Going Social: Excite Customers, Generate Buzz, and Energize Your Brand with the Power of Social Media

by Jeremy Goldman

Overview

In the increasingly vital world of social media marketing, if you don’t have a strong digital presence, it’s like you’re not even there. Going Social is an indispensable guide to taking advantage of digital marketing, reaching a critical number of prospective customers, and revitalizing your business’s brand. You’ll gain answers to the questions every marketer is asking, like How much is a Facebook “like” worth? What are the best dashboards for monitoring multiple social channels simultaneously? How do you keep it all going around the clock? And which automation tools, promotional ads, scheduling platforms, and social media channels offer the greatest return on investment? For more than a decade, author Jeremy Goldman has helped companies inject “social” into their marketing processes. He explains the ins and outs of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Instagram, and Pinterest and teaches readers how to formulate a social strategy, pinpoint and cater to the right audience, give their brand a unique online voice, create relevant and engaging content, identify and reward influencers, build strong bonds with bloggers, become truly customer-centric, respond to negative feedback, use targeting to engage more effectively, turn employees into social marketers, and engage with ROI in mind.The digital landscape offers unprecedented opportunities to spread the word about products and services. While other businesses struggle to transition from traditional marketing to online engagement, you’ll be enacting a social media strategy that magnifies customer loyalty. Featuring insights from entrepreneurs, social media directors, community managers, bloggers, and other experts, Going Social will teach you how to leverage our brave new social frontier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814432563
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	545 KB

About the Author

JEREMY GOLDMAN, a recognized expert in social marketing, has managed e-commerce and social media for major brands, including Kiehl's, TEMPTU, and Jurlique, and consulted with numerous others. He is currently AVP of Interactive Communications for iluminage inc., a Unilever subsidiary he helped found.

Read an Excerpt

1

Social Marketing: Even More Important Than You Think

AVINASH KAUSHIK, Analytics Evangelist at Google, famously said: “Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better.”1

In a similar vein, many business owners see social marketing as something that will change their businesses fortunes forever and perhaps overnight. However, they don’t know what they’re doing a and they don’t get the results they expected.

If you’re reading this book, you’ve most likely realized how important it is for your business to use social marketing effectively.

You’re probably also aware of how much the Internet is used for social marketing: socializing and sharing information. To drive that point home, the story of a solitary man walking on the side of a highway off-ramp in central Ohio offers a good example of how quickly things spread on the Internet.

The man is named Ted Williams, and, for quite some time now a he’s been panhandling by the exit of I-71 that leads onto Hudson

Street in Columbus. Thousands of people drive past him each day a presumably paying him no attention. True, data aren’t available on this, but it seems unlikely that many people mention to their friends that they saw a panhandler as they exited the highway.

All of that changed in the first week of 2011. The Columbus

Dispatch posted a short video of an interview with Williams a dubbing his voice “golden” for its perfect, radio-quality pitch. The video was ripped from the newspaper’s website and posted on

YouTube by a Good Samaritan, along with the following brief message:

“Throwing this video from The Columbus Dispatch out there a hoping we can find this talent a place to call home.”

Soon the sheer oddity of a bedraggled man speaking in such a clear a voiceover-quality tone touched a nerve with a number of people a who forwarded it to their social networks. Within hours, Williams had job offers. Mind you, he hadn’t applied for these jobs through

LinkedIn or CareerBuilder; these employers contacted him after hearing his voice via YouTube forwarding. They also weren’t momand-pop businesses; some of these offers came from the Cleveland

Cavaliers and the National Football League. Williams ultimately accepted an offer to be the new voice of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

Humans Beings Are Social

Within just a few hours of birth, newborns try to imitate the facial gestures of the first people they meet—an early attempt to socially interact. Humans have such a need to be social that we’re social even when we’re still inside our mothers’ wombs. Researchers recently used ultrasound to record the interactions of twins and found that the twosomes were reaching out for one another at 14

weeks of age. That means people have a propensity toward social action, which is already present before birth. “These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior,” says Umberto

Castiello of the University of Padova, one of the researchers who led the study. “When the context enables it, as in the case of twin pregnancies, social movements, i.e., movements specifically aimed at another individual, are observed well before birth.”

Given how social we are, it makes sense that people will find ways to “bake” social features into new technologies. In fact, there’s been a tremendous paradigm shift in the last few years, in that the fastest growing and most influential digital companies are the ones that create websites and applications that are more people-centric a such as Facebook, rather than technology-centric or algorithm-centric a such as Google. As a matter of fact, companies like Google are moving more toward people-centric models with social channels like Google+, as we’ll discuss later. We are moving into a world where we will be able to bring our online identities and networks with us wherever we go.

The human need for social interaction is more important than the need for material goods and monetary wealth. Don’t believe that? Think about the foundation on which a site like Facebook is built. On social networking sites, the users create the vast majority of content, which in turn is monetized by the company owning the social network. The hottest web properties are nearly entirely comprised of things that users contribute for free. Take YouTube as an example: On average, 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute;

every week, users upload the equivalent of 240,000 feature-length films. It would take you approximately eight years to view all the content that gets uploaded on any given day.4

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and similar sites are social hubs a and our need to be social runs pretty deep. To survive, people require food, shelter, and clothing at a minimum. Once people have those things, the next thing they typically desire is to be able to socially connect with others. Paul Cohen, founder of Cog -

nection, has built a business around human social behavior, and he has found that humans are hardwired to be social: It’s helpful for us to keep track of whom we’re indebted to and whom we should probably delete from our iPhone’s address book. “If you look at social networking based on its ability to enable reciprocity, it makes complete sense that we want to engage in prosocial behaviors,”

Paul explains. “It makes it easier for us to transmit social signals that allow us to reciprocate.”

People want a place to hang out virtually and interact much more than they want to make a quick buck. Does that statement sound outrageous?

Consider the following: In an effort to attract users away from Google and Yahoo, Microsoft offered cash rewards so that customers would run searches on its Bing search engine. When users shopped online using Bing, Microsoft sent users refunds of as much as 50 percent of their purchase.5 When Bing started aggressively offering this feature, its market share was 8 percent, compared with

Yahoo’s 20 percent and Google’s 65 percent.6 By most accounts, Bing

Rewards helped contribute to Bing’s growth; it reached 12 percent of the U.S. market by December 2010. Yet during that time, its growth was far outpaced by the top social networks. In 2010, Facebook grew

48 percent in the United States, with many emerging countries growing at even faster rates.7 In 2010 alone, Twitter opened up more than

100 million accounts.8 The desire to socialize and make meaningful connections with friends and strangers online is outpacing the need to search, even when incentives such as refunds are thrown in. People are apparently more interested in socializing than in making a dollar for searching for fleece penguin pajamas on Bing.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Social Marketing: Even More Important Than You Think

2. Devising Your Strategy and Getting Started

3. Engagement 101: Determine Your Voice and Personality

4. How to Develop Content That Promotes Engagement

5. Become Truly Customer-Centric—and Reap the Advantages

6. How to Avoid Pitfalls, Deal with Crises, and Keep Your Brand’s Reputation Intact

7. How to Staff Your Social Team and Organize for More Effective Engagement

8. Tools for Producing More Relevant, Targeted Engagement

9. How to Identify Influencers, Work with VIPs, and Grow Word of Mouth Substantially

10. How to Build Strong Relationships with Bloggers and Work with Online Personalities

11. Increase Engagement by Turning Your Employees into Marketers

12. How to Engage with ROI in Mind

13. Going Social in Real Life

14. Final Word

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Terrified by Twitter? Fearful of Facebook? Goldman, social media expert and assistant v-p of Interactive Communications for iluminage inc., rides to the rescue with this comprehensive guide to social media strategy, execution, and engagement for newbies. Though many business owners are aware that they need to crack the social media code to move forward, if they don’t know what they’re doing, they generally don’t get the results they expected. With social media, businesses can appeal to the inherently social nature of their customers with an approach that focuses more on the “social” rather than the “marketing.” With humor and a friendly tone, Goldman walks his audience through getting buy-in for a program, the proper care and feeding of customers, balancing “likes” vs. engagement and quantity vs. quality, avoiding common missteps, customer retention, building strong relationships with bloggers, working with online personalities, and bringing your efforts into the physical world. The trick is to take advantage of the fact that the cost of marketing directly to a consumer has gone down—but there’s a lot more noise to break through. Goldman urges readers to keep the focus on ROI and to spend time developing an effective strategy. This funny, friendly book is an excellent primer for the social media-averse. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

With Going Social any business leader or marketer can get an edge on choosing the right social channels, perfecting the right social strategy, and forging genuine, meaningful, and rewarding connections with customers.” - Retail Observer

"Going Social is a book that any social media marketing practitioner worth their salt should take a look at." —Young Upstarts

"Going Social is a book you have to own if social media marketing is part of your strategy." —Small Business Trends

"Get this book if you have anything to do with social media in your professional or personal life." —OfficePro

From the Publisher