Interview on LinkedIn

I posted a couple questions on LinkedIn. I received very detailed responses from the following people:

How important is social media in maintaining a brand image for both small and large companies? Do you think its best to be proactive or reactionary in your approach?

Ryan Cormier: November 5, 2009.

I firmly believe that social media is as integral to maintaining a brand image for companies of any size as every other piece of marketing that a specific company puts out. Social media allows companies to have an intimate, personal conversation with their customers and prospects, whereas traditional marketing only allows for 1-way communication that can easily be opted out of. For this reason, social media may actually become the most important tool for creating a maintaining brand image in the minds of consumers.

As a result, I feel it is imperative that companies create a PROACTIVE strategy for handling all social media initiatives. Organizations must create value for their followers in order to maintain a captivate audience. This requires proactively researching targets to figure out which social media vehicles they use, how they use them and which types of information they find most relevant/interesting across each medium. Only once a strategy has been put into place and implemented can companies employ any kind of reactionary social media practices. Even then, reactionary methods should be limited to responding to and remedying any negative comments or issues raised about an organization as a PR measure.

Bob Steinkamp, November 5, 2009.

If you're going to use it, it's definitely best to be proactive in your approach.
There's a time investment in using social media, so the real question is whether your target audience, clients, customer, etc. are using it. If they are, it's a great tool for two-way communication, which is what most customers want.

Perhaps the most important thing is that companies of every size should be monitoring social media You may recall that about a year ago, several well-known national fast food chains had some rather unflattering videos show up on YouTube.
Knowing how to use social media allows a company to respond more quickly, when the convesation goes negative or those types of videos appear.
As with any p.r. effort, a planned strategy that includes how to deal with negative social media posts, is always a good idea.

Patrick Murphy, November 6, 2009.

Hi Katie

I keep hearing the social media is like the cocktail party that never ends. If that is true then hiding in the corner will not help. So you have to put yourself out there (within reason of course......)


Our company SiliconCloud is an UK Inbound marketing company, on our home page we have methodology which you can download. It might help at the cocktail party.

Eric Friedman, November 6, 2009

It's *critical.* Social Media is part of your Infrastructure. It's not just a subset of Marketing and no company can afford to let other people be the one's doing their talking for them.

Cheers,

Erica Friedman
Yurikon LLC
Social Media Without Delusion
http://socialoptimized.blogspot.com

Pashen Black, November 6, 2009.

Social media is critical to developing, maintaining and enhancing brand images of companies. When companies rely on ad placements or press release distribution as their sole means of communicating with their target audiences, they are initiating one-way communications and not allowing themselves to go straight to the source and engaging in two-way dialogue. These one-way communication tactics, when used alone, are ineffective.

However, through two-way dialogues, companies can find out what makes their customers tick, which can supplement any traditional research they engage in, and help them establish stronger relationships, which is by far one of the most important things in establishing and maintaing relationships.

Additionally, by not engaging in social media, companies run the risk of positioning themselves as conservative, stodgy with a lack of forward-thinking strategy and offerings an not at all interested in its target audience. And, with the vast abundance of social media networks outside of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace and companies can creatively enter new markets/categories if they desire and enhance current relationships with all of their target markets: young and seasons, male and female, etc.

Question Details:
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How important is social media in maintaining a brand image for both small and large companies? Do you think its best to be proactive or reactionary in your approach?

Interview with Erin Haskell

In my opinion, Erin Haskell is a genius in the field of marketing/communications especially as it applies to social media use. She is a Media Planner/Buyer for Crowley Webb and Associates.

Hi Kate,

Of course I remember you! How's school? When are you done w/ school?

I'll make some notes/try to answer your questions below:

1-How important is social media used as a component of a marketing plan?
As with any marketing plan, the media used has to be a good fit for the objectives of the project. Its hard to say how important or how non-important it is unless I reference a specific project.

One of the most used social mediums is facebook, and the fastest growing demographic on facebook is women 35+. Linked in tends to be older men and twitter tends to trend older as well. The inclusion of social media is only important if the communications are reaching your target audience.

Take a look at mediapost.com and emarketer.com or do a google search for "media post twitter demographics" or "emarketer facebook demographics", it will give you some good secondary research on who's using what social media.


2-How much money is allocated by your company for social media?
Again, it depends on the project. Social media in terms of hosting a facebook page or having a social fan-page requires a lot of ongoing maintenance -- it's where PR meets advertising and requires a LARGE committment on the part of a client's marketing team/pr team to make the investment into ongoing communications. It's not the type of campaign that you can "set it and forget it".

Social Media advertising (paid ads on facebook/linked etc) are generally able to be targeted very specifically to your demographic. Go to facebook and click on the "advertise" link and pretend to set up an account (don't put in any credit card info-- you don't need to). You can select your demographics and geography and FB will tell you how many people are on FB in your target.

So, to answer, "how much money is spent?"... it depends on the target, but we generally include the paid social media advertising portion in our "online advertising budget line"


3-Do you use it as a tracking mechanism or just a channel of communication, or both?
It can be both-- there are ways to monitor social buzz (i've set up client dashboards to monitor messageboard and twitter and google buzz), and there are also paid services that can give you more actionable, trackable, analytical resutls (google Nielsen Buzzmetrics or Radian6).

We track all web activity using Google Analytics and we have special tools that allow us to track all online advertising activity back to our website to determine what's working and what's not.
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4-Do you feel it is better for brand management to be proactive or reactionary in your approach?

It's always better to be proactive in brand management, but i'm guessing you're talking about a crisis communications type of response. A tool like Nielsen Buzzmetrics allows a company to monitor the buzz goign on in the social space and allows companies to spot potential problems before they happen and respond accordingly. It's nearly impossible to measure without using tools like Buzzmetrics or an online social media monitoring dashboard.


PS-- who's teaching this class? Is it Kathleen? Ask her if she wants me to come in and talk to the class :)


Erin


On 11/05/09 2:28 PM, Katie Heller wrote:
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Hey Erin,

Remember me? The girl that talked WAY too loud about prehistoric sharks on the plane ride to the AAF competition last spring? I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about social media for my IMC class having to do with internet marketing. Here are just a few:

How important is social media used as a component of a marketing plan?
How much money is allocated by your company for social media?
Do you use it as a tracking mechanism or just a channel of communication, or both?
Do you feel it is better for brand management to be proactive or reactionary in your approach?

If you could answer those couple questions for me, I would be extremely appreciative! Thanks and I hope everything is going well for you!

Sincerely,

Katie Heller

Facebook helps adoption!

Okay, Parents Can use Facebook....

The article on Ad Age by Emily Bryson York took a more family approach toward the usefulness of social media. In her article, she discuss how truly far the branches of social media reach, with their impact improving communication for the betterment of parents looking for an addition to their families.

The article talks about how, not only is it easier to contact people using social media, but how effective it is at marketing yourself as a perspective foster parent. Couples can upload videos, pictures, and any other aspect onto facebook to demonstrate to the young mothers that they will be an admirable pick for their baby.

Not only does this benefit the people evolved in the infant-exchange, but adoption agencies are becoming more effective in their placement. Previously, agencies had loads of paperwork and marketing objectives before even being able to place a child in a home. Social media has expedited a process from 18 months long, to a few weeks!

How does this factor into the budget? The cost for adopting a child is not cheap. Domestic children can range from $10,000 to $25,000, according to York, with international adoptions tapping up into $40,000. Most of this goes toward legal fees and a portion to the adoption agency. With the cheap and effective social media outlet to their disposal, agencies can increase child placement and potentially cut some of its marketing budget to save money for everyone in the end.

I am thrilled that facebook and other social media outlets are allowing people some sort of use other than gossip and networking. I love social media, I can’t imagine how patient the generations were before its advent... but it seems that the further along we get into taming this wild beast of communicative power, the more good it does for society as a whole.