Online business directories provide, among other things, links to a business website and if you’re a business just establishing or wanting to improve your ranking in search engines, they can help.  The question is which online business directories will give me the best effect to my SEO?

I get a lot of requests in our strategy side of the business and in my work around Economic Gardening.  The use of online directories is a popular tactic to build links and positively impact SEO, but on the other hand, if the site is just a link farm, the effect might be negative.   How can I tell the difference of one business directory versus another?  Google makes a much more critical inspection of links to a site than they have done before, so the winners and losers in this battle for link traffic might not yet be known.  While almost all links have value in the ‘mind’ of a search engine, some are of more valuable than others.  Links from sites with similar or better a PageRank are desired, lower  ranked pages are not so bueno – they help the other site more than they might help the business itself.  Some will have a better effect than others, but the question that was bumping around in my head was “which business directories are the best ones for our clients? which will have the greatest impact on SEO?”  Many busy businesspeople just will not have the time to make entries in all of them (regardless of cost), so in order to point at the ones that provide the best effect became a research project that would help me make the recommendation to use a directory even better – I might be able to recommend a more manageable number for a busy business if I knew which ones could provide the best impact.

I began the evaluation using 50 business directories from Eric Vreelands’ post at HubSpot “The Ultimate List: 50 Local Business Directories” (Nice work Eric!) and added to it about two dozen more from Yext.com, which provides a business directory management tool.  After I took out the duplicates, I had my research list. I might be able to include still more, but this was sufficent for my task – I started with well over 70 directory or location companies to begin with and ended up with 67.

As metrics, I looked at four different aspects of the directories

• PageRank,
• # of pages indexed by Google
• # of pages indexed by Bing
• Alexa rank

The data once collected, I figured that it should tell me how well the directory performs for businesses who want to be found in search via these directories, how they impact a businesses website SEO and an indication of the relative popularity of the directory.

The short list of the top 10 might not surepise anyone, but what I learned is that we can focus out work in this area pretty well  and make sure the business is in the top 10 directories for sure, but the bottom 10 may be a waste of time.  The middle 50 or so?  Get to them when you can and know that not all directories are created equal.

Resources

Online Business Directories (PDF)

Business Directory Websites

The post Online Business Directories – the Good, Bad and Ugly appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

Waiting on my plane to depart from Chicago Midway, I had just sat down after an intense four-day session learning the principals of Economic Gardening and I was so inspired it was somewhat difficult to collect my racing thoughts into something I could share.  I had been exposed to concepts around about how personality, organic system complexity, chaos theory and other frameworks could be applied to the practice of economic development.  It was like drinking from a fire hose for sure, but now a week later, I feel like I can put some of the pieces together and connect them to how social media and SEO practices fit the practice of economic gardening, or ‘EG’ as it’s called by those involved.

My first thought is that online marketing, SEO and social media are perfectly aligned with what EG attempts, at least from the perspective of the National Strategic Resources Team (NSRT).  The NSRT is a network of trained & certified professionals which supports pilot and outsource projects for organizations that want to implement EG but might be a bit short on resources or just want to try it out in thier community.  The NSRT is a team coordinated and managed by the National Center for Economic Gardening.  As an NSRT member, I get called on in short, concise engagements and it is in those engagements that I think an improvement in SEO, online and social media process can be crafted.

What makes me think it can be is the sheer volume of SEO and social media people out there and the numerous strategies, tools and tactics that can be deployed.  I now see one of my tasks exploring frameworks for short, sharp engagements that can deliver results – not necessarily in the current quarter, or the next but consulting recommendations that have a similar certainty of results that EG promotes.  I don’t think I have all the answers of course, but the focus on ROI and results, combined with Chaos Theory have me thinking along the lines of making a small difference now that has a much larger impact later.

What is EG?  Lots has been written, but the story unfolds best on the City of Littleton website, where EG got its start under Chris Gibbons.  The results are worth noting as are the tactics – Littleton is much better place for what EG has done and now, over 20 years after its genesis, it is being rolled out on a larger scale, first here in North America.

This is my first post on the topic, but certainly not the last as the journey in EG and The Social Gardener take the first few steps together.

Chaos Symbol – Raven Beartrap’s Chaos Symbol by *KrazedKei

The post The Social Economic Gardener appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

What three things (among the zillions of possible things) are impacting how marketers connect with and get the right message to the right audience?  First is that the noise in social media is deafening and secondly, if the message does get through the din, how can you get the executive responsible a message that appeals direct to him and not a generic, one-size-fits-all bit of malarkey?  And third, we are at the front edge of a wave where we should expect consumers (and buyers) will opt out of the behavioral tracking model that many marketers rely on to help present a message at the right time (assuming it ever could that is).

Thanks to our friends at LinkedIn©, business-to-business (B2B) targeted messaging has taken a turn for the better.  LinkedIn© Company Pages and a new multiple-audience messaging capability for the Product & Services page have arrived and wow, are they exciting!  This development is important to businesses for a few reasons -

Privacy and DNT - Consumers and business are finding that they can restrict how marketers track them as they surf around the web and they are deciding that ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT) is for them.  Without a lot of hassle, consumers can uncover up to 94 different tracking cookies on any of your systems and any browser and by all accounts people are using it.  Alexa reports that around 1.25 are visiting NetworkAdvertising.org’s website, which offers a free assessment on which ad networks have tracking cookies on their system and the site also offers a one-click capability to cancel those cookies and notify ad network that you wish to opted-out of behavioral tracking with them.

I believe that web surfers will opt-out of ad networks when they can and Pew Internet and American Life Project research supports that kind of assumption.  A recent survey suggests that around 59% see the business practice of targeting ads based on data collected from users of email, search or social networking sites as an unjustified use of private information.  The growth of privacy issues is not likely to go away soon and marketers need to prepare for it – this is one tactic to address it in an appropriate way.

Wasted Messaging - Wannmaker was credited with saying that he knew half of his marketing was wasted, he just didn’t know which half – and that was before everyone on the Internet became a publisher and elevated the noise-to-message factor to obscene levels.  Most marketing messages in social however are not wasted because to receive a brand message in your social stream requires an opt-in or subscription to the brand’s online presence.

Like a paid ad though, you can now select the demographic that will see your message when they visit your LinkedIn Company Page and you can be assured that a visitor to your LinkedIn Company Page is pretty much who they say they are; not absolutely of course, but pretty much you should expect that of the 170M LinkedIn members, each set up their profile more or less accurately.  So than the person who says they are a VP in a chemical-industry company in Texas in their profile is pretty likely to be living in Texas, is a VP and they work for a chemicals company.

Why LinkedIn?

Aside from being able to define and redfine your targeted audience, conversion from LinkedIn is very high.  HubSpot reported late last year (via a post from David Meerman Scott) that a visitors from LinkedIn to their clients website experienced a x4 effect in conversion versus visitors from Twitter or Facebook.  Seems to me that an investment in an effectively developed Company Page that further helps visitors understand your value proposition is a good investment and growing in importance to B2B marketers.

How Segmented are the Demographic options for targeting?

Very.

Not being a mathematician (but I imitate one now and then), the number of possible combinations is in the millions.  LinkedIn has done a decent job of defining their professional members according to a variety of criteria.  Here’s how it looks when you examine the segmentation -

• 10           Options to select for target company size
• 18           Job Functions you can target
• 147         Industry segments to select from
• 7              Seniority levels from within the company
• 405         Geographies to choose from

By the way, these are the same ‘Target Audience’ selections for posting a company update on your Company Page.  Again, the number of possible combinations is in the millions so there is little reason for a decision maker on your product to see the same message as the rest of the world.  You can tailor the right message to the right audience using your LinkedIn Product & Services listings.

Sounds cool; sounds complicated

It is probably a bit geeky – but help is here.  A video says a lot of this better than any number of boring words, so here’s a quick (6 minutes or so) that shows what we are talking about.

LinkedIn© Multiple Audience Messaging (YouTube Video)

Once you understand the  capabilities and want to work with your team to implement multiple audience messages, getting your thoughts organized and content collected is essential.  Here are a couple of tools to help with that; an Excel spreadsheet and a PDF Work Guide that can be printed out and used to facilitate a working session to define parameters for each audience segment you want to message.

We also offer facilitator-driven workshops to help you and your company get moving on this type of project quickly.  Let us know if we can help with making sure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience today!

 Resources Cited

• LinkedIn© Company Page Guide – from LinkedIn©
• LinkedIn Help Center Page – ‘Adding a Company Page‘
• LinkedIn© Product & Service Page Guide from LinkedIn©
• Excel Workbook on LinkedIn© Multiple Audience Function from Social Marketing Conversation(.XLSX)
• LinkedIn© Multiple Audience Messaging Work Guide from Social Marketing Conversations (PDF)
• Social Marketing Conversations Video on LinkedIn© Multiple Audience Function

The post Getting the right B2B message to the right B2B audience – Everytime… appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

Social marketing and the use of social media to attract prospects, service existing customers and connect with stakeholders is clearly becoming more and more relevant for businesses everywhere. We are also clearly well past the point in adoption of social media by consumers to believe that the use of social media is a fad that warrants no further investigation.

The next step for business then is to decide how best to invest in social media-based marketing and create social conversations that support the business. One approach is to make the objectives of your marketing more data-driven, a capability that in the past was horribly expensive and cost prohibitive for many companies. Today that data is only a few mouse clicks away, at least for a Colorado-based business.

A few weeks ago we announced the development of the Colorado Social Business Survey (well… we actually called it an ‘Index’) and that soon it would be available – here it is! The Condensed Edition (CE) is available at no charge for download here (www.SocialMarketingConversations.com) and while it is abbreviated from the full report, the information presented in the CE version is both valuable and relevant to businesses anywhere that want to understand what it takes to become a top-ranked company in using social marketing.

What Does The Social Business Survey Show Me?

Readers will uncover what’s important in connecting to their audience, regardless of how they define that audience and regardless of whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter or Linked. Presented in the report are the most important factors that establish what’s important on each platform and how different online media relates to another.

Who is the Report For?

The survey is designed to be used by business executives who need to manage the business objectives and want to understand what metrics matter most. What is learned by reading the survey is how others are successfully managing a social presence for business and what best companies in Colorado are doing with social media.

To Know More

Download the Condensed Edition of the survey here or call us by clicking here.  We’ll be happy to talk with you and discuss the content in the report.

The post Condensed Edition of Colorado Social Business Survey Now Available for Download! appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

The writing is on the wall for the end of business cards.   Let’s face it – traditional business cards are archaic in a world of digital alternatives.  While I’ve carried them for years, I have never been a big fan of them.   Once you have them in your hand, you know that once you get them home, they’ll end up in a box, gathering dust.  Even if you find a great storage and retrieval system, you can never seem to find the one you need at just the right moment. When you need one, it’s most certain to be in your desk drawer and not at your disposal.  I’ve even considered purchasing a business card scanner to scan in the hundreds of cards collected during networking events and shows, but opted to wait.  I’m sure glad I did.

The next time you’re itching to whip out a business card at the next event, think first about one of these digital data exchanges, instead:

Bump someone.

Not literally, of course, unless your event is a late-night rave.  Bump is an app that allows folks to exchange contact information with other fist-bumpers holding their  smartphones.  Bump is very popular app, downloaded by more than 80 million people and used to share millions of contacts, photos and files each day.   The folks at Bump have even released an app called Bump Pay, which lets you pay your friends by just bumping your phones together.  A nice alternative, next time you’re short of cash and want to split a lunch bill!

Steven Groves, our CEO no longer asks for a business card when he encounters a new associate, but rather, asks the person to just “loan” him a card.  He’ll scan the card, return the card and then connect right away on one of his favorite networks – LinkedIn.  Steven is a big fan of our next option – CardMunch.

Munch a card.

With one quick easy scan from your smartphone’s camera, LinkedIn’s CardMunch digitizes the data, and creates a contact on your smartphone straight from a business card. It returns the LinkedIn profile (if one exists), and as an added benefit, it will show you the contacts you have in common with that person.  It’ll even allow you to easily send a one-click Linked In invite to your new contact.

Connect on the spot.

Sure, a business card is a nice, simple exchange of information, but what do you do with the information on the card?  Many times we’ll research the person on LinkedIn and possibly decide whether to send them an invite to connect.   Now, why not save a step and connect right away with one another on LinkedIn, or Facebook, if you established enough rapport?   If you request that someone link to, follow, or friend you, you’re most certain to create a lasting, engaged “social” connection.

Technology evolves sometimes causing lasting change in institutions we’ve become accustomed to – just look to brick-and-mortar bookstores and traditional newspaper media as examples.  Connecting and trading information is certainly ripe for an update.  Business cards may be next.

The post Business Cards to Digital Exchange – A Paradigm Shift appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

The demands for better and better social marketing tactics for the digital marketer is constant and unrelenting.  In an article on ‘Digital Darwinism’ posted at PandoDaily.com, Brian Solis makes the case that traditional marketers need to update their skill set to include digital or run the risk of being considered irrelevant.  I am right there with him and think he’s right in a hundred ways, but in my mind I see that the trend to digital is well past the early stage and seriously into being a fixed element in the markets bag of tricks – at least that is, if you’re paying attention.

The legacy of the evolutionary path we’re on is rooted in the days of services like Compuserve and AOL where walled communities were built around topics and times then were wild and woolly in figuring out the way online marketing worked.  In at least one case I know of, a community for truck owners was sponsored by a tire company – by trading a set of tires for banner ads.   A lot has changed since then and no longer is the social marketing world a place to ‘experiment’ with your brand, it is a place for connecting to consumers and businesses and having a conversation with them.

In his article Brian presents ’10 Trends for Transformation’ that are showing the way for the evolving marketer – leadership, vision, strategy, culture, people, innovation, influence, localization, intelligence, philanthropic capitalism.

Each trend is called out by Brian and explored in his post on PandoDaily, but three really caught my eye – strategy, innovation and philanthropic capitalism.

As an online strategist, I see a lot of marketing that seems to be done in a haphazard way, without any consideration for 1) how it connects to the organizations corporate goal and 2) for establishing success metrics and measuring how well the campaign does.  A marketing plan needs to rest on goals established by management and needs to be established so that the impact of the plan and its campaigns can be determined and learned from – better campaigns can be extended, poor ones cut off sooner.

On the other hand, innovation in social marketing is busting at the seams – cool new ways of combining social, location and ecommerce is coming out almost every day.  It is really a great time to be a marketer because everything we can envision today can almost certainly be a reality tomorrow.  Not all of it will work well of course, but the decision of whether or not something is attractive to the social audience can now be left to the audience and they are well enough engaged at this point that they WILL tell us what they like and do not like.  With prudence and respect for the audience as the underpinning of any social program today, we can try new ideas almost as fast as they leap into the brain.

The concept of philanthropic capitalism is really intriguing and the reason it’s on this short list. The way core values of a company that have been portrayed to the market have been summarized in tag lines and images embedded in advertising, but now the conversations between consumers, suppliers, employees and stakeholders of all kinds factor into how the brand is perceived.  Treat your customers well, deliver an awesome customer experience, and treat your staff like people ( not cogs in a machine) and the market will take notice.  Likewise you can use mined, milled or grown materials in your product, but not at the expense of the planet and finally, respect the community you glean your workers from and make sure you contribute to the common good of that community.

Brian’s article does well in bringing many of these elements into the conversation, but these three I see representing important elements that have to be acknowledged by marketers.  If ignored it does not mean mean that the marketer is  less strong, or less intelligent as a marketer – but it may be the indication that they just do not get how social media means ‘social’ first and media second.  If today’s traditional marketers are not more adaptable than the previous generation, they will go the way of the Dodo and the Wooly Mammoth – with good riddance.

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

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Image credit – Wikipedia / http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/ExtinctDodoBird.jpeg/220px-ExtinctDodoBird.jpeg

The original post was posted at Social Media Club in February 2012 as a member of the editorial contributors; reposted here with a few edits – SG

The post Adapt or Die – Are They Only Alternatives? appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

“It is rapidly becoming a liability for companies to ignore their social presence – we make sure our clients dodge that bullet”
Steven Groves / CEO, coauthor “ROI of Social Media”

Social marketing is becoming a lynch-pin of any marketing campaign, whether it starts offline, in traditional media or online.  In Colorado it may be even more relevant, according to a recent survey of over 150 companies by Colorado-based Social Marketing Conversations.  

According to Irv Stern, Social Strategist and lead analyst on the study “Social media sites are widely adopted by about half the population in Colorado, and denizens favor LinkedIn over Facebook.  The number of users is very high if you consider that the 2011 US Census puts 5.5M citizens in the state.”

As a part of the survey, Social Marketing Conversations totaled the number of Likes in Facebook, Followers in Twitter, and? Follows of the Company Page in LinkedIn for the top 10 companies in each social media platform and came up with 303,110 of them.

The survey ranks 150 companies with regards to the best tactics and engagement in social media. Here’s a list of the top 10 companies, with Ft. Collins-based OtterBox and Boulder-based Trada taking the top honors on each platform, proving that they are the most capable of engaging with their audience.

“It’s apparent in our survey that the citizens of Colorado are relying more on social media for connection to their community and the brands that support the Colorado lifestyle” Irv continued, “an effective social marketing presence will become even more critical for businesses that want to compete effectively in either B2B or B2C markets.”

Methodology

The survey looked at a publicly compiled list of 150 companies that are / were in their second stage of growth.  Other criteria for inclusion to the list are that the company be privately-held, headquartered in Colorado, employ more than a 1/2 dozen employees and report revenues above $750K but less than $50M.

The ranking does not show who has the most Likes, Follows or Followers however.  It is an evaluation of the firms social marketing potential and standing is dependent on the overall social presence of the firm and their Earned Media presence in the major social platforms of Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.

Details of the Survey

Detail regarding the public persona of the survey companies are continuing to expand and SMC is digging deeper into the social media presence of the companies in the survey base.  If you’re wondering how you fare against the best (and worst) social marketing presence Colorado has to offer, click here to send an email or call us on G-Voice at 602.903.1010.

The post Social Marketing Conversations announces the Colorado Social Business Survey appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

Recently I was asked about who owns the content posted on a social networking platform – not the first time though.   The question came up after my friend had heard that the platform took ownership of the content after the member posted it and that they could do anything they wanted with it!  I suggested first that the initial comment might have come from a person that was repeating what they had heard, wanting to appear well-informed, but may not have actually read the Term of Service (TOS) for the platform as most people never look at the TOS when they create an account anyway.

Wanting to reply in-fact and not heresay in my response, I linked to the TOS of one of my favorite platforms, LinkedIn (TOS link), and singled out the first paragraph to draw attention to how they dealt with the issue.

“License and warranty for your submissions to LinkedIn. You own the information you provide LinkedIn under this Agreement, and may request its deletion at any time, unless you have shared information or content with others and they have not deleted it, or it was copied or stored by other users. Additionally, you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including, but not limited to, any user-generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.”

When we next spoke, they recited the part that begins with ‘Additionally, you grant…‘ and pointed out that this was precisely the language that gave their friend, and now them, reason to question whether or not participation in an online social network is something a business or business person should do!  Here was the damning evidence that showed that they would take whatever your said in the network and use it to their own benefit, never having to share any of it with you!

I agreed that this kind of a license to use, re-use and otherwise manage the content we all post online was egregious - but needed.  The biggest reason is because we live in such a litigious society and that if we did not give this permission, it would open up the platform provider to a whole universe of claims that content had been mismanaged once turned over to the social platform in question.  If it were me as the social platform owner, I would also demand a similar right to the content – but only because the member wanted me to facilitate the exchange between they and their followers, friends or constituents – not because I really cared what they posted or how potentially lucrative the idea might be.

The reason why I think we’ve been driven to give over this much ownership of our content  is laid out in three parts; 1) why a social platform needs to gain unrestricted access to the content posted, 2) the brand promise and how it impacts participant behavior and finally, 3) member expectations of confidentiality and privacy.

All Access Required

1) Unrestricted access to the content you’ve posted is required, primarily because without it, YOUR presence would not function. You share posts, messages and various content with your friends, but the delivery of that content is left to the platform provider.  The platform will deliver the message for you, but they have no mechanism or interest in monitoring the content once posted for proper use – your friend might actually reuse the content in a manner you did not intend (BTW, you should expect it) and it is this unanticipated usage that sets the stage for the terms of the license.  If the platform provider did not gain access to the unrestricted license for your posts, it would not be long before a member claimed that the social network  published content they did not own or that they permitted it to be published against the wishes of the member.  At almost a billion members for Facebook and 110M members for LinkedIn, how possibly could they be expected to manage your preferences for your content on their platform.

All rubbish of course, but we live in a litigious society where you can pretty much count on the 5 ANY’s of a Lawsuit – ANY one can sue you at ANY time, for ANY reason, ANY where for ANY amount.  By you granting unrestricted access to the owners of the platform, you essentially inure them from any liability for the potentially damaging actions of your network.  There are other permissions and fair-use doctrine that also apply, but by securing this license from the content creator (you) they can provide you a good quality experience on their service for a fair price – I think free is a pretty fair price.

Brand Promise of Confidentiality

2) We as consumers of the services provided by the platform have come to expect a certain level of privacy in our postings, but not necessarily because the platform owes it to us, but because we have come to expect it over the years. For example, I see the LinkedIn brand promise as that they will manage the platform functionality in such a way they will not intentionally damage my persona by their actions.

Since they launched the platform in 2003, we’ve come to expect a certain behavior from their brand and so far, they’ve delivered pretty well.  If they had opted to use member content in some way other than what members had intended, the social media ecosphere would be filled with messages from offended users – there has not been any such transgression that I recall however.  This becomes then the brands promise to handle your content reliably. So long as that brand promise is maintained, the social network of humans, supported by the platform, functions.

First Rule of Fight Club… Don’t talk about Fight Club…

3) There is an expectation of privacy and confidentiality within the network, but that is ONLY manageable by the member. The best way to maintain privacy around you, your company and your ideas is that trade secrets and intellectual property should NEVER be disclosed in any online forum that has the potential for unrestricted public access. This is where knowing what NOT to publish to the web comes into play. The only way to keep a secret is to not share it at all to anyone.

LinkedIn and similar publicly accessible online platforms are not the place to post a secret or your IP.  If you send a private message using the platform it will not be disclosed without a court order, but that’s not the issue being considered – it’s the ownership and control of the message posted in a public forum, which as the TOS specify, you grant an unrestricted license for – both to the platform and your personal network.

The short answer for my friend then is to not create posts around trade secrets or intellectual property online at any time for any reason – it is a secret after all.

The post 3 Reasons Why You’ll Give Up Ownership of Your Content appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

Facebook is releasing the hounds. Those consumers who wish to share whatever it is they are doing, when they are doing it will be able to do so – as long as the appropriate verbs can be properly conjugated and developers promise to publish actions that are ‘simple, genuine and non-abusive’. Facebook also published guidelines of what they are looking for as well as what they’re are not very fond of, which is a way of saying what will not be allowed in the approved verb list.

CMOs and marketers will want to look at these types of actions and apps on Facebook, and determine which of them are precursors to buying behavior. They’ll want to make sure that the organization is able to leverage consumer intent, which is another fast growing area.

Sentiment, Tone & Intent

When we began writing ‘ROI of Social Media’ in 2009, we spoke with Radian6 and Alterian, then leaders in the social monitoring space, and learned that detecting sentiment and tone were admittedly hard to do. Fast forward to today and talk of ‘intent engines’ that can provide automation that will look at a stream, assess the conversations and then present the most relevant ones for human assessment and intervention.

What’s also coming out of some of the latest work is an understanding that intent can be segmented into specific applications – some easier to develop than others. Intent analysis in a setting of support and service delivery is one thing, intent in consumer purchase behavior is quite another.

Intent Engines applied

The activity is migrating to one of two camps – intent for support / service and intent in sales / marketing. The Intent Engine in Service and Support provides a management tool that a manager can use to understand how the line team is doing and what commitments are being made. From that perspective, the data can be managed to provide insight on what needs the customer or client is expressing, what commitments are being made and how well follow-up is being executed. These systems will work in real time and provide relevant content quickly, holding only stats for reporting over time. The technology is coming (or is here) that will make this task pretty straight forward – I’ve seen it work and I think that service and support organizations that use the web will find the technology very useful.

Intent Engine for Marketing and Sales is a still ahead of us – maybe this year, but more likely in the next few years. The requirement in this application is to handle a broader data stream from multiple platforms and to provide a more persistent data store for the data being assessed. Multiple data streams because consumers are using multiple platforms to express their intent with textual, image and video content and persistent because in order to uncover the KPIs and expressions that lead to a revenue relationship occur over time. In order to understand the data and behavior, we need to be able to connect one comment with another during the consumers purchasing process, which may take only a few minutes in lower value goods to many months for higher value, hard goods in a B2B scenario.

From low hanging fruit to hard work

If tone and sentiment for marketing was hard, intent is going to be hugely hard. Early on we can expect the use of the Facebook verbs as an early indicator. I predict we’ll see dozens of Intent Engine providers racing to support Facebook verbs, but that’s the low-hanging fruit for an Intent Engine – the real challenge will come in the work to provide a deeper level of analysis that considers time, actions and the object of that action. Initially we’ll see broad term Intent Engines that cover non-specific jargon and popular colloquialisms. These early engines will give way to niche engines that cater to industries that have the capital to support them – energy, financial and CPG/FMCG will be likely early adopters.

Intent Engines then are coming and service and support organizations will find that the technology will greatly simplify their world and help manage commitments and resources. I’m very excited about what the sales and marketing engines will look like – that’s where the gold is I think. Once we can identify consumers on a path to purchase by their social presence, marketing organizations will the find funding that can be shown to impact the top and bottom line.

The post Intent Engines and Facebook Verbs appeared first on Social Marketing Conversations.

“Social media is maturing and being widely adopted by companies everywhere – many are still not prepared for it.”

In the last post, the aspects that create complexity in social marketing were presented and in this post we look at how to evaluate them.

Aside from the mis-steps in content itself (witness the faux pas of many major brands, ranging from JetBlue, Wal-Mart and GMC and countless smaller organizations) there is, to me, an obvious challenge in identifying the layers of complexity. This post will explore the complexity relating to organizational readiness and how to understand what you’re up against before you even begin.

In most engagements, I look first at a snapshot of the existing social presence and what social media sites are a part of the marketing toolkit (Facebook, Twitter, a blog, LinkedIn, etc.) As part of the snapshot, I also look at how they are used. I look at among other things, how recent posts have been made, the frequency of posts and whether or not there is any engagement with the audience. What has become apparent for me is the apparent complexity of the implementation is overlooked and many times, the presence is ineffective. If we examine the factors around staffing, # of geographic locations involved, management or compliance approval levels and the type of content being managed, we can readily understand why many implementations fail.

What I’ve also seen is smaller organizations with limited resources tending to focus on text-based social platforms and publishing primarily textual content, even though other content has been shown to be much more compelling to the audience. As the organization gets larger and matures, the content types expand to include pictures, images, and social-quality video.

Larger organizations do these and add more content with higher production values – commercial-quality videos and professional, AP-style writing. As a social marketing initiative rolls out, the number of social media properties the organization is involved with will expand too; a B2C organization might start on Facebook with a basic business page, but soon they will be wanting to make sure pictures that contribute to the marketing message are posted and publicized, videos are developed and posted and, if the efforts are successful, they’ll add more people to the social media functions and increase the level of production values. If an organization has a footprint that has them in multiple geographies, several of those locations may find they want to develop a localized online presence, they’ll look to be involved in posting content promoting their local operation to local prospects and customers.

This increasing complexity can be mapped and provide an understanding of what’s actually needed in terms of management structure, workflow, scheduling needs, and multiple author management. To aid in the assessment, we developed the Content Complexity model.

The Content Complexity model is a construct that graphically represents the inherent complexity of the social content management model they begin with. Within the construct, a business can place a marker in the quadrant that best represents their efforts in utilizing social marketing.

Here are a few examples we’ll use to demonstrate the Complexity Model –

• Company 1 – a small to medium business in a single city with a single author, but multiple departments having a stake in the online presence. Platforms include sites that handle text, image / pictures, podcasts and video.
• Company 2 – a foodservice brand with a single author in a headquarters location and multiple regional locations. Departmental approval is required for posted content that includes text, images / pictures and video.
• Company 3 – an international CPG/FMCG brand with multiple authors, multiple locations around the world, multiple platforms and several layers of approval required for content.

As this model is utilized the permutations will be many, but we can use these examples, positioning each on the construct in a position that represents their basic complexity and then, later place these same companies on a Complexity Master to understand how complex their models really are.

To map a given organization on the model, begin with placing related aspects together on the lesser grids. One grid with each axis representing # of geographic locations by # of authors and again, on a second grid, the # of media types by # of compliance inspection levels involved. Each quadrant is labeled with a letter, ‘A’ in the upper right, ‘D’ in the lower left. The lower left (quadrant ‘D’) represents fewer participants and as we move to the right and up along the axis, ending at quadrant ‘A’ representing more participants.

The placement on the lesser grids gives us an easy to understand representation of the simpler aspects of authors / geography and media types / compliance. Using these placements and simple averaging, the markers can now assume placement of a truer representation of the overarching complexity ahead for the enterprise. Placement on the Complexity Master panel represents a merger of the location of the respective markers on the lesser panels in the construct. Now we have a clear representation of the underlying and inherent complexity, as well as the likely investment required, for each of the organizations.

Why go through this exercise? The understanding gained in this exercise is one that gives an organization a comprehension of the challenges ahead and how best to approach and budget for the task. Armed with that understanding, areas of investment can be projected out into the future and budgets better prepared.

For example, Company 3 should expect to make continuous investment in their staff, training, tools and content management infrastructure. Not simple to begin with because of their size, but because of the complexity of their operation – several people, several locations, several departments and many platforms for content development and delivery – they also need to not under-spend or understaff the operation. Companies 1 and 2 however have few authors, multiple departments (more than one), and several media types (textual, video and audio). In these operations, workflow management becomes the important function, permitting management to exercise more control over the published work of the authors. For Company 2, the organization may also need to project their social presence into a geographically dispersed team, adding complexity for sure, but also adding additional layers into compliance.

Inability to recognize these complexities puts strain on the organization. Staff is mis-managed, content arrives late and social engagement is stifled – to the detriment of the brand. The social marketing model will, conceptually at least, places authority for interaction and content close to the edge of the organization, perhaps much closer than many manager feel comfortable with because the corporate paradigm demands control over the process, the message and increasingly, the medium.

The emerging social paradigm suggests that brand definition is achieved in conjunction with the consumer itself. In dozens of conversations with marketers, I am still taken by the number that take the phrase ‘social media’ more as ‘media’, as in yet another channel in which to broadcast a brand message, versus ‘social’, which suggests an opportunity to connect with and engage the consumer audience. The failure to adopt the social in social media marketing is the hallmark of many failed initiatives and the repeated failure of marketers in making the distinction will be the single most difficult gate for the next generation of marketers to navigate.

After having looked for a year, I had hoped to find more content management solutions by now that are even beginning to handle this level of complexity but I have not. In the next post however, I’ll start looking at the existing tools and technology out there, beginning with the low or no cost options and then moving up the ladder to more function, more robust and more expensive alternatives.

[The slides are also posted on SlideShare here.]

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