So we’ve discussed Proof and why it’s critical to demonstrate that what you do and what you say means something to customers.
Now let’s discuss what you can do to demonstrate that Proof – go get yourself some Presence.
- Presence — You can’t prove anything to anyone without having a Presence. And not just in terms of being there when there’s a need, or having an ad in the right place, or dropping a direct mail piece at the right time. Presence is also being there when there’s not a need. Presence means providing knowledge. It means creating or defining needs in addition to meeting needs — for example, by providing content and establishing credibility as an expert. Or using customer interaction and knowledge to develop meaningful solutions. Presence helps you deliver the Proof.
There are many ways to have Presence — and you need to be knowledgable about all of them, from traditional tactics like emails and direct mail, to online tactics like Google keywords, to social media engagement tools like Twitter. Maybe you don’t need them all, depending on your audience, but you better know their strengths and weaknesses.
And you better make sure your Presence evolves with your customers. Otherwise, they move on and your Presence is meaningless. There are alot of things you should be doing to stay up-to-date on new aspects of social media that allow interaction and dialogue with customers. Like Google Wave, for example. Your customers may be in all these social media nooks and crannies, and if you’re not there with them as part of the conversation then you have no Presence.
Sure, you can still have 20th century Presence. We still need it! You can still send direct mail and email, run ads, hand out samples and all the other marketing tactics we develop and refine with great effort. Hell, traditional marketing works wonders when done right. Yet if your bag of tactics has not expanded to include social media in whatever ways and websites and widgets your customers love and interact with — then you will now find that your traditional marketing has alot tougher time succeeding. Competitors who create interaction are too easy to find, and they’ll steal your business with with their Presence.
Presence is scalable, and it depends on your customers. It may require people who live and breathe social media every minute of every day — bloggers, Tweeters, Tumblrs and Diggers. Or it may require a simple Facebook fan page. And it certainly requires a mix of traditional marketing in some form. So it must be guided by someone with comfortable vision of both traditional and new.
Next post discusses the third P: Persuasion.
Filed under: Customers, Google, Marketing, Online Marketing, SEM/SEO, Social Media, Twitter, Uncategorized | Tagged: Customers, Marketing, Google, Social Media, engagement, Google Wave, Four P's of marketing, Four P's, presence | Leave a Comment »





New Acronym, New Urgency to Measure Your Social Media Metrics
It used to be so simple.
At first, social media was easy because the standards of traditional marketing didn’t fit. It was new and different. It was personal and customer-driven and you were just feeling it out. It was Facebook and Twitter and what was to measure? If you knew how many Duggs you got on Digg you were ahead of the game.
But now that you invest time and resources in those customer conversations, it’s time to take a good, long look at what you get out of it in the traditional sense of marketing ROI. Even if you can’t or don’t need to measure down to an actual sales or revenue-driven metric, you should look at some the standard metrics of involvement and engagement in social media — followers, friends, comments, retweets, etc.
That’s where this helpful blog post from MediaPost (courtesy of @B2BOnlineMarketing) comes in. It suggests adding a new choice to the marketer’s toolkit of measurement metric acronyms: CPSA, or Cost Per Social Action.
I like this logic alot. In social media, engagement and interaction is the holy grail, no matter what your goal. Whether you need to plant a flag as an industry thought-leader, or build followers for a Facebook page so you can reach them for a much lower CPA than other channels, the need to measure CPSA at some level is now an expectation. And it’s different that traditional measurement, because relationships are less tangible yet potentially more valuable in the long term.
The article does post a great question that only you can answer:
Depending on your ultimate goals for your social media involvement, the true worth is for you to determine. For some, bigger Authority on Technorati may be the most valuable thing for your blog, while for others it may be Facebook followers, Twitter retweets, overall size of your social network, or something else. Or maybe you have a different way of measuring worth already that’s more complex and gives you a sales-driven ROI.
No matter what the answer to the question is, it’s definitely important to charge ahead and embrace CPSA as a new and valid metric that we look at often.
Filed under: Blogs, Customers, Facebook, Marketing, Online Marketing, ROI/Measurement, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter | Tagged: comments, Cost Per Social Action, customer relationships, Digg, engagement, Facebook, followers, measurement, retweets, ROI, Social Media, social media conversations, Twitter | 1 Comment »