Understanding Social Media and what tools to use to make it easier to manage your brand in the world of Social.

Social Media is a networking tool that allows for rich conversations by including all sorts of media types (video, images, text, web pages, sms etc.) into an interoperable platform. Or, in Plain English you can access your Social Media anywhere anytime and pretty much from any web enabled device like an iPhone/PC or laptop for instance.

Networking or the term networking is not new, it was popularised in the1990’s but has really come into its own with the advent of Web 2.0 and the maturing Internet. We all have heard of sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all sorts of new real-time services starting up like Twitter and Foursquare.

These services are really important now due to the fact that with these networks large groups of consumers, organisations and movements are building large and vocal groups. These social networks and groups within the networks are turning the power of communications around from what has been the traditional owner of the message (corporate/marketing communications) to the Social Media Networks users. These users can either love or hate your brand and services. Social Media users and groups are not afraid to spread the positive or negative critique of brands through these communities, on mass, as quick as you can type the message in fact and hit “send”.

So how do you monitor what is being ‘said’ and ‘sent’, how should your business engage in Social Media and what tools are available?

Before you jump in and start signing up and broadcasting on social networks you need to have a plan as to what your objectives are. We believe that social media is a great way for ‘real organisations with real people people’ to have real interactions and to humanise the conversation between companies and customers.

In effect, the opportunity is to create a open and interactive channel for people to be ‘real’ whilst still representing their organisation in an open and trusted manner.

We also believe that social media is a great way to manage the customer and to understand what is important to different customers who interact with your brand.

So how do I start to manage what is being said?

We will look at Twitter first because there are a lot of FREE tools available for Twitter now and it is also one of the best examples of real time customer management opportunities.

Twitter has grown at an exceptional rate and does allow for 1-to-1 discussions as well as 1-to-Many with tweets to people who follow you, or lists that users make about topics and then here is the whole of Twitter messages via the tweet stream 1-to-All!

So, how do you find people talking about your brand and service on Twitter, there are many tools out there but we use one which allows for multiple users in your business and can actively create reports and insight about your brand. We use a service called Co-Tweet.

Co-Tweet enables you to search the ‘tweet stream’ of what is being said about your brand and for you to ‘listen in’ to the conversation and consider a meaningful response.  Then implement a response from one of your team members back to the user(s) tweeting about a your brand and service. The great thing is that you can set up multiple users on a single account for your company and append initials so you know who said what and when it looks like this:

“Integratidirect said: We use co-tweet to manage all our Twitter conversations IM”

This is very helpful as there may be several people working in the business and in the rush to respond a team member may not be aware that a response had been made or if one had who had sent the tweet. Co-Tweet removes this issue. The last two characters at the end of the message stand for Integrati Marketing, but these can of course be a team member’s initials or Department.

What is even better is that you can assign ‘tweets’ to team members to follow up, as it may be a Sales question instead of a Technical Question. This way the tweet goes to the right department so that the customer gets the right information the first time.

Also, you can schedule ‘tweets’ for future dates (think of promotions and breaking news only for Twitter!), review tweets from people who your business is following, save searches and all in a single easy to use dashboard.

So what this is the beginnings of is really a Social CRM space for customer relationship management and real time engagement.

This is important for Small Medium business as it means your team will have access to the same tools which large corporate like Ford (a Co-Tweet customer) have access to and use now.

To review Co-Tweet check it out here. It is a great opportunity to manage your brand online and currently it is FREE to register.

Another service which allows for really simple network syndication of your updates from Twitter to Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin etc and Twitter itself is Ping.FM.

Ping.FM is a dashboard of all your Social Networks tools that you can enable via secure Application Programming Interface or API. What an API does is allow a secure connection between Ping.FM and the chosen Social Network using your Social Network log-in and the API string which is a secure code or public key that is encrypted. Your API is unique to you so no one else should be allowed or be able to access your public API key.

What you will need to so is spend about 15-20mins on each service you want to include in Ping.FM. But this is time well spent, when in a single ‘Tweet’ you can send up-dates to all your social network sites through Ping.FM in one ‘send’. Great stuff! But you have to use the Ping.FM Portal to do so.

So, as a wrap up,

Social Media is a great opportunity to engage with your customers by listening to what they have to say about your business, and then you can choose to respond to their conversation and engage with them.

Even better, through the engagement you have an opportunity to build your brand, save and retain customers and win on other potential customers who are listening in.

Also, the all through this discussion I have not mentioned one important factor, time. There is no way around it but it will take time to both build your Social Network and also participate. Like all good online tools and services you need to choose how much time your business can invest in managing your brand and when to engage. But at the very least you should be listening to what people are saying about your brand so you are aware and can then choose to engage or not.

I am positive we will see an immense growth in online solutions offering Social CRM applications and value to Small Medium business in the next couple of years. We will keep you up-to-date with the best tools available and will also be looking into some solutions for our clients that can help them manage this new space where word of mouth and reputation management is King.

Why having a great holding page for your new website is key! Read on…

Over the last week the Integrati team have been flat-out working on the new Integrati Marketing site. As part of the process of building a new site on a fresh Domain or website name such as; integrati.com.au has been registered for the new site. A great way of showing the world and to start to being ‘found’ by internet search engines is to have a ‘holding page’ on your new web website or Domain Name.

A holding page does essentially, “what it says on the tin”, it lets you create a soft launch of the new site by creating a single web page. This allows for ‘good things to happen’ like being found by search engine bots, robots or more correctly web crawlers. This helps your new ‘get found’ as when a web crawler finds your site it means your on your way to start page ranking in Search Engines (SE) for your site.

Also after a web crawler has found your site it will check ‘intermittently’ back to your site. A really important area which many sites forget about with web crawlers are Site maps. Whilst I believe it would be overkill to have a site map on a holding page (as it really is one page such as “integrati.com.au” when you launch the full site you absolutely need an xml. file with a Site map or Site map in your directory.

So, if you want to have your site accurately ranked by Search Engines then you must make sure that you have a Site map in your website!

So what, does a holding page look like? Well you can obviously have a look at our site now at integrati.com.au until we launch. Here is a screen shot of what the Integrati Marketing holding pages looks like.

Also, you may have noticed (if you clicked through to the site before launch) that there is an opportunity for interested users to register their interest with Integrati Marketing by “subscribing by email“.

This is important as it allows for the holding page to be put to work straight away and for the site to build up a user list of email addresses which can be informed when the site goes live. It is also a great way to potentially build partnerships with prospective customers and service providers early on.

There are some other important areas you will need to consider as well, such as;

• If you do not have a holding page it will either come up with a generic error page (page not found 404) or worse from your company’s perspective send them off to your Domain Registrar which is an ad for them not you!
• As we know by getting your site up starts the ‘page ranking’ which should improve the sites ranking in its first weeks and months at launch
• Opens your site up to be linked to again helping your page rank
• If you can be found you should be able to be contacted, so email, phone number, mail address are all options you can consider for your holding page
• Also, your site is a direct communications platform to create brand awareness and position your business in the market you choose to serve

Overall there are more benefits to creating a landing page than drawbacks, that’s why the Integrati team built ours.

Until till next time, the Integrati team.

Features and Benefits right?

Marketing has always been a way for business to be able to look at a given market and structure a way to compete whether this is through a mix of product, prices, place, promotion. This works and works pretty well as a general guide and of course there are many examples where the 4 P’s do not give the depth or sophistication to more mature marketing strategies.

The point here though is that a part of the 4 P’s is how the product is positioned in the market with what is known as the Value Proposition. There are a couple of ways to build a Value Proposition but for me I have always looked at:

• Segment
• Target
• Positioning

Then delivered a value statement which is built on these antecedents to creating a relevant Value Proposition for the receiver of the communications, be that face to face, in media or through word of mouth.

So, when we go back to the 4P’s we find at the very beginning Product. Now, in old marketing world 1960′s to the 1990′s Products were pretty much marketed on the Features and Benefits (F&B’s). Inside the product stack of any given market, let’s say cars as they are a good example of F&B’s you also have price/quality.

Car manufacturers understand F&B’s well and for years competition was either looking to match F&B’s or better them with improved this and that which would be a Product Point of Difference… until it was copied and then nearly all other manufactures in their segment (maybe Premium cars like, Volvo, BMW, Mercedes) would copy the Feature, for instance airbags.

Then this feature, which had been unique or a Point of Differentiation would become a Point of Parity. In other words they all had it. In this case it is a safety feature/benefit which is of course a good thing. This also over time cascades down to the lower segments as the technology becomes cheaper and a ‘standard’. But the point is that this happens across most sectors and their product offering.

Now in most markets there is broad positioning of products and now are what Michael Porter’s thesis called for in his Competitive Strategy of three distinct positioning statements:

1. Product differentiator
2. Low cost leader
3. The nicher

Now this still makes sense and you can see this in the market place today, think about cameras and your there. You can see all three of these positions in action.

But what is of note is something new, or old, but reinvented and recently commented on by Robert Capps over at Wired Magazine which he calls the “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine”.

Robert has written an excellent article about the idea that we are in a point in time when some products and services have risen to the point that the ‘quality’ of these products value is not in the ‘quality of the video, image’ but in the accessibility, inexpensiveness, simplicity, wide distribution and open or interoperability (it can be used on the web, with other things).

Think about some really fast growing areas in technology:

Laptop to Netbook

Vinyl to MP3

TV to YouTube

This is all pretty much known, but we have made some trade off’s here and this is the point. In the market today people have happily reduced their expectations of quality as long as they have accessibility.

So, people do not mind watching a low fi version of TV as long as they can watch it on their netbook on the tram, train, bus to work or at home on-demand. The standard is Good Enough. They don’t need it in High Definition, Blu Ray etc. because they want it now where they choose. Importantly though, the number of users by Netbooks using Youtube and other low-fi versions of products like Gmail, Google Doc’s, are very very large indeed. In fact this is a new mass movement which is clearly getting bigger.

This means, that ways of positioning which in old marketing terms via mass marketing by using, the latest and greatest features may not have the mass appeal it once had. Companies have relied on certain things beating the competition such as having the best R&D, technological advancements like Blu Ray from DVD,  or FLAC over MP3. But it may well be now that it is about looking at ways to mesh together existing products and known technologies, which interlink and enable, with accessibility, ubiquitous distribution and simplicity. Which use existing technology without the need for it to be the latest and greatest.

Now, I am not saying that R&D, innovation or product development should be stopped. Not at all, it is what humans are all about improving on what has been done before and creating the new. But, I also think what we are seeing is a huge opportunity of what is known and being able to re-invent it with great access, faster and wider distribution due to technology like the WWW. Because we will reduce our expectation of quality (Value) for accessibility when I want it.

So is it still about Features and Benefits? well yes of course it is. As I would suggest that whilst I have not given this positioning a name it has clear features and benefits.

Kotler probably identified it as one of his five Value Positions from the book Kotler on Marketing as the Value Position of More for Less.

The success of this new wave of low-fi products comes from more; accessability, on-demand, easy to use, wide distribution and of course low cost, inexpensive and in some cases free!

If you would like to read Robert Capps article “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine” it is here for you and also a podcast on the ABC here as well.

Till next time, The Integrati team.