Helping clients cross the 2.0 divide

“Our members are excited about the potential of social media, but most have not yet fully integrated social media practices into their traditional marketing efforts,” says Richard Guha, Chairman of the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). “While many marketers are worried they’re missing the boat, in reality even the Fortune 500 companies don’t feel they’ve mastered social media just yet.” 

As reported in a recent MarketingVOX article, MENG has released some data from a survey of it’s members. The big headline and opportunity for agencies is that “80% have not yet fully integrated the core elements of web 2.0 into their marketing efforts.” The survey’s release was very timely for me – as over the past few weeks I was reflecting on the challenges fellow marketers have told me they face in executing in the social web and remedies that help them overcome. In no particular order, here are some thoughts:

• Educate the organization – Chances are, it’s not just your client who needs convincing, it’s probably their boss and various other departments who have a hand in their companies digital marketing (i.e. IT, Customer Service etc.). When putting together a fancy ppt with the latest social web data, keep those other folks in mind. Don’t just include general data on Facebook and MySpace, add data/ideas that’s specific to the 2.0 trends of your clients industry and operations. Talk about the technology, set-up, man-power etc. (i.e. is it a hosted app? what kind of maintenence will be needed? will the call center suddenly be flooded with inquiries?). Just like a candidate running for public office, prepare to stump in front of the clients company many times.
• Partner with your client – All agencies claim to be partners. But with web 2.0, you’re really going to have to step up to the plate. One of the prime barriers to clients opening blogs, Vimeo pages and Second Life real-estate is that they do not have anyone on staff who has the time to moniter audience response and track social metrics. Clients don’t want their brand batted around without being able to respond on their behalf – rightly so I may add. So step-up, offer to recruit, hire and manage that position – a Social Brand Activist.  Oh and by the way – offer to share in the costs of the position. If assuring your client is that pivatol, it’s probably worth the investment. Make up the margin on the programming.
• Think small – Trying to convince your client to hand-over the entire paid media budget is not going to work. Like all emerging media, budgeting is an artful evolution. As the social web begins to provide ROI so will the dollars follow. So study the conversational landscape and pitch a test program. Jointly decide on the success metrics and stay disciplined in analyzing the data, optimizing the experience and reporting the good, bad and ugly. Success and failure go hand-in-hand (remember PointCast?)
• Measure new stuff - There’s not many case studies out there demonstrating how social media positively increased sales. It’s a difficult measure – the indirect nature of the media people consume on a way to a sale is difficult to track. There are however, plenty of studies linking the impact blogs and word-of-mouth are having on on/offline sales. So before you go telling your client how they’re going to be the next Zappos, have a sit-down about some metrics that also matter: engagement, referrals, blog mentions, inbound/outbound links, influencers etc.
• Self-service – Introduce your client to free social tracking tools and techniques like BlogPulse, Compete, Google Alerts and TweetBeeps . Not only will these free tools provide insightful data, you’ll get a “Wow!, these are free – Thanks” comment from your client.
• Show and Tell – Do some basic research on Google, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and various other social sites and keep track of how your client’s brand is being trafficked. How are people expressing their like or dislike of your clients brand – through words, audio, video, pictures, grafiti? Is your client aware that their brand is being mashed-up? Dig this stuff up and present it to them. They need to know the positive, neutral and negative.
• Be practical – Suggest that they add a social-bookmarking widget to each page (i.e. sharethis.com)

So that’s what I got for you now. Please share others. As 3.0 is right around the corner :)

- Keith Gerr