BarnRaisers

With new media channels comes new nomenclature and ways of doing business. This is true for the term, social engagement.

But what is social engagement? What does it achieve? Does it result in more sales? Better awareness? Greater loyalty? How do you know it’s working?

Or, is it just a new way of saying customer service, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and relationship building using social metrics such as Likes, Comments, Views and Shares?

Here’s what 21 experts tell us social engagement means and does.

1. In the social context at GE, engagement is the discovery and exchange of shared values and interests. - Linda Boff, global executive director of digital, advertising and design, GE
2. The process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of those people. – Center for Disease Control
3. The basis for effective communication, and together these are the foundation for mutual awareness, respect, and understanding, which in turn are the foundation for relationship building. – Center for Excellence in Mining Innovation
4. The action of engaging with others using computer-mediated communication tools. Engagement means establishing and sustaining relationships, while developing a level of trust that makes people comfortable enough to do business with you. - Urs E. Gattiker, Author of ComMetrics
5. Likes, or shares or comments. But then for our educational series, views may be the engagement. The metrics continue to solidify over time, and there is no one answer to all programs. - Scott Gulbransen, director of social business strategy, H&R Block
6. The number of unique people who have clicked on your posts. This number encompasses only the first 28 days after a post’s publication. – Facebook
7. The process of working collaboratively with community groups to address issues that impact the well-being of those groups.  Activities that help firms engage the community include credible and transparent reporting, town hall meetings and collaborative decision making. – Financial Times
8. The level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time. – Forrester
9. The process of working with people with similar situations, special interests or geographic proximity to address issues affecting their quality of life. – Genesse County Health Department
10. The ability to reach out to and get response from a company (as a consumer) or an audience (as a company). For instance, if I go onto Twitter and post a question to a specific company (@Ebay, for example), I hope to receive a response. That’s engagement. Instant, human. – Angela Hausman, Associate Professor and CEO, Howard University and Hausman and Associates
11. The level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution, and ownership. Attention + Interaction + Velocity + Authority + Relevant Attributes (variable). – Jeremiah Owyang, Partner of Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group
12. An estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals. Eric Peterson, Web Analytics Demystified
13. Any action a consumer takes with your content. It’s a Like, view, comment or share. Social success should be based on the most valuable engagement, sharing and the earned reach that it generates around a key message. - Matt Rednor, vp of global strategy and analytics, MRY
14. Does the person like/love the brand? Does the person just want the discount coupon you’re offering? Is the person just interested in what you’re up to this week, or in general? Is it a passing fancy or of life-long heartfelt significance? – Philip Sheldrake, Co-Founder, International  International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC)
15. How a brand and consumer connect and interact within their networks of relevance; measured by takeaway value, sentiment or feelings, and resulting actions following the exchange. - Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter Group, and Author of Engage
16. Connectedness, or creating a closer relationship with your audience. Brands can be engaging by creating compeling ideas and useful content that people want to share. - Pat Stern, chief creative officer, iCrossing
17. A social event that involves your directly and/or has impact on your social presence. Examples of engagement include: new comments, RTs, check-in to your venues, likes of your videos on YouTube, clicks on your links, etc, etc. - Social Report
18. A positive emotional return on social media marketing activities can be delivered over time, providing you give, give, give. – Chris Street, Commercial Content Creator, Bristol Editor
19. Social engagement is: 1) Provide high-quality content, 2) answer questions, 3) participate in conversations, 4) provide great customer service to customers and potential customers and 5) go offline - Sysomos
20. The new currency for social marketing effectiveness – Bernard Warner, Journalist and Auther
21. A social phenomenon enabled by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and taking off with the technical developments in connection speed (broadband) in the decade that followed. – Wikipedia

Taking these definitions into account, I’d explain social engagement as good, old fashioned relationship principles that have proven to work in the past; only now, they are taking advantage of online social channels and sharing to build community faster and influence more people in real time for better results. That’s why I do it.

How would you explain social engagement? Is it worth doing for your brand?

“Build it and they will come” may be a great idea for a building a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa corn field. But it doesn’t work as a social media plan.

There are now 900,000,000+ Facebook pages, 100,000,000+ LinkedIn members, 59,000,000+ active Twitter profiles and 31,000,000+ blogs…all growing. Your audience isn’t going to come to you; you have to find them.

Fortunately, there are many tools (most “open source”) to help identify: 1) who to attract, 2) where they are and 3) how well to know them.  It’s time well spent to take these steps and find your target audience. You don’t want to pursue a Field of Dreams where you build it and they don’t come.

Here are 16 targeting tools to find your audience in social media.

1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS. The #1 tool for finding your audience in social media is the analytics tool for your website. Why? In “Traffic Sources,” you’ll learn how many people find your brand’s website through social media; what social networks or “referrals” drive the most traffic and what are the specific contributions of each social network (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) in terms of: Unique Visitors, Time on Site and Pages Viewed. Now, you know how and where to spend your time and/or money. According to Northwestern University, just Facebook and Twitter (on average) drive 50%+ of traffic to small business websites.

BLOGS

2, 3 and 4. TECHNORATI, ALLTOP and TOPSY: To create 1-to-1 relationships with big dividends, look for advocates who help spread the word. Blogs are the best place to start. There are search engine for blogs: Technorati and Alltop. They’ll help you find the bloggers with the most authority for any industry or subject.  Plus, there’s Topsy to show the top trending blog posts on Twitter for any industry or topic. HubSpot says blogs lead to 55% more website visitors. Blogs also add “links” that raise your “authority” and search rank.

FACEBOOK

5, 6 and 7. WILDFIRE,  STRUTTA and VOTIGO: “‘Like’” Us on Facebook” is something most company want us to do. Why? Studies, like the one below, say the #1 reason we would “Like” a company on Facebook is to receive offers or discounts. We return our support in return. So why not attract your audience through a sweepstakes, contest or offer with an app on Facebook like Wildfire, Strutta or Vortigo. There’s available at a price point that works for any business and deliver not only “Fans” but a list with their e-mail addresses to stay in touch.

8. BOOSHAKA: 10% of your community drives 90% of conversations according to Forrester Research. To find out who are your biggest fans on Facebook, there’s Booshaka. For a Facebook Brand page, it ranks your “fans” so you know their value in terms of participation and sharing.

9. FACEBOOK INSIGHTS (“PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT”): Now, you have the road map for generate “buzz” on Facebook with Fans who can help do the heavy lifting. Use Facebook Insights and the “People Talking About” measure to monitor your progress and participate when you see comments that drive conversation.

TWITTER

10. TWITTER SEARCH: A simple way to find Followers in real-time who are talking about something that is relevant to your business or they are at at a place or event that might be important to you is by typing it in the query box of  Twitter Search. For example, at AJ Bombers, a burger restaurant in Milwaukee, Twitter Search has been used to reach visitors at the Milwaukee airport. A friendly message tells them if their travels in the area happen to take them downtown and  their near the restaurant, a special offer is waiting for them.

11. KLOUT: Once you find people you want to follow, you might want to know their Klout Score and their influence. Now, you know who to the follw on Twitter and how they can increase your reach. 30% of people use Twitter to research and buy products.

LINKEDIN

12. SIGNAL: LinkedIn’s Signal certainly isn’t new, but it is one of the most powerful services they’ve released. Signal allows you to filter and browse only relevant status updates from your LinkedIn and Twitter streams. You can target updates from colleagues, competitors, etc., and narrow or expand your view based on the following filters: Network, Industry, Company, Time published, Location, School or just most popular hash tags.

13. SWARM: Although LinkedIn’s official description of Swarm is “an eerily beautiful visualization of popular company search queries on LinkedIn,” I’ve seen popular title searches, most recent LinkedIn blog posts, most shared news, and recent jobs posted on LinkedIn.

YOUTUBE:

14. YOUTUBE ANALYTICS: YouTube Analytics is a self-service tool that gives you detailed statistics on your videos and your viewers. It’s an easy and powerful way to discover which videos and themes work best for your audience. How do viewers find you? How long do they watch your videos? When do they leave? YouTube Analytics gives you all the details, video by video or for all your videos at once, so you really understand your audience.

15. VIEWS: This may be obvious, but it’d be silly not to mention it. By monitoring viewership trends, you can identify the best and worst of your video library. This is especially important for underperforming content, where you can then take efforts to boost a video’s popularity through editing or even re-optimizing for SEO.

16. SUBSCRIBERS AND SHARES: They indicate a more engaged commitment on behalf of the viewer. If your content is quality enough that viewers are subscribing to see more of it, that’s basically the YouTube equivalent of an unqualified inbound lead.

How do you approach social media for your business? Do you build it and think they’ll come? Do these targeting tools help you to think differently? Which one would you think of using?

Small businesses:

• Represent 99.7% of all employer firms
• Employ half of all private sector employees
• Pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll
• Have generated 65% of net new jobs over the past 17 years (source: US SBA)

Small businesses have led the way to recovery in every recession.  Today, 80% say they use social media for business, but only 57% have a strategy; that’s based on 2,200 interviews of small business owners according to Business Journal.

Behind every big idea there’s sure to be a strategy so, to narrow the gap, here are 5 big social media ideas for small businesses.

1. TO BUILD IT IS BETTER THAN TO BUY IT: That’s the strategy Melrose Jewelers followed when the ran a quiz on Facebook; one that engaged potential customers by revealing the type of high end watch was right for them through a few, fun questions. They also gave consumers $250 off on that watch whose average price was $5,000. Melrose Jewelers used an app called Wildfire. They could have bought or rented a list of upscale consumers but why. They generated $2,000,000 in sales in one quarter at a fraction of the cost; saw the website traffic go from 50,000/month to 400,000/month and Facebook “Likes” go from 3,000 to 180,000 over the period. The size of their database increased by similar multiples for future marketing initiatives.

2. BELIEVE YOUR PRODUCT IS THE BEST ON THE PLANET: Tom Dickson of Blendtec is a YouTube phenomena. Blendtec has produced roughly a dozen commercials for $1000 each. Some have been viewed over 14,000,000 times. They increased company sales +700% within a year. Take a look at Tom’s passion for his brand and what happened to traffic on the Blendtec website when the commercials starting running.

3. PEOPLE LIKE TO DO BUSINESS WITH PEOPLE THEY KNOW: The idea for  Foiled Cupcakes, a company that sell cupcakes online was created when founder, Mari Luangrath, tried to buy her son a dozen gourmet cupcakes for his birthday. In Chicago, that wasn’t possible for under $100. Mari’s model was to lower costs with no store but a website with delivery service. But when the creation of the Foiled Cupcakes website was off-shored and the developer ran into a problem with PayPal, the cupcakes were ready; the website wasn’t. Mari jumped in and started the company with only Foiled Cupcakes Facebook and Twitter pages and a commitment to build 1-to-1 relationships. Today, 97% of Foiled Cupcakes’ customers come from social media and the company exceeds forecasts by 600%. Mari now get orders for 40,000 cupcakes proving there is no substitute for effective customer engagement.

4. SOCIAL MEDIA AND CUSTOMER SERVICE ARE THE SAME BUSINESS: After six months of break-even sales and no money for traditional marketing, Joe Sorge, the owner of AJ Bombers, a burger restuarant in Milwaukee, started using Twitter to attract customers. Within a year, weekly sales increased +60%. What happened? Joe jumped into Twitter where 75% of patrons now come from and AJ Bombers has attracted 20,000+ Twitter followers. Here is the AJ Bombers story.

5. CUSTOMERS ARE THE BEST RESOURCE FOR INNOVATION, IDEAS AND ROI:  Fiskars is a 300 year old Finnish company that makes fine cutting toosl. Art and Crafts stores are, for the most part, mom and pop businesess so Fiskars created an online social community of crafting enthusiasts called “Friskateers” to reach underutilized channel of small retailers for a 3X increase in company sales. Plus, the 6,000+ “Fiskateers” are used for innovation and new ideas saving Fiskars significant dollars over traditional market research.

These small business stories, as well as many for big business too, are included in the eBook, 166 Case Studies Prove Social Media Marketing ROI, downloadable with just a click on the sidebar of this website. They prove. for every big idea, there’s sure to be a strategy behind it.

Our heart goes out to small businesses because we are one too. Could ideas and strategies like these help your business?

The need to keep a community informed, connected and calm in a crisis has not been felt more this year than in mid-Atlantic and Northeast states devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

In the town of Connecticut where I live, roughly two years ago, a Facebook brand page was started: New Canaan Office of Emergency Management. It’s mission: “To protect the lives and property of the citizens; and prepare for emergencies, coordinate emergency response and recovery, and collect and disseminates emergency information.” Did they live up to their word?

Hurricane Sandy caused 68% in this mid-sized Connecticut town to be without power, 132 downed wires, 140 roads closed, serious electrical fires, one that trapped firefighters, and flooding. Then, there were reports of price gorging on water and gas by local merchants, scams and rogue FEMA agents.

Yet, during a time of hardship, anxiety and worry, “Likes” for the OEM went from 2054 to 2826. Why? Their demonstration of care and commitment replaced as atmosphere of chaos and crisis.

How did they do it? Here are 7 ways Facebook was used by the OEM to weather Hurricane Sandy.

1. PUT TIMELINESS AS A FIRST PRIORITY: Every post to the OEM was answered within a short time even if it wasn’t the desired response.

2, LET PICTURES TELL A 1000 WORDS: Photos were posted multiple times a day

3. USED APPS TO REPORT ON EVERY NEIGHBORHOOD: Google Maps App was a fixtures that showed what was going on every street. In this map, the red pins are downed wires on roads; the green pins are downed trees. This is the map 5 days after the hurricane. At first, it was much more dense with red and green pins as well as yellow pins for fires.

4. PUT A FACE TO THE POSTS: The name, Mike Handler, stood behind every post.

5. LOOKED OUT FOR ONE ANOTHER: When the underside of humanity showed up, the OEM quickly stepped in.

6. PRODUCED CALM BY DEMONSTRATING CARE AND COMMITMENT. Gratitude started to be the subject of people’s posts.

7. SOCIAL MEDIA PROVED FASTER THAN THE NEWS MEDIA: Every major news outlet in the area turned to the OEM for the latest activity and update. Their “news” was often what the OEM had already reported.

Many town  in New Jersey and Long Island endured much worse devastation but the hurricane hurt this town. It is equally clear the Office of Emergency Management helped this town and proved a “best practices” in crisis management of how it can be replicated by others.

By the way, that’s Mike with the real FEMA agents.

Could you use an OEM on Facebook in your community?

Founded in 1983, San Diego-based Circle Foods, LLC makes and markets TortillaLand, a fresh tortilla that cooks in 60 seconds, along with other ethnic foods. Three years ago, Circle Foods doubled its plant and manufacturing capabilities as the result of growing consumer acceptance and retail distribution.

Available throughout the West Coast, Southwest and Southeast in major grocery chains like Ralph’s and Vons, Winn Dixie as well as Costco and Walmart, many consumers love TortillaLand’s taste and naturalness once they’ve tried them. But the brand has low awareness compared to category mainstays, whose products are pre-cooked and processed.

In addition, because TortillaLand requires refrigeration at retail, consumers can’t expect to find it in the same place in every store. Seeking to leverage its success with a core group of loyal brand users and expand that success to new customers, Circle Foods turned to social media marketing, starting with food bloggers who were already talking enthusiastically among themselves about the TortillaLand brand.

In a recent interview, Circle Foods’ Charlene M. Richardson, Director of Marketing, explained how this social media recipe has fared.

BARNRAISERS: How did Circle Foods’ involvement in social media begin?

CHARLENE: Needless to say, we love our fans. So we’re always listening to them. With a little digging in the blogosphere, we discovered that major cooking bloggers were writing about us…even taking pictures of the cooking process on their smartphones and posting them for all to see. Fans were talking about us. Someone who lives in Omaha wrote on our Facebook page, “We drove over 90 miles to purchase them. SO WORTH IT!” The point being, we looked for and found TortillaLand brand advocates. Once we found them, we built relationships and then rewarded them for their support

BARNRAISERS: How does this reward system work?

CHARLENE: From our social media activities, we have a database of close to 20,000 people. We’ve segmented them by state. From time to time, we mail—yes, snail mail—coupons, offers and premiums to express our thanks.  We also have a blogger relations effort. We examine the traffic to cooking bloggers who write about us, the size of their social media following and geography. Because cooking bloggers are publishing new recipes almost every day, many have large and loyal followings. Our efforts work so well that our advocates have mobilized to help us when, for example, we need to spread the word on a line extension (say, corn tortilla) or attend a sampling event at Walmart or other retail outlets.

BARNRAISERS: Which social media platforms are you using now?

CHARLENE: We have a very strong social media presence. We publish a blog on TorillaLand.com every week. We have an active Facebook community of 11,000+ fans with whom we communicate every day. Right now, we are engaging with fans through a social sweepstakes: Win 3 iPads (1 for you; 2 for friends), plus sample packs of TortillaLand flour and corn tortillas and tortilla cookware. So we engage in social sharing and fun. We also have a YouTube channel, a Twitter community, Pinterest page and a few other outposts as well.

BARNRAISERS: What have been the results?

CHARLENE: Sales say it all. Business is up 35% versus year ago. Trade success has been critical, but it is undeniable that social media is a strong contributor. Our sales increases track directly to increases in Facebook Fans, then to YouTube video views and website visits where consumers can use a Store Locator to find the nearest store or download a Product Request Form to take to a retailer, which our fans do.

BARNRAISERS: What social media resources do you have to do the work?

CHARLENE: We have a team of four people from the outside, either from an agency or consultant, and interns from time to time. We meet every couple of weeks to review activity, metrics and decide actions. What makes it work is the consistency of everyone’s involvement, the generation of new ideas and the action orientation.

BARNRAISERS: What advice do you have for a company that is considering or is involved in social media?

CHARLENE: Ask fundamental business questions. What are the desired results? Who do you want to attract? Where do you find them? What are the measurements that matter? If you take the time to ask and answer these questions, the right path for your business using social media starts to reveal itself.

We’re proud that this success story for TortillaLand is also one of our own and that we’ve been with Circle Foods since the beginning of this journey.

Do you think your business could benefit from the principle’s Charlene and her team are practicing? Are you interested in seeing a +35% increase in sales for your business?