Managing Your Personal & Professional Social Profiles (Part 4)
Part Four: Authenticity – Keeping It Real
This post is the fourth in a five part series addressing the management of one’s personal and professional social media profiles. (Did you miss Part 1, Part 2 and/or Part 3?)
In the first three parts of the series I discussed some of the mechanics of managing social profiles, but arguably the most important part of working with social media would be having an authentic and consistent voice within your channels. There are many different ideas on how to accomplish this, and what better way to demonstrate authenticity than to provide a transcript of a recent chat I moderated on this subject with a few of my co-workers on Intrapromote’s Social Team!
Intrapromote's Social Team
Mary: Thank you for joining me in this discussion about having an authentic voice in social media! What is the number one mistake that you believe companies/brands make with regards to their “voice” within social media?
Dylan: I think a lot of companies make the mistake of trying to “cloak” or hide behind some type of veil; i.e. – no transparency. The problem in that is you will never be able to display any personality and the social audience doesn’t get a chance to engage in real relationship building conversation.
Katie: Another big mistake is not having a unified “voice”, like having multiple people managing the account without one vision can cause discrepancies in information/conversation.
Annalise: I have a handful of “voice” peeves, but this is my biggest: Social is often run by marketing. Marketing is not a communications department. I cringe on a daily basis when I see grammatical errors in official posts from companies or something that feels different from every other communication device they have out there.
Linda: I believe the number one mistake is to try to be something you are not willing to stand behind. Really staking a claim to being “Authentic” means you have balance between the business and the human element of transactions. My biggest peeve is posting one-way marketing messages for fear of what critics may say about the on-line persona, but it’s what you don’t say that is just as important.
Mary: Companies often have multiple departments providing input for their social media channels. How do you suggest handling the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome?
Annalise: Hire an agency… Actually, I think that for larger companies, having a “social media” department is important. Let that department funnel the requests from comms, PR, marketing, education, etc. and create a unified voice.
Dylan: Create a bottleneck in one Community Manager; give that person the authority over the content schedule and all posting rights or a small team of community managers that work together.
Annalise: But, if they can’t do that , every Company should have a style guide for all communications. Create an editorial calendar that aligns with initiatives around the organization, and work social media initiatives into the yearly planning meetings.
Katie: Create some kind of system where different departments can submit input to a team of community managers with a schedule of posts, so everyone’s information can get out there.
Dylan: Turn the ovens up real high and bake everyone else out of the kitchen.
Linda: I agree with Annalise. As a company’s social presence matures, so should the conversations and invitations to their prospects, customers and other stakeholders.
Dylan: j/k
Annalise: I love the idea of community managers, but in many organizations, those people are interns at best, and sometimes entry-level. That’s one of the major issues. It’s a professional marketing and communications role and organizations do not treat it as such.
Linda: Generalities aside, best practice is to get support for the right resources so that the silos for companies are broken down and support is dedicated towards communications metrics. Show the conversations, the sentiment, the moves from neutral or negative to positive feedback for reputation management. While early metrics won’t show an overnight success, your online legacy will. Authenticity isn’t an overnight sensation.
Dylan: That’s another great point – community management is not respected in most organizations…so hire an agency!
Linda: LOL! Exactly.
Katie: Agreed agreed agreed. Everyone should just hire us and avoid these issues. Best of the best.
Mary: What about crisis management? I think of the recent social media crisis that McDonalds experienced with the #McStories campaign. How do you remain authentic when handling a campaign that is spinning out of your control? Or even a Customer Service problem that is spinning out of control?
Linda: Acknowledge, apologize and state what you are going to do to fix it. Satisfy the human element of these transactions early.
Linda: If on the other hand, you “feel” you have been wronged by the attention an issue is getting, don’t get defensive. In other words, don’t get “hooked.” To dovetail on my prior comment., integrating metrics and information about what customers are saying in other venues and channels can only help. If the role of Community Manager is truly in the communications department, good communicators know what else is going on.
Katie: Nicely done, Linda! I think it’s really important to decide as a brand how situations are going to be acknowledged. In really big issues, it is just going to cause more problems if the company ignores the campaign. By acknowledging a mistake that was made, it will create more of a human conversation between the brand and users.
Annalise: I agree with Linda. Many companies fail to have a plan in place for when/if a situation arises that calls for crisis management. Who are the key stakeholders that need to sign off on a message? What’s the chain of notification? Which situations are a code yellow versus a code red? All of these things should exist for every company so when something does happen, the crisis can be responded to quickly – in the right voice – and hit the right message.
Dylan: Being straightforward is huge, and it’s got to hold an heir of dignity as well (speaking specifically to the McDonald’s crisis), so although there may be necessary apologies to be made, don’t turn it into the worst thing that has ever happened to the brand. The audience will ultimately respond in kind to the brand’s response and messaging, so being sensationalistic should be avoided at all costs. Did I just say heir? Good Lord – It must be Monday.
Linda: Great point Dylan…I think companies can set the tone for the follow up they’ll receive.
Mary: Any parting words of advice for companies/brands on remaining authentic and transparent in their social media channels?
Dylan: Invest in your Community Manager! It is its own profession, and should be treated as such; not a PR manager, not a journalist, not a communications manager, but all of these things with a marketing background. An agency (such as Intrapromote) has these fine professionals waiting for them!
Linda: Not necessarily in order of importance: Stay the course on what is meaningful to you and your brand. 2) Balance the business and human needs in transactions and don’t forget about the individual person. 3) Know what you are talking about and be sincere and thoughtful in how you communicate depending on your audience.
Linda: Oh, oh! Always ask how you can add value.
Katie: Don’t be afraid to show a little bit of a personality instead of just stating facts about offerings through social channels! Give your fans/followers something to smile about!
Annalise: A lot of companies are using social as new customer acquisition. It’s important to remember that in many cases, their experience on Facebook or Twitter may be the first one with your brand or business. You have to treat it like they’ve just walked into a brick and mortar location. They should be able to experience your authentic brand on all social channels, in your locations, or through your print ads. That’s the difference between the companies that convert and the ones who die trying.
Linda: None of these practices and pitfalls are anecdotal. You are either willing to work at it or not. If you truly want to succeed, your authenticity will prevail.
Dylan: Linda for the win!
Linda: COLLABORATIVE. Love my coworkers.
Katie: Agreed!!
Mary: Couldn’t have said it better myself! 
Spotify and Brand Applications
Spotify is currently one of the newest music sharing services around today. It has 3 million users in the United States with 600,000 paid subscribers. Spotify is now following in the footsteps of larger social media platforms by announcing earlier this week that soon brands will have the opportunity to create applications within the popular music sharing program.
Spotify has created partnerships with AT&T, McDonalds, Intel, and Reebok as some of the first brands to create playlists and apps within Spotify. These brand applications will be released as the third set of apps for Spotify. The first apps included Rolling Stone and We Are Hunted, while the second set included record labels and Classify.
These applications will not only feature brand playlists, but will provide an interactive user experience that is difficult to find elsewhere. For example, the AT&T application “Surround Sounds” will allow the user to search through maps and locations to see where popular songs were recorded. Reebok’s application will include a variety of workout playlists, while Intel’s “Sifter” will recommend music by using the users’ Facebook friends’ favorite music.
One of the main reasons for this announcement is the hope that brands will increase their advertising spending within Spotify. By not charging for the free service, it is important for Spotify to rely on advertising spent (and customer subscriptions) within the service to cover the large licensing fees to stream songs. By not charging to create applications within Spotify, it will hopefully make Spotify more attractive to advertisers with the increased traffic and promotion of applications.
The biggest announcement regarding Spotify’s partnership with brands was the Coca-Cola announcement. Spotify and Coca-Cola announced that they are now in a partnership that included a Spotify app, Facebook integration, and a 2013 marketing campaign. Spotify was also named the exclusive partner of Coke’s Facebook Timeline; with all of the joint marketing between Spotify and Coke, it is not surprising that a new Spotify application for Coke will debut in a few weeks to compliment Coke’s 2012 Olympics marketing campaign. In response to the partnership with Coke, Spotify’s chief of marketing solutions officer said, “We realized there were bigger things we could do together than just media and advertising. This is creating global scale together.”
The partnership with Coke is not an industry exclusive partnership; Spotify has created a partnership with PepsiCo to create apps for brands such as Mountain and Doritos. With the increase in brands creating applications for Spotify, we can expect to see many large brands and third-party developers gaining interest in creating applications and playlists through the new offerings of Spotify.
Adding a Custom Tab and Application to Your Facebook Page
Fear not, Facebook marketers! The solution to this mind-bending quagmire is just a few clicks away! Many an online marketing professional have been thwarted by Facebook’s ever-increasing desire to complicate page customization over the years, but this little “Easter Egg” ranks at the top of the list of frustrations.
Like many of you will remember, the “Add Application to Page” functionality used to be on what we all came to recognize as the application’s own Facebook page. These pages had the same purpose as a regular community or brand page with one little extra piece: the ability to add the application itself to your Facebook page. Located in the left-hand navigation menu, it was a very simple process.
Recently, however, Facebook did away with the application pages all together. They actually may be hiding on some server in Central America, but that’s not the point; the point is that we cannot access these pages anymore. Along with the pages went the “Add to Page” functionality we all became very fond of…mostly because it was the only way to add an application to your page.
So how do we add the necessary customized applications and tabs to our stable of awesomeness that is our Facebook page now? Well now it’s as easy as pie, and it only costs you one extra browser tab to accomplish! Let’s dig in:
First, make sure you collect two pieces of information:
- Within your application’s back-end at developers.facebook.com, you’ll want to copy the Application ID from the Basic Info.
- You need to grab the URL from the source of the application, or the URL where you application’s content is hosted. For example, if I was creating an iFrame application for Facebook out of this blog post, I would simply use “http://blog.intrapromote.com/dylan-price/social-media/adding-a-custom-tab-to-your-facebook-page”. Copy and keep this URL.
Once you have successfully collected these two pieces of information, you will need to insert them into the following URL into the following places:
- YOUR_APP_ID
- YOUR_URL
Here is the URL that holds the keys to the Facebook marketer’s kingdom:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID
&display=popup&next=YOUR_URL
Editor’s Note: Ensure that you are logged into your administrative Facebook account when attempting this procedure. If not, you will become increasingly frustrated, and Intrapromote holds no accountability for broken monitors.
At this point, you should be seeing something like this:
Did I just hear "Cool Page App"?
Use the drop-down menu to select your page, allow for a couple of minutes for all servers to propagate, and, “voila!” you’ve got yourself a brand new, shiny application to wow all of your colleagues!
If you’re running into issues, make sure that your hosted content has a security certificate in place or Facebook won’t allow it to show! For further questions, I recommended the official documentation found here.
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Google Adwords vs. Facebook Ads – Part 6
Part Six: Wrapping Up
In the last post of the series, we will organize everything we have talked about throughout the series and summarize the two platforms based on the 5 topics we previously discussed at length. To reiterate, this series is not meant to define which of these platforms is better than the other, simply to outline the advantages or disadvantages that exist on each.
Targeting Systems
In Part One, we discussed how the two ad platforms differed when targeting your audience. While Google Adwords depends on the search query of the end user, Facebook Ads uses a more proactive system. If introducing your brand to the target demographic is your main objective, Facebook Ads will deliver. If you’d like to place your brand in the hands of the proactive user, Google Adwords is the solution.
Part Two: Qualified Impressions and Customer Targeting
Qualifications, Please.
Part Two was all about putting your ad in the right set of hands. Google takes the cake on this one, only showing for pre-qualified search queries based on your keyword list. Facebook does pick up some of the slack with the granular targeting features like Education level, Occupation, Age, Sex and other detailed demographic information.
Part Three: What to do with your Qualified Impressions
Now what?
In Part Three, we looked at converting an impression to a click-through. Although Google will supply the necessary improvement data in the form of a “Quality Score”, Facebook allows more glitter to capture the user’s eye. Facebook’s integration of rich media into their advertising platform will gather all the “Hey, look– it’s shiny!” clicks. If that wasn’t enough, Facebook also displays the Pages and content that your friends like in the form of Advertising.
Part Four: What a Click Means for Your Brand
You Brought Them, Now Make Them DRINK The Water!
Part Four focused on turning the click-through into a conversion and is crucial to any online advertising venture. Neither platform holds an advantage here because the conversion is dependent on what the brand does after the advertising does it’s job. The main difference is that Facebook’s Sponsored Stories offering allows your brand’s Page or content to be “Liked” or engaged within the context of the ad.
Part Five: The Exposure Difference
Decent Exposure
Finally, Part Five explored the differences in impressions between the two platforms. While Google Adwords exposure is limited per search query and budget, Facebook’s exposure is typically limited by your Ad’s performance. In other words, you can have a Google Ad that won’t appear because nobody searched for it, while your Facebook Ad won’t appear because it didn’t gain enough clicks after its first thousand impressions.
Now if we’re looking at two well-performing ads, Facebook does have the upper hand on this one due to the ability to expand on the targeted audience once your ad has been seen by everyone you previously targeted. Adding search terms to your Google Ad will typically lower your quality score and leave you to create new ads in their place.
In Closing
We hope that this blog series has been helpful and you enjoyed our thinly-veiled attempts at humor. Stay tuned to the Intrapromote blog for more updates and discussions about Facebook Ads and Google Adwords!
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Cool Content & Branding On The Web
We all know that having unique content is one of the keys to successful Internet marketing. I thought I’d take this opportunity to introduce everyone to some of the outstanding content and branding that I’ve run across while surfing the web lately.
The first piece of content I’d like to share is from idrummag.com. This site has taken the idea of an actual magazine that you’d flip through in your local book store and transferred that feeling into the online world while making the experience even richer. You can view one of their drum magazines and see that they back up their tag line, “Quality On Every Click”. You’ll notice right away that it’s exactly like a magazine, with ads on the first few pages, a clickable index that takes you directly where you want to go, and high quality images and video woven in on every page. They also have worked in sharing options, email functionality, comments and a subscribe option to the bottom of every page.
That’s not to say that their content is perfect. It does not appear that this type of content is not indexable – which is a shame because there’s so much unique content to be found in these magazines. If they could make the text and images readable and embed YouTube videos instead of using their iDrum player I think they could really see some gains with this type of content.
To shift focus, I’ve been seeing some companies really leverage emerging software and applications to set themselves apart while bolstering their brand image. The one site I’ve been hooked on is We Are Hunted. I originally discovered We Are Hunted through Spotify, which they’ve used to establish a rapport with music listeners by offering an app dedicated to finding new music on Spotify. After trying their app I was compelled to visit their site where you the listener can create playlists with new music to share, with the chance to become a playlist superstar if your playlist makes it onto the “Popular Playlists” page. Not to mention that the app connects Spotify to your social media so that your friends on Facebook and Spotify can see you’re using their app, really making use of social relationships to build their user base.
It’s a perfect example of a brand using new technology and trends to hook users and eventually drive consistent traffic to their site.
Have you run across some Internet content or branding that is absolutely addicting? Feel free to share your findings by commenting below.
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Social Media ROI: The Difference Between Social Media ROI and Value
The day before my panel at SXSW Interactive, I attended a session entitled, “What’s so BLEEPING Hard About Social ROI?” There was a long line outside the door, and the room was filled with eager internet marketers, social media managers, and virtually everyone else who thought that this panel was going to provide some magic formula for determining ROI. Once the panel got going, however, it was easy to see that this session, despite the list of all-star panelists, was yet another regurgitation of the situation with minimal insight for anyone at the intermediate level or beyond. I left after 20 minutes.
So what, indeed, makes social media ROI so (bleeping) hard? In my next few blog posts, I am going to break down several ways your organization can begin to answer the question, “What is the ROI of social media?” Don’t expect a miracle formula or an algorithm from me – I hated math and it’s much more complex than a simple equation anyway. Instead, I’ll give you some tried and true ways to decide where to play in the social space and how to demonstrate the value of doing so.
Social Media ROI is Not the Same as Social Media Value
It’s a simple concept, but many organizations struggle with the notion that every “Like” and every “Retweet” comes along with a dollar sign. Instead, businesses need to understand that there is a chain of events that will lead to the dollar sign. It isn’t going to happen overnight, but over the long-term, the value will become clearly visible. When I am asked for the ROI of social media, I like to pose this question instead, “What’s the ROI of NOT doing it?”
Social media ROI doesn't happen overnight. It's a process.
The Social Media ROI Cycle
I can’t even count on two hands all of the fabulous brands I didn’t know about when I first joined Facebook. Yet, through the simple action of my friends “liking” the brand, I slowly became more aware of them. This awareness is the first step in the cycle, followed by me electing to engage with the brand by following them. This is where the potential customer gets to slow down and let the brand take over for awhile.
Once I’ve elected to learn more about the brand, it’s up to them to earn my trust. As a lover of all things nature, I liken it to the courting dance of the bird of paradise, one of the most amazing shows on earth. The brand or business must put on a display that is not only impressive (seriously, the male bird of paradise pulls out all the stops), but trustworthy. It is showy with sincerity. It has to be interesting, without being overly ripe with marketing. After all, I’ve elected to allow your brand into my personal space. Turn me off with too much messaging and I can just as easily elect you right out of my space, too.
Once you’ve convinced me you are worth my business and I’ve purchased your product you have to retain me as a customer and keep the conversation going. And let’s face it, it is far less expensive to keep me happy than it is to start the cycle all over again at step one. This is where the lines between ROI and value are blurred, and where many marketing execs start to get a little stir crazy.
There is tangible ROI because I’ve made a purchase. Until I buy again, that number stays the same. But the value of my engagement with your brand – be it the other people I’ve influenced about your brand, the more aware I am of your brand, or the way I perceive my relationship with your brand and its products – almost always exceeds the dollar amount I have spent.
The sooner you come to terms with the fact that social media is a fluid medium, the sooner you can quantify success. There is no one way to define success in the social space. There is no set dollar amount. There is no one parameter that will work for every brand. Every initiative within each organizations will be measured in a different way.
How does one campaign increase brand awareness? How does another build a qualified fan base? Establish what value you hope to receive with each social initiative, and how it aligns to the bigger picture of your investment, and you’re on your way to determining the ROI of social media.
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