What’s the difference, you might ask?
Social Media Marketing is using social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to keep the same type of outward-bound “push” communications of traditional, old-school marketing.
Social Media is providing the information and ability to potential and current customers to interact with your brand. The point is to develop the groundswell of interactions both with and between the customers and your product. It is one of the greatest tools in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) arsenal, but difficult to use and even more difficult to understand the Return on Investment (ROI).
Measuring this type of interaction is difficult, as people interact with social communities according to the 90-1-9 rule: 90% of the audience lurk as content consumers, 9% interact with the brand, and the remaining 1% are the content creators resulting in “Participation Inequality”.
Social Media is about the Needs of the Visitor
The results of Social Media is a drastic paradigm-shift in the way we, as communicators and marketing professionals, must think about our brands, our customers, and our stakeholders.
Ten years ago we all realized that we needed a website, but it took several years for us to understand why we needed a website and specifically how we might use it.
Today we are in a similar situation with Social Media, understanding that we should all think about having a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, but understanding how to use these tools appropriately is more difficult.
I recently purchased a new pair of shoes from Zappos.com. I was merely replacing a pair of shoes I had bought from them this past winter and they weren’t anything special. I ordered them online at lunch, expecting them in the standard shipping of 3-5 days.
I arrived home that evening and received notification that they had upgraded my shipping. The next afternoon my shoes arrived. The experience I had with Zappos delighting me with their customer service made me tweet and post on facebook about it, and as I only have a handful of followers who are friends, I thought nothing of it.
I received a twitter response to my tweet, thanking me for my purchase, that they were glad that I was pleased with the service received, and encouraging me to contact customer service should I have any concerns.
Another example is when my cable and internet were not working but the Comcast website told me everything was fine. As I live in an old building, I wasn’t sure if this was an issue with my location or with Comcast, so I decided to use @ComcastCares twitter help using my smartphone. They were very responsive and quickly told me that the problem was in my area and that the website needed to be updated. I’m mildly perturbed that ComcastSteve is still following me, however.
Augie Ray published a blog at Forrester research “Do You Want To Succeed At Social Media Or Social Media Marketing?” that discusses how many communicators, advertisers, and companies focus on Social Media Marketing versus Social Media.
What good are all of these social tactics if these retailers fail to provide the sort of real-world experience that get people saying positive things? While furnishing tools that customers can use to post stuff to social networks is helpful, what matters more are experiences that inspire people to engage with and about the brands in social ways.
Many of our constituents want to merely consume our content but they want to consume the content of users just like them.
The end product of our marketing mixes must be a synthesis between standard outward-bound marketing to encourage the use of Social Media for the groundswell communications via Facebook, Twitter, your blog comments, youtube videos, etc. to work in conjunction with a strong emphasis on Customer Relationship Management using an overall Web Engagement Management strategy to reinforce your brand and the use of all of these marketing tools to have a cohesive brand/product that encourages-not forces-customer participation.
So how do you as communicators/marketers in higher education define ROI for your organization and how is this reflected in your web engagement management strategy?
This edited post was first published on the MIT WebPub blog on August 25, 2010.