Best of Social Media Success Summit ’10 – Week 1

This is the first opportunity that I’ve had to attend the Social Media Success Summit. I wasn’t sure what to expect – I’ve been at webinars before, but this is the first time that I’ve attended a conference online. It’s only been one week (out of 3) and we’re off to a great start. There was so much amazing stuff presented, that it is impossible to get it all in in one blog post, but I’m going to do my darnedest.

The keynote speech – How to use Twitter as a Marketing Weapon was given by the ever enthusiastic Guy Kawasaki. Here were my key take aways:

• Twitter Search: Twitter search is absolutely amazing. I didn’t realize how powerful that it truly is. Guy talked about “the power of the OR.” You can do a search for what is important to you and your competition as well. Guy used the example of Nikon and Cannon. Doing an OR search can show what people are saying about you and your competitors. Another cool search is using from: and to: to find out what people are saying to you and what people are saying about you. You can also use advanced search for local searches. Just add “near: [zipcode/city name] within: [number of miles]”, and you can find tweets in your area.
• Learning from others: Guy mentioned @CleverAccounts, a twitter account that is run by twitter employees in which they tweet cool things that other people are doing with twitter. A great example of support is @ComcastCares. They are constantly looking for ways to help people who use their service. A great example of sales is @DellOutlet, where they were able to use twitter for selling refurbished equipment, making $1.5M a year in sales.
• Google Searches: Guy gave a great example of how to use Google to search for people on Twitter. You can find potential customers on twitter by searing for what they write about themselves in their user names and bios. Use the following searches  intitle:”search string (profession) * on Twitter” site:twitter.com and  intext:”search string (profession) * on Twitter” site:twitter.com. The example that Guy gave was for photographers. The idea behind this is that people are declaring themselves as photographers, and if photographers are your target audience, that’s who you should be looking for.
• Watch out for twitter fascists. Some people are purists and only want people to use twitter to connect socially with others. Guy makes sure that everyone knows that he is using twitter as a marketing tool. He believes that you need to get more followers.
• People are looking for others to curate the internet for them: There’s so much information going on out there that people want you to give them suggestions. Great sites to find information out there are Alltop, StumbleUpon, and Smartbrief.com. You can find interesting content that will keep your followers riveted.
• Some great tools that Guy uses: ObjectiveMarketer.com can be used to schedule tweets. You can repeat tweets with this tool. It gives a ton of information about your tweets and who’s seeing them. Twitterfeed.com can be used to tweet your blog. Twithawk.com allows you to craft tweets to respond to other peoples’ tweets. Tweetmeme.com gives people an easy way to tweet your blog. It can be more powerful than Digg. Retweeterati.com shows the people who get RT’ed the most (which is the best form of flattery)

One thing that I found disappointing was that Guy only said “that is a beautiful thing” twice. 🙂

Mari Smith is a Facebook guru. Her first session was Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Pages for Marketing. It was an amazing session and I’m really looking forward to her next session, next week.

• Why you need to be on Facebook: Mari started with the reasons that you need to be using Facebook. I knew that it was the #1 social network, but I had no idea that it passed Google, on occasion, as the most trafficked site on the internet. That’s reach. There are 500M active users and 250M people that log on every day for 55 min each day. 70% of the users are outside the US.
• Personal Profile: It’s OK to use your personal profile for professional networking. You can organize people on Facebook by creating user lists and setting permissions for each list. You can also add fan pages to these lists.
• Types of Pages: Mari says that there is no reason to use groups anymore. The real power is in Facebook fan pages. Things written on fan pages become part of the fans news feeds. New community pages are being added by Facebook. They take information from Wikipedia and allow others to write information about the page
• Use Fan Pages instead of Groups – unlimited members, custom content. Content should be on the wall.
• Creating your Facebook page: Make sure that you know who your target market is and cater to them. You can drag or change the order of all tabs except for the wall and info tabs. A welcome tab is a great way to greet new potential users and encourage them to like the page. You can set it as the first tab that new users see when they come to your page. Every tab has its own unique url, and if you want, you can send traffic directly to it.
• Social Plugins: You can take the power of Facebook to your website as well. There is a whole list of plugins, like Facebook like, that allow people to share information with their friends’ Facebook page, without even needing to be on Facebook.

Jason Falls’ session was called 5 Ways to Measure Social Media Marketing Success. Metrics and Social Media never seemed like things that went together, but Jason made it seem simple.

• Objectives: Before you start tracking anything, you need to figure out what you want to track. You need to set goals and expectations so that you have objectives to reach. You need to have singular goals so that you can stay focused, and so that you can measure against them.
• What can SM marketing do? There are 5 goals that people try to succeed at: brand awareness, community building, customer service, research, development & collaboration, and opportunity to sell product or service
• Objective statement: You need to create an objective statement. It should include your target audience, level of attainment and time frame. Once you have that, you’ll know what to measure.
• Media Placement: There are two types of media placement, bought and earned. Bought are things like billboards. Earned media placement are how your customers tune into your social media engagement. They choose if they want to be connected. A good way to get them to engage is to reward them for joining in. A good example of this would be a coupon for joining a Facebook fan page. You can advertise on Facebook about it, as well as conventional methods of advertising.
• Have a Facebook Content strategy: To implement your objectives, you need to make sure that you set up a strategy for engaging your customers. You should create a to-do list in order to meet your objectives.
• Branding: Branding is the image of your product in the eyes of the market. Brands are determined by how the audience interacts. You can influence it.  Make sure that you are part of the conversational market share. You should run focus groups and surveys to check on how your social media engagement is working, and how people are learning about your brand.
• Building community: You can see if your efforts are working by measuring your number of new users. Do users buy more? Are they retweeting or liking the information you share?
• Customer service – You can track your efforts of successful customer service by seeing a reduction in call center costs. You should also see more positive and less negative online sentiment.
• Research and Development: Ask your customers for new product and feature ideas. It is one of the easiest ways to do market research. To track, you can look for number of ideas, features and sales of the products.
• Sales – To track sales, you an use web analytic software. You can see how people are getting to the site, and from there, see if they are making sales.

I was blown away by Ramon DeLeon of Domino’s Pizza. He is the pizza guy that gets it. He was using social media before there was social media. In How a Chicago Pizza Franchise Used Social Media to Create Raving Customers (A Case Study), he told how he connected to his customers and created relationships.

When Ramon started out, he wanted to make sure that he had a competitive advantage. In the 90s, practically no one else was selling to universities. Students had limited access to phones so he took pizza orders online. Before there was twitter, he also used AOL Instant Messenger to stay in touch with his customers. Ramon has always been concerned with looking for ways to help customers. He would run contests and give away practically free pizzas. He might have lost money on individual sales, but the money he made off word of mouth more than made up for it. Before Facebook was open to everyone, some of his university customers created their own Facebook groups in order for people to share information about sales. He even considered returning to college in order to get a Facebook account. His strategy was to get to know the administrators of the groups and offer them deals that they could share with their followers.

Here are some words of wisdom from Ramon about using Social Media

• Have a core business plan and set your goals.
  
• Give customers positive reasons to talk about you
• People do business with people they like and trust – get a friend to talk about it
• Be transparent
  
• Engage. If you don’t – It’s like being at a dance party without dancing
• Make photo-ops – people will want to share it
• Social Media fire can only be put out with Social Media water – if you make a mistake and it comes out on social media, make sure that you fix it with social media. Check out Ramon’s response:  http://tinyurl.com/wowyou
• Make the brand fun
• Promote your customers – he uses pizza boxes with his  twitter ids
• Use 4sq to let people know where your business is. They can share it with their friends.

All in all, it’s been a great week. I can’t wait to hear what they have in store for us this week. It should be fun.