By M. Isi Eromosele

In a socially connected marketplace, shared knowledge is now emerging as the ultimate resource. Information wants to be free and in today’s new market paradigm it is: free of constraints on place, free of control on content and free of restrictive access or consumption.

Social media and its underpinning technologies connect people in ways that facilitate sharing information, thereby reducing the opportunities for marketplace exploitation. The Social Web dramatically levels the playing field by making information plentiful, even as it compels businesses and organizations to operate more transparently.

The Social Web highlights excellence just as it exposes mediocrity in products and services in the global marketplace, without regard for the interests of any particular party.

Social media technologies, as expressed through social CRM, vendor relationship management applications, customer-driven support forums and consumer communities where participants engage in all forms of social discourse now act in unison to equalize the market positions of manufacturers, business and organizational leaders, customers and stakeholders.

As a direct result of the above, businesses and organizations embracing social technologies are delivering better solutions that have been developed through direct collaboration with customers and stakeholders.

Contemporary businesses, organizations and governing entities are increasingly meeting the challenge of transparency and operating with their customers and stakeholders, often through an empowered and connected workforce, to deliver self-evident value that gets talked about.

For the marketers, their customers, suppliers and stakeholders are the new source of future innovations and marketing and therefore also the drivers of long-term growth and success. This is what social business is all about.

Social business in action is running your organization in a way that generates the conversations you want. Social media is now considered a given in business.

The advent of Web 2.0 and the Social Web has clearly revolutionized the science of marketing and the art of engaging with customers. The collaborative social technologies that now define contemporary marketplaces offer a viable approach to driving changes in deeper business processes across a wide range of applications. There is something here for most organizations, something that extends very much beyond marketing and communications.

There is a veritable link between the basics of social media marketing and the larger idea of social technologies applied at a whole-business level. Even within organizations, you can think of this deeper, customer-driven connection between operations and marketing as social business.

With the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, the set of tools that facilitate the process for people to create and publish content, to share ideas, to vote on them and to recommend things to others have upended the well-established norms of business marketing, resulting in a much needed change.

No longer satisfied with marketers’ advertising and promotional information as a sole source for learning about new products and services, consumers have taken to the Social Web in an effort to share among themselves their own direct experiences with brands, products and services to provide a more real view of their research experience. At the same time, consumers are leveraging the experiences of others before they actually make purchases themselves. The impact on marketing has been profound.

The classic purchase funnel is connected to the Social Web through digital word-of-mouth (a.k.a. social media). This loop, from expectation to trial to rating to sharing the actual experience is now a part of almost every purchase or conversion process.

Whether consumer-facing, B2B, for-profit or nonprofit, people are turning to people like themselves for the information they need to make smart choices. Consumers look to these new sources of information for guidance, alongside traditional media communications; which are still very much a part of the overall marketing mix. The result is a new vetting process that is impacting the efforts of businesses and organizations to grow their markets.

Social Feedback Cycle

What the social feedback loop really represents is the way in which Internet-based publishing and social technology now connects people around business or business-like activities.

This new social connectivity applies between a business and its customers (B2C), between other businesses (B2B), between customers themselves, as is the case in support communities and similar social applications and just as well between employees.

As a result of the above, there is much more widespread dissemination of information on a broader basis. Information that previously was available to only a selected or privileged class of individuals is now open to all.

Social Business

Social business takes social concepts - sharing, rating, reviewing, connecting, and collaborating to all parts of a business. From product design to the promotions team and customer service, social behaviors and the development of internal knowledge communities that connect people and their ideas have given rise to smoother and more efficient business processes. Social business, viewed in this way becomes more about change management than marketing.

Social media marketing seeks to engage customers in the online social locations where they naturally spend time. By comparison, social business picks up on what they are talking about and what they are interested in and connects this information back into the business where it can be processed and used to create the next round of customer experiences and hence the next round of conversations.

Your Customers

It is important to understand the role of the customer, which includes anyone on the other side of a business transaction: It might be a retail consumer, a business customer or a donor to a nonprofit organization.

What’s common across all of these archetypes and what especially matters in the context of social business is that each of them has access to information, in addition to whatever information you put into the marketplace that can support or refute the messages you've spent time and money creating.

Beyond the marketing messages, be willing to consider suggestions for improvements or innovation that may originate with your customers: As a result of an actual experience or interaction with your brand, product or service, your customers have specific information about your business processes and probably an idea or two on how your business might serve them better in the future.

Consider the following, all of which are typical of the kinds of information your customers may have to give you after a transaction with your company:

The above list is typical of the kinds of information that customers have and often share amongst themselves and would readily share with you if asked. Collecting this information and systematically applying it is in your best interest.

This information and the ensuing pleas for help expressed in online forums is something you can collect through social analytics tools and processes. It can then be combined with the experiences of other customers, as well as your own process and domain knowledge to improve a particular customer experience and then offered generally as a new solution.

This new solution could then be shared through the same communities and collaborative technologies with your wider customer base, raising your firm’s relative value to your customers in the process and strengthening your relationship with the customers who initially experienced the problem.

The resultant sharing of information and its use inside an organization forms the stepping-off point from social media marketing and social analytics into social business. From a purely marketing perspective, this shared consumer information can be very helpful in encouraging others to make a similar purchase.

It can enlighten a marketer as to which advertising claims are accepted and which are rejected, helping that marketer to fine tune their message. It can also create a bridge to dialog with the customer; think about onsite product reviews or support forums so that marketers can understand in greater detail what is helping and what is not.

Access to customer-provided information means your product or service adapts faster. By sharing the resulting improvement and innovations while giving your customers credit, your business gains positive recognition.

The participation and hence marketplace information is coming from the customers and is heading toward the business. Traditionally, over mass media, it’s been the other way around.

Now, it is the business that is listening to the customer. What is being learned as a result of this listening and participation is then tapped internally to change, sustain or improve specific customer experiences. When subsequently tied to business objectives, the practice of social business becomes holistic indeed.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

With over 75 percent of wealthy Internet users actively using social media, the question is no longer if luxury brands should utilize the web as a luxury market, but rather a question of how to do so.

The dynamics of the online marketplace continue to shift with the exponential growth of social media platforms. Consumer behaviors and expectations are also changing with the growth of these social media platforms.

As social media establishes itself as the premiere venue for information exchange, the conventional methods of messaging favored by many luxury organizations will become increasingly irrelevant.

Although luxury brands face unique hurdles, they also stand to reap significant rewards by embracing social media. Social media is still a relatively uncharted frontier for luxury brands and the early adopters will have a large advantage moving forward.

Success will be dependent on these companies developing strategies that address the new behaviors of the modern affluent consumer online while appreciating that luxury brands in social media must remain just that, luxurious.

Today, the more informed and newly empowered consumer is demanding more from brands, especially luxury brands than they had traditionally received. With the power they have acquired through social media, these consumers now essentially dictate how organizations market to them.

The Luxury Difference

Luxury brands distinguish themselves through superior quality, from the actual product itself to the in-store experience to the cachet of the brand. Purchasing a luxury good is

akin to making an investment.

This is why luxury brands take pride in every step of the process, from design conception to production. Social media can help demonstrate to consumers the level of craftsmanship that goes into production and can serve as a powerful way to showcase the luxury difference.

Impactful, turn-key solutions such as telling the distinguished story of the luxury brand help affluent consumers appreciate the significance and history of what they are buying.

Social Media – The New Luxury Marketing Paradigm

While social media has empowered consumers with deeper insight, it has also had an unintended consequence for luxury brands. In the past, communications from luxury providers to consumers were provided through tightly controlled traditional media channels (print, television, direct marketing, etc.) to influence the conversations of the elite.

As such, only those with the means to purchase luxury goods had influence on the desirability of particular goods and services. Simply put, luxury consumers made purchase decisions based on other luxury consumers.

Social media has opened doors to give a wider range of consumers access to both information and products previously unavailable to them. With respect to luxury brands, what is desirable or undesirable is no longer the sole purview of the traditional luxury audience.

While portraying that image remains crucial in social media, the reality is that even non-luxury consumers can now have an impact on the success or failure of luxury brands. Over time, a crowd of relative unknowns can create a tipping point for a luxury product’s success or, if they so desire, failure.

Many of the qualities that luxury brands are built on such as tight quality control and immersive shopping experiences, may seem contrary to the nature of social media communications.

Certainly, the use of social media inherently trades some control for increased engagement. The reality is that discussions about brands are happening already and will continue to flourish with or without the direction of the brands themselves.

Many of the qualities of luxury brands are built on such attributes as tight quality control and immersive shopping experiences, which may seem contrary to the nature of social media communications.

However, the use of social media inherently requires the luxury marketers to relinquish some control for increased engagement with their prospects and customers. The reality is that discussions about brands are happening already and will continue to flourish with or without the direction of the brands themselves.

Luxury brands face a choice: influence the conversations themselves or be drawn into the discussion through less desirable circumstances. These brands can no longer afford to differentiate thenselves purely on higher price points and claims of quality. They need to prove their worth online in other ways.

A luxury brand requires stringent attention to the qualities that make the brand what it is. To maintain that level of quality online requires a commitment of both human and financial resources. Corners cannot be cut just because it is the Internet.

Cheapening a brand’s image online will have the same negative effects as it would in the real world. A semi-functional website; a dead social media profile; an inadvertently tacky sponsorship can all factor into a luxury brand’s downfall online.

Due to the fickle nature of brand equity, any social media marketing done without a well-researched approach and full scale commitment is highly risky. Social media marketing shares a fundamental similarity to other marketing activities: with a well-developed strategy and good execution, luxury brands stand to gain in the short and long term.

Challenges Online

Social media for luxury brands is no longer an optional marketing consideration. The definition of a luxury consumer and of luxury itself has changed. Luxury brands must deliver brand experiences online to see continued success.

With a deep understanding of how these new tools can be used appropriately, brands can harness the power of social media to directly communicate with their audiences, promote their brands and raise their brand equity.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

The consideration phase of the purchase funnel is the focal point of your social media marketing program. The consideration phase is the point in the purchase funnel where potential buyers make the most intensive use of social media in the context of a transaction.

Word-of-mouth is the currency of the consideration phase: in the pre-digital marketplaces, word-of-mouth exchanges between people powered the referral and recommendation process.

In the digital age, on the Social Web, word-of-mouth, in some form and especially social media, is part of almost every information exchange that takes place.

Specific social media components can be applied and used as a part of your marketing program.

Blogs

Blogs are one of the primary places where thoughts are collected and commented on. These are conversations that you can listen to, or jump into provided you disclose your affiliation.

You should create your own corporate” blog and use it as a platform to talk about issues that relate to your brand. For maximum effectiveness as a marketing channel, be sure that what you talk about is also of interest to your customers.

Microblogs

One of the more recent tools on the Social Web is the microblog. Services like Twitter (text) and Seesmic (video) have become important components of social media.

Microblogs facilitate short bursts of thought and communication, in particular in a context of people who are interested in the thoughts of specific others. You can create a profile and use these tools to tell others what’s up, what you’re working on or to ask questions. Disclosure is essential.

In particular, take care to understand the rules that apply in any specific forum, especially as regards spam.

Reviews, Ratings, and Recommendations

The Social Web is often characterized by terms like the “wisdom of crowds.” Reviews, ratings and recommendations are all tacit forms of the voting process through which the collective conscious arrives at consensus.

These same tools can be used in a marketing context, both in a learning mode, for example, to see why your customers like or dislike a product or in an outreach mode where ratings, reviews and recommendations play a direct role in affirming or derailing an impending purchase.

Video and Audio Podcasts

Podcasting can be an important part of your marketing program. The typical podcast episode is 15 to 30 minutes: What could you do if you had someone’s attention for that amount of time?

Because podcasts are episodic, you have the ability to build on more advanced or nuanced themes over time. You can use a podcast as an extension of a current program to deliver in-depth material about the use or application of a product.

The Point of Sale and Beyond

Thinking back to the role of social media in the consideration phase of the purchase process, it isn’t surprising that social media can be applied at the point of purchase and even more so, after the purchase.

What happens in the consideration phase almost always carries though to the point of purchase: The social conversations themselves likely begin post-purchase.

This is because the conversations that are relevant to a potential buyer and therefore, useful at the point of purchase are in general based on the experiences of those who have already purchased the product or otherwise had a direct experience with it and then talked about it.

Tell-a-Friend

This social feature, perhaps more than any other, ought to be a best practice for every marketer. Ask yourself this question: If you, through efforts that cost you both time and money, brought someone all the way to your website where they happened upon something that you sold…but that was perfect not for them but for someone else that they knew…wouldn’t you want that person to tell the other about it?

Of course you would! Yet, in practice, far too many marketing sites fail to include this simple feature. If you haven’t implemented this, think about adding this one in particular as a social marketing tool.

One Final Note

Think about how your operations department or function fits into this social media marketing plan. For most social media applications, operations will have much to do with the success of your campaign. After all, it’s in operations that the actual product or service experience is created.

Consider the following important questions:

Most important at this point is to have the basics in place to begin building a social media marketing program that complements what you are doing now while addressing the specific business objectives that you have set.

Points Of Differentiation

Social media is most different from traditional media in that it lacks the option to force an interruption: Your message has to be invited in. Social media is fundamentally measurable. Social media can be organized as follows:

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

With regard to social media, your message is an invited guest from the get-go. This is both an opportunity, your audience is picking up your message on its own and a challenge as you have to have that invitation to get in.

The use of social media is intended to complement and extend your current marketing efforts, not replace them. Offensive practices such as spam and pop-ups, attempted instead with social media are unlikely to win friends in precisely the forum where you really want to win them: the Social Web.

On the Social Web, you have to take a different approach when creating your social media marketing plan. When you first establish a presence on the Social Web, you’re like any other new-comer.

The fact that you’ve been marketing for 10 or 20 years doesn’t mean nearly as much as your online social reputation. If you’re new to social media, then by definition you don’t have a social reputation beyond the carry-over from whatever you have built outside the Social Web.

Building a solid online reputation is essential: ultimately, it is your online, not offline reputation that drives your results on the Social Web.

Your online social reputation is something that you build as you go. Metrics like the ratio of blog comments to your blog posts: unique visitors, dwell times and quantitative assessments of social commentary about the content you create or the conversations that reference your brand, product or service can provide an indication of your online reputation from a social viewpoint.

Based on those measures, you can get an idea of what needs to be done to strengthen or improve your reputation, regardless of your starting point.

Social Media Channels

To make sense of the Social Web, it is highly useful to split social media channels into functional groups: platforms, content and interactions. It makes it much easier to plan a social media merketing program.

Social Platforms

Social platforms, the first of the big groupings within social media, include social Networks - Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo and more as well as white-label platforms that can be used to provide community and support services.

Also included in this group are wikis (collaborative platforms that drive consensus around ideas, externally with customers or internally with employees and partners). Through participation, you’ll learn more about social media than by sitting on the sidelines. Social media is not a spectator sport.

Social Content

The next big group is social content, the things that people make and share: content, photos, videos, comments, blog posts that then circulate on the Social Web. This content is often consumer generated but just as easily can be marketer generated.

Social content is an area where you can play in several ways. You can use existing social content to gauge your reception and reputation as it currently stands. What are others saying about your company and what you offer? You can look for new ways to extend your products that tap the ideas and the applications being advanced through social content.

Social Interactions

If social platforms are the containers for social content - the photos, posts, videos, and other content that people share, then how do Social Web participants keep track of what’s going on?

That’s where the final group of channels, social interactions fit. Think of these as the little pieces of content that fly around based on something that you or someone else just did, messages that notify you of what just happened or what is just now available to you.

These include “Follow” notices on Twitter, Share updates on Facebook and Google alerts are all examples of these links.

Think about social platforms, social content and social interactions: Which is most likely to provide the support you need and fits into the marketing program you already have in place?

With your objectives identified, you can think about the kinds of applications that may be useful. Perhaps you’re thinking about setting up a blog or launching a podcasting effort. If so, tentatively place these on your social feedback cycle and touch point map. Think through how these new marketing efforts will complement what you are doing now.

As such, you have identified the core social media channels that you’ll be considering for complimenting your existing marketing program, based on the dynamics of your current customers and their interaction with potential customers at the point of consideration in the purchase funnel.

You should now have a social feedback cycle that includes active listening or participative components. In addition to the awareness and purchase activities you are already engaged in, you should now have social elements that connect and amplify your messages if you are planning an outreach effort.

If you are starting with a listening/learning effort, you should have a solid set of metrics identified that support tracking what you will learn over time so that you can use it to drive change within your organization, setting yourself up for success when you choose to add socially based outreach efforts to your marketing program.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

Recommendations are a critical component of social campaigns. In fact, recommendations are social campaigns.

When you analyze a traditional campaign, you find at its core a message crafted by a professional PR firm or agency creative team. You find a message that is aspirational with regard to the brand.

It’s what the brand manager and agency account executives hope consumers will think, which will then carry them all the way through the purchase funnel to the cash register.

This stands in contrast to a recommendation. Recommendations, whether in the form of a conversation or a video clip, power the Social Web. A recommendation, often appearing along with a review or a rating is an expression by one person of what might be useful or helpful to another. It is a powerful and influential endorsement of a brand.

Ratings quantify the strength of the recommendations. Unlike the aspirational or persuasive marketer-generated message, a consumer-generated recommendation is often a purely informational component in the purchase process.

Consumer-generated messages are both positive and negative and they are generally first-person, adding authenticity and urgency to the message. Think of a social feedback cycle: the conversation however it is expressed enters the purchase process in the consideration phase, between awareness and purchase.

Social media covers the range of emotions and views that are raised in the post-purchase experience. Consumer-generated content can sway, convert or dissuade, depending on its polarity (positive or negative).

By comparison, marketer-generated messages nearly always attempt to positively persuade. “You’ll love our product because….” so much of what happens in advertising is positive (that is, encouraging and supporting a purchase).

The general response from consumers has become “Nice, but you’re really only giving us part of the story. What about the negative? What happens after we buy?” Of course, that question leads directly onto the Social Web where it gets answered.

Influence on the social Web, expressed through the diverse set of social media components is indeed powerful. Trust is a big part of the driver. It is for this reason that being open and honest is critical.

Any indication that integrity is in question causes an otherwise well-intentioned social campaign to weaken. At its extreme, it will wreak havoc on your brand. It is influence, not control that you are really after in your social media campaigns.

It is influence that can be applied tactically at the point of consideration in the purchase process. This is the exact point where a purchase decision is being formulated and validated.

Understanding who is likely to recommend you (or who will not) and to what degree along with why (or why not) is critical in assessing your readiness for a social media campaign.

The Social Web ought to be reasonably receptive to your efforts, provided you follow the basic rules of etiquette and conduct as established: disclosure, transparency and participation versus interruption.

If you are having problems with your brand, then engaging the social Web directly, in other words, using social media as an outreach tool is risky. Fortunately, even in this case you can still use the Social Web and social media.

Using social media for outreach is just one of the two available modes: the other is listening and feedback. Particularly for brands, products, or services with a low (or negative) ratings with consumers, the Social Web can be a great place to quickly and at low cost discover the kinds of things that, if addressed will prove themselves valuable in positively turning things around.

What your customers have to say about your brand is where the implementation of your social media campaigns needs to start. By talking with a small set of customers, you can see how to begin a systematic and ongoing evaluation of all customers, current and prospective and how to use what you have learned or will learn to refine your marketing.

The measurement of influence is critical to successfully implementing social media. Influence, rather than control is the central element you have at your disposal on the social Web.

Taking the time to gather and distill quantitative metrics is essential. Develop a comprehensive dashboard and report card that includes potential social measures. Integrate blog indexing services and any relevant online data that you have access to into your measurement platform.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

One simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company’s product to a friend?”

It turns out to be a fundamentally important metric and central to the successful implementation of social media. Think about it: If your own customers would not recommend you…well, you have a serious problem.

Measurement and the social Web go hand in hand, although it’s not always obvious how to go about measuring something as dynamic as a conversations.

As a largely online phenomenon, social media measurement borrows heavily from existing online metrics. At the same time, questions like “How likely is it that you would recommend my brand to a friend?” are rooted in the principles that drive social media.

There are two key points that must be stressed:

Building A Winning Brand

Building a winning brand and maintaining one are two different things: Dell built a commanding position in the personal computer (PC) market by offering a better way for its customers to buy one.

When its customer service floundered however, Hewlett Packard (HP) gained and retook the global market share lead in the third quarter of 2006. Dell is now pushing hard to regain its top spot and not coincidentally social media and the positive practices that drive it are part of Dell’s program.

In both of these cases, the role of the customer recommendation is central to the rise or fall of the brands.

Social Media Evangelism

Put two concepts together, the evangelist as the key to long-term growth and that profit earned by means that fail to delight your customers threatens your long-term viability and you have what is essentially a formula for success not only on the social Web but in businesses as well.

On the social Web, made up of social media applications such as social networking platforms, blogs, photo and video sharing, collaborative event planning tools, ratings and reviews and more, the conversations that stem from actual, delightful experiences with products and services are the key to driving and sustaining evangelism and hence long-term growth of brands.

Traditional marketing programs are essential in driving awareness and seeding markets. Evangelism causes a steady amplification that builds over time through the combination of word of mouth and digital content on the social Web.

It literally creates markets. Contemporary brands and their social reputations are being built through practices that encourage evangelism.

A large piece of your customer base will enthusiastically promote you for a variety of reasons if you’ll only give them the means. This desire goes beyond any single characteristic, for example, price associated with your brand.

Social media is an articulation of the response to your brand, product or service in actual use. The ad or PR campaigns you create set the expectations against which that response is generated.

Fundamentally, the social Web is built on conversations that do not belong to you but instead belong to someone else. Instead of trying to control the conversation (or worse, the participants), you have to change your product or service experience that drives the conversation. This, along with your behavior on the social Web, is the only element of a social media campaign over which you have full control.

If you’ve got a great product that is delivering a superior (delightful) experience, then use social components such as blogs or video sharing that encourage more talk: use the social Web as a platform to spread your message.

If you’ve got work to do, use tools such as support forums to identify and correct issues: use the social Web as a listening tool and take the conversation to the communities where you can fix the problems. Above all, participate and be open and honest about what you are doing.

Influence And Metrics

“How likely are you to recommend company X?” Embodied in this simple question is everything that powers (or destroys) a brand on the social Web. This one question is the basis of a very simple but powerful measure of influence.

When your customers willingly support you through a pricing structure that provides a profit based on satisfaction and are at the same time willing to evangelize your brand, to recommend you to others, you are in a splendid position.

Applying social media will then be a very straightforward and largely risk-free proposition. After all, your customers are already talking about you favorably and you have a business model that will stand up over time.

Are you worried about “managing the conversation”? In effect, you already are. Through the experience of delight that you already provide, you are influencing the conversation in a way that is favorable to your brand’s position.

The experience of delight is the only way to positively influence the conversation on the social Web. Delight can arise as the result of great experience or because you handled an experience that was less than great…in a great way.

Provide a great experience, and the conversation will take care of itself. Conversely, provide a poor one and the conversation will reflect that instead. The measurement of influence and in particular tracking it over time is key to managing your social presence and fully tapping the social Web to its potential.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

Two essential marketing elements play key roles in an effective social media concept:

First, social media involves a diverse set of activities – social networking, blogging, and so on.

Second, the effective use of social media depends in part on the activities selected and the mix of the social and traditional channels that your audience is interested in or to which it is receptive. In other words, the effective use of social media, involving technology, control and other components is essentially an integration paradigm.

Social media, while certainly different in terms of how you approach it, is no different than anything else in your marketing toolbox: the channels may be different, but you still plan for it within the context of your business and campaign objectives and audience and channel mix.

Building Your Social Media Strategy

In developing your Social Media Strategy, the challenges you will face will be along the lines of one or more of the following:

Relate these challenges to your business and involve your coworkers. Build consensus. Above all, look at what you are selling or promoting. If it needs fixing, then right now would be an excellent time to take care of that.

If things are as they should be, you’re going to find smooth sailing. Implemented correctly, social media will help set significant differentiation between you and your competition.

If your product or service isn’t all it should be; if there is a notable gap between marketing expectation and operational performance and you don’t take the time now to address that, you will find it difficult to implement your social media strategy.

The Main Points Of A Social Media Strategy

Building Your Social Media Strategy

You’ll begin building for your social media campaign by first establishing a solid base and working knowledge of the tools that are available to you as a marketer and only then add social media marketing elements to your plan.

Importantly, you’ll also learn the etiquette and rules of social engagement. In social media-based marketing, perhaps more than any other single factor, the understanding and adherence to etiquette (along with emerging best practices) will make or break the

effectiveness of the campaigns you create.

Social Networks: The Power of the Collective

The power of the collective is all about the power that arises directly from the ways in which the Social Web is organized and what it conveys to its participants as a result. Understanding how network organization affects the flow of information is central to your successfully implementing your social media strategy.

There are three network-value-governance laws as related to social media. They speak to the fundamental value of a network from the perspective of those connected to it.

These laws ascribe a potential value to any given network on the basis of how participants are connected to a central source, to each other and so on. The laws that govern the value of social networks and the Social Web itself are presented in order of increasing importance with regard to the use of social media.

The first law underlies the reach component of most media pricing models. In the typical broadcast application, a single voice is sent to millions of listeners. A net-work with 100 people is therefore 10 times as valuable in terms of reach as a network with only 10.

The second law states that for networks that support communication between members, rather than only from a single source, the network value grows as the square of the number of users. Think of this as arising out of the fact that people can talk in both directions and with more than one conversation occurring simultaneously.

The third law holds that the value of the network grows more powerfully with the formation of groups (which in turn give rise to communities) and the interconnections between them. Compared with a network of 10 people, a network of 100 people that can talk not only with each other but with outlying communities will carry the information farther and faster.

The Customer - Centerpiece Of Social Media

The notion that the customer is at the center of all potential brand-related experiences is based on the Social Web reality that all of the communications that a particular individual is exposed to shape his/her ultimate perception of your brand, product or service.

Note that all communication, everything you say, along with everything that your customers say plays a role. This includes your advertising and the actual product experience as well as the conversations occurring on the Social Web.

Specific to marketing and its core objectives, customer perceptions generally (and certainly hopefully) contribute to a conversion. It is in this way that social media ties directly into your marketing toolbox.

Social components such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and more surround the conversion process and are central to the usefulness of social

media in marketing.

Social media contributes to informed choices by aggregating and making available to an interested individual the collective experience and resultant conversation.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

Social media involves a natural, genuine conversation between people about something of mutual interest, a conversation built on the thoughts and experiences of the participants. It is about sharing and arriving at a collective point, often for the purpose of making a better or more-informed choice.

Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people and peers.

Examples of social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), Facebook(social networking), Twitter (social networking) Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing) and Flickr (photo sharing).

From a marketer’s perspective, social media is not an entity in the way that direct mail or TV advertising are, but is rather a collaborative process through which information is created, shared, altered, and destroyed.

Accuracy Of Social Media

Social media uses the collective, the wisdom of the crowd; it is seldom entirely wrong. In fact, more often than not, it is more than reasonably accurate and therefore constitutes a measurable, trackable feedback point with regard to the acceptance and performance of your product or service.

Social media is used effectively through participation and influence, not command and control. The opportunities for participation can lead to influence, influence that helps companies to achieve their business and marketing objectives.

Social media is utilized in the conversations that occur between your customers, conversations that you may not even know about and certainly will not be part of unless you are present and listening.

Choosing not to participate is tantamount to endorsing, by your own absence, the messages that are ultimately formed in social channels. You can choose whether or not your customers will see you on TV. You cannot choose whether or not your customers will see you on the social Web.

They will, because they will put you there. You can only choose whether or not you will join them there. As such, for contemporary brands aiming for long-term success, not participating is not an option.

Social Media and Marketing

The social Web, used correctly, is all about what your community of supporters can do to help you build your business. Keep in mind too that all of your other channels still exist; social media is a complementary extension of all of your other marketing efforts. Social media is, after all, more of a mind-set than a true channel.

To effectively influence an audience on the social web, you first listen to them. Tap it. Learn from it. One of the characteristics of social media is that you can listen to it, measure it and track it over time. You can use what you learn to modify and improve what you offer and in so doing influence the online conversation.

Social media is characterized largely if not completely by the content trail of ratings, reviews, comments, and more that it leaves on the social Web and by the voting processes and related assessments that clearly mark what the crowd thinks of

this content.

So, you do have a measurable pulse that you can use to guide your efforts in near real-time. Listening to and responding to your customers by paying attention to their conversations is a great way to use social media to influence these discussions. But just how do you influence them?

Give them an experience that they will want to talk about positively and then using the resulting conversation to continuously improve. If you follow this approach, over time you will separate yourself from competitors who don’t tap social media and especially from those who opt for shortcuts.

One of the most valuable aspects of social media from a marketer’s perspective is in building and maintaining a feedback loop. It is through this feedback loop and your measurement of it that you can learn where and how to influence the social conversations that are important to you.

Social media plays into the purchase process via the social feedback cycle simply, the feeding back of the post-purchase experiences of current customers into the purchase funnel at the point of consideration for use by potential customers when making a purchase decision.

The Purchase Funnel

In the purchase funnel, there are three stages you move your customers through as you define the pathway along which you move potential customers toward the ultimate goal, the sale. These three stages are awareness, consideration and purchase.

The purchase funnel offers both an insight into why traditional media works so well, and why marketers who rely on traditional media exclusively have difficulties when first thinking through the potential application of social media.

The purchase funnel is a model that characterizes the process that leads from awareness through consideration to purchase as if it existed in a vacuum. It treats your marketing program and in fact your entire business as if it were a closed system.

A more contemporary representation of the purchase funnel incorporates the social Web and accounts for the impact of consumer-generated media during the consideration stage. It is an open model that recycles the experiential data generated by current customers for the benefit of the next wave of shoppers.

The feedback loop that connects the post-purchase conversation back to the purchase funnel is the key to the application of social media.

Impact Of Social Media On The Purchase Funnel

Social media, like any other form of expression that takes its roots in word of mouth, cuts both ways. It can boost viewership and purchase by reinforcing the underlying marketing message just as easily as it weakens intent and the likelihood of successful conversion.

Social media sits at the pinnacle of the current trends in consumer-to-consumer conversation and marketing effort amplification. As you set up your social media program, don’t hesitate to experiment. Don’t be reckless, either: your brand may or may not be your life, but it’s almost certainly your livelihood.

Begin with your business objectives and solid preparation and a current review of your customers’ online media habits. Then, look at the various social media channels you have available.

Find the channels that build on or complement your current efforts or that fill a gap in your current marketing program and start there, building your social media program as you develop your capabilities.

Marketing Promises Operations Delivers

The connection between operations and marketing, between promise and delivery is central to social media. Social media, in the business context is based on the degree to which the actual experience matches the expectation set.

Recent studies have shown that of the estimated 3.5 billion word-of-mouth conversations that occur around the world each day, about 2.3 billion of them, roughly two out of three

make a reference to a brand, product or service.

Word of mouth is increasingly manifesting itself through digital social media, where it spreads both farther and faster. This use of the social Web is increasingly important to marketers.

Look back at the purchase funnel and expand it to include “post-purchase” experiences of the overall marketing process. Social media connects these experiences back to the purchase process in the social feedback cycle.

Social media is effectively the product of operations, given the expectation (the brand or promise) established in Marketing.

The social feedback cycle is set in motion by a post-purchase opinion that forms based on the relationship between the expectations set and the actual performance of the product or service. This opinion drives word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth ultimately feeds back into the purchase funnel in the consideration phase.

Right between awareness and point-of-purchase comes customer-driven social media. It hits hard too: remember, word-of-mouth is considered to be the most trusted source of information.

The social feedback cycle is driven by word-of-mouth, itself driven by the actual post-purchase or trial/sampling experience. It is essential that Operations and Marketing be in sync.

Getting the Operations + Marketing link right is the first step in successfully implementing social media.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

The spirit of being a successful company has been about communication, sharing ideas and connecting. These core values are still the heart of social media today.

Exchanging knowledge, swapping stories and bonding is something that both companies and their customers will always cherish. What’s exciting is the new and evolving ways they can now communicate with each other.

Social Media is all about communication on a whole new, quick and effective level that is all in real-time… The possibilities are truly endless!

It is imperative that every company develop its own House Guidelines to educate all their employees about the importance of using Social Media correctly. While there are hundreds of Social Media websites, you may want to start with just three.

These would be Facebook for social networking, Twitter for content sharing and business updates and finally YouTube for videos and product demonstrations. Each of these platforms has a specific function, so choose what is right for you and your business.

Creating a Successful Social Media Presence

Find your digital audience

Find the right audience. Begin by surveying your audience to determine their interest in using social media and what platforms they may already be using. You want to go where your audiences already are rather than asking them to come to you.

Once you have determined several sites that they actively use, determine whether these sites also meet your needs of communication, fair access for everyone and online safety.

Create a strategy

Connect programs to business goals. Consider how you can use social media to interact in ways that meet your business goals. Each of your social media updates, posts and campaigns must work towards one or more of these strategic goals.

Define clear measures for success and track them. Set goals. What do you want from this effort?  New Visitors? Increased Brand Awareness? Define clear goals and measurable means to meet them; choose one or two online platforms that help you meet these goals.

Develop community guidelines

Set the rules. Community guidelines should provide a strong foundation for what your audience can expect when they visit your online spaces. It also provides a clear explanation for why you would potentially remove any content from your pages.

These boundaries ensure that the space is safe for all to use. Be transparent. Users in the social space know when an organization is being inauthentic. Post your guidelines publicly. Be open and honest in all communication.

Build an editorial calendar and team

Protect your brand

Make sure to protect your brand by creating a general account for your network, versus attaching it to one person’s email information.

Protect your privacy and organization

Make sure that any employee blogging or posting comments online is aware that disclosing financial, operational, legal or personal information is prohibited. Publicly articulate that comments posted in your space are not necessarily the opinion of the organization.

Plan a publication schedule

Determine how often content will be refreshed, new posts will be posted or comments will be made. Set up an editorial calendar for postings and plan ahead around holidays, special events, etc.

Work to formulate who internally is responsible for updating and maintaining content. With programs like Hootsuite, you can schedule a whole month of posts and updates ahead of time.

Connect, Listen, Monitor, Measure

Understand user wants and needs

Before engaging in the social space, do some research around what your audience likes, what they want to know more about and what they can use in their communities. Be prepared to have conversations with them and answer questions. Understand that some of your employees’ roles will be as customer service representatives for your organization.

Accept, and prepare for negativity

There is a fine line in social media regarding negativity. Some organizations are stricter than others when it comes to allowing negative dialogue to occur in their space. Always try to engage the conversation publicly by being responsive, offer help to ease the situation. Trying to control the dialogue through aggressive screening and selective posts is generally not effective or recommended.

Get permission

If you plan on using any content from other sources; site them, link to the article or reference the contact. You are not only protecting yourself from plagiarism and other legal charges, you are encouraging users to click back and forth from various websites at their leisure, the true essence of social media.

Prepare, prepare, prepare

Ensure that you also have an escalation plan in place should information or conversation on your page illicit an unexpected response. Determine who will have the final say in responding to a crisis on your page.

Responsible Engagement In Innovation And Dialogue

Explore how online discourse through social computing can empower your employees as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications but masses of communicators.

Through these interactions, your company’s greatest asset, the expertise of its employees can be shared with clients, shareholders and the communities in which the company operates.

Believe in the importance of open exchange between your company, its clients and customers and among the many constituents of the emerging business and societal ecosystem for learning. Social computing is an important arena for organizational and individual development.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

By M. Isi Eromosele

Today’s interactive social web and related innovations make for exciting challenges and great opportunities.

The web continues to reshape the world in many ways, such as how we do business, how we connect and how we market at an incredibly faster pace. Its impact on all organizations globally is massive and pervasive. Organizations whose leaders hold back will be lost.

Embracing the social web paradigm is an imperative. Businesses need to make a plan that is rooted in the understanding that the social web is a mechanism to connect and engage with customers.

This is more than a social media campaign. Basing a plan on the fundamentals of the social web ensures that your business begins to incorporate it in a systematic way rather than ad hoc, which is vital to a successful implementation.

The following are some unique features of social media marketing that can be used to the benefit of your organization:

Best Practices For A Focused Social Media Strategy

Your adoption of social media marketing will depend on your products and services, your market’s readiness and your corporate culture. Rather than taking it on all at once, you might want to find one or two avenues to test out.

Research Your Potential Market On Their Turf

Perform a keyword search to discover which online channels and what messages are influencing your prospective customers. Get to know how/where they communicate online. What are the hot topics and pain points? What are people saying about your organization or the competition?

Scan conversations on relevant blogs, review white papers and articles posted on sites or look into media monitoring services like Google Alerts. Once you have a better idea of what you’re up against, you can come up with a more targeted method of reaching the audiences that are the most valuable to your industry.

Consider Including Social And Interactive Marketing In Your Media Budget

According to Forrester Research, it’s estimated that marketers will spend more than $55 billion on social media involvement by 2014, not including paid advertisements. With the advancements in search engine optimization, real time social media updates are now incorporated into results. This only bolsters incentives to earmark social media in your marketing budget.

Humanize Your Brand

If you host a blog, do it well. Blogs provide an opportunity for you to put a human touch to your corporate persona. Postings should be well-written and signed by employees. Allowing bloggers’ personalities to shine through help reflect your unique brand culture and introduces corporate leaders and generates sales leads.

The tone and goal should be significantly different from your corporate website - omit press releases, sell copy and financials. Focus instead on your audience and the messages they want to hear. Blogs rely on up-to-date content, so don’t venture in unless you can guarantee a fresh blog post at least every few days.

Focus On The Relationship Before The Technology

The first step is to learn the social technology profile of your target online audience. That profile can range from inactive (those who are untouched by social technologies) to creator (people who write blogs, upload videos, etc.).

Only then can you proceed to the next important steps, such as determining your objective (Create a community for market research? Member support? Word-of-mouth promotion?) and strategy (How do you want to change your relationship with members?).

If you’re still unsure or uneasy about your role in tricky social media situations, create a Social Media Engagement Model. It’s important to remember that negative feedback on your social media channels isn’t necessarily a crisis (though it can be, so have a plan in

place for managing it).

Use Negative PR As A Teachable Moment

The knee-jerk reaction to negative user-generated content is to remove it. However, if you have a negative media issue to tackle this may be just the venue for it. Transparency builds trust with your audiences, so the more authentic you can be the better.

If you’ve decided to approve/keep any negative user-generated content, chances are the public is already blogging about it, which may be more detrimental if left unaddressed. If in doubt about an issue’s impact on your brand reputation, do some internal public relations triage. Your colleagues are your greatest resource, and may be able to provide some insight into the issue, and a possible solution or response.

Then, instead of avoiding the issue, post the concern with your thoughtful explanation or apology. On the other hand, you’re ultimately in control. There’s no need to post every unfavorable remark. To create transparency and trust for your brand, respond to only the negative comments/interactions that are relevant or appropriate.

To Help Grow Your Audience, Incorporate Word-of-Mouth Marketing Tactics

Examples can include referral programs, new mover incentives and other viral marketing promotions. Consider bolstering your word-of-mouth vocabulary by joining the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. True word-of- mouth marketing is based on an honest, open philosophy that works to create customer enthusiasm instead of pushing marketing messages.

There is a difference between basic organic word of mouth, which can include open dialogue with the public and responding to member concerns from the amplified version, developing strategic uses for social media platforms and feedback tools. This can include creating blogs and targeting more influential prospects that can spread your message exponentially.

Optimize Lead Generation

Your social media campaign needs the following elements to successfully generate leads:

Cross-Promote Through Various Channels

Appreciate the fluid interplay among industry blogs, sites and microsites. Get your organization’s name on the Web in as many places as possible to raise your search engine ranking as well as your perceived authority.

Start backlinking by posting articles written by your experts on relevant sites, blogs and forums and include numerous links back to your site. Promote your blog and site URLs in your quarterly publications.

Track Your Social Media’s ROI

How do you know if your social media efforts are producing results? One way is to determine if site traffic has increased as a result by using what are now traditional Web analytics. This can be as basic as tracking the referring domains and seeing if your blog, viral video or other social platforms are among the top performers.

Or populate your calls to action with toll-free numbers that are unique to each campaign or media platform. A high percentage of users research products and services online, but make the actual purchase over the phone. Well-placed online polls though tools like SurveyMonkey may also be helpful in evaluating your results.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group