Media Munchies

Social Media and Sales | CustomerThink

How corporations use social media to gain market share
The strategic engagement began in March 2009. After some review meetings, we included a few customers as advisers to the new social media strategy development. In May 2009, the strategy was simplified and reduced to one sentence:
“Create a superior customer experience.”

After the development of a social media-leveraged sales strategy, the sales team reduced their email volume dramatically and used cold calling only in cases where they could not find their clients in the social web – LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, etc. The team that used to do mostly cold calls is now engaging with clients on the social web. After some training, the team was able to reach about 200 people per rep per day and they have approximately 30 - 50 interactions. Success is now measured by how many clients are touched, the number of responses and how many resulted in an engagement. Within six months, the sales team found their best practice model for the market and effectively reduced the cost of sales by 4%, which contributed to a 20% increase in profitability.

via www.customerthink.com

This is a great post by Axel Schultze showing an unusual case study for social media. It's unusual in that it's not a flashy marketing campaign but rather a strategy to support business processes. In this case, to support the sales staff to "create a superior customer experience."

The goal was to enable the sales team to reach more people personally each day, and that was achieved. Being able to "touch" 200 people per day using social media instead of 40-60 using cold calling shows a tremendous value add.

And what's amazing is that this is an ongoing business process, not a campaign by some brilliant agency. This is remarkable to me because this is a benchmark for social media acceptance: when it becomes part of the day-to-day business process.

How Much Old Spice Body Wash Has the Old Spice Guy Sold? - Advertising Age - News

Mr. Mustafa, a former NFL wide receiver who essentially switched to playing defense for Old Spice against the Dove launch, is now clearly back on offense. None of the data (including that for the four weeks ended July 11 that showed continued gains for P&G in body wash), yet reflects the sales impact of Mr. Mustafa's 186 highly publicized personalized response videos earlier this month, which generated more than 34 million aggregate views and a billion PR impression in a week, according to P&G. In a single week, views of the personalized ads surpassed the nearly 29 million viral video views of Mr. Mustafa's four TV ads since February.

As of July 18, Old Spice, with 94 million views, had become the No. 1 all-time most-viewed sponsored channel on YouTube, Mr. Norton said. Old Spice had eight of the top 11 most-popular videos on YouTube on July 16. In the six days following the start of Mr. Mustafa's personalized videos, he reached more than 100 million followers.

via adage.com

Stunning statistics on the Old Spice Guy campaign.

Five Things 'Jersey Shore' Taught My Agency About Social Media - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.

via adage.com

Interesting study on the power of the reshare on Facebook versus Twitter.

FP Tech Desk: Facebook fails on customer satisfaction: survey | FP Posted | Financial Post

As Facebook prepares to announce that 500 million people use its service, turns out apparently most of them don’t enjoy the experience.

Tuesday, the yearly American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) e-business report was released, for the first time including data on social media websites. And the results might have just ruined Mark Zuckerberg’s day.

Sponsored by ForeSee Results, the survey gave the world’s largest social network a score of 64, putting Facebook in the bottom 5% of all 223 private companies included in the survey. For some perspective, Facebook actually scored 2 points lower than the air travel, an industry where satisfied customers are about as common as departure delays.

Even the United States government got a higher customer satisfaction rating in the survey.

“Of the 140 federal government agencies and websites measured by the ASCI, only 11 scored lower than 65, including the IRS,” Larry Freed, president of ForeSee Results, said in a statement.

via business.financialpost.com

Facebook beware: the SNS competitive space is ripe for MySpace to stage a comeback or for some new upstart site to cull new members from those scoring the Facebook experience only slightly higher than paying taxes or being bumped from a paid flight.

How to Search for a Job Online - WSJ.com

In a tight job market, building and maintaining an online presence is critical to networking and job hunting. Done right, it can be an important tool for present and future networking and useful for potential employers trying to get a sense of who you are, your talents and your experience. Done wrong, it can easily take you out of the running for most positions.

Here are five mistakes online job hunters make:

1. Forgetting manners.

If you use Twitter or you write a blog, you should assume that hiring managers and recruiters will read your updates and your posts. A December 2009 study by Microsoft Corp. found that 79% of hiring managers and job recruiters review online information about job applicants before making a hiring decision. Of those, 70% said that they have rejected candidates based on information that they found online. Top reasons listed? Concerns about lifestyle, inappropriate comments, and unsuitable photos and videos.

via online.wsj.com

How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made

Old Spice, marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy and actor Isaiah Mustafa are collaborating on the project. The group seeded various social networks with an invitation to ask questions of Mustafa's character, a dashing shirtless man with over-the-top humor and bravado. Then all the responses were tracked and users who contributed interesting questions and/or were high-profile people on social networks are being responded to directly and by name in short, funny YouTube videos. The group has made videos in response to Digg founder Kevin Rose, TV star Alyssa Milano (now big on Twitter) and many more people, famous and not.

via www.readwriteweb.com

Thanks to Marshall for showing us how the Old Spice videos were coordinated and shot.

Five quick ways to use social media for festivals and events | Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Five quick ways to use social media for festivals and events

Are you responsible in some way for a festival or special event, and would like to get jump-started using social media to promote it?

I always advise including social media as an integral part of your overall marketing plan, not sticking it on as an afterthought, but sometimes you do need to push the train forward a bit even if all the track isn’t laid to the end.

Hey, it worked for the US Transcontinental Railroad….

If your festival or special event is coming up quickly, here are some things you can do to enhance your online presence, and then you’ll have a platform to build on more thoughtfully for next year:

via www.sheilasguide.com

Great bookmark for any small business or organization looking to do a local event and seeking information on the best way to use social media promote it. So glad this post is written--now I don't have to. :-)

http://socialmediatoday.com/douglaswhite/139816/social-media-fans-win

http://socialmediatoday.com/douglaswhite/139816/social-media-fans-win

A Facebook fan will spend $80 a year more on a product than a non-fan. Fans are 40% more likely to share brand information.

8 Tips on Using Twitter to Build a Powerful Business Network | Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

More than ever, building and growing a business means becoming part of the social web. A powerful network of loyal fans means your message can be visible, heard, understood and spread with the speed and reach of the Internet.

How do you get a network like that?

I often call Twitter the world’s largest networking room, but that doesn’t do it justice. Networking rooms are physical and geographically limited. They can’t expand and contract in size. The people who visit the room are limited by those who can physically get to the location where the meeting and the room exists in space and time. And not every networking event collects the people who are interested in what we do.

Unlike that networking room, Twitter let us decide who is at our “networking event.”

8 Tips on Using Twitter to Build a Powerful Business Network

via www.successful-blog.com

GREAT list of tips, all to be stood by. Note to self: add Listorious to suggestions for my Twitter class.

Poynter Online - Digital Journalist Survival Guide: A Glossary of Tech Terms You Should Know

Back in January, we asked Jennifer 8. Lee (a former member of Poynter's National Advisory Board) to write a short glossary for journalists on "how to talk tech." She wisely enlisted the Hacks/Hackers group, which aims to build relationships between programmers and journalists, to crowdsource the effort. We're publishing the results here.

The days are over when a journalist could ignore those geeks in the corner who typed lines of code, worked on the website and spoke in a bizarre language populated with acronyms. Any journalist's story now may be distributed with an API; information gathered by a reporter could be used in a mashup or shared via Scribd.

This glossary will help you wade through such terms. They relate to Web standards, programming, online tools, social networking, online advertising and basic technology. If you're particularly challenged, this thing called an iPhone is even defined for you. Get started now -- the list will grow more quickly than your relatives join Facebook.

via www.poynter.org

API, cloud computing, blogs, etc. defined by geeks for journalists. Good, modern, relevant definitions. Flagging for next presentation.