Blog Potomac Speaker - Maggie Fox
Filed under: Education and Training, Social Marketing on Friday, June 13th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine
The next speaker is Maggie Fox (she’s the one at the lectern in the picture, Josh Hallett of BlogOrlando is the one at the microphone), the CEO of the Social Media Group, with a discussion on the latest trends in traditional social media marketing
Listen -
- Who do you need to talk to?
- What are they saying,?
- What are your business objectives?
- here are they saying it?
- How can you join the conversation?
This is not a campaign, this is a long term engagement / commitment. Once you have generated the community, you need to think about how you recognize and harness this community. Don’t let it die.
Q. How do you measure your success?
A. Look at site traffic, do you have 1% site engagement? How vocal is he community?
Q. What works well internally social media wise?
A. IBM uses social media well internally, with high levels of employee engagement. Internal blogs totally flatten the dialog, there’s more equality / less intimidation communicating with executives.
Q. What’s the carrot to get internal people to engage?
A. They have to want to do it, and be good at making content. Micro-blogging may or may not be a solution, as while the content levels are smaller, the engagement levels may be greater.
Q. Twitter or FriendFeed?
A. Maggie says she likes both, which draws groans from the audience and shouts of “Coke or Pepsi”. She likes the aggregation of FriendFeed, but doesn’t like the fact that it’s not as personal (plus you can’t block people from viewing your FriendFeed feed)
Q. If a community is left to die, can anyone take it over?
A. Disney had a proto-social network - Disney’s Magic Kingdom - for over 10 a couple of years. They just announced 3 weeks ago that it would be shut down. Communities should be allowed to continue if they can be self sustaining. Don’t necessarily think of them as communities, they may be better thought of as movements.
Q. How do you teach a client that Reputation Management is important?
A. It depends on the kind of strategy that you want to have. Do you want to respond to everything or just the influencers? Most companies need to only care about those influencers. She uses Radiant 6
Q. What about sites like Seth Godin’s where there are no comments?
A. Comments should be moderated with a clear comment policy. Comments are the best way to engage on a blog.
Q. How can you launch a campaign using twitter?
A. 2 different twitter strategies - Twitterbot - just pushing stories out, no need to really answer responses. Secondly the personal response, where a real person engages with others.
Q. How would you use Facebook?
A. Examine to determine whether your target audience is there in the first place. The challenge is that it’s a walled garden, you can’t get data about Facebook outside Facebook.
Q. A digital marketing agency without a blog asked what they should blog about…
A. If you’re selling something you’re not doing yourself, you’re going to have challenges if informed clients do some investigation.
Q. How have you best been able to educate executives?
A. Walk in and do a presentation at the C level as soon as possible when beginning an engagement, otherwise education takes up a lot more time down the road. It also helps to gain champions on the executive team. Lunch and Learn sessions work great to spread the knowledge around the organization.
Hey Simon, thanks for such a thorough write-up!
One thing I need to note. I had my facts wrong: Disney’s Magic Kingdom was only around for a couple of years. Nevertheless, the decision to shut it down was not greeted kindly.
Glad you enjoyed the preso!
↓ Quote | Posted June 13, 2008, 11:11 pmI’ll go ahead and make that correction (as well as add in your picture)
↓ Quote | Posted June 14, 2008, 12:01 am