Learn Your Social ABCs

As many as 60% of the Fortune 1000 will be doing social media marketing by next year, according to Gartner Research (Oct. 2008) — and almost half of those will fail. How can you keep your brand’s social media campaign from becoming one more skidmark on the information highway? Here are some pointers from Sarah Hofstetter, social marketing analyst for digital marketing firm 360i and author of its “2009 Social Marketing Playbook” white paper:

• Develop a strategic lens for evaluating your social marketing to avoid “shiny object syndrome.” Everything from building brand awareness to increasing purchase intent is fair game.

• The richest social media efforts are about continuous conversations, not narrow campaign goals. “Unlike media campaigns, conversations can’t be flighted,” Hofstetter says. A big idea that meets strategy needs (while respecting the social medium’s culture) is better than a short-term concept.

• Study the range of platforms to find out where your customers are already talking about you and adopt tactics that can insert your brand into those conversations organically. Finding the right channels is half the battle; not every platform is right for every brand.

• The medium is the measurement: Different platform-specific tools let you track how well your campaign is engaging users on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al. Learn them, decide which metrics are important to your social strategy, and reap the benefits.

More tips and tools for social media are available at the Promo Interactive blog at www.BigFatMarketingBlog.com.

DID YOU KNOW?

Don’t Tweet the Boss — Yet

56% OF C-LEVEL EXECUTIVES UNDER 40 USE TWITTER, OTHER MICROBLOG PLATFORMS, OR EMERGING MEDIA SUCH AS SOCIAL NETWORKS, WIKIS AND MOBILE WEB. THAT DROPS TO 34% FOR THOSE EXECUTIVES 40-49, AND PLUMMETS TO 3% FOR THE TOP BRASS OVER 50.

Source: “Rise of the Digital C-Suite” research by Google and Forbes Insights