The problem with that approach is that it limits the view and results by having the company/ brand in the center or stage with as many people as possible “watching the show”. Then, those of us that successfully become “aware” of brand X wonder: “Is this what we want to see? Am I interested?”. As a result, many people would either stay or disengage and leave.

But…

What happens to the huge awareness opportunity that a company gets by becoming “aware” of each one of the members of their community? What would happen if more companies would stop rocking for a second and made an effort to learn about those folks in the front row, and continue with the rest? Wouldn’t the audience be prepared to give them real-time feedback? Wouldn’t the brand/company be in a better position to show on stage great stuff that their audience is dying to see?

Awareness can’t be unidirectional. Our friend, Dale Carnegie would say: “The world is full of people that are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual that unselfishly tries to serve others has enormous advantage. He has little competition…”

It’s a clear challenge how to come up with regular blog topics and posts that ultimately deliver value.
The typical approach consists on acknowledging that you need a blog for your company, then you publish a couple of posts, no one leaves a comment and suddenly you/your team start finding excuses, saying that you’re very busy to look after the blog and that on top of that is not delivering any results. Does that sound familiar at all?

Let’s tackle the problem in three steps:

First step: The Objective

To write valuable content in order to get found by people in my niche. The goal is to become a solid and reliable resource of useful information that will help prospects, customers and people in my community make a better decision when it comes to X product, service in a given industry.

Insight: When working with clients, we found that if we don’t define the objective/s at the very beginning, it’s very easy to lose track, focus and interest.
It makes a huge difference when clients see the blog (and the valuable content to be delivered), as an asset that will help them get closer to their customers, grow a community and why not, convert more sales, rather than taking “blogging” as just another task.

Second step: The team

Assuming that step one is clear, is it going to be only you writing blog posts or will someone else in the team help? Define all potential candidates. Create a spread sheet with their names and area/s of expertise. It will be easier to assign a specific blog topic to a certain blogger based on their profile.
Please, don’t limit the blogging team to Management / Upper Management. You’d be surprised to see how many passionate and knowledgeable professionals you have in the front line that could contribute with excellent content. Remember: They’re always in touch with the customer.

Third step: The content

A very healthy excercise to sort out the “what do we write about?” question is to go to technorati.com and blogsearch.google.com to look for blogs in the same industry and find companies that write about a similar product or service. This will provide you with a very valuable insight in term of the “voice” of the blog, ideas for articles and what content do users seem to like the most (based in number of comments for example)

After that, there’re several different ways to come up with content ideas but I’ll share with you my most powerful one and it’s called: “Make it public“.
You know your product, service, industry better than anybody else. You know the customers’ regular questions and you know what makes them happy. Think very carefully about your day to day activities and how you deliver quality content for customers and prospects…

The secret

You and company own a wealth of information that can be easily shared with your audience. The problem is that you have been working extremely hard to deliver all that great content and resources in a “private way” (email, telemarketing, post… how many people can find you like that and how many benefit when they get your message?)
Yes, I’m aware that companies also handle private information. That, of course is out of the question and stays confidential but if you receive the same question from customers every day and you came up with different useful solutions, why not share them all in your blog and “make it public“! Why not making an ebook with those ten valuable resources for your community to download? Why not explaining in a one-minute video the TOP 3 of them?
Start by going through all the internal wealth of information, the day to day activities, Q&A, interactions with customers, problems and opportunities. You will be surprised how much of that is not being shared “publicly”. This post was created after writing a list of our customers’ top questions

Final tip: create an Excel spread sheet (Google document even better so the entire team can collaborate with ideas in one spot) with two tabs: Blog posts ideas (document every topic idea, otherwise you’ll forget!) and content pipeline so you are in control of the posts to be published on your blog.

So, open the safe, acknowledge your wealth and make it public. Thoughts?

Now, let’s take these results as a starting point.

I realised that even though most of these supermarkets have a social media “presence”, none of them are using it in creative ways as an avenue to gain a bigger piece of the conversation out there.  This point becomes even more important now, since all these brands are about to face the busiest month of the year with Christmas and New Year.

I’m going to share with you (Supermarkets) two ways in which you can be remarkable for the entire month of December and become the most talked about supermarket. What I’ll also do is a follow up post close to the end of 2010, with the updated version of the graphic above (mentions per brand) and check out the difference. In other words, we’ll see if any of these supermarkets made an effort to beat Tesco (And Tesco made an effort to stay at the top).
Ready for the challenge?

Location, location, location

People go to your supermarket every day, week and month. That’s a huge advantage, therefore you need to capitalise on that, especially with gelocation becoming so popular and so many people owning smart phones (iPhones, Androids).

Here’s the idea: Besides using the old-fashioned in-store announcement, i.e. “We remind all customers that our dairy products have a 20% off this months, etc“, make announcements that encourage people inside the supermarket to tell their friends what’s going on and make them want to come too! How about that?
So the idea would be to launch a December promo where you will announce a discount or giveaway every HOUR.  Example of speaker announcement: “Do you have a smart phone? Check into Foursquare and send it to Twitter with the hashtag #itsfun (come up with your own short branded one). The first two people to do that will get XXX price or 70% off  XX special brand” (It must be something attractive).
The beauty of this tactic is that people have to really be in the store because they never know when the announcement will be made. In other words, users can’t just cheat by checking in from outside your supermarket

If your brand is stronger on Facebook, do it with Facebook Places. In this case it turns more visual since your Facebook check in allows you now to include a picture. So part of the deal would be to check in through Facebook Places and include a photo of your favourite product. The first one, or first two to do it, will get it at 50% off or maybe for free. Not bad!

Bonus: Placing a few signs strategically across the stores, announcing that you offer Free Wi-Fi it should be a nice winner!
If you organise this idea well, and advertise it correctly (spreading the word so people know what will happen during December in your supermarket) it will make it easier to take a nice piece of the conversation away from your competitors and have a lot of customers from other supermarkets come to yours!

Engaging Photo and Video content

If your supermarket is in the Stone Age and still doesn’t allow pictures or video inside the stores, please get over it and grow your brand! If you don’t do it, your competitor will and with that, a nice piece of your market share will go too. Not cool huh?

Work on one BIG Christmas giveaway by making people submit a picture of their favourite product or brand through a Facebook App (customised tab) on your Facebook page (You cannot run promotions on your Wall unless you use an application). The beauty of doing it through an app is that it has better chances of going viral. It’s also easier to measure results. You’re more in control too.
I you don’t want your developer to build an application from scratch, you can also benefit from Facebook for Marketing solutions such as Wild Fire App. Very useful.

Have your customers send you creative photos and/or videos inside the supermarket. They would submit this as a link. Then you can have a dedicated page on your site with a gallery of either all or the best photos and videos sent by your customers. You can choose the criteria you want but idealy the best one/s or most creative would get that BIG Christmas giveaway.
This step will contribute to building a stronger community and will capture the attention of many new visitors.

I have more ideas but these two should get you going. Are you ready? Do you have more ideas? Leave a comment below!

1. The Marketing / Communications Department think that they need to do something about it.
2. During the next product launch they do everything the same.
3. At final stages they start wondering “how can they incorporate social media” to get more exposure.
4. Many of them waste even more time trying to get this “social media thing” approved by Legal or other departments before it can go live.

Does it sound familiar?

Some of you might know by now that this approach will simply not work at all, especially when social media is seen as a pure “advertising platform”.

I was reading yesterday an interview by Jesse Stanchak on social media strategy with Scott Monty (Head of Social Media, Ford Motors). He said:

“We start thinking about product launches and shows like this, that it’s baked in from the beginning. It’s not an afterthought, where you get the rubber stamp, “what are we doing for social media?” kind of thing”

This is one HUGE reason why companies like Ford are very successful spreading the word cleverly in social networks. Without this approach, it doesn’t matter if you have a big budget, your company would be wasting most of it (if not all).

If your business is getting ready to implement social media, make sure of the following:

Be open and patient

Don’t think about the Marketing or Communications Department only. There are more people within the company that will be more than happy to participate and share their creativity and social media ideas.
Also, don’t get discouraged if not everybody cooperates with the idea. One of the biggest obstacles for companies approaching social media are lack of knowledge and company culture.

Act creatively

Besides all the obvious points like having a goal, defined metrics, expectations… have a proper creative round with the team you put together for this project (maybe product launch). You will notice that this step will make a significant difference. Not all the ideas will make but you will nurture a good pipeline.
If anybody says: “I don’t have any good ideas”, answer, “tell me all the bad ones you have then”, as Seth Godin would say.

Think social

What is that same answer you deliver to clients everyday? What is your customers/prospects’ best topic/product? The answers to these questions would represent clearly “something of interest” and could be converted into “hot content“. In other words, if you are delivering that same daily answer to one person at a time by email, only one person at a time can benefit. Versus, you do a quick, creative (could be a screencast) blog post, or video of yourself/team explaining the solution and thousands of people will benefit and what’s best: more people will know that you exist
The majority of companies work very hard everyday to keep private what should be public.

Get found!

Once you incorporate the idea of social media from the very beginning, your team or Department will realise that is a lot simpler to think in terms “making quality pieces of content” (breadcrumbs) to be shared regularly (blog post, video, presentation, pictures, etc). Focus con leaving as many of these. Ensure to be there to talk with the people that will start feeling identified with your brand and content.

What’s your experience? What would you add?

Last Thursday, February 18th, we offered our second webinar.
Even though our monthly sessions are for companies that want to embrace social media, this one was more oriented to staff in the Sales and Marketing departments.

We’re very happy with the results, more than double the people signed up and attended this webinar.
We’d like to extend a special THANK YOU! to our guest speaker, Neville Hobson (@jangles), Head of Social Media Europe at WCG, that contributed with great insights.

As many of you may know, we’re relying on Gotowebinar‘s technology. One of the cool features shows the level of engagement from the audience. It was nice to find out that the results were pretty high! Thanks everybody!!

As promised, we compiled all the relevant info below:

• Full recording of the webinar
• The slides
• The conversation thread under the Twitter hash tag #sm4sm
• Questions & Answers (in the comments below)

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

You may also download our slides from our Slideshare account!

Find below, also the conversation generated LIVE on Twitter

Thanks very much to everyone that helped us spread the word in the different social networks.
We’re looking forward to have you on our next free monthly webinar:  “Social Media for Internal Communications“

We’d like to share with you an overview of our 2010 social media strategy. It’s a good opportunity to help you start with your own plan, give you some ideas or at least point you in the right direction
We are absolutely open to suggestions so remember to leave your comment at the end of the post!!

Blogging

Focus: Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK readership / spark conversations / *Networking / Improve search engine rankings

* This year we’ll choose to read and comment on 10 blogs: 5 will be to follow trends and stay up to date, the other 5 will be strictly for business networking.

Blog topics (Tip: Define categories first)

Reviews, Video tips, Internet marketing, Social media

Blog’s ideas sandbox:

Ask on LinkedIn Q&A, Read other blogs (listen)/ reblog, Reviews (books, events, apps, etc), Web trends/ Search / video tips

Characteristics

• Frequency: Twice a week
• Posts must offer value
• Must include images and/or video
• Time allocated per post (research, writing, marketing) = 2 to 3 hours

Blog post Marketing

• Include relevant trackbacks in the post
• Send tweets throughout the week to promote the content
• Bookmark: delicious.com, bookmarks.yahoo.com, stumbleupon.com
• Submit post to: Bizsugar.com, Digg.com and Reddit.com
• Send post only to relevant LinkedIn groups and “follow” articles (this way you’ll be notified if someone makes a comment so you can follow up)
• Submit blog feed to 5/10 RSS news feeds weekly

Video & Photo content

Photos will be uploaded to FlickR and Facebook (automatic to Twitter).
Videos will be uploaded to You Tube / Tube Mogul, then Facebook (automatic to Twitter).

Subscribe to Channelship’s You Tube channel

Facebook

Focus: Share engaging photo and video content / Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK fans/ multiply interactions / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Friend relevant contacts from Twitter and LinkedIn (profile)
• Pump good photo and video content
• Listen: reply to any question or comment ASAP. Keep the conversation
• Interact: Make comments / “like” status updates
• Facebook ads campaign: targeted to people in marketing and communications

Time allocated: 4 to 6 hours weekly

Twitter

Focus: Share helpful-engaging links / Listen to random and selected conversations / Build authority / Expand US & UK community/ increase conversations / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Follow contacts from LinkedIn
• Follow back relevant contacts
• Follow people especially traditional marketing and communications
• Proactively do Q&A
• Chit-chat
• Share GOOD stuff! try to always include a link to good content

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

LinkedIn

Focus: Share helpful-engaging status updates / Build authority / Expand US & UK network/ increase group interactions / Business networking / Company-Industry communications / Increase business opportunities

Building the community

• Follow contacts also on Twitter
• Join US/UK strategic groups
• Send blog posts only to relevant groups and “follow” the article.
• Read groups’ digest and engage in relevant threads.
• LinkedIn Q&A: offer value answering selected questions. Ask industry questions also.
• Keep personal/business information and LinkedIn apps on profile up to date.

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

Email Marketing

Focus: Share helpful-engaging content/ Build authority / Expand US & UK awareness/ increase business opportunities / Company-Industry communications / webinars main promotional tool

• Platform: Mailchimp
• Grow email database using website, webinars and offline networking.
• Segment database!!! (don’t send every single person the same information!)
• Newsletter will contain three topics: best blog post/s, Great tips or social media case study and invitation to monthly webinar
• Frequency: Once a month

Time allocated: 5 to 10 hours monthly (depending on the campaign)

Have you found the strategy useful? Go ahead, and share below what worked for you last year or how can this strategy be improved!!

Best,

Fred

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