How to Scale Social Media Marketing #1

There are two big questions in relation to using social media on the minds of most experienced marketers: scale and measurement. This is about achieving scale.

Scale

Most marketers believe in the superior persuasive ability of word of mouth marketing. They recognize social media as a digital platform that expands the impact of WOM and also makes it measureable and, therefore, "budget-able." Still, everyone wants to know how you can significantly expand the reach and impact of your efforts and how you can operationalize enough of your effort to hope to get the ROI in the neighborhood of rational. So there is scale to impact and scale of operation. At the same time you are trying to achieve scale, you have to avoid underming the principles of word of mouth marketing that make teh discipline relevant in the first place - authenticity of opinion and the personality of the communications The last thing you want to do is to turn your social media effort into a email CRM program where you are trying to hit your target with enough frequency that a small percentage act but before you piss a majority off with a flood of email newlsetters.

Three Steps to Scale

We have been planning and deploying social media programs for over 4 years on top of another decade of digital marketing. The problem of scale became clear quite early. Here is one of our models for expanding the reach, enagement and impact of a social media-based word of mouth program.

1. Operationalize Influencer Outreach Without Losing the Personal Touch

Identifying and engaging relevant bloggers is a time-consuming practice. There are some rules of the road that just cannot be bent. There is no shortcut to thinking long and hard about why they should care about whatever your brand may want to talk about or involve them in. Still, you can go from reaching out to a handful of influencers to connecting with a hundred by adding some infrastructure to your effort: blogger CRM management, internal best practices for WOM marketers to follow (vs. rediscovering them again and again), and the sincere cultivation of long term relationships with a broad group of influencers. In short, you can sacle how you organize and execute your efforts. That will get you to a hundred.

2. Add a "Pull" Syndication Layer for Influencers & Fans

What if you could invite a few hundred to a few thousand influencers to stay connected with the brand over a sustained period of time? What if you could routinely send them content and offers that they found valuable enough to share and talk about because they were authentically "remarkable?" We have our own platform - Backstage Pass - which allows us to connect with a growing number of influencers online and continually give them a brand experience they find valuable. However you do it, establishing a network of brand fans that you routinely reach out to can help. They will choose to "pull" content or offers from you or engage in periodic conversations and that scales both for reach and for operations. (yes, you can use Facebook for this). This will get you to a few hundred at the G-zero layer.

3. Amplify Via Content-Driven Advertising

Word of Mouth and advertising work well together. Each enhances the perfomance of the other. For WOM programs, you can raise 'relevant awareness' quickly about some online conversation or experience by designing a media plan that delivers content and conversation through the ad units not traditional display or search advertising. If you are having a conversation in a popular women's social network on summer vacation travel for a automotive brand, ad units that pull RSS feeds of the latest posts from bloggers on the subject and drive to the hub of conversation help. This lets a strategic (read: cheap) ad buy amplify the conversation without spoiling the experience with unrelated brand advertising. Conversly, you will find that those ads perform better than average when placed in proximity to the "earned" conversation in the social web. Now you are reaching thousands directly and even more via the pass-along of your initial G-zero layer.

Other Information on scaling social media:

• Scaling social media programs  - Beeline Labs

• Does Social Media Scale? - Servant of Chaos

• Social media marketing's scalability problem - Being Peter Kim

Comments

[toputop]

Good post on Social media marketing.Thank you..

[georectification services]

Good post.
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[jer979]

John,

I'd love to see a little more expansion of the idea in #3. Do you have some examples? Also, the idea, at least as I understand it...does it allow/promote any brand confusion?

We know you can't control the message, but if you are integrating RSS feeds from 3rd parties, you may not want to highlight directly messages that are not consistent or, at worse, detrimental to your brand?

I love #3 and it's a great synergy between a Raving Fan centric model and a mass model, but it's still a bit unclear in my head.

Really great post though. Thank you.

[Carri Bugbee]

The more I think about scaling social media marketing, the more I think we need completely different business models and ways of thinking about how we approach this conundrum.

Looking at it in the same way we approach advertising or other traditional marketing (i.e., one-to-many) just won't work. I think social media marketing has to scale more akin to PR and/or CRM. It will always be people-intensive, but the cost savings will come from media savings. Social media initiatives won't necessarily be "cheap," marketing dollars will just be allocated in a different way.

@CarriBugbee

[Denis]

Hi John,

thank you for sharing this.

However, I have a doubt about point 1. I do agree with personalisation of the communication, and the sincerity and the long way process but, on my day to day work, I feel that bloggers (expecially the influencers) are pitched too often for participating to a WOM program. And I'm afraid that they are already pissed off.

I am experimenting different approaches, letting influencers find my "client" from other activities, a mix od ADV and WOM with my friends and people that I know.

I guess the WOMMA seminar would help me, shame there is an ocean between!

(I hope any of above makes sense)

[John Bell]

@CarriBugbee
I agree we need to approach differently. I also agree that effective social media-based WOM programs aren't 'cheap". I do think they are mre effective especially when integarted with traditional marketing.

Marketers need scale. That scale will come in three ways:
1. operational scale - meaningful outreach to more influencers
2. scale of reach
3. scale via "pass-along" or the G2X model