Monthly Archives: February 2012

- by Josie Rogers

What are the top five organisational concerns with social media? How can you deal with them?

When talking about social media with clients, there are a number of questions that commonly come up. Many stem from the challenges of adjusting to using social media as a new way of reaching customers and advocates. I have highlighted the five key concerns we get asked and how we help alleviate them.

The five most common concerns organisations have about using social media are:

1. Brand damage
2. Compliance issues
3. Lack of expertise
4. Difficulty in measuring ROI
5. Resource constraints

Brand damage

No one wants to be the next #McDstories gone sour or be the next brand caught deleting negative comments. On a less viral level, no one wants customer-retention issues stemming from slow responses from those in charge of running the social profiles.

One way of avoiding brand damage is to educate your staff through professional social-media workshops and clear social-media guidelines. This should help avoid situations that leave the profiles open to brand damage; it will also open doors to would-be brand advocates among your staff, who can represent the company, the brand and the products and services via their own social profiles.

Compliance issues

Have you ever seen a brand with myriad social-media accounts that all seem to do the same thing? How do you control the setup of new and random profiles? By putting policies and processes in place, there’ll be a clear process for account setup, which will avoid the proliferation of new accounts that serve no purpose or duplicate effort.

Develop clear and concise social-media policies, and ensure that employees contributing to social media have read and understood those policies. They should provide guidance on setting up and running accounts, and engaging with stakeholders.

Policies are great, but how can you ensure that they result in socially-savvy employees representing the brand in a productive way? Training, of course! Face-to-face or online-based training sessions give practical guidance on social-media activities, and on combining activities to engage an audience and generate leads. You can find out more about the benefits of training in one of our earlier blog post: Is training the answer to the social dilemma?

Lack of expertise

Are you planning to start social-media initiatives? How do you plan to integrate all of your planned social-media activities to ensure you’re driving value for the brand? Do you know what to do in order to achieve your goals?

When choosing to partner with an agency or consultancy, it is important to look for a proven track record of tangible success in social media – campaigns that deliver value and ROI. At Volume, we work alongside brands and provide expertise (from a number of social-media tactics to a fully integrated strategy supported by best-of-breed social tools) to ensure that our clients get the best return from their social media activities.

Difficulty in measuring ROI

How do you actually measure return on investment. What do you count as a success?

Start by setting measureable objectives you are looking to achieve. For example:

  • Site traffic generation
  • Interactions and engagement
  • Re-syndicated content
  • Event registrations and attendance
  • Leads

It is possible to use social media mapping tools such as SociView™ to understand your social media real estate, assess and rate your social instances to see how well they are performing. Each topic area is given a score based on the following:

1. Visibility
2. Influence
3. Relevance
4. Activity

Armed with this information, you can see how well your accounts comply with set score levels, and from there, ensure that accounts continue to perform well in a valued-added way.

Resource constraints

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has searched a brand’s social-media pages, groups and feeds eager to find specific information, only to discover that the last updates were a few months ago.

All too often, accounts are set up by keen but busy people – a few months on, the realisation hits that the resource needed to maintain the profiles negatively impacts their day job and primary objectives. Or people move on leaving accounts dormant.

We help minimise the time and resource needed to manage clients’ social media real estates by using a managed service. We monitor mapped social-media presence through SociView and ensure that all accounts comply with predefined target scores. Alternatively, we offer a range of social media support services to help  build and manage social media presence to ensure that clients gain maximum value from social media activities.

Do you face any other challenges when dealing with social media? How do you deal with them?

If you are interested in finding out more about our social-media services or SociView, get in touch: info@volume.co.uk

- by Rachel Adams

Demystifying Facebook Advertising

Facebook has 845 million active monthly users and 2.7 billion daily likes and comments. Facebook is completely unprecedented, and let’s face it, a marketer’s dream. This you probably already know, but despite the capabilities and power of Facebook – people still seem to focus on Fan Pages and neglect the incredible power of Facebook advertising.

If you aren’t familiar with Facebook advertising already – now’s the time to get on board. Mobile advertising is coming as early as March 2012, and with 50% of Facebook users accessing the site with a mobile phone, it’s already being estimated Facebook is going to make a staggering $1.2 billion in just 12 months through mobile advertising alone.

So if Facebook provides brand pages that are free, why bother with paid for advertising? Well, Facebook advertising doesn’t stand alone and should be just one element of an integrated campaign. It supports the classic Facebook brand page and shouldn’t be considered a substitute.

What can be achieved with Facebook advertising?

When creating a Facebook advert there are two options – drive traffic to a Facebook page or an external touch point. When using Facebook advertising it is about 40% cheaper drive traffic to a Facebook page than an external website and so absolutely the route I’d recommend. If people are taken out of Facebook the bounce rate is likely to be higher.

Now here’s the key – most people use Facebook advertising as a way to get more fans/likes. This is where the problem lies. It should be used to achieve a business objective so the ROI is apparent. For example – we used it to drive downloads of our mobile application Bleat and our clients are using it to generate leads.

How Facebook advertising works

There are a few options when creating an advert:

Sponsored story:
when a user likes a page or post, it creates an advert using that person’s name, the action and the Facebook page then shows it to all their friends. The theory being that users are more likely to take action if there’s familiarity. This only works well if a page or post already has quite a large number of likes.

Source - facebook.com

Drive traffic to a Facebook page:
the title of an advert will automatically be the name of a page. You can either:

  • Promote a page: type in whatever text you like to support the advert, and pick an image if you don’t want to use your page’s profile picture.
  • Promote a post: if you have a particularly engaging wall post then this could be for you.

Drive traffic externally:choose a picture, headline and body copy.

Picking a target audience is where Facebook is brilliant. You can pick specific age, gender, country, city, marital status, workplace, education and most importantly – their likes and interests. You can even target specific fans of other Facebook pages.

Once that’s done a bit like Google Adwords you select your budget (daily or lifetime) and then pay for either clicks or impressions. Always go with clicks – this way you’re guaranteed results. It will automatically suggest a maximum bid (for the advert to appear in place of other ads) based on your target audience e.g. 66p per click, but often you’ll pay less than the max bid. A big factor in price difference is the target country, the UK and US are generally pretty expensive as you can see from this list from Social Bakers of the average cost per click by country.

Does it work?

Yes – if you do the legwork. If you just drive people to a Facebook wall, you’re not going to get a lot of likes. The user will be confused. You need to set the user’s expectations in the journey they’re about to take. Firstly give the user a reason to click on your advert in the copy and take them to a customised Facebook landing page. It should be related to the advert and shows something the user is expecting to see, but make sure it’s engaging.

The trick here is also to include a ‘like gate’. Tell the user to like the page to access the page/content/something special. This way you guarantee yourself a social opt-in. What’s behind the like gate should be related to your objectives – so if you’re generating leads maybe have an embedded form which they fill in to receive an incentive.

The Results

Without going into too much detail we’re currently running a client campaign. They’ve gained well over 3,000 likes at an average cost of 16p. A good percentage of those likes have converted into leads, and the average number of interactions per fan hasn’t dropped either. In a separate campaign we received 13% more likes than clicks – this means 100% of people who clicked actually liked the page and people who saw the advert but didn’t click went and found the Facebook page within 24 hours.

And now mobile advertising is coming. Customisable Facebook landing pages don’t work on a mobile phone so best practice will differ, but first get on board and start using it and you’ll no doubt reap the benefits.

If you have any queries about social and integrated campaigns, contact us: info@volume.co.uk

- by Rachel Adams

Print ain’t Dead (honest)

In a digital age, full of digital communications and digital conversations – it’s sometimes easy to forget the joy of a simple letter or package through the post. Stored in an over-stuffed drawer I have birthday, valentines and congratulations cards spanning back to 1999. I keep them for sentimental reasons, but I don’t keep sentimental emails in a special ‘memories’ folder.

That’s the beauty of print or what we now call ‘tactile communications’. They can give us a sense of excitement, bring back memories and make us feel special. That’s why it’s so disappointing when spam fills up our letterboxes with ill-considered and badly designed mails that don’t consider our needs, wants and preferences.

Print isn’t dead, it’s just often misused and abused. Here at Volume we have the capability to create completely personalised direct mail material… and no, this doesn’t just mean adding the customer’s name at the top of the letter.
So, let’s put this into practice. I’m guessing at some point you’ve probably ordered a pizza from your local take away. Having once ordered a pizza, subsequently you probably received their latest menu through the post. With personalised print, why send a whole menu when the pizza company could send a personalised voucher for your favourite pizza? This not only potentially reduces postage costs, but also means you’re more likely to react to the menu or voucher because it means something to you!

Our clients are already seeing the benefit of this, and personalised print campaigns are hot off the printing press (quite literally) with more coming through the pipeline. Those customers are using it to retrain loyalty, improve open rates and make sure that customers are reacting to their content.

The best print campaigns are not only personal but they can also be fun too! That’s why for a client we recently created this ‘dress up’ direct mail (pictured below). This allowed people to ‘pop out’ the clothes and attach them to Fred as they pleased.

So when people tell you print is dead, think about how much you value print. On Tuesday if you receive an e-card instead of a Valentines card, tell us then that print is dead. Print is moving with the times: becoming more fun, more personal and more competitive. It sits in a support role for digital – not to compete against it.

To find out why print ain’t dead, visit our website or follow our print Twitter feed.

- by Daryl Swinden

The data laws will be changing; are you prepared?

Data drives business, provides marketers with valuable insight about consumers and enables highly targeted communications and response-tracking of campaigns. With new developments and engagements around social media (see our social insight blog), it undoubtedly is evolving into a more powerful resource.

But isn’t ‘data’ still something that just geeks worry about? Surely its impact is negligible on professional marketers who are pushing the boundaries for creative, social and integrated campaigns?

Well, something is coming to the data world that will affect all of this.

It’s the new EU Data Protection Regulation. This new legislation will look to standardise the data-protection laws across the 27 EU member states including the UK.

But you’re not affected, right?
Wrong.

EU Data Protection Regulation - DMA warns of fears it will damage UK businesses http://t.co/JXKi3wfD
January 25, 2012 4:48 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@DMA_UK
DMA UK

 

Whilst still in draft format, this proposed legislation will at best be an extra headache for business and at worst, could totally break the marketing model as we know it.

With this new regulation, we are going to have to rethink what we are doing and how we are doing it.


There will be even more emphasis on the ability to use an individual’s data - only if they are happy for you to do so. The multi-billion-pound marketing industry that uses this information is of secondary importance.

Of particular interest in the new revision are the following categories:

Explicit

Piggybacking the oh-so-popular cookie law, consumers (and that includes business consumers) will have to give “explicit consent” for an organisation to use their personal data for marketing purposes – even if the consumer has had a previous interaction. So “inferred consent” will go out of the window. Clearly, if this consent can’t be proved, then potential contact databases will have to be scrapped and started again. And nobody wants that, right?

You never saw me, right?

Individuals will also be able to request the deletion of their data – in what’s called a “right to be forgotten”.  This is the first proposed regulation to deal with social media and data protection, but will have far-reaching implications across all marketing activities. The additional administration of this, coupled with the impact of customer profiles and trends, will have both financial and planning implications.

Tell me about me

Right now, individuals can request a copy of their data.
Why aren’t we all inundated with these requests? Well, there is currently a nominal fee of £10 to obtain this information. It is proposed however, that this fee will be scrapped – meaning that these requests are likely to come thick and fast.

When is a number not a number?

When it’s an IP address.

IP addresses are a digital marketer’s dream – they allow us to recognise users. This then means we can run analytics and analyse web behaviours.

Well, it now transpires that these IP addresses are considered personal data. Even though they’re just numbers and you can’t communicate with people via an IP number.

Size matters

Companies with over 250 staff will need to have a designated data-protection officer.

 

Don’t panic just yet though. The legislation is purely draft at this stage. Bodies like the DMA will be fighting the corner for the industry and hope to make sure common sense prevails in some of these areas.

And realistically, by the time all the bickering about what is acceptable to all parties has died down and we have a new regulation, we may be three to four years down the line.

What is clear, however, is that change is happening, and whatever it entails, you should be prepared for a more transparent and open relationship with your data subjects. Those companies that will succeed are those that start planning and incorporating this into their activities now, not in four years’ time.

You can fight it, or accept the inevitable.

Is your organisation prepared for change?