It seems like we've been writing about it for ages, but real documented accounts of successful social media marketing campaigns are still fairly thin on the ground.

Is this because it is not working? Not at all. There is plenty of research that confirms that social media marketing is a viable, powerful and increasingly important part of the marketer's toolkit. It's also well known that companies are planning to invest far more in social media techniques in 2010 than in previous years. But it is taking a while for the case studies to filter through.

So we thought we would document some of our experiences to date, and have produced three case studies based on our work with three different clients, and will publish them here in a series of blogs over the next week or so. The case studies are quite different in scope and cover the following topics:

#1: Building a social media presence
#2: Creating and populating a community
#3: Blogging for people who don't blog

We don't want to suggest we have prepared a 10,000-word thesis on each one, or that they feature the world's biggest brands. But what we have written is an honest, practical account of what we - and some very forward-thinking marketers of course - tried to do and how we got on.

We hope our experiences may be of interest to others out there who are considering the same thing, so we thought we'd share it. That is the principle of social media after all, isn't it?

Download the pdf file by clicking here: B2B Social Media case study: Building a Presence.

This piece complements a post I wrote about a month ago, where I explained the reasons why forums are a frequently neglected but highly effective part of the social media toolkit for marketers.

Online communities as we have already established are a great way of building conversation and attaining engagement, however, it's important to adopt key tactics especially when joining a forum as a B2B Marketer. I was fortunate enough to be taught from a person who has been on the social media scene since it's pretty much started and is now heading up the social media division at Brands2Life.

Let's start shall we? Here are a few factors I take into consideration when approaching a forum:

• It is important to have a set of brand guidelines that will tell us who the target audience are. That way you'll be able to sign up to forums that are relevant to the brand's category. This should also apply to other social media platforms such as Twitter.

• I have found the most important factor to consider in all of this is the TONE. The tone that is adopted within the forum will not only be representing your brand but it  will also allow other community members to relate to what is being talked about within a thread. The tone is easily identifiable via monitoring conversations within the forum before signing up; it is important to watch & learn.
  *Note that if you are representing a brand it is important to sign up as the brand's name so that other community members can trust who they are speaking to.

• Once comfortable with the tone that will be used, the first post made should always be an introductory post. It is important to create a presence and become recognised. Ensure to state that you have 'joined the forum as a means of.... and are representing the brand.'   
  

• Become conversational by talking to other community members who have topics that are relevant to your brand. Continue to build the community's trust for 2-4 weeks before you decide to start up your own thread and get conversing about the brand. 

• Forums are great means of driving traffic and one can do this by adding a signature that will link to the brand's website (again, only once you have become established) so that one doesn't  necessarily need to keep talking about the brand as that could be deemed as spam.   
  

• Lastly, have fun. Going into a forum is a little bit like going to a party. You join a crowd of people by firstly engaging with on-going conversation. What you will not do is join a crowd of people and completely change the topic because that would be plain rude.

I hope that this blog post has helped answer why forums are just as effective and how they can be better used to our advantage. I would strongly recommend forums as a suitable social media platform and another way of maximising a brand's exposure/awareness.  

I was at a conference recently on Social Media Monitoring. During a panel session, someone asked a question about measuring the ROI for Social Media activities. The panel did their best to respond, but admitted that it was still difficult to establish a direct link between Social Media marketing and revenue generated. One by one (and there were five of them), they came out with different versions of the same story: 'we know that our activities generated revenue, but it wasn't really possible to track it. It was hugely successful, though.'

By the fifth response, I was getting really frustrated. Not because of this failure to measure revenue, but because they were immediately associating the ROI for Social Media marketing WITH Revenue.
 
Different marketing activities generate different types of result. Some results are easier to equate to revenue than others. Can we measure the exact revenue generated by an above the line, branding campaign for instance? Social Media Marketing is all about generating conversations. These conversations can be about different subjects, and can take place on different platforms, even cross between platforms. They can also influence people to find out more by using other tools such as search, or plant a brand name in their mind meaning that at some future point they click on a banner. There's no way therefore that we can (or should try to) measure the revenue generated by a Social Media campaign.
 
Instead of thinking of 'R' for Revenue (yes, I know it's 'R' for Return, but I want to make the point), we should be thinking of 'R' for Results, and with Social Media these come in many forms:

-    The number of conversations started
-    The number of people involved in those conversations
-    The mood of the conversations and reactions to them
-    The number of Retweets
-    The number of new followers recruited
-    The number of new links generated

and..... the number of clicks generated, where and if we can measure them.

All of the above represent Results, and all of the above are a measure of success - just a different measure from those that we have become used to with 'traditional' on-line marketing. With Social Media, we are very much concerned with influencing potential buyers higher up the funnel, a no less important activity, but one step removed from revenue generation. Let's therefore judge performance in a realistic way, so that success can be clearly proved and celebrated, rather than attempting to present it using irrelevant and inconsistent metrics.

It's tough being a small business, especially in B2B. There is never enough time in the day to manage the day-to-day business, let alone think about promotion, so making a foray into social media marketing is the last thing on many small business owners' minds.
 
But when I read Diana Huff's discussion on LinkedIn that small businesses may not be able to compete with large companies because of the difficulty of creating content, I thought the opposite was true: social media is in fact a great leveller.
 
The reason is, as has been discussed on these pages before, that the impact of content does not depend on the money behind it. True, if you have a big budget and people to organise it, you can produce highly polished videos, and beautifully designed ebooks, compared to the hastily-compiled Wordpress blogs that the time-pressed entrepreneur may have to make do with.
 
But if the content itself is valuable - if it is useful, original, thought-provoking, expert - it will work as well as the big-budget productions of the blue chips.
 
The beauty of content marketing is that it does not carry a crippling media buying cost. Small businesses cannot compete in advertising terms with the big boys, because they cannot afford it. So, in the past, when brand presence depended on advertising in the business titles, the small players found it hard to compete. But in the brave new world of content marketing, media is not paid for, it is earned - by usefulness, by creativity, by expertise.

If the small business has an interesting, valuable, expert, useful angle, it will be spread by others and posted in lots of other places.

If they have the creativity, they don't need the spend.

 

Image courtesy of the great iPhone app, iHandylevel - available for download at all good AppStores.

Business Week interview with Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics

'Loyalty is an emotion. Trust is an emotion. If you really want to make headway, you can't just do the rational part. That's really like fighting with one arm behind your back. You need the rational and the emotional, but of the two you really need the emotional more.'

So says Dan Hill, author of Emotionomics, to emphasise the value of using emotion strategically in the marketplace. And how do you achieve emotional impact in marketing and advertising? Not from lists of features and benefits - that's your left brain talking. To hit them where the wallets are, you've got to get creative. 'Less explaining, more entertaining', we might say.

Or as Dan Hill sums up:  'We make our decisions emotionally, we justify them rationally.' Features and benefits can appeal to a buyer's rational side, producing satisfaction of a kind, but that's after-the-fact impact.

In 2010, I'm hoping we can help more clients recognise the influence an emotional response (and therefore creative execution) has on buyer behaviour. Emotionomics gives us some food for thought to offer, such as the fact that an emotional response typically triggers five times more brain activity than a rational one. By the way, we also offer monitoring, analytics, and other tools like eye tracking to satisfy your rational side.

What would you like to believe for your business in 2010 and beyond? Let us know at www.iwouldliketobelieve.co.uk.