There’s a lot of information out there about setting objectives and strategizing over social media programs. But I see very little about a key facet that is essential to the success of any social media marketing effort: Preparation.

Before your company jumps into social media, you need to understand the demands of the undertaking. Despite its using a digital interface, social media is a time- and labor-intensive enterprise revolving around honest, human interaction that necessitates timely responses on your part. Additionally, there are new technologies that must be learned with their inherent communication streams and protocols. Finally, understand that unforeseen issues will arise because anything that has human interaction at its core will also have some amount of unpredictability. My inner Boy Scout warns you - Be Prepared!

To start, the heart of the decision is how open or constricted your social media communications will be. Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter uses this slide to show three levels of openness and a topline of how they might be organized.

Once you settle on the general organization, however, there are still lots of other decisions. It’s important everyone involved is on the same page regardless of how tight or loose you run your program. Here are some questions to consider:

• Who is involved in the process? They need to be well-versed themselves in social media and have the right knowledge set for your target.
• What will they be communicating? Is it a coordinated effort or is it ad hoc?  Do you want to get the word out on some particular news or a product introduction?
• When should they be monitoring and posting? Will your team members be motivated to write and post on a regular basis?
• How should they comport themselves online? Will there be governance policies regarding topics, language, etc.? How will you respond to comments and media inquiries?

Then there are the legal issues: content ownership, trademarks, copyright and privacy concerns, for example. These are even more important in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.

As is the case with all marketing endeavors, a great strategy is not enough. Your success in social media marketing will come from being prepared before you execute. Scout’s honor.

Everyone talks about lead-gen.  But, what about protecting what you’ve got?

I’m convinced that a lot of marketers are, as they say, “going out for hamburger when they’ve got steak at home.”

Why does this strategy get so little attention? There are the obvious reasons; it’s a long-term strategy, it’s tough to track, it requires coordination between service and marketing staffs.

But, I also get the sense that customer retention lacks sex appeal.  Telling the CEO (or a recruiter) that you grew the customer base 20% comes off a lot cooler than reporting that you cut customer defection by 20%.

It’s time to get serious about retention and its close cousin win-back marketing. The following numbers from a PricewaterhouseCoopers study make a compelling case:

• most companies lose 10 – 40% of their customers every year
• it costs 5 to 10 times more to get a customer than keep one
• reducing attrition by 2% has the same impact on profits as cutting costs by 10%.

Bottom line, the PWC study states that reducing customer defection by 5% increases profits by 25% to 85%.

How can cutting attrition have such a big impact on profits? The obvious benefit from keeping customers is incremental sales.  But hidden benefits are just as important:

• loyal customers increase referrals that bring in new business – for free
• loyal customers don’t need promotional pricing used to attract prospects
• loyal customers provide information (quantitative and qualitative) that helps the business acquire new customers more efficiently.

In a tough economy, every customer counts. Now is the time to pay more attention to those you have.

Defining and building a brand is an ongoing process and it’s a process that is being rewritten everyday. In the past, brand was developed by the marketing department and communicated to the target audience through advertising in a one-way conversation.

From a marketing perspective, brand was meant to create perceptions, not necessarily create action. Sure, brand marketers liked to measure awareness, perception and persuasion, but were not willing to measure a direct correlation to sales or even leads.

Today, consumers interact with brands in many different ways, and the brand advertiser can track much of this interaction. This ability to track has advertisers thinking about using brand to create perceptions over the long term and create action immediately – even if the action is not necessarily sales. Some of the keys drivers in this mind shift are: Read the rest of this entry →