That’s why social media can be a powerful tool for movers to reach potential customers and showcase their services. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube can help movers connect with their target audience, build trust, and generate leads. Here are seven ways to use social media to reach people looking for movers.

1. Create a Business Page or Profile on Each Platform

Creating your profile is the first step to establishing your online presence and identity. Include your contact information, website, logo, and a brief introduction of your company and services. Add photos and videos of your previous projects, customer testimonials, and awards or certifications.

2. Post Relevant and Engaging Content Regularly

Posting good content is the key to attracting potential customers and increasing your visibility and reach. Post tips on moving, packing, storage, and more. You can also share behind-the-scenes looks, customer reviews, and success stories. Use hashtags and keywords to optimize your posts and make them easier to find.

3. Interact With Your Audience and Respond to Their Comments and Messages

Interaction builds rapport and trust with your potential and existing customers. You can answer their questions, address their concerns, and thank them for their feedback. Use feedback to improve your services and offers.

4. Run Contests and Giveaways to Boost Your Engagement and Awareness

Contests and giveaways are a fun and effective way to reward loyal fans and attract new ones. Offer discounts, coupons, free consultations, or free services as prizes. Consider partnering with other local businesses or influencers to cross-promote your brand and reach a wider audience.

5. Use Paid Ads and Sponsored Posts to Target Your Ideal Customers and Generate Leads

Advertising is an efficient way to invest your marketing budget and get more exposure and conversions. You can use various to segment your audience and deliver personalized and relevant ads and posts. Be sure to track and measure your results and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

6. Create and Share Video Content to Showcase Your Expertise and Professionalism

Video content is a compelling way to demonstrate your skills and capabilities. It will differentiate you from your competitors. You can create and share video tutorials, testimonials, case studies, or live streams.

7. Join and Participate in Online Communities and Groups Related to Your Areas of Operation

Joining online groups is a valuable and authentic way to network and connect with your potential and existing customers and establish yourself as an authority and a leader in your field. Be friendly and helpful to anyone with questions about living in the area.

Social media is a powerful and effective way for movers to reach people who need their services. Social media utilization results in more leads and referrals. Movers who want to grow their business and stand out from the crowd should leverage the potential of social media.

The post 7 Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Looking for Movers appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

By keeping up to date with shifting trends and focusing on enterprise-wide engagement methods from the start, you can better foster customer interaction.  This is a constant issue for marketing teams who are working to keep up with customer expectations when interacting with a brand online. Here are 5 ways marketing teams can improve engagement with visitors:

Humanize your Brand

Your website should include interactions via video, animation, and podcasts. Customers are increasingly attracted to video, and this is the perfect medium for storytelling.  But marketers are finding an even better response from branding constructed around a person or character. Customer engagement will bloom when you make your website more interactive, informative, and personal.

Customer Service

Consumers expect a seamless experience each and every time they interact with a business and are much more likely to engage in an online chat than call customer service on the phone. You can improve your existing customer service by adding a live customer service chat feature on your website.  This feature could make or break your customer’s buying experience.

Simply having live chat on your website isn’t enough to turn a visitor into a customer or a customer into a happy customer. Their live chat experience should be personalized and give them the answers they need in order to convert. This can be extremely challenging for teams since all live chat agents may not know the answers or have them readily available.

This is where automated workflows and support ticketing software solutions come into play. Platforms like Wrike integrate with support software like Zendesk to automate who receives which support tasks along with how they are resolved, as they move through internal processes like verification, QA, and ultimately deploying fixes.

Big Data

According to Forbes, companies utilizing data-driven marketing are six times more likely to report increased profitability, and five times more likely to improve customer retention. It is now easier than ever to purchase software that easily analyzes customer behaviors and trends.  Collecting this data is useful for strategizing and development, but it is also effective as content that can be presented to customers, perhaps in the form of an infographic.

Adaptive Delivery

Adaptive design can optimize user experience by simultaneously rendering pages based on device capability and established information of particular users.  A personalized approach to design can positively impact the functionality by determining the intent of your customer.  This option may be more advantageous for building engagement than a responsive design.

Chatbots and Social Support

Customer service needs to be instantaneous.  If your customers have to wait for a response, you may have already lost them.  Businesses have been turning towards social media for quick support, otherwise known as social support.  One step further is the use of chatbots.  Companies are increasingly finding this as an effective tool for creating personalized content and information delivered directly to consumer.

Your website is your connection to your consumer. Focus on creating a visually-appealing and relevant site that engages your customers, and creates an experience that leaves them satisfied and wanting more.

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There is more to social media than publishing updates and waiting for something good to happen. If you truly want to reach all your goals, it’s imperative to focus your time and resources on maximizing engagement.

The tools you use to maximize engagement could be the difference between the success and failure of your social media strategy.

If you want to get on the right track, here are five tools you should start using today:

1.  Survey King

There are many ways to engage with your audience on social media, with a survey, form, or questionnaire among the best.

Survey King makes it simple to not only create visually appealing surveys but to also track results to gain the insights you need.

2.  Click to Tweet

You want to make it easy for your audience to share your content via social media. This is often the first step in engaging with someone.

Click to Tweet makes it simple for anyone to share a particular piece of content, such as a blog post.

For example, maybe you’ve created a killer post on how to set a budget as a college student. You can use Click to Tweet to help readers share the content on their social media platforms.

3.  Klout

Are you finding it difficult to share interesting content with your audience? Are you wondering what type of content will help generate a conversation?

Klout can step in and be your guide. By suggesting shareable content that your audience has yet to see, there’s a greater chance of engagement. Along with this, you can track everything from likes to shares, giving you a better idea of what is and isn’t working.

If you want to improve your social media performance, the use of Klout is a must.

4.  Dasheroo

It can be a challenge to engage with your audience when you don’t know what’s generating the best response.

Maximizing engagement often comes down to nothing more than knowing your numbers. Dasheroo can help with this, as it serves as an all in one dashboard for all your social media accounts.

If you’re going to put time, money, and energy into your social media strategy, you might as well go all the way. This means tracking the most important KPIs associated with your business.

5.  Hootsuite

Managing one social media account can be time-consuming (and often frustrating). If you have several associated with your business, you may find it a challenge to keep up with the action.

Hootsuite can help with this, as it allows you to manage all your social media platforms from a single dashboard.

You can schedule posts, engage with your audience, and measure your return on investment (and that’s just the start).

If you’re tired of spending a lot of time on social media, without ever really knowing what you’re doing, use Hootsuite to get organized. It’s one of the best tools you can use from a management and engagement perspective.

Engagement is a Big Deal

With roughly 70 percent of Americans using social media in some form, this is a great way to give your business a boost. As long as you’re focusing on engagement, not just publishing updates, you have a greater chance of success.

It doesn’t matter if you are joining Twitter chats to connect with your audience or using LinkedIn groups to your advantage, you need to get your brand in front of your audience as this positions you to engage with those who are interested in what you have to say.

Conclusion

You don’t have to use all of these social media tools, but each one can have a positive impact on your social media marketing strategy.

Engagement is the name of the game, so make sure you’re connecting with your audience as often as possible. This will put you on the right track.

What steps are you taking to ensure that you’re getting as much benefit as possible from your social media updates? Do you use any other tools to help with engagement? Share your thoughts and personal approach in the comment section below.

The post 5 Tools To Maximize Your Engagements On Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Marketing: Making Emotional Connections That Drive Advocacy

Similarly to the conversations we have with friends, Pattabhiram stresses the importance of having conversations with your consumers rather than campaigning to them. His principle of adaptive marketing touches on the idea of behavior-based marketing, rather than mass-marketing.

Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all campaign, companies need to listen, learn, and engage with their consumers. The point isn’t to market a product to whom you think people are—it’s to market the product to the behavior of each individual. This continuous loop of “listen, learn, and engage” drives lifetime value between brand and customer.

Regarding advocacy, Chandar says not to confuse consumer loyalty with consumer advocacy. Secondly, don’t assume a correlation between your most lucrative consumers and your best brand advocates. Pattabhiram describes consumer advocacy with what he calls a 1% rule to advocacy: “90% of your consumers are lurkers, 9% are likers, and 1% are true lovers.” So while that 1% may not significantly contribute to your revenue growth, they do still provide significant value to your brand. Companies should make diligent efforts to reach out to this 1% and make it as easy as possible for these consumers to advocate passionately for your brand.

Embrace the Art of Storytelling

Consumers are constantly surrounded by the noise of similar and multiple brand offerings. This has created a shift in the balance of power from marketer to customer. Storytelling allows for a brand to not only differentiate themselves, but to also create a unique engagement opportunity. The goal of storytelling is to create an emotional connection with your consumers. These principles can help your brand identify their story:

1. Go from product-driven to outcome driven, or what Pattabhiram refers to as “customer-obsessed.” Customers don’t care about the actual product, they care about what the product means to them.
2. Make your story memorable. Facts are less important than the epic nature of the details in a good story.
3. Be authentic. Build connections with your consumers on an individual basis.

The Engagement Economy in Action: Marketo and Aetna

As the marketing industry’s innovation leader and best solution for high growth enterprise businesses, Marketo is focused on helping marketers shift from the traditional styles of marketing to the new style of engagement. In today’s engagement economy, it’s important to build continuous, meaningful, and relevant relationships at every step in a consumer’s journey. This focus allows for the growth of revenue—and lifetime value. By capturing what is in your consumer’s mind, you are ultimately securing long-term engagement.

Marketo has helped healthcare organization, Aetna, with its engagement marketing strategies—with great success. With the altruistic goal of delivering better health care to people, the brand campaigned directly to its employees. Aetna has effectively combined its social channels with its website and associated pages, creating a unique and personalized experience for its customers. After their initial investment of $500K in their campaign, they have seen a 16x return on investment.

Podcast: Chandar Pattabhiram

For those of you who’d like to learn more about Chandar Pattabhiram and his advice for thriving in the “Engagement Economy,” we invite you to listen to his podcast, below. You can also subscribe to the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast on , Stitcher and to learn more from the marketing industry’s top CMOs.

The post 4 Reasons to Embrace Engagement Marketing appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

That is to say, social media is now an engagement venue and can deliver amazing benefits to brands if they approach it that way—by fostering engagement among customers and with the brand. If you’re engaging people and they are paying attention to you, that’s a basic form of brand awareness and education. If they share your posts, that’s word of mouth marketing, and in some cases serves as an endorsement. If they comment and tell stories, they are contributing, which is a form of commitment that develops loyalty, advocacy and sales.

This activity, especially the comments, can become valuable sources for insight.

The difference between ‘Like’ and ‘Love’

Large fan numbers alone rarely contribute to a tangible impact on your bottom line.  It’s more of an industry vanity metric. Sometimes, if tied to a promotion, you get results, such as sampling, or short-term sales; but it really just isn’t sustainable over time. In fact, large follower numbers can often lead to a drop in a fan’s perceived value of a brand.

For example, a beverage company offered free samples of their new healthy juice drink to people who “liked” their page. Due to an overwhelming response, they ran out of samples. However, many of those who responded would “like” the page only to get a sample, not for the purpose of engaging with the brand or receiving information about the brand. The cost of the program was worthwhile from a sampling perspective, but the accumulated fans had little value in terms of sustainable engagement because they didn’t “like” the page for the right purpose, nor did the brand follow up with any kind of conversational engagement that might otherwise have built loyalty.

large follower numbers can often lead to a drop in a fan’s perceived value of a brand.

Just building up fan numbers doesn’t create engagement or sustain it. You have to create conversations that are of interest to your customers and empower them to do so as well. For several years brands were primarily focused on amassing fans, but after having built up a certain number, they didn’t necessarily know what to do with them. Customers may “like” or “follow” a brand’s page, but that doesn’t mean they will engage with you. This is partly due to the social nature of the media form.

The value of a ‘Like’

95% of Facebook brand “likes” never return to the brand page, so they only see your content if it shows up in their newsfeed. This happens when you post really good social content on your page, or if you pay for ads that send content to a customer’s page. But even then a customer isn’t necessarily paying attention to that ad. It has to be socially engaging whether it’s done through organic (on your page) or paid (advertising) approaches. Data shows that either organic or paid, the more socially engaging the post the more reach it has and the more attention customers pay to it. This is partly due to the inherantly social nature of humans and partly due to the algorithms the social networks use to control what gets through to users.

Of course you want to have fans so you can engage with them, so building that number up is useful in this context. However the real business goal is engagement. Engagement impacts business, not fan numbers. As such, a smaller number of fans with more engagement are more valuable than a large number of fans with small engagement. As an example: 5,000,000 fans with 1/4% engagement = 12,500 people engaged. 500,000 fans with 5% engagement = 25,000 people engaged. In the latter case, by investing less in fan growth and more in engaging them, the overall cost is lower yet with better results.

The post Forget your Follower Numbers, It’s Time to Focus on Engagement appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Create Emotional Connection

The gold is found when brands create emotional connection. Creating emotional connection is real and authentic. Connecting an emotion to your brand is #winning. Making people cry over absent fathers, daughters going to war, or children unable to grow up because you failed to use safety locks does not in any way connect those emotions to your brand. It feels manipulative, and the last thing you want your customers to feel is manipulated and cheated. Which is how we got to #Downerbowl as a trending hashtag. I found that hashtag embarrassing to my profession. And to be completely honest, I did feel manipulated. And it made me actually angry at the brands for trying to get tears from me to buy a car.

Before #Downerbowl, we had a few great ads that made emotional connection to the brand in a powerful way. Dove does a great job with their Real Beauty series. Always did it with Like A Girl. And Similac recently did a great thing with their recent video. All of these examples tied the emotion to the brand. Dove and Always are about making women feel ok about being women and aging. They make the viewer feel powerful. And in Always’ case, they elegantly pointed out that “Like a Girl” is an insult that’s time has come. Similac tackled the age-old parenting battles that tear people down and remind us, it’s about our children because we are all doing our best to raise kids despite our differences.

Connect Emotion To Your Brand

The lesson here is to find a way to connect emotion to your brand. It is not easy. At all. If it were, the ads that fell flat would have been stars. But, they weren’t. Creating emotion is a ton easier. But it isn’t enough.

If you want to go the emotion route here are a couple of tips and tricks to consider:

Do not sell fear

We all see this one a lot. We saw it in the Nationwide ad that lit up Twitter in the wrong way on Super Bowl Sunday, but we also see it all the time in social. Fear baiting is not the way to create emotion. In fact, I have seen countless brands lose a big chunk of fans by posting a significant amount of content that may have been perceived as frightening. Financial and insurance institutions that have posts about fraud, theft, or what to do when you lose your wallet scare the daylights out of people. When people are on using social media or watching the Super Bowl or Oscars, they are catching up with friends; they do not want to be greeted by Debbie Downer scaring the crap out of them.

Play to hope

I want to believe that tomorrow is going to be better, and if your brand can help tomorrow be better – this is an easy win. Show people how tomorrow will be better by using your products. And I do not mean that tomorrow will be better if I have a new car. What I mean is what is your company doing to make tomorrow better and why should my buying your product fill me with hope for the future. If there is no direct play with your product making things better tomorrow, you can always try to tackle a subject that is top of mind to your customers and tackle that in an attempt to be the brand that starts a conversation (without killing a fictional child).

Remember the context of your ads and when people will be interacting with them. I still contend that useful will win the day. But as we are smack dab in the creating-emotion theme in the ad game, I would recommend that we move the bar higher and stop creating emotion; instead, work on creating emotional connection.

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My friend and colleague, Danielle, recently shared this article: “How to Craft an Agile Marketing Campaign”. It’s a solid how-to piece that you should read. But when I think about these principles for a large-scale enterprise, agile has a few hurdles to cross before it is widely adopted. Which is a huge risk for large-scale enterprises. The risk is this: Your scrappy competitors will beat you to agile and will know more about what works faster, giving them a competitive advantage.

Why agile?

Agile is not expensive. Agile is cheap. Which is why smaller, scrappier companies can win with the tools of agile. Agile also does the one thing large-scale campaigns don’t do…test and measure and adjust. Most large-scale campaigns take months of planning, even more months of tweaking, only to launch during the Super Bowl to crickets. Very. Expensive. Crickets. Agile is smaller in nature. You have to start smaller and more rough in terms of campaign. And (broken record alert!) you have to measure everything.

But, we’ve been doing it this way forever. We plan, we focus group, we adjust, we execute, we develop wild contingency scenarios. It is an epic effort to develop a campaign today in our omni-channel world where leaders require results. The problem I see with making the change to agile is three-fold. and the solutions are really simple.

Selling small is impossible to leadership

Agile requires that we start small. The agile campaign is one that starts with a nugget and lets the data determine next steps. That is a tough sell to almost anyone in leadership. Can you imagine that pitch? C-level leadership: “Tell me about the 2015 strategic marketing plan.” Marketing team or agency: “So, we’re thinking about a small Facebook campaign where we are driving traffic to the site using this type of messaging.” More crickets. Potentially career damaging crickets.

Take off your control freak hat

The hardest part for modern marketers with agile is that it requires that we stop trying to control every possible scenario and every possible communication. The reality is this: we are not in control of any aspect of our marketing outcomes. And we never will be. We should work to give up this stress-inducing, arm-flapping habit right away.

We don’t even know where the data is

I’ve talked to far too many clients in my day, and I always ask about results and ROI; I am never shocked to learn they have no idea where the data is. IT and Marketing work in separate, and sometimes combative, relationships. If we are going to be agile, we need to start asking questions about tracking and metrics that we’ve never asked before. We need to know where our customer data lives and how we can tap into it to see if our work is contributing to increased basket size, repeat purchases, account growth, etc. Until we know where the data is, we cannot be truly agile.

The solution

In all of these instances, the insane pitch to leadership, the desire to control everything about a campaign, and our resistance to real ROI measurement doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is this: agile should start with a small piece of the marketing puzzle as a proof of concept. And as any proof of concept, the best stuff stays; the rest is either ignored or re-tooled into a different test. This is how agile could easily be propagated through a large enterprise. Start with a measurable goal. Then, take the time to understand where the data is. Create an outline of what your campaign should be. Take the experimental money you’ve set aside this year, find a use case or a specific product to promote, and do it in agile-style. See what works in a small way before going bigger. It is after all, the agile way.

The post You heard the very expensive crickets. Now, hear this. appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Engagement Is Everything

“It doesn’t have to be a snowman”

There are many things that Jasmine needs: sustenance, protection, attention, reliability, and love to name just a few. And your audience needs the same (regular content, customer service, responses, reputation, and care, respectively). But beyond the basics of her life, she craves (and craves and craves) engagement. There’s no big lesson there; a child wants to play. But the learn has been that it rarely matters what form that engagement takes. She’ll take play time, story time, listening time, helping time, even bath time. To her, attention and interaction is absolutely the most important thing in the world, and I cringe at how many times I fail to provide it. I have vowed (many times) that the offer to “play with me daddy” will never be turned down, but it’s not always that easy. Heck, sometimes engagement is even a chore, and that is painful to admit.

Social marketing is no different. Have I always responded, 100%, to my audience on Facebook or Twitter? Have there been questions asked, doors opened, comments made that have just been ignored? Absolutely. Will I recognize, thank, or even see all of the social shares of even this particular post? It’s ideal, but the honest truth is a hard-to-swallow no. (That speaks to a larger issue of priorities, but this post will be long enough already, so I’ll save that topic for another day.) But every tweet, mention, and share is a possible invitation to play, and we should recognize that if we ignore or deprioritize these it’s at our own peril. Though you might not feel like building a snowman today, realize that it’s not the snoman that matters; it’s the engagement that your audience craves.

Lack Of Focus Is Okay

“I’ve started talking to
the pictures on the walls”

If I ask Jasmine to walk to the bathroom and brush her teeth, an entire hour can pass (okay, what seems like an hour) before she ultimately gets to her destination…if she ever does. On one hand, her ability to be distracted is maddening; on the other hand, it’s amazing how she sees possibility in everything. Color her Dug from Up (#squirrel!). What I am realizing is that her lack of focus is only part of the problem; the other part is my lack of patience. Cue the parallel to consumers, employees, and any other audience for your brand. Each one of us is constantly distracted, constantly looking somewhere else, constantly allowing our attention to be grabbed by any number of dings, beeps, alerts, and brain wanderings. As marketers, this drives us crazy because we want 100% of the focus on us, what we are producing, and what we are trying to say. But as regular people, we are the same exact way.

What I have learned from my daughter is that she needs pretty regular instruction, laser-focused guidance, and just enough leeway that she doesn’t realize she’s right on track. Too often, especially in social, we do the exact opposite of this. We post random words and images, we have no real strategy for CTAs (other than to always include one…somewhere), and we do a poor job with patience. Yes, it may take a prospect (much) longer than you’d like to progress in the funnel, but with patience and care, you can get your audience where you want them to go. Just realize that the patience-and-care part can’t be shortcutted. Without any clear plan of action, you’ll find the toothbrush in the underwear drawer, the stool turned upside down, and your audience in a totally different room of the house (#truestory). We tend to get very impatient due to the pressures to engage, convert, and ultimately prove ROI, but don’t blame the distracted; it’s in their (um, our) nature. Look at your own part of the process, and do your best to make the plan stupid simple to follow. In other words, hide the Elsa doll; otherwise, you’ll never really be the center of attention.

Words Matter

“I wish you would tell me why”

To a three-year-old, language is very fuzzy and fluid. It’s a great time of experimentation, learning, and play. But to a four-year-old, words suddenly become very important. The often-relied-upon “in a little while” or “later” just doesn’t cut it anymore; “Don’t touch” no longer seems to include using feet or elbows; and “you didn’t say [fill in the blank]” is heard almost every day. But not only are words important because they open up a new world of loopholes, they are important because they open up the grey area on the truth-lie spectrum. Yes, marketers, this should sound familiar.

Fuzzy language, partial truths, and sly misdirection have been part of marketing from its inception. Some would argue that it’s a necessity, others would argue that it’s an evil, and others would argue that it’s both, but the fact is that it’s part of the landscape. Never has a brand’s words mattered as much as they do in our current age of social marketing. I won’t trot out the normal list of brands who have gotten into serious hot water due to a word or phrase carelessly tweeted, but such are good reminders that our words, every single one of them, matter. Transparency and wicked clarity are the only tactics to combat an audience who loves the opportunity to prove authority wrong (yes, that audience includes four-year-olds). At the end of the day, my Jasmine is a reminder to me that no matter how temporary I think my words are, there is a lasting impact, and, just like social reminds us from time to time, those words, especially the ones we would like to take back, can be very, very permanent.

Love

“I’m right out here for you, just let me in”

No matter how much we prioritize engagement, focus smartly, and come to a common ground of communication, the relationship means nothing without love. Our job is to love our audience unconditionally, even though they will not always reciprocate. They may even hate us from time to time, and they might even have a very valid reason for that emotion, but we do not give up on the relationship, we do not write them off, and we do not hate them back. You might not always like your audience, but you should always love them (they are why you have a brand, right?). Luckily, my four-year-old has a few years to go before straight-up rebellion should kick in, but I know this lesson is coming, and I’m preparing for it now. As a brand, unconditional love (both giving and inspiring) should be of the highest priority, since all else (conversions, sales, loyalty, etc.) relies on it. And social is the best outlet we have ever had to foster such. When you look at your social channels, do you see love? Do you see love in the form of generosity, helpfulness, honesty, and engagement? How good are you at loving those whom you want to love you back? Social has turned a holiday card friendship into a daily relationship, and how you tend those relationships now will heavily inform when the tide turns. I’d advise you, and me, to prepare for the teenage years now. Because love, unconditional love, is the only way we will survive.

Engagement, Focus, Clarity, and Love

“Do you wanna build a snowman?”

First, I deeply apologize if Frozen is now stuck in your head, but welcome to the world of having a four-year-old daughter. And her birthday wish would actually be for you to be Frozen-filled today, so I’ll consider that your present to her. These four lessons, and how they relate to brand marketing, hit home with me today, and I thank you for taking the time to take this journey with me. I’m sure there are many more lessons to come, and there are likely many of you who have your own lessons to pass along. The comments area is there for you, so I encourage you to drop some wisdom for me, my team, and the rest of our readers. I’ve built the bottom level as a foundation, so who is going to help build the rest of this snowman? I’m hoping it’s you.

The post Four Things My Four-Year-Old Has Taught Me About Social Marketing appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Where we ended up – “Thought Leadership”

We have somehow taken the noble-ish idea of having a conversation with customers on a grand scale, to want to be more “human” and become thought leaders. Talk about ego in social. We should not assume that we are in a position of leadership. I am lucky enough to write for this blog and regularly pontificate about my ideas and thoughts on digital and social media marketing. Does it make me a thought leader? No. It makes me someone who is lucky enough to get 700 words a week to spout off on things in my professional world. I’ve blogged twice now on being useful instead of human.

Where we can go – “Trusted Resource”

And now, I’d like to shift the thinking from becoming a thought leader to just being a trusted resource. Like being useful, it is far more attainable and honestly, what people expect from their product and service providers. We need to be the guys who work at the local bookstore who know all the books ever written about anything. Or the hardware store guy who knows how to hack your broken pipes back together. We trust them. Are they thought leaders in books or plumbing? No. They are people who we trust to ask about our lack of knowledge in a certain area. In fact, I would MUCH rather be a trusted resource over a thought leader any day.

Thought leader does imply a competitive advantage. It implies people will take my work more seriously. Being a thought leader, you are implying that you know more, best. And if I think about, I don’t want that from my favorite brands. I want to feel like I can trust them. I want to feel like that are interested in helping me first. I want to be able to ask a question and get an answer. I want to be able to be inspired and neither of these elements implies thought leadership. One could argue that thought leaders are inspirational. And one would be right. But, I do not feel they are not mutually exclusive.

And let’s be honest, trusted resource is a lot more achievable than 100 thought leaders in an organization. And to that point, can a company BE a thought leader? Or are thought leaders people who work for the company? I struggle with this all the time. Because I cannot think of a single brand that I would label a “thought leader”. There are people who work at certain companies that I view as thought leaders, but it doesn’t inherently translate for me. Call BS on me with this one in the comments. I am wrong all the time!

When you are a trusted resource, you will offer your fans more tips and tricks, answer direct questions and provide them with the information about the best uses for your products and services they never thought of. And it builds trust, because you are there to support them. You are better able to really earn the right to introduce them to new products and ideas when they know and trust your guidance and advice. And best of all, you can back it all up. Being a thought leader means working really hard to stay on the cutting edge. Being a trusted resource is being a customer advocate, being a thought leader might be a little ego-driven.

The post Consider the trusted resource appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

There has been quite a kerfuffle over how Facebook has changed their algorithm to hinder a brand’s reach. People have said that they are biting the hand that feeds them (total teenager move!). Over at Twitter, they are working hard to monetize their platform with more ads in feed. And LinkedIn is becoming a classifieds section and everyone’s content (people included!) is getting lost. Yes, indeed, social is growing up and becoming a fine teenager. And it’s time for us to let go a bit so that we can grow up too. Here are a few points to ponder as we do this.

Don’t panic

Change is inevitable. How we react to change is the defining factor. I learned in my newspaper days that panic accomplishes nothing but wasting precious time that y

ou don’t have. So, as all of our channels begin to evolve and potentially make it incrementally harder to manage, we must first agree to not panic. In the moment of change, we have to be thoughtful, think it through and slow down. When we do this, we can pivot as well to positively impact our products and brand. The ability to pivot will be a key skillset moving forward for our teams.

Accept

No matter how much we complain; these companies are growing up. And in doing so, they are going to change the rules. And they can. They hold the audience. Which to us marketers is gold. You know what they say: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.” Truth is: they also know that advertisers will pay for it. We will grumble. But in the end we will grumble and pay. And to the platform (and their shareholders), all that matters is the paying part. They hold the cards. You can choose to leave the platform and while you are at it, you could cut off your nose to spite your face. So, not a good choice.

Ask the right questions

And I don’t mean a shrieking: “What do we do nooowwwww???!?!?!!” I mean questions like: Where have we had organic success so far? What did that success mean to our bottom line? How can we adapt the message to deliver greater value? What does our audience value? What can we do to build trust? How can we add to the conversation? These are the questions that should be explored when faced with big changes from our platforms. These are the questions that will help you to…

Adapt

With change comes adaptation. When our platforms change, we should look at it as an opportunity to revisit strategy. Look at it from fresh eyes and determine how we can adapt what we are doing to make an impact on the change. Maybe we become less human and instead become more useful (mantra alert!). When we can look at the challenge in a methodical way, without panic, we can usually devise some great solutions.

Be a student

The time is right be become a student of social media and content marketing. Study your competitors. Study your category. Study all of the people who buy your product. Study the people who don’t. Know what they want. When you are a student of your customers, you can deliver value and honor your relationship with them so that changes will not severely damage the work you’ve done. Knowing what your fans and people like them value in their lives will strengthen the relationship because the focus is where it should be: the customer experience.

Test and learn

It is natural for our industry to spend a lot of time speculating on what these changes will mean in the long term, but, until we start messing around with our content, we cannot know for sure. You must take a test and learn approach. You need to move fast (enough) and break things. You won’t know what’s working and what’s not unless you make a plan to test and learn. Oh, and document so you won’t need to learn it again later.

All of these ways to let go will require a lot of change for corporate marketing departments where change is not as nimble as social requires. But, we too are growing up. We are learning to build audiences, fans and advocates. We are learning new tips, tricks and tools each day to be better at social media. The thing is, we must accept that change is constant. And this will be the first step to letting go of our angst about the social media teenager in our house.

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Jason Falls’ post from last week really got me thinking. People can gain a BIG social following because, duh, they are people. People are unique with personalities, strengths, weaknesses, humor, humility, grace, forgiveness and so on. Individuals can be charming and interesting. It is natural to be attracted to charming people. We are all human after all and enjoy human connection. Well at least some of us do. And because of this reason, it is much easier for people to grow a large social following. It’s natural to want to connect with people and their personalities on social. It is however, un-natural to “engage” with a product or brand. I almost never talk to my pillow. I occasionally talk to my treadmill, but not in a nice, friendly way. So, let’s drop this whole notion of being more human and try instead to be useful.

Anticipate and answer questions

Curate content that is helpful to your audience and related to your product. And when you get to that 20% of the time you are talking about yourself, use that real estate to answer common questions people may have about your product. The beauty of social vs. your website is that it is so bleeping easy to add content that will answer questions that your customers probably have that may be a barrier to purchase. Use social for this! Be helpful. Help them learn something they may not already know about your product, brand or company.

Offer tips and tricks

Your product may have alternative uses that are clever hacks. Tell people. People love to learn new ways to use something they already have. Beyond your own product, look at your category and offer people ways to make their lives easier within your category. For example, if you are marketing tents, there are probably 1,000 additional uses for a rain fly. Poof, right there is a dozen blog posts, a ton of social updates, a meme or two and potentially an ebook.

Lighten up whenever possible

Do not confuse levity with humor. Very few brands can pull off funny. Ever. Usually backfires. Levity is something different. It lacks seriousness. The advice here: Do not take yourself so seriously. You are a brand who makes a product (generally) and your customers have a choice across nearly all categories. And while this competitive nature of business is very real to brand marketers, it is not real to your customers. Lighten up. Social media is where people go to take a minute break in their day. Remember that. Add something light to the conversation. It may be hard and it is going to require some testing to find your footing with levity. On the flip side, some brands should not leverage levity. Serious topics require like zero levity. If you are say a funeral home, levity may not be for you…

Show them

Videos, photos and visual content drive a lot of engagement. If you want to educate your audience on your product or category, consider video and visual assets. These draw attention and can be incredibly useful to people who may have questions on your product or category. We are in the “show me” age after all. So, if you can deliver content via video, photo, infographic, etc. do it.

Support them

There is no better use of social media than helping support your customers. It shows prospective customers that you care and are interested in their success. By not supporting your customers when they have problems, questions or concerns, it speaks very loudly. Like really loudly. So, if you have no capacity to support your customers on social, you should be immediately looking at ways to do this.

Social is growing up and as social marketers we need to evolve as well. It is time we give up the ruse that brands and products can be human and transition to a more tangible goal of usefulness. Always open to new ideas, what other ways can your brand be useful?

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The Power of Now

So much is made of Oreo’s ability to deliver content that is branded, and most importantly for this post, timely. The Super Bowl power outage is often cited as agile marketing at its best. There are a few brands that are building tools and models to master this new, real-time marketing category. Nike is another brand that has joined Oreo in the real-time arena.

Like Oreo, Nike has a large fan base and enviable engagement. Oreo and Nike are consistently posting content that is relevant to not just now, but right now. Both brands have created a clear framework for what to post in real time. When something happens in the world that the social sphere is talking about, these brands activate their creative team to develop real-time posts that are uniquely, yet consistently branded, with a strong rallying cry for their audiences to join in the conversation. These talented creative teams know the Nike and Oreo brands to the letter and are trusted to create and distribute messaging in the moment. When this happens…engagement-polooza!

Take for example LeBron’s second NBA Championship. Nike created content that celebrated the star and they did it in such an engaging way. They invited people to call and leave LeBron a voicemail. They accompanied this with an audio message of different luminaries leaving LeBron a voicemail. The engagement on this post was solid, and in the moment enough. However, look at the post immediately following the Heat’s win, the image of LeBron with the caption “Witness History” was shared 5,800+ times and garnered 90,000+ likes. It captured the very moment the community was in a frenzy.

How to get real-time

The key to getting into the real-time game is threefold. One, have clear brand guidelines. Like insanely clear. For example, nearly all Oreo posts look the same. White background, large hero image, simple message and an Oreo watermark at the bottom. Similarly, Nike’s content has similarities; close in, emotional sports photography or action product shots, Nike font, Just Do It tone.

Once you have created your style guide that includes do’s and don’ts for the team to execute against, we reach our second point. You will need to train the community manager to recognize a real-time marketing moment. This may be the diciest of the steps because this is where things can go horribly awry. Kenneth Cole, we are still looking at you. The ability to recognize a moment in time that has both social buzz and a brand connection sounds a lot easier than it actually is. To accomplish this, it is valuable to brainstorm pop culture events and talk about how the brand can leverage these moments to be more real time. You will never be able to plan for all of the amazingly weird things that happen in pop culture, but, if you brainstorm and design a few scenarios, it might be easier to identify those real-time marketing moments. For example, you know something interesting will happen at an awards show. Engaging your social team to talk through different scenarios and how the brand might be able to listen to the social chatter and contribute something amazing in real time. For example, remember when Angelina Jolie flashed serious leg at the Oscars, the team at Skintimates could have been all over that conversation will a real time approach. This was a missed opportunity.

It is important to trust your team to do their job and engage in real time marketing

So, you have your guidelines and the team is listening for a real-time marketing moment, then, you will need to be ready to trust the team to authorize the creation of content in real time and execute that work. Since most community managers are not artists or comics, it may mean activating your agency at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday; it may mean that you have a team on call to create something using a template. Once you have the brand guidelines and the team trained, we come to our final step. Trust. It is important to trust your team to do their job and engage in real time marketing. Mistakes may get made, which if why having a response model at the ready is a great idea.

Oreo and Nike are both beloved American brands with a strong brand voice and iconography. Their adoption of real time marketing is advancing and entrenching their brand in social. They have shifted their marketing mindset to be more agile in nature. And this shift does more to support the consumer than their competitors as media consumption continues to evolve. Are you ready to get real time

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