Webjam Company Blog » Marketing 2.0 Update 6 - Social Media Campaign Diagram

Over the last few weeks I had many discussions with colleagues about how to make social media work. Its great to have a strategy, a social media platform, a company presence on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook, but then what? How are you going to achieve the benefits you set out to achieve in your strategy. How are you going to engage with your customers? How are you going to improve your customer service? How are you going to sell more product? Its clear, that many companies are just scratching the surface and are learning how to use social media. Some with success, others without. One of the best examples of a successful social media campaign is Burgerking's Whopper Sacrifice. Burgerking developed an application called "sacrifice your friends". Anyone who "unfriends" ten of his/her facebook friends would receive one free wopper. Over 20.000 users added the appliction to their Facebook profiles and they dropped 200.000 friends in total. Facebook then blocked the application because of "data protection" issues. This only led to more PR for the application. The term "sacrifice your friends facebook app" shows over 1.000.000 results in Google. There are plenty of disaster stories as well like Habitat decided to use trending topic #hashtags at the start of their tweets to get noticed. They used ones that had absolutely nothing to do with furniture, but top hashtags for that day. Such as #iPhone #mms #Apple because Apple launched MMS on iphone that same day. Just to really mess things up, Habitat even used an Iranian election hashtag. Thanks to the caching in twitter search, the offensive tweets lived on long enough to capture the evidence, but regardless of whether deleted or not, the damage to the brand had been done.

This challenge of how to develop successful social media campaigns is high on my priority list in rolling out Webjam's marketing strategy. First, because its part of our advice we give to our clients when they implement the Webjam social publishing and engagement platform. Second, because we are rolling out our own social media programme and we want to make sure we hit the right buttons in engaging with our stakeholders. In further developing our strategy I came across this really useful social media strategy diagram, developed by David J. Carr. It groups the development and roll out of a social media strategy in 4 distinct phases.

click diagram to open high res version in new window.

Phase 1: LISTEN. In this phase you have to define your key stakeholders and listen to what they are doing on the web and social arena. Its just like real marketing. Who is your target market, and what do they need. The only difference now is that standard market research won't do the trick. You now have to find the online places where they are and listen to what they are saying. About you, your product, your service, the market etc.

Phase 2: UNDERSTAND. Again, marketing 101. But with a slight difference. Now that you have identified them and grouped them in what David calls tribes, you have to give them something they belong to. Something they can join. In social media terms this is called joining a community. Just like the real tribes do. And once you've done that you then feed the tribes with relevant and interesting objects. This is the content. This can be tools, widgets, apps, videos, photos, ideas, assets or any other content. As long as it is relevant to them.

Phase 3: ENGAGE. This is probably the most important phase of the roll out. Mingle with the tribes. Play their games, have conversations and connected experiences. But make sure you use their preferred platforms, their personalised pages, or the video and photo sharing sites they use. Even simple email can be effective in this stage. Its about enable, encourage and optimise for sharing the social objects created in the previous stage. If this is done properly, the content will be shared on Blogs and niche sites, will be replicated on other social networks and will ultimately drive the creation of communities and forums. In this phase, paid for media (Online ads, promo links or Google Adwords) can be used to stimulate further distribution of the content.

Phase 4: MEASURE, REACT & RESPOND. This phase is critical. This is where you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Whether you achieve the anticipated results. In Webjam we do this in three levels of sophistication. REACH, ENGAGEMENT, BRAND. From very simple traffic analysis, to community engagement and ultimately to brand sentiment analysis. This data can then be used as input to finetune the strategy and this makes it a vicious circle.

I hope you share my enthousiasm on the usefulness of this diagram. Obviously, there are many web tools available that will help you in each stage of the diagram. This will be too much to cover in this blog entry but I will discuss this in a future blog entry.

Do give me your feedback on this innovative and clear approach on implementing social media campaigns.

Written by: Marc Campman - Webjam Director of Marketing

notes:

See http://www.slideshare.net/kholzapfel/social-media-success-stories for samples of successful social media campaigns

see http://www.penn-olson.com/2009/09/21/5-social-media-disasters/ for social media disasters