Read here to see what the Facebook engineers had to say, and hear what has worked for several case studies.

Intro: Facebook Platform for Mobile

How has the web changed since the early days?

• Photos!
• Facebook tagging (social)
• Games
• Not focused on rendering the best graphics, but social aspect
• 200 million people playing games on Facebook Platform
• The rise of mobile
• Across all levels of mobile devices
• 350M users of Facebook mobile
• Twice as engaged as desktop version
• Social + Mobile
• Friends, Newsfeed, search, notifications, requests, bookmarks
• Photography, websites, music, communication, games, books

Web Apps (HTML5) Development: Matt Kelly & Vikas Gupta

• How to facilitate sharing with friends
• Problematic when sharing over different types of devices
• Apps don’t exist across platforms
• Hard to share content between them even if apps exist
• How can Facebook fix this?
• The social channels
• Requests: user to user direct messaging
• Make sure they are super fast! Almost real-time
• News Feed: one to many sharing with friends
• Posting, view on wall, view on news feed
• Open Graph: Lightweight, seamless sharing
• Wherever your app lives or works, Facebook distributes properly so there are no holes.
• Bookmarks
• m.facebook.com
• Gives users a specific spot to get back to your app
• Mechanism for engagement
• Native facebook for iPhone
• Payments
• Use credits to monetize apps
• Build social from the ground up
• Search, login auth, directed to app
• Social apps work everywhere
• iPhone, laptop, android, ipad, android tablet
• HTML5 works across all platforms

Native App + Open Graph: Aryeh Selekman & Christine Abernathy:

• iOS and Android + Facebook platform
• Open Source Native SDKs
• Developer app settings
• Fields to configure iOS and Android apps
• Linking and app distribution works appropriately if these fields are filled out correctly
• Single Sign On (SSO) login without typing
• Login with facebook button

• Understanding Native Distribution
• If an iOS or app exists, all requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories will link directly to native app (or apple store if not installed)
• On android, requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories wil only direct to your mobile web app
• 5 Best Practices
• 1. Build a mobile web app
• HTML5: distribution on m.facebook.com on all webkit enabled touch browsers
• native wrappers
• take advantage of SSO capabilities

• 2. Implement SSO
• 3. Implement requests for app discoverability
• Rate now, invite friends, send requests
• 4. Leverage existing friend graph
• Promote activity and interaction
• Re-engagement
• Push notification through native channels to let you know your friends joined
• 5. Get your app on timeline

• Open Graph and Mobile Apps
• One API – distribution to ticker, Timeline, newsfeed
• Allows you to define what people do in your application
• Reading, listening, watching, etc.
• 4 Steps to get started using open graph
• 1. Define your actions and objects
• Action verbs
• 2. Design your Timeline aggregations
• Pictures, maps, represent actions and data that people send through
• 3. Markup and expose your objects
• Everything represented by underlying URL
• Where do objects live
• 4. Publish actions
• Object URL
• Action names

Native Distribution for Mobile Apps

Case Study: PhoneGap

• Pattern
• Embed a chromeless browser in a native app
• Create a bridge between the browser and the native code providing access to native APIs
• Write a web app
• Package the web app with the native code and deploy to devices
• Write once debug everywhere
• Take note
• HTML, JS, CSS included in an app package
• HTML loaded on file:// URI scheme, no cross domain request restrictions
• Engineering wise, approach is simple to extend to new platforms
• Support Platforms
• iOS, Android, BB, webOS, Symbian, Windows Phone (mango), Samsung Bada
• Mobile first!
• HTML5: write native code easily, scale like an app so width is design width – no pinch zoom etc
• CSS3: webkit transformations
• The future
• Tooling
• WebGL
• Facebook, Linkedin, Walmart use case
• Continue polyfilling HTML5

Case Study: Washington Post Social Reader

• Coding for the futures
• Everything you write effects possible futures
• Architect for the foreseeable futures
• Short term futures
• Building mobile second
• Use mobile to rethink boundaries
• Roll mobile learning back into the webapp

Case Study: Thuzi

• Hospitality app
• Social by design
• Send invites, RSVPs
• Share great offers with my friends
• Provide reviews of the experience
• Capture the moment for a special occasion (Timeline)
• Local by design
• Dining is a local experience
• Find a local restaurant
• Invite friends, redeem offers, find out what’s happening
• Native by design
• Want to ensure you have access to the newest native APIs
• Want to have the fastest app possible
• Want to guarantee formatting correctness
• More choices for monetization – iAds, etc
• Many existing open source libraries and blog posts and tutorials
• Are not dependent upon plugins or other 3^rd party series for push notifications

Original at Facebook Mobile Hack NYC BlitzLocal

Brands and companies have understood the importance of communication with their customers. Traditionally, in a somewhat antiquated means of communication, chagrined customers would call a 1-800 number or write (if you were even less technologically inclined) to express their displeasure with a company. With platforms such as Twitter and Facebook that allow for instant response and timely interaction, good brands and companies have created accounts on these sites that are staffed full-time by a customer service representative.

1.     Responding requires a high-touch and thoughtful approach

Some great examples of brands that have taken to Twitter are:

-        Airlines:

• Delta’s @DeltaAssist
• American Airline’s @AmericanAir

-        Cable providers:

• Time Warner’s @TWCableHelp
• Comcast’s @ComcastCares

-        Motor companies:

• Ford’s @FordCustService

Engaging customers about their complaints is one of the best ways to retain brand loyalty and encourage their continued use. That being said, there is a right way and a wrong way of communicating with customers. There are two basic categories in which complaints fall: 1.“[brand] sucks” and 2.“[brand] help” – and knowing which to respond to is important. If a Twitter user merely tweets, “@Delta, you truly suck”, how is a brand supposed to respond? There is nothing in which to engage them with. However, if a Twitter user posts “@DeltaAssist traveling with an infant and had a confirmed seat on window but got moved to aisle”, it is Delta’s duty to respond to this customer.

However, one to three tweets should be the maximum for exchanges online; after that, the conversation should be taken offline by exchanging contact information. Sometimes, the problem can be resolved in just one tweet – for example: “@DeltaAssist: I’m sorry about your seat, please DM your confirmation # so we can check your next flight for you.” This takes care of the situation head on without going back and forth.

We’ve also noticed three great ways brands are responding to their fans on Twitter:

1.     Take advantage of over-share

If you’re in NYC, you’ve probably eaten at a food truck or three. The great thing about many food trucks is their ability to be mobile – they are restaurants on wheels! Brands such as the Souvlaki Truck have created Twitter accounts to monitor what they’re fans are saying about them. We recently tweeted to the @SouvlakiTruck recently about missing their food – they used to be right around the corner from us – once they saw our tweet, they responded by offering a care package to be sent to our office. The following week we were all dining on their delicious Greek food.  And because they were tuned in, the Souvlaki Truck was able to be proactive and garner 60,000 impressions from our tweeting our appreciation.

2.     Reveal the human side of brand

Recently, one of our interns tweeted to his colleague that we were out of sweet potato chips and hummus. Another great brand @PretzelCrisps, took it upon themselves to offer their snack as a viable alternative that goes great with hummus. They engaged him and asked for mailing address. Sure enough, that afternoon, bags upon bags of Pretzel Crisps were dropped off at our office. By revealing themselves as real people behind the social media platform and not just an automated bot that responds, the Pretzel Crisp brand was able to create a relationship with a new customer.

3.     Create personal interactions

One particular brand that has an interesting campaign on Twitter is Jell-o, which launched their “Pudding Face Mood Meter” in an effort to gauge America’s current mood. Jell-o is tracking tweets that contain smiling and frowning faces and are taking the opportunity to tweet to those users that tweeted frowning. While they are cued in to the collective American feelings at a current time, they are not making the interaction personal. It seems more insincere to tweet to someone who is having a bad day: “here, have a coupon for a free Jell-o pudding” as opposed to engaging the user if it’s appropriate to your brand message. This misguided effort to connect with new fans and the connection between the brand and the message they wish to convey is not obvious.

The few things we’ve learned from the culture of dissatisfaction are:

1.     That even though consumers are increasingly venting on Twitter and Facebook, certain brands are proactively transform complaints into praise.

2.     Brands can strengthen their existing customer relationships and create new ones by engaging the right way.

3.     As long as you make it a good story – the word will spread itself.

Guest author David-Michel Davies (DMD) is Executive Director of The Webby Awards & the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.       He also serves as Chairman & Co-Founder of Internet Week New York. DMD has appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, and Good Morning America to discuss Internet trends and news, and he has lectured to audiences at a diverse mix of conferences and companies including Interbrand, Microsoft and the Institute for the future.

Original at The Webby Awards Presents: Social Media & the Culture of Dissatisfaction BlitzLocal

Depending on the term, it could be 90%+ of these searches not being relevant, and at $5-10 a click, that’s a lot of irrelevant clicks to pay for to find a winner, even if that winner will pay you $10,000 for a new website.

The biggest problem with B2B is that when someone types in “dentist”, you don’t know if they are a dentist or if they are looking for a dentist.

The die-hard PPC folks will argue that you’re just not choosing the right keywords (go for more specific terms), don’t have enough negative keywords (exclude anyone searching with city terms—since these are likely consumers), or you’re not writing specific enough ad copy (supposedly, consumer won’t click on your ad if your title is “Hey Dentists!”) While these comebacks are true, they are missing the big point.

In B2B marketing, you must target WHO the user is, not WHAT they are searching on.

In search, you don’t know who the user is, but you have a clue by the nature of their search terms. In social, you know WHO the user is and you’re catching them before they search.

STEP 1: Isolate the Target

So while you can get a ton of consumer traffic by targeting “dentist” in Google, when you interest target “dentist” on Facebook, you’re targeting by job title and profession.  Try it. In fact, try a number of job titles and see just how many chiropractors, teachers, plumbers, administrative assistants, and marketing managers there are out there.

Voila!  Now you’ve pinpointed all the dentists, dental assistants, students studying to be dentists, retired dentists, and folks who have a dentist fetish—all of them on Facebook. Now narrow down to the specific target you want by age, location or even specialty—maybe you want to talk to just cosmetic dentists in California.

Add in lateral targets—magazines they read, associations they’re a part of, and so forth.  You can read more about micro-targeting here.

STEP 2: Get Your Testimonials and Trust Signals

You probably thought I’d next talk about ads, which is what most people do.  Nope, in social people don’t search—they are interrupted with banner ads. You can focus on ad copy in Google PPC because people are actively looking. In Facebook, you have to gently nudge people to take a look at you and momentarily distract them from spying on their friends, or whatever they happen to be doing on Facebook.

So you need distraction-worthy content, which comes in the form of what their friends are doing. If that potential dentist client of yours is perusing through what her friends did yesterday, she might be persuaded to click on news where those very friends are talking about your business—maybe how they used your software to get more traffic to their website, streamline billing operations, etc.

When you have a TON of testimonials (across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on), paired with content that you’ve published in major outlets, paired with positive things that other reputable organizations have said about you—then it’s more likely they are coming to you versus you coming to them. Some people call this “inbound” or “pull” marketing because you’re leveraging that prospective friends to do the selling for you. Because, despite your Harvard MBA and years of business experience; sorry Charlie, they trust what their friends have to say more.

Ideally, get this content to live on your website or Facebook page, although this is not completely necessary. Let’s say that you wrote some compelling article in an industry journal. Send ad traffic directly to that site so you can leverage their trust. If you wrote your article correctly, the by-line (about the author piece at the end) will have a line or two about what you do. And if you did a good job creating real value in that article, as opposed to selling, they’ll contact you. No need to scream at them or place popup windows in their path—they’ll find you.

Step 3: Turn Your Ads On 

You wouldn’t have a grand opening party without first making sure your place has plenty of food and drinks, right?  In the same way, make sure you have the compelling content from Step 2 before you start advertising. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Take the interest targets that you set up in Step 1 and pair it against the content you have in Step 2.  Think about WHO you are talking to, not WHAT they might be searching on. For example, if they are a dental hygienist, what content is most compelling to them? What if they are a receptionist—what might they find interesting? You’ll find that you might not have super relevant content for everyone. That’s okay—you’re just testing at this stage. Later you can mix and match what combinations work best.

Note that this is NOT landing page optimization, which is more superficially about elements that comprise the landing page—the image, the size of the button, the headline, and so forth.  We’re talking about the whole lead gen. lifecycle—creating a clear path between the targets, what we say to them, and what we want them to do. That last piece is the landing page—to get them to call the phone number, fill out the form, watch the video, etc.

Step 4: Run the Math

Set your Facebook campaign budgets low, perhaps $10 a day. Use the default CPC bids, since you don’t need to get into the nuances of how bidding works—this is not Google. What you care about is your Cost Per Click and conversion rates.  CPC divided by conversion rate is your cost per lead, by the way.  We created a calculator for your use, in case you are rusty on first semester statistics:

This is B2B, so your cost per lead could be over $100. Maybe you’re at $2 a click and 1 in 50 clicks results in a phone call.  Maybe it’s a lot more because you’re selling something that costs thousands, so that a hundred dollars is an acceptable price. Or maybe you’re competing in New York City, where the price is exorbitant from all the advertisers that overlap one another from poor targeting.

Whatever the case, if you’re doing this on Facebook, you have to be prepared for seemingly negative ROI for the first few months.  Why? Because we are catching people well before they are searching, so it could be months before they want that new website, CEREC machine, billing system, or whatever it is you’re advertising. With Google, the conversion timeframe might be that same visit. This is unlikely in your case, unless your product is an impulse buy and also under $100.

Some final thoughts:

We are often asked a common set of questions, so let’s address some of them here:

How big should my interest target be? You don’t need a thousand ads—just a handful that target just the people that you want to hit. If your interest target is over 10,000 people, then either you’re doing something wrong or your audience is nationwide.

Do I need new landing pages for Facebook? Probably. Video is what converts nowadays, so you probably need to fix your other landing pages while you’re at it. Camera shy? They aren’t choosing you for your good looks, so get your Flip video, some good lighting, and film a 2 minute intro. Say what you’d say if that dentist was sitting right in your office—don’t be “fake” or talk like a newscaster.

Will BlitzLocal do this for me? Sure, if you have at least $10k to spend in fees, not counting advertising budget. If you’re a dentist, we require only $2k a month in total (labor plus ad spend), since we’re targeting just one region and because our dental campaigns can be replicated. If we have to build something that is not reusable across many clients, then we have to charge more for it. We are not the cheapest game in town.

Do you offer free articles and training?  I would love to use your service, but cannot afford it. Sure. Send a note to info@blitzlocal.com and we’ll send you some of our internal training materials. You can also post a question at facebook.com/blitzlocal, where others can see and benefit from what you ask.

 About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook, and has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues.

Original at Marketing B2B via Facebook: The Most Common Mistake You’re Probably Making BlitzLocal

1. Locate the conversations
2. Gauge the overall sentiment of those conversations
3. Participate in the conversations
4. Work towards increasing positive sentiment

Tools to help businesses locate the conversations that are taking place around their brands, products, and services have proliferated over the years, so achieving #1 is generally a piece of cake.

Participating in the conversations simply requires good old-fashioned customer service, as does increasing positive sentiment, although a fair amount of training may be required to teach employees how to navigate different social networks, and help them understand just how public their interactions really are. Despite the extra training, numbers 3 and 4 are still hands-on, human-touch activities that that businesses already understand how to handle, and they generally don’t handle being automated very well. Customers would rather have no interaction with a company, than to have nothing more than automated robots attempting to solve their problems.

So if number 1 is easy to solve with automated tools, and numbers 3 and 4 are handled primarily with human-touch activities, what about the second need – gauging the overall sentiment? This is an area that into that fuzzy, not-quite-sure-how-to-handle area. People and businesses are trying to automate this process because applying a sentiment grade to huge datasets is beyond the capacity of manual human power. At the same time, trusting a machine to correctly analyze sentiment is fraught with problems.

Let’s first consider the ways that a machine might analyze sentiment.

Methodology 1: analyze human-scored data, in which humans first analyze and rate sentiment of each piece of data, and the machine then analyzes those ratings to produce reports and aggregated summaries.

Methodology 2: the machine applies a human-scored dictionary of phrases to incoming data, then analyze the data to produce reports and aggregated summaries.

Both methodologies require manual human action first, and neither is a perfect solution. Either humans must score data, as in methodology 1, which is not scalable, or humans must score dictionary phrases, as in methodology 2, which is much less accurate because the phrases cannot take things like mixed messages or sarcasm into consideration. “I love my ugly shoes”, has both positive and negative dictionary words (love and ugly). How should a machine evaluate that? Or “Wow, that’s the most awesome mullet I’ve ever seen!” might sound positive to a machine, based on words such as “wow” and “awesome”, but that algorithm will miss the fact that the user was being sarcastic.

For now, the best solution seems to be the human/machine/human process. Humans must first create phrase dictionaries (or use ones created by others), possibly run actual data through a group of humans who score the data as the basis for which machine learning can rely on, then let the machine classify new, incoming data using the human-scoring process as a way to improve the machine algorithm. The entire process should be repeated as often as deemed necessary. Eventually, the classifier should improve, but humans will always be needed to oversee the results.

Clearly, this process is not merely a matter of humans vs. machines. Both are required to properly handle sentiment analysis.

“It’s hard enough to determine sentiment via email– think of when you may have misinterpreted tone in your own personal communications. Now try to determine sentiment when you have only 140 characters or when a third of these interactions come through a mobile device. Irony, sarcasm, and humor are hard to convey via a 4 inch touch screen. Thus, automated sentiment analysis is problematic, at best, but can at least give you a general sense of how your customers feel. Then manual checking of sentiment can sit on top of your automated monitoring.”

– Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal

So how should companies gauge sentiment if automated tools aren’t sophisticated enough to pick up on sarcasm, for instance, but humans aren’t scalable to meet the growing flow of data?

There may not be a “correct answer” to this question, but I believe a smart strategy is to choose the best tool to meet your particular needs, and then use intelligent, business and marketing savvy humans to “analyze the analysis”. This human-based analysis of the analysis will ensure that the data reports are not only correct, but are also actionable. After all, knowing that 93 customers are unhappy is a meaningless metric. Understanding which customers are unhappy, and why they are unhappy, leads to being able to take the necessary action to accomplish goals 3 and 4 – participating in conversations and improving sentiment.

Let’s take a look at a few ways that sentiment analysis an be turned into direct action:

Customer service: find specific complaints and negative sentiment, so those users feelings and issues can be addressed, before they cause widespread brand damage.

Promos and offers: determine how a new promotion is doing, enabling quick decisions on what to promote further, and what to discard. Sometimes, a promotion backfires, and should be pulled (and perhaps explained) before negative sentiment explodes.

Understand conversion problems: make note of potential blocks within the conversion funnel that is creating negative sentiment, thereby causing potential sales to fall off the cliff.

As I mentioned early on, there are many tools to help locate and monitor the conversations taking place about your business. These tools range from the simple Google Alerts tool to the more robust and complex Radian6, with most small businesses choosing a tools that fall somewhere in the middle, such as socialmention or Trackur.

Some tools that are either entirely focused upon sentiment analysis, or include sentiment analysis as one feature of a broader social monitoring tool, include:

• OpenAmplify
• Social Mention
• Amplified Analytics
• Lithium
• SAS Sentiment Analysis
• Trackur
• Radian6
• Collective Intellect
• Heartbeat
• Webtrends Social Measurement

Which tool is chosen will depend heavily upon company needs and budget. Regardless of the tool used, however, the question businesses need to ask is, “Do we have the manpower needed to properly assess the results, and then take action to enhance or improve sentiment?”

A smart marketing team, in conjunction with a customer service team, should do “an analysis of the analysis” to determine the next steps to take. Understanding the causes of sentiment and making smart marketing and customer service decisions based upon that understanding requires people who are trained and highly skilled in these areas. These people may be in-house, or may be a part of an outsourced social media marketing agency such as BlitzLocal provides, but what is clear is that while machines may be necessary to process large datasets to calculate sentiment, humans are a crucial factor in not only refining the analysis, but in taking necessary actions based upon that analysis.

Original at Understanding Sentiment – It’s Not Just A Humans vs. Machines Approach BlitzLocal

When I googled “social media vs. seo” (in quotes) this morning, 12,400 results were returned. Restricting the same search to only the past year, over 800 results are returned. Obviously, many people are pitting the two against one another, and have been for some time.

There’s little sense, in my mind, in postulating whether social media is better than SEO or SEO is better than social media. Making these two marketing channels adversaries is akin to pitting shirts against pants/shorts. For those people who don’t wear dresses or jumpsuits, they’ll likely be wearing a shirt and a pair of pants. Asking them which is better will probably only result in having them give you a look that implies they think you’ve lost your mind.

Cross-Channel Marketing Rules

When promoting anything, whether it’s a business, a website, a product, or a brand, promotion works best when it covers a broad spectrum of marketing channels. Television ad campaigns work best when they are reinforced by radio campaigns, magazine campaigns, newspaper campaigns, email campaigns, etc. Cross-channel marketing succeeds because the layers of reinforcing messages work together to create a connection with the target audience.

Waves of Data Engulf Users

People today are absorbing external stimuli in huge waves of data, much like a whale ingests enormous swarms of krill. It is unlikely that a whale would be able to pick out the one particular krill that tasted peculiar amongst the millions he ingested. Likewise, the data we absorb each day is so large and diverse, that recognizing and remembering one marketing message amongst the continuous data flow is rather low. It’s much easier for a lone marketing message to be lost in the flow than it would be if it were repeatedly reinforced by entering the data stream in various ways, from various places, and at various times.

Be Where They Are

The goal should always be to interact with users where they are. If they are searching via a search engine, then an SEO campaign can help reach them during that process. Of course, a PPC campaign also works hand-in-hand with SEO to cover both the organic and paid listings that are returned in the search results for the queries relevant to your brand, service, or product.

Users are spending a considerable amount of time on social networks, so a social media campaign is needed to reach them there. Like the concept of using both SEO and PPC campaigns to cover organic and paid search listings, social media campaigns will include organic interactions such as tweets, Facebook Likes and wall posts, etc., in addition to paid interactions such as promoted tweets and Facebook ad campaigns.

Value In Each Piece Reinforces Overall Value

Each channel will reach users at a different point in the marketing funnel, so the value should be calculated and compared in relation to other marketing efforts aimed at that same audience. In most cases, a search user is likely to be in one part of the marketing funnel, and a Facebook user is in another (or may even be outside of the funnel altogether). Pitting the value of an SEO campaign aimed at the search user against the value of a social media campaign aimed at the Facebook user will only result in a confusing matchup. There is value in both, with each being one important part of an entire cross-channel promotion.

Give each marketing channel its own level of respect, evaluating the effectiveness of each using data that is relevant to that particular channel. Analyze how well the campaign is working within its channel, adjust, re-analyze, adjust again, until you are satisfied that it is accomplishing the goals you set for that particular channel.

Make sure each channel’s message is consistent with the messages from other channels, so that every channel reinforces the others. As the daily influx of data streams through each person, those reinforcing messages will build upon one another and help the entire package of marketing messages stand out in the user’s mind.

The key isn’t to compare seo vs. social media, but to use the right messages in the right formats to ensure the best chance of reaching users at the right time and in the right place. The more often you can accomplish that, with consistent messaging, the more successful each campaign will be, no matter which channel it was focused upon.

Let us know if you’ve found a particular combination of cross-channel marketing especially successful, or if you’ve had problems connecting various channels to create a tight overall campaign.

Original at Social Media vs. SEO – No Contest! BlitzLocal

This webinar was presented by:
Brendan King, CEO, Vendasta
Mike Hartrich, Director of Digital Products, LocalEdge
Greg Sterling, Opus Research

Intro:

Small business are increasingly interested in social media and “conversational commerce”. However what does that actually mean? After the Twitter account or Facebook page is established, what next? SMBs and the sales channels and publishers that serve them are struggling with how to divide the labor and bring social marketing to SMBs but in ways that are efficient and still preserve the “authentic voice” of the local businesses.

Greg begins with a few words about himself and Opus Research and then presents a series of surveys that were done which helps us see the current state of the rise of social media and its impact upon small businesses.

The Rise Of Social Media For SMBs Occurred Because Of Several Factors:

• SMBs claim that most of their business comes from WoM (word of mouth)
• Reviews/social media are an extension of WoM, and they can be very powerful.
• Social tools and sites are free or cheap
• Social media is more intuitive, giving SMBs the confidence that they “can do it all by myself”
• SMBs are following the consumer, going where they are (e.g. 600 million facebook users)

Survey: Are You Marketing Savvy?

In one survey, 65% of the respondents chose either “neutral” or “not savvy”.

Survey: How Do Customers Find You?

• 82% word of mouth
• 66% search/internet
• 37% “advertising”
• 23% yellow pages, etc.

Survey: Current and Future Media

Most Used Media Right Now: Created a social profile, IYP/newspaper site, email marketing, print yellow pages, blog, direct mail, print newspaper
Plan To Use Soon: email, video, blog, direct mail, print newspaper
Won’t Use: TV, local radio, groupon/deals

Survey: Current Marketing Methods

Company website, social media, email marketing, seo, ppc, online display, video, blog

Survey: Top Sites Used By SMBs To Promote Business

1. Google/Google Places
2. Facebook
3. Yahoo
4. Linkedin
5. Twitter
6. Citysearch
7. Yellowbook
8. Bing
9. Superpages
10. Yelp

Survey: Why Do You Have A Facebook Page?

• 41% had a Facebook page vs. 27% a year ago
• It’s an easy / affordable way to create extended awareness of the business
• Best way to communicate with customers
• We have to to stay competitive
• Important way to generate sales

Survey: Social Media Benefits

• 41% better relationship with customers
• 37% increase visitors to site
• 29% increased phone calls
• 28% increased sales

New: Facebook Deals

The Groupon / daily deals phenomenon is now coming together with the Facebook pages platform.

Social Media Challenges: Time, ROI

• 66% of SMBs said they updated Facebook at least weekly
• 63% feel social media has helped make customers more loyal
• 56% feel social media has taken up more time than they expected
• 25% estimate that they made a profit on their social media spend while 15% estimate they have lost money. The remaining respondents said they broke even
• Many SMBs often think that social media has fallen short of their expectations

Mike presents next:

Social Media – A Small Business Perspective

What Are Business Owners – HEARING?

Customers are saying to SMBs:

• Where can Ii find you online?
• Is your site up to date?
• What about this review I read about you?
• Can I find you on Facebook?
• Do you have Foursquare coupons?

Other business owners & analysts are saying to SMBs:

• You need to be on Facebook
• You need a mobile strategy
• You need to be on deals site
• You need to engage more

What Are Business Owners – SEEING?

• New technology
• New articles
• New studies
• New growth stats
• New sites
• New channels
• OVERWHELMED

What Are Business Owners – FACING?

• Advertising/customer
• Engagement segmentation

In the past, small business owners split their focus between main business activities. Now owners must:

• Assure their website is updated
• Monitor their SEM PPC campaigns
• Review their organic SEO listings
• Update social media
• Monitor business reputation

SMBs are finding it tough to stay authentic and still push sales.

What Are Business Owners – SAYING?

• They need help.
• They cant keep up with their website, blog, SEO, PPC, Facebook updates, online reviews, daily deals
• Confused, distracting, cluttered
• How are my competitors doing?
• How can I track online?
• Is there a service that manages all this?

What Are Business Owners – MISSING?

Many SMBs dont have:

• Websites
• Basic CRM
• Social presence

Many SMB owners are:

• Too busy
• Lacking experience
• Behind the curve
• Too sales-focused
• Missing the point
• Not able to track

What Are Business Owners – CHANGING?

• Focused on online
• Engaging their users
• Building knowledge
• Sharing their experiences
• Seeking partners
• Gaining confidence
• Running out of TIME

What Are Business Owners – DOING?

Finding Success:

• Testing self-service
• Finding online agencies
• Expanding traditional relationships
• Hiring talent in-house

Building/Buying:

• Websites
• Social presence
• Reputation management
• Online CRM
• Analytics

Content creation is a challenge – or rather, doing enough of it. For example, posting on Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis is hard. They are looking to partners to help them build that content.

Brendan begins his presentation now.

The explosion of reviews and UGC content is everywhere.

What is Reputation Management?

• Presence/visibility
• Reviews
• Mentions
• Social engagement
• Competition/industry benchmarking

The medium is two-way, not just push – consumers can participate so it has implications on reputation, which makes it scary for the business owner. The brand becomes what your customers say it is, not what you say it is.

Their company released some stats and wants to qualify the data they used. They chose 2000 random accounts from all users who use their services. These random accounts came from secondary and tertiary markets rather than the large markets such as New York or Los Angeles, so that the numbers would be more representative of the typical SMB. Here is what they found.

Presence/Visibility

They look at what kind of presence the SMBs have across 25 social networks, to see what the business’ current visibility is. They found that 32% have 10-14 social media listings, 27% have 5-9 listings, and 15% have more than 15 listings, with the rest having fewer than 5 listings. Even in small markets, 49.8% of SMBs that use their services already have a Facebook page, while only 5% have a Twitter account. In addition a large number of them have a page on Foursquare that they don’t know about, so they have not claimed those pages. Many of those unclaimed Foursquare pages have check-ins, which the business owners are unaware of.

Reviews

22.3% of all those SMBs have reviews, which is up from 8% last year.

• Yelp: 51.1% of those SMBs have Yelp reviews
• Google: 17.4% of them have Google reviews

Reviewed Businesses By Category:

• 40.4% – local services
• 13.4% – restaurants
• 12.6% – local shopping
• The remaining business are across many smaller categories

Mentions

99.7% of the SMBs had “some” mention of them online

SMB Usage Of Their Reputation Management Tool

Within one month of receiving alerts, 13.6% of SMBS logged in to interact with the tool. At some point, over time as they use the tool, they have a lightbulb moment, and they come back more frequently. The average time per visit is just over 7 minutes, and 20.1% spend over 10 minutes per visit.

This was the end of the presentation. What follows is the Q&A:

Q: Someone wanted to know if they believed the SMBs when they stated that most of their business came from WoM?

A: Everyone agreed that if the business owners were to dig deeper, they would likely realize that they lumped together a few different channels into WoM, mainly because they dont really know where the leads are coming from.

Q: How should SMBs manage the task of dividing up labor between themselves and the partner(s) helping them keep up their content creation (both on site and on Facebook, etc)?

A: They’ve found that partners are helping SMBs craft the message that goes out, including idea generation, and that is effective. It is challenging, however, to get a small business owner to get focused on building out those relationships, rather than just concentrating on making sales.

Q: PPC vs. social media? Are SMBs becoming less focused on paid search as they move towards social? Or are they embracing both?

A: They are seeing more SMBs branching out – not replacing – just adding social to the marketing mix. SMBs are looking for a balanced approach. They want to work with trusted partners that direct them into channels which are good fits for their business – showing them what works best for their vertical.

Q: SMBs are screaming, “Help me, Help me!” How do you scale that?

A: Instead of just selling, selling, selling, SMBs need to build relationships. They need tools and guidance to help them do that easily.

Q: Look into the future. Predict major trends in a year or a year and a half.

Mike: As SMBs get more engaged and spend more time and priority on content creation and doins more CRM, they will be seeing the effects of what they’ve done.

Brendan: The future holds more social media. The nature of advertising has changed, and SMBs need to catch up. Reviews won’t go away. SMBs need more transparency, direct contact, and more openness. They’ll see more complexity and confusion, which is why guidance and tools is so important.

Original at The Rise of the Social SMB – Liveblogged BlitzLocal

This post was live-blogged from a webinar I attended today. It was presented by:

Susan Etlinger, Altimeter Group

Justin Huskamp, Product Marketing Manager, Coremetrics, an IBM company

The webinar begins with Justin discussing their Coremetrics Social analytics tool:

Social media marketing spend is the fastest growing investment, and will pass email marketing in 2013.

Facebook and Twitter command huge and growing audiences, and are a proven way for brands to reach their customers.

40% of Facebook users “like” companies

51% of twitter users follow companies, brands and products

Social likes and tweets are really just another form of a review.

Do social channels provide any incremental value?

• Social sites are second only to display for generating new visitors.
• Facebook engenders more session loyalty than email, twitter or referring sites.
• Facebook referrals are more efficient at conversions

Why build a social following?

People spend 90% of their Facebook time in their news feed. You NEED to be in the feed. Engagement makes the message viral. Once engaged, that customer is now an evangelist to an average of 137 like-minded friends. So, create a fun and engaging social content and contests. Don’t just throw offers at them.

Tracking Earned Media:

What’s Hot? Tools are needed to show where to focus on good content and good audiences. What’s converting? Once you track it, you need to appropriately attribute earned media alongside all channels. So, track the social channel, then compare it to other channels.

Susan is up now with her portion of the presentation:

Challenges of Social Data Measurement

1. Multiple, shifting sources (which leads to)
2. Inconsistent dataset
3. New behaviors = new data types (what does it mean when someone likes…)
4. Inconsistent quality
5. No measurement standards (biggest issue)
6. Privacy considerations

Social Measurement Sand Traps (3 Challenges)

Data Challenges

1. Engagement – no agreement on what it means. Decide what it means for you and be transparent with your organization on that.
2. Reach – Partial datasets, inconsistent measures
3. Sentiment – Alogrithmic sentiment ~ 75% accurate at best
4. Influence – Not all influence is created equal. Someone may have be an influencer to you for web tools, but not for cars or makeup.

Tool Challenges

Have to include new tools that specialize in social space, and old tools that specialize in enterprise crm, analytics, market research, so need tools that are a blend of both.

Organizational Challenges

Each corporate department looking at data in very different ways.

All this adds up to…
data challenges + tool challenges + organizational challenges =
Frankenmetrics

Before you do anything else, have a goal for measurement!

Use approriate metrics at each level:

• Social strategist: engagement metrics: fans, followers, clicks
• Line Of Business/Geo Stakeholders: social media analytics, insights, share of voice, word-of-mouth, resonance
• Corporate Level – Business metrics: revenue, reputation

The Elephant in the Room: ROI of social media (which may be the wrong question)

ROI = [Gain from investment - cost of investment] / Cost of investment

A better question might be: What is the BUSINESS VALUE of social media?

Case Study: Let’s imagine a Comcast customer tweets a complaint about not getting a particular TV channel in his area.

Think KPI, not [just] ROI when looking at this tweet.

How do each of the departments look at this tweet?

• Brand Marketing – Brand impact? Do we deal with it, ignore it, or what?
• Product Marketing – Isolated incident or trend? Should we offer it?
• Competitive Intel – Vulnerability or opportunity to outshine competition?
• Operations – How much did it cost to resolve?
• Customer Service – Did we make the customer happy?

Six Use Cases for Social Media Value

1. Brand Health – Understand how people talk about your brand on social web.
2. Marketing Optimization – Decision support for social marketing investment
3. Revenue Generation – Generating leads, conversions, and revenue via social media
4. Operational Productivity – Reducing operational costs via social media (saving money in call centers, for example)
5. Customer Experience – Helping customers and improving their experience with your company and across channels
6. Product Innovation – Consumer-led ideation

Social Insights and KPIs

1. Brand Health

Insights:

• What topics spark conversation?
• What topics spark emotion?
• Sentiment by social media channel
• Stated intent to purchase
• Whether brand gets credit for promotions

KPIs:

• Volume of social media mentions
• Sentiment
• Share of voice vs. competitors
• Number of fans/followers
• Highest-performing topics
• Number of brand mentions per campaign

2. Marketing Optimization

Insights:

• Which channels generate highest visit loyalty
• Which platforms generate highest logyalty/conversion/revenue
• Where conversations about your brand occur online
• Likeliness to buy based on specified behaviors
• If social channels cannibalize other online channels
• Most effective times to post social content/engage
• Where to find brand advocates

KPIs:

• Conversions/sales by channel
• Impressions by channel
• View-through/click-through by channel
• Visitor loyalty
• Advertising equivalent of earned social media
• Most followed account/people who talk about your brand

3. Revenue Generation

Insights:

• Effectiveness of social channels for conversion and revenue generation
• Likeliness to buy
• Impact of social media on search results
• Whether social channels are cannibalizing other channels

KPIs:

• Conversions by channel
• Sales by channel
• Visit loyalty
• Improved search engine placement

4. Operations Productivity

Insights:

• Potential cost savings from deflected calls
• Most active adovocates
• Which services issues best answered online
• Knowledge base gaps

KPIs:

• Number of calls deflected
• Call deflection savings
• Number of advocates
• Value of advocates
• Reduction/deferred hiring of FTE

5. Customer Experience

Insights:

• Most common service and product issues
• Triangulation of above with service channels
• Acceleration of issues
• Sentiment and emotion drivers

KPIs:

• Number of customer service issues addressed via social channels
• Percentage escalated and resolved
• Percentage of positive ratings and reviews
• Sentiment ratios

6. Innovation

Insights:

• Most common service and product issues
• Customer requests
• Competitive opportunities and threats

KPIs:

• Speed to market
• Product development efficiency

The Future of social Analytics:

1. Enterprise-class capabilities such as data quality, integration, governance and scalability will be checkbox items
2. A basic ability to understand social data will be come a critical skillset
3. Machine learning will continue to improve, but probably not as fast as everyone wants it to.
4. In the next 1-2 years, we’ll see social benchmarks
5. Ultimately, the terms “social media”, “social business” and “social analytics” will go away.

Recommendations

Focus on which is incidental and which is vital.

1. Have an objective
2. Know your data
3. Think globally, not locally (across the company departments)
4. Think directionally (look at data patterns over time)
5. Don’t underestimate the soft stuff (processes and people)

That concluded the webinar. I found some useful nuggets of information in this presentation.

Original at Effectively Measuring Social Media – Liveblogged BlitzLocal

So let’s talk about how to actually get these businesses to become your clients, starting first bywhat NOT to do:

• Cold calling– Going door-to-door and walking into someone’s business is NOT cool. You are a stranger, they’re busy running their office– and most of the time you won’t even be able to get to the decision maker. The receptionist will stop you. Might as well sell magazines and charity chocolate bars, since you’re just going to get rejected. Rejection sucks– you want THEM to come to you. That allows you to set the price and puts you in a great spot. More on that in a sec.
• Spending money on PPC– Yeah, I know it’s hypocritical. You are selling PPC, but don’t do it to promote yourself. The reason you don’t is the same as cold calling– selling SUCKS. You spend money, waste your time, and have to deal with rejection. And that’s just more marketing cost you have to pass on to the clients.
• Building the most awesome, informative website about your services– Let me tell you something. You don’t even need to have a website! “But what if they want to see my website?”
  you ask. Tell them that you’re so busy serving clients first that your site is still in progress. Clients first, see?
• Giving away services for cheap or free: Someone probably told you that if you’re just getting started and don’t have a client list, then you need to do the first few for cheap to build up a portfolio. That’s complete nonsense. Most prospects won’t ask you, for example, about other Italian restaurants or veterinarians that you’ve done. Discounting your services devalues you in the client’s eyes, plus will make you unmotivated to work hard for so little money.
• Talking about how well you know PPC, SEO, social media, etc: Seems counter-intuitive, right? They’re a business owner, not another affiliate. The more you sprinkle acronyms into your language, the more you’re losing them. You’re not speaking their language. I almost never mention the word PPC to clients. Instead, I say “I couldn’t find your name on Google. But we can get you to show up if you let us advertise on Google for you.”

So those are the 5 most common ways to fail at selling and getting new clients. There are a few companies in the local space– VC-funded monsters that have tens or hundreds of millions of funding to blow on these techniques. But if we’re talking about YOUR money, then focus on what actually works.

And now the secret to how to sell local clients….

You ready?

…
…
…

The secret is that you don’t sell– you let others sell for you because of your reputation. So you get clients by building up your reputation.

Put on a seminar at the local chamber of commerce or networking event– if you can charge $15 each, even better. Not because you need the money, but because it makes folks who attend take you seriously. Every one of the 5 mistakes mentioned above degrades and devalues your offering– it turns you into a panderer instead of a highly sought after expert.

In the course of every day life, you will run into people who are small business owners. There’s 20 million of them– how can you not? And when you’re talking to friends about how Google works– which we do all the time to folks who don’t understand what we do– you’re equipping others to sell your services.

And each friend of yours has perhaps 100 friends that they talk to and will mention that you’re an expert on getting people on Google. So you should almost never take on a project from a friend– but you should definitely consider taking on a project from a friend of a friend. A friend will expect a “good friend” discount, while a “weak tie” (friend of a friend) will not. Plus the number of people that you are connected to 2 steps away is 100 times larger than those just 1 step away.

And when those people come knocking, because a friend told them that you’re a Google expert, then you run them through this process:

• What do you want to show up on Google for?
• Let’s do a search and see who is there now.
• It’s going to cost between $1,000 and $5,000 a month to advertise on Google– depending on how much market share you want. Shall we start with $1,000 a month for a couple months to see how we do?
• We can track exactly how our ads are doing- how many visitors click on the ads and then how many calls result from that. That allows us to calculate the cost per call. You’ll probably be between $40 and $100 a call, depending on the competition. We’ll have to test.
• And from there, we can adjust the ads based on what kinds of clients you want (more laser hair removal, and less botox? Sure).
• We will place a phone number on the website that is only on the web, just for tracking, which bounces to your regular number.
• No website? We can make a minisite for you.
• Sign here and gimme your credit card.

If they don’t get that, whine about cost, or complain, then don’t push the issue. You have a number of other interested clients that you have to get back to. You don’t want bad clients. There are so many local businesses out there that you can have your pick– and that includes the competitors of the guys who aren’t really interested in your online advertising service.

So there you have it. No need to deal with rejection. Don’t have to spend a lot of money or build a site. Just have to casually talk about getting onto Google with your friends, who then spread the word for you. And then you walk those friends of friends via the process I’ve just laid out.

The hardest part is the first few weeks to build your reputation. You might feel like an imposter if you haven’t done it before. Take heart that local PPC is not the hard part, nor is listing clients with Google and BING Local Business Center. Just remember that you’re competing against the other local dentists and massage therapists- not thousands of affiliates worldwide.

And once you have a few of them down, then these clients tell their friends— and soon you have a thriving business of people who are seeking you out. You just have to sit back, take the calls, and decide which of them you want. Doesn’t sound like selling does it?

Now managing clients, building sites, setting up call tracking, billing credit cards automatically, and so forth is a whole different set of issues– I’ll write another post on that if people want to hear it. But as for selling, it’s easy when you let others sell for you.

Original at How to sell local clients BlitzLocal

Researching Facebook’s site was the most fun I’ve had at work in a long time.   I wasn’t nearly as familiar with Facebook as some of my friends.  The site is so addicting I’m not sure I want to know it too much better than I do now… Some of my Facebook savvy friends had hundreds of friends and were sending me Mafia Wars weapons, IQ Quizzes, and cause invitations before I even ‘friended’  my wife and daughter.   The quizzes are entertaining, the games are worse than crack, and the ability to re-connect with long lost friends sucked me in.  The site combines the best features of classmates.com, linkedin.com, Picasa, (photo sharing) chat, charities, fan clubs, causes, and games.  Additionally Facebook brings all the best features of these sites to a new viral level.  But the one thought that kept nagging at me was: folks on Facebook are not there to research products so how can we reach them while they’re socializing on this site?  The marketing challenges seem insurmountable:

• Finding my B2B audience among the 250 Million
• Getting their attention while they’re ‘playing’
• Not interrupting or peeving them in the process

Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto have all the trappings of a typical Silicon Valley start up: high ceilings with exposed ventilation ducts, a gourmet kitchen open all hours, and a virtual United Nations of employees all spread out in desk areas without walls.  None of them appears older than 28, and some are moving about on skateboards and razors on smooth concrete floors.  Our conference room was a candy colored assortment sofas that swallow your bottom surrounding a 60-inch LCD TV serving as our demo screen.  Despite the trendy trappings, Facebook had much more substance than met the eye.

One of the mid twenty somethings presented to us that Facebook an incredible lineup of user demographics and can target them on no less than 19 different parameters including:

1. Country
2. State
3. Age
4. Gender
5. Interests
6. Activities
7. Music
8. TV Shows
9. Education
10. High School
11. College
12. Major
13. Workplace
14. Relationship status
15. Books
16. Moms/Parenting
17. Small Business
18. Pet Enthusiasts
19. Sports

Demographics didn’t quite convince me but I was getting warmer.  Facebook connects more than just people to people; it connects:

• People to companies
• People to organizations
• People to products
• People to classmates
• People to social groups
• People to causes
• People to hobbies and interests
• People to brands

While all this reconnecting/socializing/chatting/sharing/gaming is going on, the viral aspect of Facebook is also thrown into the mix. Word of mouth is powerful.

For example, when someone goes out to eat, buys a car or any product or service for that matter, do they trust the reviews they see on Yahoo!, Cars.com, or Amazon?  No disrespect to these fine websites, but I don’t trust their reviews any more than I trust restaurant reviews from TV “Phantom Diners.”  Disappointing sushi shops are more the rule than the exception when I believe American restaurant critics who purport to know something about sushi.  The fact is, I trust my friends, especially my very meticulous Japanese friend’s sushi restaurant recommendations.  So when I’m connected to friends on Facebook and one of them recommends a good sushi shop, they’ll usually tell a friend.  That friend tells friends and soon the word on the best sushi shop spreads around like a virus.

Now let’s take that virus and multiply it.  Let’s say the sushi shop we’re raving about runs an ad on Facebook with a $10 off coupon.  My friends are more inclined to click on the ad because of my recommendation.  CTR and Conversions increase because the social context increases the probability of intent to purchase, (by a multiple).  Ok, I’m getting warmer, but it’s still a B2C example.  What about B2B?

Through Facebook’s Pages, businesses can create a page to connect with customers and create a community.  Company X can, through Event Ads, let its community know that it’s attending the next Comdex or E3.   The company can run an ad on its corporate page with a lottery for a prize to be announced at its booth.  Company X could have speaker announcements on its Facebook Page.  Why would a company want to do this?  Company Fan Sites or Corporate site Pages are Voices – 1/3 of your fans will see what you put up on your site.  30% of your fans will read what you’ve launched on their individual home page.  If they comment on that announcement on their wall, it’s seen by all their friends following their comments.  How’s that for reach?

Engagement Advertisements

On the right side of the home page, (Engagement Ads) “become a fan,” Ads can be video, static, Users can comment on ads or video on the user’s profile page.

Celebrities and Industry Experts

Company X can capitalize on its unique content and celebrities.  If Company X has industry experts who’ve published technical articles and how-to application notes, it can feature these experts as Celebrities on Facebook.  If your company has a celebrity or expert who can create fresh content for you, that content can be launched as an update on the corporate Facebook page or the expert can have his or her own Facebook page.

Favorite Pages Application

The Favorite Pages Application can be used as a corporate sponsor.  The Afflac Duck fan site posts photos of the Duck visiting famous places all over the world such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the pyramids of Giza.  All the photos posted on the site of course are taken from the Duck’s perspective, i.e., from 1 foot off the ground.

If Facebook is the social networking site where everyone is, why not take advantage of the fact by becoming part of it?  The B2B aspect became clear: start a corporate Facebook page, populate it with useful unique content that users can’t get anywhere else, and make sure the content drives traffic to and from the corporate web site.  Facebook Profiles enable brands to connect with fans.  Videos, Comments and interactions get organically put back on users sites.  Companies can ask users for feedback.  They can make an offer once a day and make a pitch in the voice of a character

• Papa John’s Pizza gained millions of impressions and 130k fans in 24 hours
• They thanked the fans with exclusive offers – and the redemption rate was higher than email offers
• Built brand loyalty

I’m convinced.  Now can I convince my colleagues at work?

Meanwhile, I’ll just have some fun.

Original at B2B Advertising on Facebook BlitzLocal