Content
To have success with Social Media you need to be able to provide a content which your costumers want to discuss and either learn from or even better tell to their friends or other costumers of yours. The content has to be good quality content, content which is modeled keeping in mind your business objectives, content which is what your customer is going to be “engaged” with. Content which delivers the value to the customer which your product/ service provides. Content which is true and honest and themed to create the relevant space of opportunity within your target customer segment! And the part of creating valuable content to your costumers has a great impact on your Social Media success because your costumers they´d much rather spend their time talking to each other about what is interesting them than engaging with you with a badly proposed content in your blog or tweet or where you express your social dialog. Content is also about storytelling and making the stories trustworthy and authentic which will engage the costumers in the values of your product, service or even company. Do you have the ability to create a content frame which the costumers can develop among each other an hereby develop their own stories about your product, service or even company - peer to peer stories are the strongest social communication - then you have created real Social connection and the media will work its best.
Metrics
Metrics on social media is something management want to discuss and would properly use as an excuse of deploying the funds for the expansion of the Social Media strategy. No doubt metrics is important to measure what you get out of having the dialog with your costumers, but don´t over exceed your measurement and make it the most important part of your Social Media success. We know for sure that C-level management want to know of ROI of the Social Media and hereby can see the success of the interaction with costumers and company. Have some simple measure points and don´t have to many I would choose 5:
- Visitors and sources of traffic.
- Network size - how many followers and fans do you find.
- Quantity of commentary about brand, product or services.
- Loyalty how often the interacting in the network repeat by the same followers/fans.
- Social Media leads how many of the leads can be found from the social media interaction.
This is not a complete list of how to measure Social Media but a start and not rocket science but things you properly do in your other marketing campaigns where you use other tools to get your costumers responding to your brand, product or service.
Opensource.
How willing are you to discuss and let the costumers have impact on other areas in your organization than just marketing. Do you dare to let your costumers into product development or are you afraid of letting your competitors react on your and your costumers good ideas?
Are you open enough to let your costumers comment on your services and let everybody know that your are good or bad in the eyes of your costumers?
Is your openness that big so you can handle to let costumers interact in the innovation of your products?
It is possible a matter of time until you can not ignore the fact that your costumers want and need to be a part of the process which you have the fully control of today - we are not talking about democratic processes where costumers will be asked about everything and will have impact on anything. We need to have them into the process to get our cost down as products getting cheaper and cheaper. To illustrate the openness take a product of care, the care manufacturer should be able to grant their costumers the right to interact with the cabin of the care - they should not develop and have an opinion of the gearshift or how the engine are performing - they should help developing what kind of other gadgets should be in the car- is it mandatory to be able to have hands free phone equipment in the care, should there be a connectivity for my I-pod so i can listen to my own music and so on. That is where opensource should work and the more open the company are the more dialog will the company have.
