internet presence management to a new market.
The panel consisted of representatives from Western Union, lifestyle products company Gaiam, email services provider Exact Target, and Red Door’s Digital Strategy group. The format was informal (coffee shop with about 40 people) and examined the challenges and benefits of social media during customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and advocacy. Very happy to hear some great insights from the panel and very astute questions from the audience.
A few highlights:
- Consumer conversations about your brand are already happening. We no longer control the point of origin of our messages, so it’s vital to listen and ideally identify your brand’s influencers.
- Many consumers look to social media networks for direct communication with the brand. It’s what they expect, so be prepared to respond.
Issue posed: Is it better to create your own community or join existing ones? ExactTarget: “We derive benefits from doing both – one for customers, one for prospects”- Western Union actively listens to social media conversations using Boulder, CO’s Collective Intellect. They notice that concerns around the issue of fraud are prevalent, and have taken steps to re-position their brand as a result.
- Gaiam’s approach to social media was to first establish a presence in social media, then encourage conversations, and only then move to invite others to the community. New visitors who see a lack of engagement might not see the benefit of joining.
- When asked what acquisition tactics had worked well, Gaiam cited cross-promotion and Facebook’s engagement ads. ExactTarget cited a Twitter wall and lounge set up at an event which got new Twitter users and encouraged customers to talk to each other. ExactTarget also mentioned the use of social-media-sharing tools in their emails, such as Post to Twitter.
- When asked what tactics would be tried in 2010, Western union discussed placing a transaction application into social media, and Gaiam wants to experiment with more limited-time coupon offers. Gaiam added that their fans expect rewards from them in exchange for being their fans. Western Union added that while some reports have cited that people join social media communities for deals, his experience has been that fans are searching for much more than that.
- Red Door cited Threadless as a pioneer in creating a social media hub on their own domain.
- Western Union has found that non-profit content plays very well (i.e. is engaged with) in the social media space
The big social media trends in 2010 will be to measure ROI (Gaiam), leverage the local social mobile opportunities (Red Door), apply more rigor to social media and develop more industry-accepted metrics (Western Union), and incorporate social media into the rest of one’s business- Social Mention was mentioned as a good free tool for listening. CoTweet is used by both ExactTarget and Gaiam to facilitate multiple users managing a twitter account
- An audience member asked the question that needed to be asked: “How does a small, over-tasked marketing department handle everything that social media requires?” The consensus was to start by developing a corporate-wide social media policy. Look at Intel’s publicly available one for an example or a Forrester report on Social Media as another. Next, conduct a listening campaign using tools such as Social Mention, Technorati, Google Alerts, Google Blog Search—all of which bring the conversation to you.
- Another audience member asked another absolutely vital question: “How do you handle negative comments?” The panel consensus was to try your hardest to leave negative comments alone, but respond quickly and constructively. This lends credibility to the conversation. In certain occasions, they should be removed, especially if they violate pre-stated rules of the community.
- Red Door is doing five more of these speaker series in 2010, with the next one in April. I’m excited to attend…
Filed under: Best Practice Tips, Educational Presentations Tagged: | Facebook, social media, social media monitoring, Twitter
