Chris Van Veen Marketing Communications

Social Media: Should you, and How?

You'll see references to the term Social Media almost everywhere you look today. The catch-all encompasses on-line creations such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other lesser-known ones.

As a marketing tool, companies can and do use social media to help boost visibility, awareness, buzz, and (of course) sales. It's also a great way to strengthen thought leadership, which I talked about previously. Small organizations wishing to act like bigger ones can use any of these tools to their advantage. Let's say you have a new product that's tough to describe in words or photos, but "BOY, would people go wild if they could see a VIDEO!" Try producing a homebrew video and upload it to YouTube. Then, point to it using Twitter or through a special Facebook page created for the purpose. Use of key words will help ensure that people find your content whenever and wherever they look. This treads on the territory of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is beyond the scope of a blog entry. But key words are important because they essentially represent electronic bread crumbs leading directly to your video, a white paper, or a Powerpoint presentation.

You may think of any of these tools as highly personal in nature. "Isn't Facebook where I tell people what music and TV shows I like?" Well, yes. But the lines of distinction are blurring. Companies are looking to evangelize and touch people wherever they may be. Smaller, less bureaucratic companies are often more nimble than larger ones, and they can turn on a dime to embrace social media quite readily. This is their ace in the hole, and many of these companies can trump larger ones thanks to this flexibility.

One of the keys to embracing social media is to be integrative about the process. In other words, Twitter can help strengthen a Facebook page, which can help draw viewers to a YouTube video. It's not unlike a mesh network where each point of the star can be reached by any other. Ultimately, these are relatively low cost initiatives that can often be implemented by existing personnel. Some large and expensive agencies may argue that they know best, but the reality is that social media is new for everybody.

The biggest bit of advice is this: don't dive into social media simply because everyone else is (or claims to be). Understand your value proposition and how you sell what you offer. It may turn out that one tool (say, Twitter) can pay dividends while another (YouTube) may not. And by all means, get the word out that you're getting the word out through social media. Social media represents a bigger trumpet, but you still need to play it correctly. Using social media, you can draw attention to all your other marketing activities such as white papers, conference speeches, trade show exhibits, and articles. Embracing social media in this fashion can help boost the ROI on these 'old-media' tools to the point where they pay off better than they ever did.

Event Marketing: A Good Idea if Done Right

Trade shows and industry conferences are seen as 'necessary evils' to many marketeers. You'd be hard-pressed to find folks who universally love them, yet trade shows exist in the marketing mix because they literally bring sellers and buyers together. To talk. To show. To compare. To sell. To promote. But for all those wonderful advantages, why aren't trade shows 'universally loved?'

For one, it's tough to truly gauge the effectiveness of a trade show. A lot of time and money gets invested, and the 'return' on that investment is often difficult to quantify. Do you simply count the number of 'leads' and use that as a metric? Many companies do, and then they leave it at that. These are the folks who lament the lack of effectiveness of event marketing. The key is to begin the effort by defining how you'll define success. Complaints aside, these companies often begrudgingly return to the same show a year later because 'their competition is there.' You'll find that this rationale is common. Many companies feel that they'd be 'conspicuous by their absence' if they chose not to attend a show on a recurring basis. But they'd only be conspicuous if they failed to choose some other way of connecting with their customer base. Too often, a decision to attend a show is made simply because 'the other guy is going.' And that would be a mistake. If you're clear about what your success metrics are, then it ought to be easy enough to determine whether trade shows work or don't.

There are two keys to making trade shows work from an ROI standpoint. First, select the show carefully. Second, maximize the effectiveness of the effort by participating in the conference sessions. Trade shows need to be selected carefully. Years ago, I saw that the focus in our market space was trending toward smaller, focused shows and away from the larger national ones. I did some analysis of the demographics, talked to some people, and decided to be a charter exhibitor in a first-time show called DesignCon. It was then and is today a very successful show. It's not a large show by most measures, but it is an effective one. What made it most effective is that it was a conference first and a trade show second. This distinction attracted the industry movers and shakers...the folks you really want to rub elbows with. Because it's expensive to send personnel to any show regardless of where it's held, you'd like to make sure the right people plan to be there.

Once I felt that DesignCon was going to be a winner (judging by its conference session agenda) I made sure that we presented a paper there. This is an important distinction. Trade shows are equal parts sizzle and steak. The sizzle is out on the show floor, where everyone has their promotional hat on. But by focusing on the conference session rather than simply 'building a booth,'  we were able to promote the show differently. It was an easier sell to senior management, but also to our prospects and customer base.

If you go with this one-two punch every time you attend a trade show, you'll see remarkable results. You'll see that the conference session draws more qualified people to your booth, and you'll see that your booth presence sends more interested people to your conference session. In the end, the effort becomes a winning one because you've maximized the value of the event.

Thought Leadership Helps Boost Visibility and Awareness

Over the years, I've been drawn to a topic called thought leadership. Basically it's a way for small- and medium-sized companies to become leading evangelists on a technology or a product category. Lacking marketing muscle (read: dollars) to advertise in any meaningfully comprehensive way, small companies still need a voice. They still need to gain traction in markets that are often crowded and loud. A small company can do themselves a world of good by embarking on a white paper campaign. This starts by charting up to a dozen worthy topics and then assigning content managers to them. These can be product marketing managers, business development managers, or MarCom folks such as me. But it's very important to list topics where true leadership exists. If you can't define a topic and then agree that a leadership position exists, then move onto the next one. The list should then act as a road map for a repertoire of white papers (sometimes called 'position statements') that help the company win visibility in the marketplace.

Too often, companies take a promotional approach to their white paper campaign. This is a cardinal sin, because a white paper ought to be a discussion on a technology and a particular vision of it, without actually pitching a product. Companies love pitching products, but that's where advertising comes in. The white paper truly needs to be devoid of any hype or promotion, even going so far as to eliminate product names. Treat your white paper campaign this way and you'll win the day: customers and prospects will value your white papers and share them among colleagues. And people who read white papers are the influencing type; they're the ones who often make buying decisions. Finally, make sure you have a regular drumbeat of whitepapers culled from your initial list. Space them out over the course of a year, highlighting major conferences and events as places to launch them.

Thought leadership can also be won through good analyst relations. Every industry has industry followers. These are the (usually) impartial eyes and ears of any industry, and they gain respect and esteem because of that impartiality. A small company can seem like a much larger one by getting face time with key industry analysts and keeping their tanks filled with technical developments. Remember, they depend on you at least as much as you depend on them. Done and managed properly, it's a true symbiotic relationship.

One final area where thought leadership can yield green shoots is at trade shows and conferences. Buying a booth and exhibiting is easy. A much more powerful one-two punch occurs when you pair up a display with a presented paper. One helps the other, especially if you can talk about a technology in front of industry peers and colleagues upstairs while showing off your wares downstairs. You'll also notice that industry editors and analysts will crowd the conference sessions, because they know the heartbeat of any industry resides a bit more robustly there than it does on the show floor.

Isn’t it time to start MARKETING again?

Marketing is the exercise corporations undertake to create and foster demand. But what if a soured economy neutralizes this demand? We have two general categories of goods and services: those that we need and those that we want. This economy has wreaked havoc on the 'want' side of the equation. Have you seen many commercials or advertisements for cruise lines? Or pleasure boats? Or airlines? Indeed, there are whole categories of goods and services that you don't see promoted much (or at all) these days. You see evidence of this whenever you pick up TIME or Newsweek; these are pretty thin editions each week, thanks to a dearth of advertising. Radio and TV are sharing the same fate.

So with a year of this 'new reality' behind us, isn't it time to start MARKETING again?

For this to happen, fundamentals need to be in place. Incomes and employment not only need to stabilize, but grow. Consumers who have been browbeaten into focusing on 'need-to-have' rather than 'want-to-have' items are placing a huge strain on companies that largely offer things in the latter category. It's tough to find rationale for marketing a cruise line when consumers have snapped their purses and wallets shut.

Does this mean that makers of 'want-to-have' goods and services simply fold up their tent and call it a day? No, because that's not the American way. The American way is to come up with a new paradigm if the old or present one stops working. And everything in corporate America during the 1990s was about 'paradigm shifts.' Well, here's a paradigm shift for the ages. So what will corporations do about it within the context of marketing?

The first thing is to recognize that our fortunes are cyclic. In other words, 'We've Seen This Movie Before.'  That's why there's not a whole lot of 'tent-folding' going on. You'll see retrenchment everywhere you look, because corporations realize that it's tough to use 'marketing' to climb out of a recessionary grasp. But we do know that better times will return, because 'better' is simply a relative term we use in context with a preceding period of time. At some point our trend toward 'worse' ought to stop heading in that downward direction and start going the other way.

Once we recognize that things are cyclic and that 'better times are on the way,' the next thing is to be ready for it. This economic collapse has been a shock to the system, in macro terms and micro terms. The stock market is nowhere near where it was years ago (macro) and I'm now a happy customer at The Dollar Tree store (micro). Our savings rate is increasing, which means that consumers are deciding to do a couple things. First, they're still going to focus more on 'needs' rather than 'wants.' The money will go toward milk before it goes toward a milkshake.

But this isn't to say that the desire for 'wants' will go away. It simply says that people are going to be more value-driven. And that's where marketers can shine, by focusing on benefits more than features. Take more time to show the steak more than the sizzle. The job of marketing hasn't necessarily gotten tougher; it's now just a more focused play on what the advantages are when a consumer opens their wallet and says 'yes.'