Red Door Interactive brought together a panel of experts to discuss the use of social media for business. The panel, moderated by Red Door’s Morgan Witt, brought insights from a variety of perspectives: consultants supporting social media campaigns (Jamie Dicken of Brickfish.com and Crosby Noricks of Red Door), people responsible for social media efforts within companies (Adrian Glasenapp of New Belgium Brewing Company and Dirk Shaw of Vignette), and the founder of a company that facilitates tracking of social media (Ari Newman of Filtrbox). The discussion began with attempts to define social media, with Noricks offering the definition as “receiving, sharing and producing content online.” Dicken noted the importance of thinking broadly about social media rather than getting too tied to any specific platform, because the platforms that predominate now (largely Facebook and Twitter) may change over time.
Although social media represents a new method of communication, many of the fundamentals behind a social media campaign are consistent with the regular media campaigns companies have long used. Dicken commented that a social media campaign must be thought of “as part of an overall marketing program” and in most cases will represent only a fraction of the overall media spend for a company. As such, it is essential to define goals, implement metrics, and carefully consider messaging which some companies fail to recognize; Dicken noted “I hear about companies hiring ‘Twitterns’ [interns to do all the tweeting for a company]; would you put an intern out alone in front of a bunch of news cameras?”
Despite the fact that many social media platforms do not cost anything in the way of hard dollars, the time invested to manage this content can be significant and it seems the age-old adage “you get what you give” applies. When Glasenapp started working on social media at New Belgium, the company’s Facebook page was “basically the logo.” The company has been able to increase customer interactions through actively posting rich content including videos, conducting contests and giveaways, and conversing with its fans. Glasenapp commented on a significant uptick in fans when the company produced a custom application. Effective use of social media also requires significant coordination among departments to triage and address incoming messages. Shaw commented that although he has overall responsibility for social media he must effectively facilitate the “interaction of departments” including “marketing, sales, product, support, and service.”
As companies increasingly spend more time and energy, it is only natural that the financial types will want to start evaluating return on investment in the space. At this point, however, there seems to be no gold standard for what or how to measure this return. Glasenapp considers himself lucky to work for a savvy chief branding officer who was “very interested in social media” but expects to find himself “justifying the effort more” because the company is “investing more.” The easiest quantitative measures provided in social media (e.g. followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook) in some cases may be only loosely (or not at all) correlated to a company’s actual goals, usually driving sales. One common measure that goes one step beyond the number of followers is to consider how often a message is rebroadcast or retweeted. But Newman noted that this measure can be deceiving, as a message may be “retweet[ed] into an echo chamber” if it rebroadcast by people with few followers while a single retweet by an influencer with thousands of followers can achieve much more. Filtrbox and Brickfish are among the companies that offer their own methods to better measure social influence.
In some cases, it may be possible to track social media influence to outcomes outside the social media realm. Shaw noted that Vingnette tries to evaluate social media based on “business outcomes” including “sales leads,” which shows real financial value because the company tracks its cost per sales lead. Along with these hard measures, Shaw also believes that social media has been important in building the company’s presence and reputation. Through cultivating relationships via social media, Vignette was vigorously defended by industry analysts when a competitor put out a very misleading white paper about the company.
Although the broad goals behind social media are relatively consistent with that of regular media, the tactics employed are vastly different. Accoring to Newman, the first step in understanding how to use social media is recognizing that it is a “conversation and not a broadcast,” and the importance of being “authentic and genuine.” Noricks noted that there exists “a lot of confusion about what to share” for people and companies first entering the social media space. As a rule of thumb, Noricks offered that companies should engage (retweet, respond to questions, provide information) three to four times as much as they provide purely promotional messages. Norick also advised the need to respond to customer comments quickly because “two days may be too late,” an expedience that often requires a new mentality instead of “waiting to address it in the weekly meeting.”
