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Consumers are increasingly avoiding traditional marketing. Today’s marketers need to adopt new strategies to engage consumers in ways that invite participation in their brands. ConsumerSphere is singularly focused on helping businesses to effectively engage their customers with social media.

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Social Media Strategy

Inbound Marketing- Get Found!

by ConsumerSphereGuy on December 10th, 2009 in Engagement, Innovation, Social Media Strategy

The majority of today’s “traditional” marketers use outbound marketing to reach their audiences. For
message distribution, they use print media, radio and TV. For lead generation, they use direct mail, cold calls and email blasts. These methods may have worked in the past; however, by using tools like
TIVO/DVR, email spam‐blockers and caller ID, consumers block messages they don’t want. People now
control how they consume media and what messages they care to hear.
But all is not lost! Consumers still want to learn about the best products and services for their needs.
The key is they want to find this information on their own, most often by using the Internet. For
example, someone might peruse the blogosphere to read first‐hand experiences with a particular
product. Maybe that person will also search for reviews online or engage with others in social media to
learn other views and opinions.
Instead of continuing to push marketing messages out, effective marketers adapt to this consumer
behavior by creating marketing campaigns that pull people into their business. This strategy is called
inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers. In other words, instead of taking the time and resources to go out and find customers, you set yourself up in such a way that the right kinds of qualified leads find you. Inbound marketing, focused on areas like search engine optimization, content and social media, is cheaper and better targeted than traditional outbound marketing like advertising, cold calling, direct mail and email blasts. Inbound marketers offer the public useful information, tools and resources to
attract people to their site, while also interacting and developing relationships with consumers on the
web. Inbound marketing tools include blogging, content publishing, search engine optimization, social
media and social networks.
As 2010 approaches “being found” should be on the top of this list of any effective marketing plan.

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5 Steps of Social B2B

by ConsumerSphereGuy on November 23rd, 2009 in B2B, Engagement, Social Media Optimization, Social Media Strategy, Strategy

One of the number one complaints about social media is that it takes too much time.

Companies considering the leap into the land of blogs and tweets often run screaming into the night after they glimpse the reality of what it takes to launch and maintain a worthwhile social media presence.

I don’t blame them. The onslaught of digital information is overwhelming, but there is hope. The key is in being selective.

We all know that it’s the kiss of branding death to try and be all things to all people.

The same goes for social media engagement. Unless you have a dedicated staff ready to spend all day, every day monitoring every inch of the Web and churning out top-notch content, you need to be choosy about how and where you spend your time.

This isn’t rocket science, you say? You’re right. But it’s amazing how many people – even professionals – fall into the trap of trying to be everywhere, all the time. In this highly competitive market, it’s easy to start making judgments based on the fear of missing out on something.

The 24/7, real-time nature of social media sets businesses running faster and faster on the proverbial hamster wheel. You start by monitoring here and there, then you launch a company blog, set up a facebook fan page, start tweeting, create a professional group on LinkedIn, develop a collaborative community for crowd-sourcing industry-specific solutions, and so on and on and on. Before you know it, running your social media efforts takes nearly as much time as running your core business.

Instead of jumping on every shiny, new wagon recommended by the so-called gurus, take control of your social media journey. Here are six steps for making sure things don’t get out of hand:

1. Strategy first:  You want to make sure the plan is custom-fit to your needs and capabilities as well as the needs of your target audience.

2. Have contingencies: Even the best strategy sometimes goes awry. Your project is going to be a huge success, but – just in case – make sure you are prepared for anything.

3. Roll-out in phases: Get your toes wet before you attempt a backwards triple somersault with a half pike and a twist. Start small and grow your presence in as organic a manner as possible. Listen well, and your audience will tell you what your next step should be.

4. Enable : In the best case scenario, social media becomes part of your company culture, not a specialty that’s handled by a few select members of your marketing department. Deputize people across your business to monitor and engage, but be sure to keep an overall eye on the conversation, watching for consistency and balance.

5. Target,Target,Target: Finally, narrow your focus. Be brutal. Though it’s highly unlikely that your company can stand out everywhere, if you concentrate on a few key areas, there’s a better chance for greater impact. Even if you wind up with a smaller audience, you’ll be able to have a deeper dialog, and it’s the deeper dialog that leads to actual relationships, a perception of leadership, and business deals.

Are you already engaged in social media? How did you get started? What worked for you, and what was an utter failure? What advice would YOU give to a business getting ready to take the plunge?

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Blueprint to Strategic Social Media

by ConsumerSphereGuy on October 8th, 2009 in Engagement, Metrics, Social Media Strategy

Audience>Objectives>Strategies>Tactics>Measurement

Audience: Who are you trying to reach?, Where do they congregate?, What motivates them? Clearly define demographics, psychographics and life-stream profiles.

Objectives: What your are trying to achieve?. Is it increase awareness?, drive traffic?, gain trial? Defining your desired goals upfront determines everything else. Social media is NOT a “build it and they will come” tool.

Strategies: This step is your action plan for accomplishing your social media objectives(Content creation, community functionality on site, network outreach, etc.)

Tactics: These are the actual initiatives and implementation programs developed from you strategies (UGC efforts, contests, Apps, etc.).

Measurement: The all important ROI metric. Social media brings a wealth of new metrics that correlate to you social media initiatives. Things like topic velocity, continuity, virality and engagement.

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Mobil, Coupons and Social Media

by ConsumerSphereGuy on October 7th, 2009 in CPG, Engagement, Innovation, Social Media Strategy

Social media is about sharing. Coupons are about shopping. Shopping is an extremely social experience. That is why a major social media topic in may discussions revolve around tips, advice, and sharing purchase information.

Mobile marketing requires that the participant opt in to your offers. Because of this, mobile coupons can deliver the Holy Grail for marketers, targeted prospects and customers that want your information, and revenue generation.

On-demand mobile marketing platforms provide you with low out of pocket costs and speed to market. With little risk, marketers can get their mobile coupon promotions lined up and running. Once you’ve got your strategy and integration into your traditional marketing mapped out, it takes just minutes to setup and run a mobile coupon campaign. With the open rates at 97%, it’s a no brainer to start using mobile coupons for prospecting and retention campaigns.

Major points to consider:

1. Coupon sharing is a major social media activity

2. The SMS marketing message space is relatively spam free and uncluttered resulting in a 97% open rate (83% within the first hour) for messages.

3. Mobile coupons work best when incorporated into your other social marketing programs, include your short code whenever and wherever possible. Also, give your program time to build, and get viral, your first few offers will serve to build your database.

4. Once you’ve got your communities created, consumers or groups react positively to exclusive coupon promotions. For instance, the clothing designer Armani held an exclusive in-store preview for their mobile clientele that had lines out the door and near record receipts.

5. Now is the time to start thinking about how you can incorporate mobile coupons into your marketing objectives. Your competitors are thinking about it or doing it, so don’t be left on the sidelines.

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Social Media As A Marketing Channel

by ConsumerSphereGuy on September 25th, 2009 in CPG, Engagement, Social Media Strategy

Social Networks offer marketers a new channel to reach targets. As with any marketing effort, social media should be thought of strategically first before tactics are even considered. When thinking social media consider the following:

1. Meets a business objective: First and foremost, any social marketing campaign or activity should match with a business objective, regardless of the tools being used.

2. Encourage Member Interaction: The most successful social networking campaigns and efforts involve the audience.

3. Quickly scale: Social networks are designed for information to quickly move from member to member, so campaigns that lean on these capabilities perform the best. These attributes known as Velocity, Viralness, and Spread are key.

4. Foster self-expression or communication: Members of social networks like to communicate with each other, or self-express. As a result, campaigns should satisfy these needs with the appropriate tools

5. Offer an satisfying User Experience: This encompasses the overall experience of the campaign, the content and navigation items should be where expected, the language familiar to the audience, and overall look and feel of the site appeasing.

6. Provide longer term utility: Successful campaigns have a longer term value, rather than a short term ‘disposble campaign”. These campaigns add value by being a useful application to the members, rather than just quick dose of entertainment.

7. Enhance Value as Community participants: As more people contribute or interact with the campaign, the value is increased. This can be in the form of content that is created by the community, contests, voting, or games.

8. Supports Community Goals: Every community is different, and each has unique goals (from supporting products, to each other, or to just be entertained) the campaign focus should therefore meet the needs of the community, before the needs of the marketer.

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Consumer brand or Brand consumer?

by ConsumerSphereGuy on October 2nd, 2008 in CPG, Social Media Strategy, Videos

Social media is having a profound effect on advertising and marketing and this video says it all!

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Why Social Media Matters

by ConsumerSphereGuy on August 3rd, 2008 in Social Media Optimization, Social Media Strategy

“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.” – Forrester

It is becoming increasingly evident that social media is having a  profound effect on brands and must be a primary marketing consideration. We believe that it is essential for CPG brands to embrace social media because:

Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (advertising & promotion) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based discussions, forums, reviews, social networking) are quickly proving how well they work.

Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

Brands that manage to deal directly with their end users have a competitive asset for the future.

Consumers, customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, right now in social media; with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. ConsumerSphere’s mission is to equip CPG brands to effectively leverage social media to protect and manage their reputations, meaningfully converse with consumers to drive brand loyalty, uncover emerging opportunities, stay competitive and avoid crisis.

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Benefits of Social Media for CPG

by ConsumerSphereGuy on July 11th, 2008 in CPG, Social Media Strategy

The most critical benefits of Social Media to CPG brands include:

Accelerating Brand Advocacy – Compliments can come in many forms. It could be about brand performance, quality or superiority. It could be a customer raving about the experience they just had with a product or with customer service. Potential consumers and customers are looking for reassurance on a product decision love to see what others think of your brand. ConsumerSphere helps brands to identify and nurture brand advocates and enable them to share positive buzz/testimonials about consumer brands and products.

Greater Insight – Social media offer marketers real-time, cost effective, and unique insights that traditional qualitative focus groups don’t necessarily provide.  Social media provides a new laboratory to listen and dissect consumer opinions. Our solution process is specially designed to listen to and understand what consumers are saying about your brands. Our “Extract” process digs deep to uncover the “Gold” in brand discussions and identify the key implications and opportunities for your brands.

“What’s Hot!” – Topics will often pop up online that draw huge crowds. There is a lot to be learned in the discussions especially when they have the potential to affect your brand. Following the swarms can give you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who has opinions. It also may point out a topic that you will need to monitor going forward. Tracking a topic’s viral nature and how long it lives can give you an idea of its importance. Our clients don’t miss the action because our 24/7 brand alert capability provides our clients with the reassurance of “always on” monitoring.

Targeting Influencers – Influencers within a space can carry a lot of weight. They gain their power either from conversation frequency, the number of people who link to their posts on a topic, the number of people commenting and how engaged visitors are to their posts. The swarm forms around an influencer helps spread brand opinion and therefore carries significantly more weight. Knowing who these influencers are, and their opinions of your brands helps you determine who to reach out to for help as brand advocates or to understand why they currently hold a negative view. The unique influencer detection capability integrated into our tracking suite gives marketers the ability to know their brands “who” and “where” of social media influence.

Reputation Management – Discussions happening in social media can serve as an early warning system before an issue goes main-stream. By using advanced tools, you can observe new words popping more frequently about your brands. If you were an airline, as an example, the sudden appearance of the word “cancellations” along with the words “bad” and “customer service” would immediate trigger a need to drill into the posts driving them. Tracking these “crisis” words over time on an ongoing basis will help gauge the effectiveness of any outreach campaigns to address the underlying issues. Our 24/7 brand alert capability is constantly monitoring for any developing issues.

Measuring Success – There has been a lot of buzz lately on how to successfully measure online marketing and outreach campaigns. Much of the focus has centered on the topic of engagement. While a universal engagement metric has yet to be agreed upon, there are still a number of effective ways to measure engagement and ROI in general. More specifically, by tracking the mentions of a brand in user-generated content before, during and after a campaign and isolating positive words associated with a particular brand, you can gauge the number of times they were used over a period of time and thereby gauge consumer reaction to any given brand initiative (ie: promotions, advertising, online efforts). We work closely with each client upfront to establish the optimal metrics to fit their specific measurement needs.

360° Social Impact– With so many social media channels available, conversations often become splintered. A discussion can start within one channel and quick leap into another making it difficult to follow. Comprehensive and integrated monitoring can help bridge the thread across all types of social media. These various related inter-channel discussions can then presented as a cohesive connected conversation. Our 360° suite of tracking tools was created to effectively track and integrate them into an intuitive, and easy to understand social media brand assessment.

Ultimately, a brand represents the sum of all conversations (consumer and customer) surrounding the brand. We can assess a brand’s overall user sentiment, determine which words are commonly associated with it, understand which competitors rank closest in buzz or mentions, uncover advocates, and uncover the channels that contain the most discussion. We can thereby pinpoint opportunities for reaching and influencing the most valuable and engaged audiences. Identifying the strategic implications of our social media analysis is a paramount objective of all ConsumerSphere client engagements.

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