Social Media Wave- Social Media Marketing Agency

It's no secret that going beyond the push messaging of traditional marketing is a much needed shift in how we treat our clients. In fact, giving a voice to your customers is one of the best olive branches we have at our disposal as social media marketers.

The trouble is, most of the web sites we have are nothing more than static brochure sites. Many have added links and hidden directories to cobble together some "Social Interface" by perhaps linking to those ubiquitous Social Networks or added a /wordpress.com feature to host your blogs.

I am truly excited to be announcing a new Joint Venture called SimpliFlying Airports with our AirGate Solutions team (I am a partner) with SimpliFlying pte based in Singapore. After more than a year of mashing up notes, ideas and concepts my partner Robert Cook and I began our go to market strategy for bringing Social Media methods and best practices (yes there are some of each!) to Airlines and Airports. Robert is a senior consultant to both sectors of the aviation business and has been an industry leader in developing strategies for increasing both operations and retail efficiencies.

We have been working on blueprints for the use of Social Media strategies, developing meaningful aviation market based objectives and metrics, developing passenger technology architectures and more. We met with Shashank Nigam of SimpliFlying pte (Global leader in Airline Branding and Social Media use) several months ago to compare thoughts on the market, the opportunities and the synergies we shared collectively. So in short, we were in immediate awe of what we all felt was a partnership which had to become very real very quickly.

In the iterim, we have been heads down creating our Joint Venture which also marks the opening of a new office in the Greater Toronto Area, located in downtown Toronto. This new office will compliment existing offices in New York and Singapore.

A lot goes on behind the scenes in developing a plan to target a particular sector, so just understanding Social Media applications from our perspective would not get us anywhere near the marketplace. For the last 2 years, we have worked closely with developers, industry analysts, thought leaders and taken a hands on approach with applied Social Media and Web 2.0 platforms and technologies. We met with several pioneers in "New Media" from the advertising world who get branded entertainment for retail and we partnered with the best out there.

Following business trends is a collateral activity that also must track with the crystal ball gazing within Social Media. What are Social CRM impacts and measures? What will loyalty programs look like in a year? What real pivotal changes are possible today? Who are the sector leaders in other verticals such as automotive?

Creating a small crack in a large market is very strategic- that light that bleeds through better be laser light -with the power to disrupt the status quo on the other side.

That is what SimpliFlying Airports is doing-officially as of today.

 

Look for more information about what we are doing at SimpliFlying Airports and follow us at @simpliflyingAP on Twitter

 

I was just reading an article titled "Starbuck's clobbers all consumer brands on Social Media" and thought the results seemed sort of strange in terms of how we should be measuring ROI via concrete metrics.

The source cited for the data was none other than Social Media think tank "Famecount". Mapping your results against Lady GaGa is surefire way to measure your brand's KPI's now isn't it? I am sure the brand managers are breaking their arms on each other's backs with congratulations over this milestone.

The source of the data is the Social Web- not a problem with that, but the metrics of the major SN's quantitative totals of Fans, Followers and Subscribers respectively is a sheer clusterpoop of "relevant" data.

 

More meaningful would be the 4 major business objective categories of:

1. Useful Dialogue
2. Active Advocacy
3. Self Support Indicies
4. Feedback for Innovation 

Each objective should have a mapping to a set of measurable KPI's  and formulae to calculate the "movement of the needle with meaningful measurement". Things to be looking for are comments, mentions and recommendations for example- clear indicators of engagement into multi channel and multi dimensional interactions with the brand.

This type of measurement requires some tools and processes to get started -some of which you can benchmark for free, but to determine variable sentiment analysis ( a hybrid of sources and processing algorithms meaningful to your business objectives) will require the use of some more sophisticated monitoring tools. (Yes beyond the Famecount pointer)

We will be blogging more about SM metrics and developing an active framework that we will be offering as a workshop in the very near future- because articles like this make it necessary to divert fantasy from ROI in Social Media.

 

Small and Medium sized businesses typically all have websites and many are contemplating adding Social Media and Digital Media capabilities.
The worst idea today would be to try to retro fit the circa 1999 html or 2002 custom flash based web site with a birrage of cobbled in features. This plan is sure to keep a basement full of designers and web developers in business while you wait for less than acceptable results.

The almost up to date web site sports a newsletter sign up, a few dated images and perhaps some tricky whitepaper downloads that may require a full page of customer data to access. While this sounds quite brilliant, it is so far behind what is available today with Open ID based log ins and dynamic blogs.

The flash point is here now where the previously prohibitive costs of a web site rebuild and the availability of flexible Web 2.0 platforms open up the gates to opportunity. The high costs of designers and web developers is now under control due to the open architecture of Open Source Software platforms based on the ubiquitous "LAMP" stack. LAMP is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php - all proven, scalable platforms which allow thousands of developers access to provide the market with non-proprietary tools and designs.

The cool part of the architecture is that once a Content Management System is installed, the user (business owner) has the opportunity to change the design- the look and feel of the sites pages- at will and for very little cost. The platform itself can be updated and upgraded with a super long life expectancy. This means that there are effectively no "rebuilds" of the site with those ridiculous design and development costs!

Content Managment Systems come in several varieties - namely WordPress, Joomla and Drupal (A high end CMS for publishers). The differences on the platform level (LAMP) are minimal- they are all based on the same code. The CMS dashboard or back end- considered the user "operating system" if you will is virtually the same- although they look different and require different interface steps. They do have differences in the flexibility of the presentation of your content. Some have argued that Word Press is better for blogging, but Joomla also provides commenting, rating, Disqus log ins etc. etc. so it is a moot point.

Word Press for example is a very simple platform making it easy for self publishing, good SEO tools and easy to use plug ins for more robust blogging capabilities. There are more developers coming in to add more corporate design templates over simple blog designs. So in theory, you can get away with a simple Word Press Blog as a web site replacement. We have done several and they are good for a hub for your communications strategy.

Joomla is the other CMS in the space where there are more users for corporate web sites, portals and vertical applications such as video sites etc. The platform is flexible in terms of content placement and features and there are dozens of developers creating very useful business engagement modules, plug ins and components. Some we like are a Market Research tool for collaboration, highly detailed surveys, scheduling and e commerce-and of course integration with Social Engine and Community Builder on line community platforms.

Most of our commercial sites for our businesses are done in Joomla, but we do not hold a prticular bias. It would be important to understand the options available for each platform before making a decision. Rates for set up and deployment are about the same, so there is no cost advantage of one over the other.

There are other plug ins and extensions worth considering that help the business manager decide on which CMS to go with over a plain old html or php site. Web 2.0 offers many considerations to make inroads into inbound marketing that non CMS sites just can't accomplish.

Some of the freebie plug ins for Word Press are OK, but I would suggest that the commercially available ones are typically better supported, have a upgrade and migration path and do cost some money to get started. That said, you do get what you pay for so time to market, interoperability with the CMS (without the dreaded Server Error 500 coming up to replace your web pages) so some experience in managing the entire "operational" environment is necessary.

The scenario I often see are the Word Press affiliate guys who are in the "spiff business" to get you to buy a template, host on their favourite hosting company, pump a couple of hack services (code or CSS mods) and leave you with a potential house of cards.

Simple things like regular backups before installing new plug ins may sound logical, but do you know how to do it? If you are adding new followers on Twitter, Facebook Fans and notching up the blog views you will see how important your site is to your day to day operations.

Adding strategic value to the CMS is what our clients have looked for. Offering Digital Content services is something we llike to do over hacking templates. This is where we repurpose images, videos, presentations and whitepapers with voice overs and create new videos for example. The new media is video and if we add live interactions to video we can increase engagement metrics by 500%-this is where to spend some new dollars vs. old on a web site rebuild.

Our Bizz Web 2.0 group can provide some ideas and concepts to make your CMS part of your Social Media strategy far beyond blogging. There are several Social Media models and strategies that should be considered before you jump into a CMS without a plan.

Bottom line is that you will save money and have a functional Social Media ready Web 2.0 platform for some time to come for a lot less than you have sunk into your current web site.