Imagine a company that has upscale retail locations around the United States receiving tens of thousands of customer visits. Now imagine not having anyone there to greet and interact with those customers. What’s the point of the storefront?

Facebook fan pages are much the same thing. But only 0.2 to 2 percent of fans go back to a page. Why? Because there is nothing going on that interests them.

Fan pages are a unique marketing canvas to connect with avid consumers. Yet some brands are terribly underutilizing these pages, making them basically brochureware repositories — essentially inviting customers in but not engaging them or giving them an incentive to return. More so, they don’t understand what their customers want from them. Fans may “like” the page, but what good is it really doing the company or its customers?

Other brands are working harder to tap their pages’ potential, inviting fans to post on the page, using brand-generated posts to ask them questions, and offering promotions that capitalize on the fan base’s affinity. The fan page becomes a focus group that can be mined for consumer insights, which can feed back to content creation, stage gate development and campaign tracking. It isn’t the “like” that matters; what matters is creating conversations to understand the consumer.

A two-prong approach of audience discovery and competitive analysis can help uncover what motivates and energizes your consumers.

Audience discovery is the use of social data to segment those who talk about your brand into their affinities. When you understand your audience, you can tailor the message and campaign to generate more fan attention. And if you understand what to do with your fan page, you can give it a new place in your owned media platforms. Rather than investing in media properties that become more expensive as they become successful, you’re now on your way to developing owned media that increases in value the more it’s used.

What do your consumers want from you – coupons, product updates, cutting-edge video, exclusive deals or contests? What are they interested in – sports, music, TV? Do they care about your brand affiliations or sponsorships? A “like” is a passive response to content, while a comment is engagement.

Brands need to mine competitors’ fan pages for insights. Competitive analysis provides insight into what your fans and their friends find engaging on other brands’ sites. What do your fans like on the competitor sites? Are your competitors treating your fans in ways that provide an edge over your company?

If you were running a bricks and mortar store, you’d expect your floor people to find out what customers want when they come in the door. In the same way, audience discovery and competitive analysis can help you be in sync with your Facebook fans. Knowing their interests can help you establish a road map to effective fan engagement. You can then repeat the analysis periodically to capture nuances and shifts in fan interests. Now that’s something you and your customers will really love.

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Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools.

Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every product marketer’s mind has been how to justify the ROI?  Never is that more true than at budget time. The purse string holders might harbor unspoken thoughts like:  “We spend big bucks on those developers, customer support and sales engineering people.  Why are you wasting the company’s money by giving them geek toys when they should be doing real work for us?

If you’re concerned about social media cost justification, you’re not along.  A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) survey found that only 20% of CMO’s felt social media produced measurable ROI and 62% hoped it may someday.  If the CMO’s lacked ROI confidence, then just imagine what a CFO or CEO survey might have told us!

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools. The classic product marketing approach to social media is treating it like just another broadcast media channel by posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like you get with other online media like banners, text links and search.  All of that is a good start, but the results you need to justify your efforts will come by taking a holistic company approach.

Here are some real-life examples and I am sure you can find others when you start thinking this way.

Improved Customer Support

Social customer support can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides an “exceptional customer experience” which also unlocks the beauty of social media and the web in sharing stories of great customer service travel far and wide.

Collaborate with your customers

I don’t care whether you own a community or your rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups – but a community is a great place to create a social experience with your customer. B2B marketers often host bi-annual advisory boards or annual user group meetings and these are just screaming for a way to keep them connected via a tool like on online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs, more revenue – a perfect combination!

• Users
  • Generated 32% more ideas
  • Sent 27% less email
  • Found answers to questions 32% faster
• Employees
  • Spent 42% more time communicating with customers, which led to better retention rate
• Results:
  • Support calls dropped by 28% (Lower costs!)
  • Sales to new customers jumped by 27% (More revenue!)

Activating brand advocates

When you give great customer support or have a great product – why not activate the social channels to accelerate their word of mouth. See below for what happens when you do.

• Find diehard fans on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Enlist them for your brand
  • Get them to make recommendations
  • Build your brand with the power of their voice
• Results:  5-9X ROI (based on revenue lift) by activating best brand advocates

Increase Engagement with Professionals

• Used LinkedIn recommendation ads to invite endorsements and engage target users
  • Earned 2000 product recommendations
• Results:  500,000 viral updates on company products

Finding intent to purchase

You may be wondering with all this great social media conversations going on – is there anyway to mine social media to market smarter? The answer is yes there are tons of ways to mine the data to improve your content creation, SEO and SEM keyword selection, media planning (from online to tv media) and for lead generation.

• Analyzing social media to find leads using a variety of search terms
  • Both competitive and non-competitive search terms reveal buyers such as “replace product X” or “upgrade competitor Y” – any list of competitive terms paired with the words replace or upgrade can give you a list of potential prospects

• Results:  $250,000 sale found using social media and completed in 14 days

By now, you should be getting the idea of ways to expand your thinking on justifying social media. When you find others, let me know!

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When I first saw the way in which Facebook data could combine with Twitter data, blog, forum, search and web data to make a rich profile of your consumer – I was blown away by the possibilities of knowing your customer better and knowing what really makes them tick.

Check out me and Dr Manuel Aparicio from Saffron Technology discuss the possibilities of harnessing the power of Social Data on yBCtv!

Special thanks to George Barker, the man behind the video magic, over at yourBusinessChannel the people who love “telling business stories and getting them out via a network of networks” for producing this video. See yourBusinessChannel for more videos with key thought leaders on the topic of social media and beyond.

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It’s easy to get caught up in the buzz, and the hype, around social media. I’ve been working with many B2B companies to help them figure out when and how to use social media in their business.  The answer is always a bit different depending on the product or service. One area that few people have written about is how to use social media for solution marketing. Let me demystify the topic a bit by sharing five ways I’ve seen it really work.

1)   Is there a market for your solution? – With one-twelfth of the world connected through social media there is bound to be a conversation underway about your specific solution. Wouldn’t it be nice to know upfront what that conversation is about and the needs the participants are expressing? Few marketers do the social-focused research ahead of time to determine the market. But there are great opportunities, such as the ways social media data is being used in the stage-gate funding process for solution development.

2)   Leverage your brand advocates – If you already have fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, why not energize their word of mouth about your solution? You could enlist them to use the solution for free if they agree to write a review of it. Of course you can’t dictate that they write something positive. But whatever they say, they’re helping shape your solution with the power of their voice!

3)   Leverage your community – Whether you build your own or rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups, a community is a great place to promote a new solution to your existing customers. B2B marketers often host advisory board and user group meetings, and these forums are hungry to stay connected via a tool like an online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs and increased revenue – a perfect combination!

4)   Find intent to purchase – You’re probably interested in how these great social media conversations can help you find leads. There are various ways to mine the data using search terms. Both competitive and noncompetitive search terms can reveal buyers such as “replace solution X” or “upgrade competitor Y.” Just search competitive terms paired with “replace” or “upgrade,” and voila, a list of solution prospects!

5)   PR blitz in conversations not publications – The US is becoming a newspaper-less society. Meanwhile, new companies start up every day that want to be featured in the shrinking number of publications. Your PR needs to move from publications to conversations. Begin by tracking conversations where you brand’s solution fits best. Then start commenting at least daily on the stories that are most relevant to your solution. This will lead to 250 articles with mentions of your solution, as well as links back to your site (think of the SEO value there!). Over the course of a year, this is comparable to having hundreds of relevant, contextual ads out there for your brand, at a fraction of the cost of traditional PR!

So there you have it. Five ways you can use social media in your solutions marketing, all with the potential for solid return on investment. Good luck, and let me know if I can help you.

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Does that sound like your job? I know it sounded like plenty of roles I had within major companies!

But as a Social media marketer, we believe in the power of a world where consumers are more connected to friends and brands, but when it comes to convincing the C-suite how and why, oftentimes they find themselves pointing to indeterminate measures of success such as Facebook Likes. In fact, 68 percent of companies don’t know or can’t measure social media ROI or worse 62 percent of CMO believe that social media will pay off … eventually!

Well that day is already here for the enlightened CMO which is exactly what I want to talk about at this years SXSW event. In my session I will elaborate on over a dozen proven social media strategies from brands like Dell, Jive, Avaya, SAP and the NCAA to establish targeted social media programs that delivered real results. My session will explain how to combine social monitoring with analytical firepower to go from reactive social media—such as customer support and crisis management—to proactive social strategies that lead to product innovation, lead generation and interactive buying.

But I need your help to vote for my session! So if this sounds good to you I would appreciate it if you would click here and vote for my session!

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I loved the article by Nick Carr a few years ago that asked the question – Is Google Making us Stupid? Nick likened the use of Google and other tools as training us how to “power browse” and not really read effectively.

So I have been thinking about a parallel article that would apply in the social media space as people try to effectively read what is being said on mediums like Twitter and Facebook about their brand. Most often they end up with a tool that monitors for them brand mentions and breaks them into bite sized chunks of data and ranking them by sentiment.

So consider the fact that raw sentiment as determined by machine is often only 65% accurate – to me this is dangerously close to 50% or the equivalent of a coin toss. In fact most social media analytics firms do something to “augment” their sentiment analysis to make it more accurate – usually involving human intervention.

But in my estimation these firms are working on the wrong end of that equation. Why fix sentiment – its never going to be 100% accurate – since most people can’t agree on the spirit or intention of a tweet anyway and they never will.

I think brands need to focus on the broader content being used about a brand. Brand managers pride themselves on understanding the audience that surrounds their brands. The Internet and now Social Media have spurred two of the largest shifts in consumer behavior in the last 15 years; analyzing online and social activity is now a requisite to accurately anticipate trends. And focusing on positive sentiment over negative sentiment ignores 50% of the conversation that was classified as neutral – I guarantee you that there are key learnings in there that any brand would want to focus on. In fact in our tests, only 10% was either positive or negative (obviously, that can vary from topic to topic or day to day), so even more than 50% of the posts were ignored. So I ask you again – is Sentiment Making Brands Stupid?

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Vitrue a social media marketing platform determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 when it comes to a Media Equivalent Value (MEV) per year. This calculation is based on the brand posting to their Facebook Fan Page twice a day and that they have a million fans which equates to 60 million impressions per month at a $5 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), so 60 million impressions. This would result in $300,000 a month in Media Equivalent Value or what the brand might have to spend elsewhere to get the same eyeballs. So then the math goes $300,000 month, which is $3.6M a year, meaning with 1M fans, the average value is $3.60 per fan.

While I can understand the approach to equating it to media dollars that you would have to spend to get that same reach only .2% of Fans ever return to a Fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip to BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it.

The true value of a Facebook fan is Zero until you can monetize them. And that’s the era I think we have all just entered. For the last 2 years we have been building our network of people that “like” the brand by creating content and engaging with them. I certainly hope you have been doing this – and its not an insignificant feat to create all this content. This is the #1 stumbling block I hear from marketers over and over again.

So the question I hear from many marketers now is “ok I have done that – now how do I monetize them?”

In reality there are only 2 ways to do this and I invite your comments on this approach – you either sell them something (hello f-commerce which is coming to a Facebook fan page near you soon) or you activate them in some other way like an “advocate” network meaning if they cant buy from you directly perhaps they could refer you a new customer which might even be better than buying something from you if you think of the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV).

Bottom line is I think we are exiting a phase of experimentation (what I like to call Social Science Experiments) and moving into a phase of monetization. How are you monetizing your fans?

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Almost 5 years ago I started this blog with the notion exploring the changing definition of Buzz Marketing in light of this new thing I saw on the horizon called “Social Media”.

I remember questioning where all this blogging was going to take us. I even asked others in my podcast series like Douglas Karr from the Marketing Technology Blog, who built strong following on his blog record time, where are we going with all this blogging and where will it take us? The answer was – neither of us knew!

Like Doug I was experimenting with this new technology in all of its forms from RSS, blogging, podcasts, videos, twitter, social networks, Facebook applications, mobile, location based applications and as you have seen me speak about before I think the role of marketing is changing to one that is becoming more like a Marketing Technologist. But it always felt like we were on 2 paths – our day job of running marketing and our night job of experimenting with these technologies to find something we could then add into the mix of our day job.

Well fast forward to today 5 years, 7000 tweets, 413 blog posts, 78 podcasts, 21 awards, 4 “for Dummies” books and numerous eBooks later and I am happy to announce that I have finally converged the 2 paths I was on into one meaningful path that really makes me happy.

After 2 years of developing a strategy to deal with various types of social media conversations within Avaya we finally got the monitoring and routing of those conversations to be institutionalized within the firm. No small feat by any means but I just couldn’t imagine that the sum total of social media in B2B was just about monitoring and reacting to tweets all day. I felt there had to be more we can do with the social data that we just cant get out of monitoring. So I started looking at the social media analytics space for social technology that can provide real insights. You can read about all of my findings in my post on Monitoring vs. Analytics [Infographic].

During the process of looking for the next big thing in social media, I ending up finding some really exciting technology at Networked Insights. Having owned both Radian6 and Networked Insights side by side I realized there was a big difference between “data and insights”. Data is reporting on what has already happened, Insights are ideas that come from the data that allow you to find new market opportunities, new ways to place media and new ways to find customers who exhibit purchase intent, which is why I hired Networked Insights in the first place!

I believe there is a vast sea of unstructured social data about everything you can imagine out there which can be used to help pre-inform your decision making in marketing, its up to the marketers to harness the insights of what the data is telling us to challenge the norm and transform marketing into the revenue generating center it should be!

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