Blog: Effective Marketing with Social Media presented by Margaret Gold

ICT KTN Online Business Essential Clinics #4 Effective Marketing with Social Media

presented by Margaret Gold, 20th October 2011

Margaret is an innovation and business launch specialist at Gold Mobile Innovation Ltd, she works with entrepreneurs, start-ups, institutes and corporate ventures to move their ideas into businesses and launching them to market. She is also the founder of The Mobile Collective, an idea-to-launch community platform for the collaborative development of mobile apps, products and services.

Margaret provided a huge amount of information in her presentation so below is an attempt at a summary. If you would like to find out more about Margaret’s presentation the slides have been uploaded here. They are purposefully very detailed and contain several important statistical diagrams, planning aids, case study lists and bibliographies for you to keep as a resource.

The producer / consumer feedback loop

Understand that social media is reliant on word of mouth. It cannot be used in a traditional broadcast manner. The ‘social’ makes it explicit that it is about how you connect to networks of people and encourage them to spread your information for you.

Your audience

Take the time to learn to build a profile of your target audience, understand what it is they like about your product on offer. Explore the relationships they have to it and find out what emotional responses it triggers so that you may develop a way to hook into that.

A customer journey

Think about how someone is making use of your service or product. Follow the diagram in slide 5 and expand upon the moments when they are in contact with you before, during and after the point of transaction. At these touch points trace how are they interface with you, is it via a retweet, a comment, a telephone conversation, an online checkout or are they simply reading information on a static webpage?

Within this journey consider; moments of truth – when you either stand out or you don’t; how you are monitoring and measuring this journey, experience design etc. The journey can become increasingly complex so perhaps, build up resources when conducting your market research that you can then work from to start simple and expand in stages.

User personalities

In slide 7 you can see a diagram of the different user personalities and the types of tools they use. Understanding what tools people are using and why is key when planning a successful strategy.

Social Object

The term was coined by Hugh MacLeod from the gapingvoid blog. It’s the idea that people congregate around things they have in common eg: an interest in micro breweries, a love of motor sport, a desire to start a business! Map out the vista of the social object(s) your service or product sits within. A tip to begin with is to consider what your idea is proposing to solve and see how this can be put forward as a social object.

Find the key talkers

In order to engage with your audience you need to be listening to what people are saying and making yourself available as much as being a self-promoting broadcaster. Find the connecting people who talk to and influence others and can also push out your information. Find out what platforms they work through.

Planning your strategy

Now that the research is over, it’s time to plan! Sit down and consider the following:

What social media tools fit your audience?
What is the problem your proposing to solve?
What kinds of tools will serve your purposes? slide 12

What do you want to achieve through using social media tools? Examples are perhaps:

How do people first hear of me?
How do they begin to interface with my service or product?
How do they feedback?
How can I keep them in the user cycle?

Designing your campaign

There are four rules to remember when coming to design your campaign:

Give the customer what they want (competitions, discounts, previews etc)
Make your activity bite-sized
Engage little and often
Choose lots of little campaigns over big ones as they are more effective at building relationships

Building relationships

When it boils down to it, our new modes of consuming via social media are based upon a desire to create relationships with others be that your friends, family or colleagues. Individual profiles are built up through in an alignment with the people, activities or ways of thinking that represent held beliefs. For these links to exist you, as an product or service, must create a pathway into your organisation. This creates the necessary feedback loop between you and your audience that enables your information to spread effectively.

We have a total of seven clinics this series and so if you would like to find out more or to attend please see our programme overview. For any questions relating to this event or the series in general please contact caroline AT metamute.org.

This workshop series will be free to attend thanks to the generous support of our sponsor the ICT Knowledge Transfer Network.