Archive for August, 2010

Keeping track of Social Media success.

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

One of the questions that we are asked on a regular basis is, how does one decide if their Social Media program is a success? What are the Key Performance Indicators? Alban D’Sa, the Operations Manager at Quay Appointments in Sydney, Australia asked this in LinkedIn.

The answer is a simple one. You look at what you are trying to achieve with your goals and use the Social Media tools that are most helpful. Then you look at an indicator to tell you if you are succeeding. One of my favorite success stories in City Social Media is Suisun City. It has two Facebook fan pages. One is for the Downtown Waterfront District, the other is for Suisun City in general.

Both give information about the locale. The Waterfront District is more about business. It has over 400 members. That makes sense for a business environment. The city fan page has almost 2,000 fans. It is much more oriented toward the fun going on in the city. Scott Corey says that it’s easy for him to be the Marketing Manager for the city because it has such good stories to tell. The important thing is, he makes sure those stories are told.

Andy Moore, Director at iThnk.com of New Zealand says, “KPIs such as number of followers/fans, amount of traffic to your page or site and the depth of comment threads from your posts are all good ways of keeping tabs on your social media campaigns.

He suggests “choosing the indicators that are most the relevant to your objectives at the outset of your campaign and monitoring these on a regular basis to make sure you’re on track. For example if your goal is to really engage with people I would monitor the amount of comments and responses you’re getting with each new update.”

He wrote a blog post on this subject recently so please check-out the link below if you’re interested…

http://www.ithnk.com/2010/07/02/what-is-social-media-success/

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Publicity, Social Media, Web sites | 2 Comments »

The lifespan of a brand.

Monday, August 30th, 2010

After reading my blog post ReBranding is rarely sucessful, unless you keep it real, Irv Hamilton, Placemaking Group’s Senior Vice President had this to add…

The comments on branding were very interesting.  But there are several aspects of the process that I think if often overlooked.
One is the lifespan of a brand.

Sometimes a brand spans a long period of time.  Other branding does not have a long life.  In some cases the life span — long or short — is intentional.  And with other branding programs, the life span of a branding effort is affected not by management decisions, but by external circumstances.  Anticipate how long a branding strategy will be valid, and act accordingly.

Another consideration is how the changing marketplace either strengthens or weakens a branding program.

Over the years one of branding efforts that I have thought to be both appealing and functional has been the Yellow Pages program based on the slogan, “Let your fingers do the walking.”  Sadly, the Yellow Pages and your fingers are obsolete sources of information.  You could re-brand it based on a new theme such as “Let your search engine do the walking.”  But somehow it doesn’t the same ring.  Pity.  I’m going to miss those fingers.

You can build a case that self-deprecation is a foolish branding strategy.  Imagine the planning committee sitting around looking for a branding strategy that focuses on the shortcomings and weaknesses of the company, its products and its services.  Ridiculous?

Hardly.  AVIS spent large amounts of marketing money successfully pushing the fact that they were a runner up rather than a leader.  And the once-small producer of fruit products still announces, “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.

Having said all that, we have two important pieces of advice for branding strategists.

First, don’t forget that timeframe plays a key role in branding.

And second, nearly everyone wants to be a leader.  That means there is plenty of room to recognize the silver and bronze medalists.

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ReBranding is rarely successful, unless you keep it real.

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

We hear about ReBranding a lot. That’s a concept that is exciting, especially when people have been either going through a process of Strategic Planning and are enthusiastic about the plan for the next year, or a new leader who thinks that if they change the brand, they can establish their own path.

The problem is, new branding or rebranding hardly ever works. People already know the brand. You can polish it up a little, maybe look at it from a slightly different perspective. The thing you can’t do is just make up a brand. People see right through that. The most famous example is the New Coke disaster, where the leaders of Coca Cola thought that if you have enough money you can convince people that the new brand is reality. I think that what we learned from that is– you don’t EVER have enough money to pull that off.

I’m thinking about this today because I just read a blog post by Mitch Gooze where he talks about what a failure Kentucky Fried Chicken’s ReBranding has been.  Here’s how he sets us up at his blog Value Acceleration…

  • “As you may have noticed, a while back KFC corporate decided to reposition KFC into the grilled chicken market. (I guess they figured if you turned the word Fried into “F” then you could also change the menu and its focus.)
  • “To put it bluntly, grilled chicken has been a disaster … as far as the franchisees are concerned. Same store sales are off 7% and grilled chicken is only about 16% of chicken “on the bone” sales.”

To read the rest of his post click here!

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Your Social Media Strategy-Facebook and Twitter, you communicate differently with each.

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Catharine P. Taylor brought up a great question in her blog post in the Social Media Insider. Her question is one that we’ve talked about here on a number of occasions. The question is what kind of communication and with whom is appropriate in each form of Social Media? She points out that Twitter and Facebook have very different environments and she’s beginning to see that you communicate differently in each. Here are her observations…

  • “I guess that MG Siegler’s column yesterday on TechCrunch, asking whether Facebook should adopt a friend and a follower system, resonated with me because I’ve been thinking about the nature of my social networking relationships lately as well. I finally got around to decoupling my tweets from my status updates earlier this month — 15 seconds that I should have found in my schedule at least a year ago.
  • “The problem was that I was concerned my worlds were intermingling too much — more than I, or those in my Twitter and Facebook circles, wanted them to. I do a fair amount of outreach on Twitter for the various projects that constitute my living. My friends on Facebook, though originally made up largely of professional friends — because soccer Moms and college friends hadn’t yet discovered it — had turned more into a place where they ruled the day. And, though no offense is meant to my “professional” Facebook friends, having discussions about why the kids have yet another half day off from school seems much more in context on Facebook to me than ones debating the virtues of the iPhone 4.
  • “So, as Twitter and Facebook began to evolve, I began to grow uncomfortable with the spillover between the two. Did the professional crowd get tired of my 140-character laments about my almost daily trips to CVS? Did friends and family wonder why I would express any interest in recruiting them for a panel at the Social Media Insider Summit (plug!) or share a story about market share of the Android platform? Fortunately, everyone was too polite to write obnoxious stuff about my confused life on my wall, but still … it was high time that I tried to bring method to my social networking madness.”

That’s what each of us has to understand. There’s a different feel to the communication depending on where you are communicating. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—they are each a different platform with a distinct atmosphere. On Facebook, you control (or at least you have more control) over who reads your posts, in Twitter everybody can read your posts.

Click here for her entire post.

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