Last week, our CEO, Steve Dao (@steve_dao), sat down with Vera Kevic, head of Public Relations and Communications at Access Alliance, to answer a few of her questions about the importance of social media marketing and online community management for brands in today’s digital age. Here are some of the highlights, from the transcript.

Vera: Tell me a little bit about your company and what you do.

Steve: Sure. With the emergence of social media and digital marketing, a lot of consumer reviews – be it brand positive or negative – are happening in the online space and it’s all about how we can ‘control’ those conversations; know what’s being said and then react to them accordingly.

For a small business that’s looking to reach out, generate new business or make new contacts, avenues such as Twitter and Facebook are absolutely massive for this.  For established brands, people are leaving reviews on blogs, various forums and social media. With all of these peer to peer conversations, we want to know what’s being said, and if there is positive or negative sentiment.

V: And then, how do you find in dealing with the company? Say if [social media marketing] is brand new to them, do you find resistance?

S: At times, yes. I’ve been giving a lot of presentations lately where the resistance comes from fear of losing control; opening the conversation, opening the door, and having potential negative things happening or being exposed.  The lesson to the business owner is that you yourself are not going to turn on or off social media.  It’s happening whether you like it or not. It’s up to you whether you want to turn a blind eye, pretending you’re a four year old kid, putting your head under a pillow and having the mentality that if I don’t see you, you don’t see me.

V: Yeah, you’re being talked about on social media. Whether or not you are talking to them or controlling the conversation, it’s still happening.

S: It’s still happening. Whether it’s about you specifically or even opportunities in your industry, you definitely want to know about it. A great example of this is a business owner saying “I don’t know if I want to be there because it’s almost like I’m encouraging people to say positive or negative things”.  Our response to that is, well, you should always be encouraging consumers to say positive things, but if there are negative experiences involving your business or brand, social media allows you to deal with them in the public domain.  This allows other people to see how you handled that situation as well.  We always advise against deleting negative comments.

And then there’s a state in which if you could build community, where community members jump in and start answering questions or addressing negative comments for you. At that point you’ve reached a whole other level of achievement.

V: That’s golden!

S: Absolutely. We are in a time now where a lot of people are trying to justify social media’s ROI. A lot of executives are asking, “Why am I paying people to sit in a room with computers and do this?”. But they don’t really get it. You know, they could drop a couple of million dollars on a TV commercial and know that they’ve caught an audience, etc.  And, yes, while your reach is huge there, are you having a meaningful conversation? Are you learning from and/or listening to your audience?

V: So, how do you create or track the ROI with the use of social media?

S:  We try and educate business owners to ask questions to really make it interactive. And don’t just ask questions just for the sake of pushing your message out there and trying to better your business, but rather ask questions that are genuinely of interest to your clientele; what matters.

So, as you do that, you can kind of tie it into ROI. If you’re a retail brand: possibly retail redemption.  Tie a coupon code to it or tie in some sort of trial. The other interesting ROI that’s very popular is from a customer service standpoint.  If you implement social media and your consumers are asking questions through Facebook or Twitter, and you are answering these questions, well, what is the decrease in your call centre activity, where you would have had to pay someone to sit there and answer phones?  If you can answer that question live and in public, maybe you can turn away 10 or 12 calls that would have referred to that exact same question.

So, there’s a sales implication and a customer service implication. And then just from the traditional ROI: you just want to watch what market your share is doing. If you truly commit to this, and when I say commit to it, I mean invest 12 or 18 months and do it.  Have a strategy.  We hate using the word campaign because we feel you should truly build a community.  You’re not going to dive in for 6 weeks and then dive out like you will a television campaign.

V: Do you see any value to having traditional media, radio, television?

S: It’s an interesting question and I battle with it all the time.  We don’t want to be the type of shop that comes in and tells you to forgo all of the traditional stuff and go completely digital.  However, all statistics have shown that media buys through to 2015 are becoming more digital.  There’s more money spent on social teams and bringing digital marketing and social media in house.

The logic model that I use, from a small business standpoint, is your ability to ‘fail fast’ (should you fail) on social or digital marketing.  What I mean by that is, if you’re a business and you’ve gone outbound with a print campaign – even this little café we’re in now – if they want to do a mail drop in this area, they went into a print shop and say they want 2500 pieces, it’s going to cost them ‘x’.  The print shop is motivated to say, I’ll give you 5000 pieces for just incrementally more. It’s not going to be double what the 2500 were.  So the business owner or the brand manager is motivated to say, yeah okay, we’ll reach more, it’ll just cost a little bit of money so my per unit cost will drop, which makes sense from a per unit standpoint. But there you are only putting out one message, one image, one target.  You push it out and you wait, whether that be print or TV or whatever.

Digital media ads allow you to run specific ad campaigns through a strategy. I can go outbound and target, say, people aged 18 to 24 and 40 to 55. And I can use a different message for both, but I’m not spending any more money.  So for a thousand dollars, I’m going 500 to this market and 500 to the other market.  And I can test and see the different results.

So it’s no secret that that’s why, I’m not going to say social and digital is better, but you often now see traditional media pointing to social but you don’t see social pointing back.  You don’t see social saying “Hey, look for this flyer in your mailbox and do this”.  It’s saying at the end of our TV commercial, “Like us on Facebook here” on the postcard you see “Follow us on Twitter here”.  So it’s pointing in that direction and will only continue to do so as businesses and brands look to Spark Conversation™ and leverage peer validation.

So we ask you:

What do you think about today’s social media marketing landscape? Did you learn anything new?

Peoples’ social and purchasing behaviour are becoming increasingly intertwined. Users are becoming more and more comfortable with social media; trusting it more and responding to the ways in which it develops the traditional purchasing process.

Just as consumers are social, it’s no surprise that the products they purchase and the brands with which they interact should be as well. However, it’s not just about having a social presence, but using this presence to drive sales. Brands both big and small are taking to Twitter as a means to promote products and increase sales. Read below to check out some popular Twitter sales strategies.

Sony Vaio

It wasn’t long ago that Sony offered over 1,500 Twitter users the opportunity to build a customised Sony Vaio laptop at a 10% discount. During this period, Sony reported an increase in Sony Vaio sales of $1.5 million. While many social media campaigns focus on freebies and contests, the Sony Vaio offer had a clear sales target. The Twitter promotion offered Sony consumers value – a personalized product at a reduced rate; incentivizing users to buy who might not have otherwise.

Crowd Seats Tickets

Crowd Seats, an online sporting event ticket supplier, reports that 1 in every 3 orders they receive comes directly from social media. That’s a whopping 33% of business that never existed 10 years ago. Check out how sports teams are using social media to drive ticket sales by taking a peak at Crowd Seats’ infographic below.

What have your experiences been driving sales through Twitter and other social media?

According to a new study by The Research Intelligence Group, 76% of consumers (that’s 3 in 4!) look for a lawyer using online resources at some point during their search.

For lawyers looking to identify leads and find clients, this means one thing: in today’s digital age, a robust online presence is absolutely crucial. Lawyers can choose to join the conversation or lose out on valuable business development opportunities. In order to successfully market yourself and your firm, you should regularly maintain the following online assets.

Custom Website with an Integrated Blog

Knowing how often consumers turn to the web for general inquiries nowadays, it is absolutely essential for lawyers to have a website and blog that can address common legal questions and issues. Offering helpful whitepapers, checklists, FAQs and articles on your website not only demonstrates your profound knowledge and breadth of experience on the subject, it also proves your value to online consumers. Plus, a unique and appealing client-friendly web design helps to separate your firm from the competition.

Strong Social Media Presence

Social media is a phenomenal marketing tool for today’s legal professionals. Frequent activity across all major social media platforms allows you to spread your message to a wide audience and interact with potential leads on a more personal level.

Nowadays, consumers receive input and advice online from family and friends through social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. When people receive a service, whether good or bad, they often post comments and reviews online. It’s now possible to get tips and suggestions when choosing a lawyer from a handful of contacts and connections, simply by reviewing what they’re posting via social media. That’s the power of peer recommendation.

Regular Email Marketing Campaigns

Frequent email marketing campaigns are great for keeping in touch with your mailing list. In business, it’s a common rule that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clientele. Those clients or contacts that provide referrals likely make up a chunk of your mailing contacts. By sending out email campaigns on a regular basis, you remind them of your services and encourage them to spread the word. Plus, email marketing is a great way to keep everyone updated on new offers or firm events and invite them to follow your updates via social media.

SEO Program

In order to rank high in search engine results, it’s good practice to optimize your website. By considering how search engines work as well as the way in which consumers perform web searches, a marketing professional will be able to assess your website and take measures to improve its visibility in the search process.

There’s no denying that today’s digital age has dramatically changed the way in which people look for lawyers, or any professional service for that matter. In the end, the way in which you choose to react to this change will have a great impact on the success of your business.

One innovative approach to social marketing for lawyers is MyLawBid, a new online business development tool. If you’re a lawyer in Toronto, Ottawa or Vancouver, MyLawBid can bring prospective clients directly to you. Click through for more information about the benefits of MyLawBid as a legal business development tool.

Moms are an important part of offline life, so it’s no surprise that they’re a pretty big deal online, too. Whether they’re connecting with friends, family or brands via social media or they’re sharing the latest product reviews or recommendations on the web, there’s no denying that online moms are an active and influential market.

The Social Space

Did you know that one in three bloggers are moms? It’s true! In fact, 52% of all bloggers are parents with children under the age of 18. Moms are frequent social media users as well. Compared to the online average, moms are 38% more likely to follow or become a fan of a brand or celebrity on Facebook or Twitter. And almost 5 million moms – over one third of their unique visitors from home computers – visited Pinterest in March, 2012.

Surfing the Web

In order to save time and money, many moms are also avid online shoppers. According to Neilson data, moms are 35% more likely to shop for clothes, 50% more likely to buy toys, 29% more likely to buy music, and 23% more likely to purchase e-books online.

Going Mobile

But moms don’t just limit their online and social media practices to the house. They take it everywhere! According to a study by NM Incite, 54% of moms own smartphones and 50% of moms access social media using their mobile devices, compared to only 37% of the online population.

Check out the infographic below for more interesting tidbits about the American Media Mom.

This post was contributed by Joe Linford, who writes for the social shopping site Broadband Genie.

Brands give a lot of attention to social media, and really, why shouldn’t they? Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest have enabled brands to connect with their target audience and increase customer engagement. Businesses can tap into the vast user base of these platforms to provide information about products, services, new product launches, and customer service easily. The best part is that their customers love it! If your customers are sharing what you share, re-tweeting your tweets, and re-pinning your pins, your social media marketing strategy is a success, but the success of any social media marketing campaign isn’t determined by the number of fans and followers. Any marketer worth their salt will also tell you to measure social media analytics.

Most businesses have depended on inbuilt dashboards like the insights section for Facebook page. It gives you information like the reach, number of likes, and so on, but fails to provide a breakdown of advanced metrics such as demographics and conversion data. With social media becoming more complex than ever before, these metrics are now becoming critical for business owners to fine tune their social media strategy, and to understand how the socially savvy customer is reacting to their content.

Here are three simple ways of tracking social media data –

Social interaction analytics

Social interaction analytics is available for Google Analytics users. Initially launched to track Google+ activity, it can now be integrated into social network buttons and used to track general and advanced social interactions.

To use social interaction analytics, you must first install social network buttons from their respective websites. Social network buttons include the Facebook like button, the Tweet button, the +1 button from Google+, and the Pin It button from Pinterest. Currently, tracking is available only for Facebook and Twitter. Google+ tracking is in built and no separate code needs to be installed for it.

Each button code needs to be appended with a specific tracking code from Analytics. The snippet looks like this:

_gaq.push(['_trackSocial', network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath]);

Use this link to understand each parameter and how you can customize this code snippet to receive data in your Analytics dashboard.

Advanced social interaction features for Facebook include number of unlikes, which can be very useful in creating an effective social strategy.

Google Analytics Tagged URLs

Tagged URLs are the most effective and probably the easiest way to track social traffic to website links and blog posts. By using a unique URL, you can see advanced reporting statistics in the Google Analytics dashboard.

Use the
Google Analytics URL builder to create a tagged URL. If you’re using this to track data from multiple social channels, you will have to create multiple tagged URLs, each specific to one channel.

Tracking with social media management dashboards

Perhaps the easiest way to track analytic data is by using a social media management dashboard. Hoot Suite is a wonderful tool that provides essential social interaction data that helps brands understand the effectiveness and reach of their social media campaigns.

The URL shortening service, bit.ly, also provides reporting features like number of clicks and traffic sources.