Moderator: Jordan Kasteler
Speakers:
Brent Csutoras Social Media Marketing Expert, BlueGlass Interactive
Michael Brito, VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital
Tony Adam, Sr. Manager, Online Marketing at MySpace
Up first is Michael
Using Social Media to Create Customer Advocacy
How do I know when I’m loyal to a brand? I looked in my cabinets, my laundry area, my refrigerator and which brands I’ve seen in my cabinets and refrigerator for years. There’s a difference between being loyal to a brand and advocating for that brand.
When I advocate for a brand, I talk about it with others online all the time.
Make data driven decisions
It’s about the people, not the tools. Consumers expectations about brands online have risen in the past couple years. They want more from brands than they used to. How do you live up to those expectations?
- Create great products
- Provide superior customer service
- Engage with your customers authentically
There are a lot of great brands that listen on the web but they’re not doing anything with the data. They’re not taking action.
Engagement correlates to financial performance.
The top brands within the social web have seen an increase in revenue as compared to those who don’t engage, who saw significant reductions in revenue.
Traditional sales funnel
Brand awareness is most important, followed by consideration, preference, purchase, and retention.
Activating your advocates – a new circular model
If you love your customers, they will love you back, and tell others. Awareness, Consideration, Preference and Purchase all revolve around your customers.
I need to communicate with my employees so they become advocates online – this is also important.
Create a customer advocacy program
- Top down support from executive management
- Employee Activation
- Training
- Internal Collaboration
- Social CRM planning (infrastructure, process, governance)
- Social Media “Rules of Engagement”
- KPIs
Jordan – it’s important that everyone is on the same page within the company
Next up is Tony
Going Viral- The keys to driving traffic and acquiring users
What is Virality?
Virality is taking one action and turning it into many. (via Brent Csutoras)
It’s not just one action, it’s multiple actions. Getting things out there in the stream. If you have a sign-up on your site, get it out there on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter…
Encourage sharing. Liking and Sharing on Facebook – I’m still a big fan of the Share – it shows up in your stream, I haven’t seen Likes in the stream.
Get people to retweet things, see what others are retweeting.
Make sure your users are sharing your content. Don’t just leave a share button, but see what your users are doing. If someone really likes something, give them a pop-up that says you’ve noticed and encourage them to share it in their stream.
Making Content go Viral
Great Content. You want great content – if it’s BS, you can’t expect it to be shared by others. Example – people like ripoffs ‘ The 12 biggest ripoffs in America – has led to over 700000 uniques over time.
Comedy – everybody loves Oatmeal. Who doesn’t remember Legos.
What’s Trending – trending topics we did one on the blackberry outage, whats happening with artists currently. Get breaking news on the site.
Old Spice – everyone’s been talking about Old Spice lately? Almost 8 million views on YouTube for the Swan Dive video.
Know who your influencers are. If you know something like Old Spice is out there, take advantage of it. @OhDoctah responded to the Old Spice video with his own , got over 130000 views to his response.
If you make it shareable, they will share it. Just think of making it really easy to share. Embed codes are also good – like with infographics, which are really popular lately.
How do you become an influencer?
It’s not just becoming a robot. Get involved and stay active in the community – be human. If you’re consistently active, you’re going to do really well with them.
The user of Virality isn’t to just get stuff out there, it’s to increase visibility – to get users, to get traffic.
Case Study – The Ultimate Cell Phone Plans Comparison
We went viral a little, then got picked up by Mashable, the Consumerist, Gizmodo, Lifehacker… We got over 600 links to the post. Our embed codes were used – while I was there, we ended up ranking top five for “best cell phone plans”, “compare cell phone plans”. It’s not just about traffic, it’s getting registered users, return visits…
Next up is Brent
Viral – getting extreme amounts of visibility outside of your niche
The coming Digg V4 – and what it means for you
We can’t always be an influencer ourselves. Digg is a way to get your content in front of influencers who get it out in front of their followers and it goes viral.
Kevin’s back, Jay is gone. Speculation is they didn’t see eye to eye on the direction of Digg. When they launched the Diggbar there was a lot of contention around how they launched it. That is seen as the beginning of the return of Kevin. Lots of change coming as a result.
The first change – the Diggbar is gone. Sub-categories and Upcoming sections are gone. It’s more Twitter-like. My News is the new recommendation engine. They’ve made it very Twitter-like – you’re no longer seeing just suggested action, you’re seeing more information.
There’s a list of changes but there’s a lot of debate about whether these are the best thing they could do or the worst thing they could do.
Power Users – will they become more important or less?
Digg has always had a big stigma about making content popular by a handful of users, power users. The complaint – Digg is run by the top 100 users. From Digg’s point of view, the top people are not bad, they just know what content to submit in a way that allows them to become influencers.
Power users are no longer power users, they’re influencers. It’s not submission based any more. All of your actions are visible to everyone. Every time you vote, comment, participate, it’s not distributed to a selective few, but to everyone that follows you. So now you have to be more careful about how you participate. Some people won’t have the ability to become an influencer now.
There’s less focus on recognition. You as a user are only important as an influencer. You only see the submitter when you get two clicks to the final page.
The new system allows for integration with Twitter & Facebook. It’s potentially going to allow people like Ashton Kutcher become a power user, an influencer overnight. It’s going to be questionable about how regular people, marketers are going to be affected. I think it’s not going to go over well.
Publishers
Digg has made a solid effort over years to reach out to publishers. The New Digg allows people to put in an RSS feed and automatically submit content from their own site. It’s one thing for publishers to participate but users don’t want to be pitched to. SO even though there’s an option for the feed, we’ve already seen some feeds with 100 items an hour. You don’t always get the title and description, which are vital. Losing that ability is something I think is going to be detrimental.
We’re going to make a drag and drop dashboard that allows us to customize a feed on the fly – you’re going to have to find a way to manage your feed so it’s more appropriate to not being a spammer.
Digg Deja Vu
No more URL change submissions
More duplicate topics
With all the duplication checks, you can submit one story if it’s on multiple sites.
Networking
Networking is always effective – the more people you have in your network, the better. I don’t think the new Digg is going to change that. With the integration of Twitter and Facebook, you’re going to have to do more with Twitter. You really need Twitter account, a Facebook account now.
Another thing will be how do you cut out your Diggs? You’ll have to think about that.
Banned on Digg?
There’s no more complete bans. If you had been banned before, you can submit now with no problems.
There are silent bans – you can participate but we’re never going to allow that submission reach the front page. They’ve never admitted that they’ve had that publicly, but we’ve seen it happen. We’ll see how that goes.
Final Tidbits
The majority of users don’t log in. If you’re not logging in, there’s only a handful of people getting content to the front page. So how much are things going to change? The new Digg could change everything, or it could do absolutely nothing at all.
Power Users are Gods now.
Q&A
Q – We use Digg but it seems the audience is young guys. Is there a way to use it even if our content doesn’t target them?
Brent – It’s not just young kids – it’s really balanced. The light-hearted, not pushing too hard stuff. You can’t just do something that’s exciting about your product. If I don’t care of it outside of your niche, it won’t go viral. Digg is not the only network. StumbleUpon, a lot of these sites are a lot more forgiving. They separate things more Delicious, to buzz…
Q – Can you describe infographics better?
Tony – Infograhics a graphical representation of information. Taking facts or data and displaying it in a way that’s interesting to the average person. Putting it out there in a way that people will want to read it. It’s easier to share infographics with the embed code. It makes things easy for a user to share.
Jordan – it makes it really easy for people to digest and consume information that would be complex to write about.
Q – I’m amazed that you got on the first page for cell phone comparisons. I’d love to hear more about your SEO strategy to get that one page those results.
Tony – it wasn’t just one page. We did a lot of content around cell phone plans. The infographics are what pushed us over the top. We’d been on the 1st page but couldn’t ever go into the top five until the infographic.
Jordan – if there’s a lot of social signals, you can get pushed to the top of results for a short period of time just from that.
Q – What are a few things people shouldn’t be able to do from Social Media rules of engagement?
Michael – With some companies you still have to go through legal each time. With others, they establish the rules, conduct training, then let their employees go out and participate.
Q – Recent news about journalists getting fired – what are your thoughts?
Michael – Once you establish the governance model, your employees are going to screw up – with Sun Microsystems they had one Sentence – “don’t be stupid”.
Q – How involved are attorneys in creating these?
Michael – They’re heavily involved.
