Marketing

4 Things You Should Do Before Hiring a Social Media Agency

August 23, 2012 by Kari Rippetoe

It seems like every marketing and PR shop out there is “doing” social media – everything from influencer outreach and managing your social media presence to “getting you (insert number here) more followers – guaranteed!”. And yes, Tuvel is also a digital communications shop that offers social media services (and we do some great work, too). But the task of choosing a social media agency to help you out should not be taken lightly.

Before even starting to look at potential social media agencies, there are 4 important steps you need to take (by the way, this will help you tremendously when it comes time to writing up that RFP for agencies to bid on):

Do your research. Just as you would research the online and offline publications your audience is reading, you should also do some preliminary research into their social media habits. Are your customers/members/attendees using social media? If so, where are they? What are they talking about? This is certainly something a social media agency can help you do, but this cursory research will help you gain valuable insights and establish goals. Which is the next thing you should do…

Establish goals. This is where you need to ask yourself WHY your brand should be using social media. Use the insights from your preliminary research, in conjunction with your high-level business goals, to determine specific, trackable and realistic goals for your social media marketing efforts. Examples might be:

Increase awareness of your brand or product.
Establish a customer service channel through social media.
Establish your brand as a thought-leader.
Increase new leads and sales.
Increase traffic.

Evaluate resources. You may have already determined that you need to hire a social media agency to provide your organization with the additional knowledge and people-power to run a successful social media program; however, you should still evaluate the resources you already have in-house who will be assisting with program implementation, or even carrying on the effort after the agency has laid the groundwork.

Set expectations. Make sure that your internal team and management are clear on what to expect from social media. Everyone needs to understand that it will take time to build traction. Social media is also so much more than a set of tools – a well-defined social media strategy will have content, email, PR, sales and customer service elements woven into it – and everyone will need to pitch in time and effort to make it work, in tandem with the agency.

What steps do you take before hiring an outside marketing or communications agency, social media or otherwise?

INFOGRAPHIC: How to Identify and Empower Your Social Media Influencers

July 12, 2012 by Kari Rippetoe

Blackbaud, in partnership with Small Act and the National Wildlife Federation, recently published an interesting whitepaper on social media influencers and how to identify them for fundraising efforts. What I found most interesting about this whitepaper (which you can download here) is how influencers are scored based on how many networks on which they’re active, how large their networks are, and how engaged they are with those networks. The whitepaper breaks influencers down into 4 groups:

What’s even more interesting, is while Key Influencers and Engagers make up only 6% of total influencers, they have a total average estate value of over $700K. So, when it comes to engaging social media influencers for your next fundraising campaign, those two groups should be your biggest focus.

But, don’t discount Multichannel Consumers and Standard Consumers. While not as active on social media, they’re prolific (94% of total influencers) and still wield considerable donation power. They should be engaged in different ways, since they tend to be influenced more than influential – following the recommendations of their social media networks, friends and family.

Blackbaud produced this useful infographic, which defines each of the four groups and gives a good overview of the information contained in the whitepaper:

What’s the Definition of Value?

May 31, 2012 by Mitch Arnowitz

Earlier this week, I participated in a Facebook discussion kicked off by Toby Bloomberg, the Marketing Diva. In addition to Toby, other way bright people in the conversation included B.L. Ochman. If you don’t already know who these fine folks are, make it your business to do so!

Turns out that Toby, an influential blogger, received an email from the PR Director of a major brand asking her to support their latest campaign. The discussion thread covered areas like pay-to-play and bad PR pitches. But, the part of the conversation that caught my eye was the definition of perceived value. Not value to the brand or PR Director sending Toby the note, but how the blogger or person receiving the communication defines value.

We execute influencer outreach campaigns on behalf of clients and sometimes reach out to bloggers. We don’t typically begin a conversation asking someone to support our brand or cause. Rather, we try to find out what turns the reader on, where the value is for them – usually referred to as the Whats In It For Me. Sometimes the value is not a free pass or sample! A free trial download may be valuable to our client, but may not be valuable to the person that they’re trying to impact. Instead, value may be defined as access, education or an audience.

Recognition of community participation on a leaderboard can be an example of value, demonstrated by the rise of social gamification. As these dated (but still on-point) articles detail, value to some customers can be offering product input or even involvement in product creation. Having said all of that, sometimes people do want dollars off!

On the Internet, beauty truly lies in the eyes of the beholder. While the end game may be brand support or sales, experience has taught us that the reception of our campaigns is greater when the focus isn’t solely on the client brand. It has to be about the people.

The other interesting issue discussed in this thread was relationship-building. B.L. Ochman nailed it when she said “we’d like you to support our brand” is like saying “can we pick your brain.” In other words, building relationships by focusing on the other persons needs is a good place to start. You may not always be able to deliver, but listening goes a long way.

But enough about us. How do you define value?