When Chris Brogan started his social media marketing agency New Marketing Labs, he stated that he would only work with Fortune 100 companies. He had no clients at the time, but lo and behold, Fortune 100 companies came calling. Now the agency’s client list includes Sony, Microsoft, PepsiCo, all of whom look to him for help in using social tools effectively to drive more business.
- Before you start a social media practice, hold a stakeholder meeting. Invite Legal, Human Resources, IT and the departments that will be using social media. Use this core group to develop goals, strategies to meet goals, metrics and come up with plans for crisis or failures.
- Build a listening station – see Chris’ blog post “Grow bigger ears in 10 minutes” for quick step-by-step instructions for building your listening platform. But at a minimum, you can begin with Google alerts to see where your audience is and what they’re saying about you.
- Look for metrics that augment existing marketing metrics. For example, how does social media get me more test drives if I’m a car dealership? The dealer could begin by listening for people on the Web looking for a car. Personal example: Chris tweeted about how he didn’t like his local car dealership’s website. A dealership in Texas contacted him and he ended up buying a car from them sight unseen.
- Recognize that different departments have different goals and use unique metrics for each goal set. Customer service wants to reduce time to response, marketing wants to get clickthrus for a promotion, sales wants qualified leads.
- Velocity is a metric that will become more important than ever before. Meaning, the velocity of response between a customer making a statement and a company responding back, or the velocity of change of sentiment – if you have good sentiment and then people suddenly don’t like the product anymore, how fast did that change? This will be a metric that we can track better and one that will have an interesting impact in communications and marketing.
