How Technology is Changing Social Media Marketing

Three ways social software harnesses the power of scale

Contents
executive summary.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................................................................... . . . 1 INTRODUCTION.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................................................................... . . . 2 STRATEGIC PLANNING.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................................................................... . . . . 2 A pricey proposition.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................................................................... . . . . 2 An eye to the future.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................................................................... . . . . 2 Strategic advantages built right in.............................................................................................. . . . . 3 ORGANIZATIONAL EFFICIENCY.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................................................................... . . . 4 Mountain Dew.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................................................................... . . . 4 Harness the full power of scale...................................................................................................... . . . 5

Annies Homegrown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................................................................... . . . . 5 Stretch your editorial resources. . .................................................................................................. . . . 6 The Washington Redskins.................................................................................................................... 6

SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................................................................... . . . . 7 Get optimal results with optimized technology.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 You cant fix what you cant measure. . ............................................................................................ . . . 8 Six methods for measuring social. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Measure, monitor and analyze.. . . ...................................................................................................... . . . 9

Esurance.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................................................................... . . . 9 CONCLUSION.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................................................................... . . . . 9

executive summary
A healthy and growing fanbase is a social marketers dream come true. But, keeping all your fans happy can quickly become a nightmare. Attention spans in the social space are short, and the impact of any single interaction is fleeting at best. Theres simply no way around it, ongoing social success demands a constant churn of unique and engaging content. How do leading social brands keep it up day after day? The solution is technology. And in the world of social marketing, technology is all about the power of scale. Marketing automation is finally catching up to the business technology curve, and some of the most exciting and valuable advances are in social marketing software. As a marketer, its critical for you to sit up and take notice, not only because technology can make your job easier and more productive, but also because your influence over the technology you use is growing dramatically. According to Gartner, 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were almost three times as high as IT budgets, and the gap was expected to grow in 2012. Marketing already makes 30% of its own technology purchases and influences almost 50% overall. Whats more, by 2017 Gartner expects that CMOs will be spending more on IT than CIOs do.1

By 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs do.

Because your role as a technology influencer and decision maker is growing, its more important than ever that you understand exactly how different technology choices can affect your resources and your results. To that end, this paper explains how social marketing technology allows you to do more faster, at a lower cost, with better results, and greater insight. We explore the top three ways you can use technology to empower social marketing managers and bolster a growing brand. And we look at specific examples of how four leading brands use technology to help their social marketing fly.

1 Gartner, By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO, January 2012

Whitepaper | H  ow Technology Can Take Your Social Where Its Never Been Before

INTRODUCTION
A post, a tweet, a pin, or an update are all simple and speedy enough tasks to complete. But the social audience is a hungry beast, and once you start feeding it you cant afford to stop. When youre just getting started with social marketing, it may be simple enough to log onto the separate social networks and create every interaction by hand. But, if youre doing social right, your brand will soon gain traction, your fans will multiply, engagement will increase, and the demand for content will take off. Active social brands quickly learn that content demand always outpaces content resources, which means you need to make your processes more efficient and enable your team to work faster. You need systems in place that seamlessly expand your brand into new networks, regions and markets. You want to be able to work quickly and efficiently with other departments or sub-brands and with outside partners. And when employees are busy with other projects, take a vacation, or move on to other positions, you have to be sure new people can step in without skipping a beat. There are an incredible number of moving parts in almost any social marketing initiative. But, to successfully grow a brand, social media managers must be able to focus most of their energy on the bigger social strategy instead of on the processes and logistics of individual executions. This paper is organized around the three key areas where technology can make that happen: strategic planning, organizational efficiency and social media results.

Wildfire clients get: A Wildfire strategist as part of your contract A quarterly review 36 white papers per quarter 36 webinars per quarter

them? How can you use your planning tools most effectively? How do you measure your results and benefit from what youve learned? A pricey proposition If you turn to third-party consultants for their expertise, all that strategizing becomes a pricey proposition. Social media consulting fees can run up to $500 per hour, and monthly reports and advisement can result in an annual fee upwards of $90,000.2 And keep in mind; those expenses are in addition to any development and on-going management fees for social channels. The right social marketing software will include the same or better strategic consulting services at little or no extra cost. Remember, a third-party consultant is happiest when youre paying for their help on a repeat basis. Having customers who are satisfied all the time, on the other hand, motivates a good social software-as-a-service business. When youre using a social technology to its full potential and growing your business as a result, youre more likely to expand your use of the product and recommend it to others. Your success is a win/win for you and the software vendor, so its in the vendors best interest to provide efficient, high-quality strategic resources and advice. An eye to the future When choosing your social technology keep in mind that the social media landscape is changing daily. That means your social software should be forward-looking and strategic by its very nature. Your vendor should have more than a great product right now; it should also have a compelling vision of where social marketing is headed and a plan to get you there. The best social software: Quickly adapts to incorporate important new social networks Always complies with current social network formats and requirements

Wildfire supports all leading social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.

STRATEGIC PLANNING
With time and resources at a premium, every significant social marketing effort should be planned carefully. Not just to maximize its own results, but also to further the brands overarching social strategy. The questions you should ask are many, and the answers are constantly changing: What campaign concepts are most compelling? What best practices should you use to implement

Mack Collier, Cost of Social Media in 2012, January 2012

 Gives you timely social best practices resources like webinars and white papers Provides strategists who are well versed in developing social trends and how you can capitalize on them Strategic advantages built right in Some aspects of strategy are more technical than analytical, and the best social technologies handle such issues automatically. Two areas in particular where strategic functionality should be built right into your technology are localization and compliance. Localization Every social marketer should be thinking about the future, about expanding their brand into new markets or regions on the way to becoming a 24/7 global brand. You never know where you might find your next great customer or market, and social media can give you efficient low-cost access to people you might not be able to reach any other way. For example, Argentina, Brazil and India may be beyond your physical reach, but they also have the highest penetration of social network usage plus the highest usage frequency and intensity. 3 But, to go global you need to localize your content. For starters, you should speak your audiences languagein Europe, for instance, nine out of ten Internet users prefer browsing in their own language.4 For maximum relevancy, you also want to be sure youre targeting the right audience at the right time with the right message.

Localizing a single campaign by hand is essentially the same as launching multiple campaigns at once, which is a time-consuming and tedious task. But localization is easily manageable with the proper technology. Instead of launching five campaigns in five different languages, you can launch one campaign, with all of the relevant creative assets stored, that automatically and dynamically adjusts itself to the relevant language. Automated scheduling also allows you to post content at the most ideal time anywhere in the world. Compliance and regulation If youre like most people, youve signed up for so many online accounts that you click right through the terms of agreement without even realizing theyre there. When it comes to your brands social properties, though, you need to pay attention. Facebooks terms provide a prime example of whats at stake and how complex the rules can be. To protect the reputation and integrity of its social network, Facebooks regulations consist of thousands of words of legalese, all of which have direct impact on the governance of your page and its social activities. Items covered include everything from who may access your pages to page naming conventions to how you design your cover photos.

Social marketing software ensures that pages and applications stay in compliance with constantly changing social network requirements.

Qatar ran a global social media campaign with Wildfire in five languages and grew its community by 150,000 new fans in 30 days.

Every social network that your brand uses has its own set of rules and regulations, and they all change constantly to keep up with government requirements, product updates and other developments. If you fall out of compliance, the pages that youve labored on building up for months (and longer) can be removed

3 InSites Consulting, Social Media Around the World 2012, September 2012 4 EuroBarometer, User Language Preferences Online, May 2011

Whitepaper | H  ow Technology Can Take Your Social Where Its Never Been Before

in an instant, and the communities youve grown around them can disappear. The best way to avoid this disastrous scenario is to use social software that stays on top of the latest requirements for you and has compliance built right in. The best social software vendors constantly monitor social network requirements and update their products accordingly. To the extent that its possible, they prevent you from making mistakes that put your social campaigns and communities at risk. On the other end of the spectrum, they optimize templates and functionality so you can quickly and easily exploit any activities that are permitted.

You could tackle your campaigns one at a time using an agency or in-house resources, but thats an extremely time-consuming and expensive approach. One Industry survey showed that the typical agency cost of a short-term (1-3 month) social media campaign in 2012 was between $1,500 and $20,000. A long-term (36 month) campaign averaged between $25,000 and $75,000.6 The right technology not only makes it incredibly faster and easier to create a campaign, it also allows you to run as many campaigns as you want at a lower cost. Better still, the value you receive goes far beyond just the value of the digital assets that are created for a given campaign. The best social software helps minimize or eliminate development costs, agency fees, strategy consultation fees, and maintenance and management fees. And it allows you to simplify processes, replicate procedures, and easily create workflows.

ORGANIZATIONAL EFFICIENCY
Any marketer who tests the social waters realizes quickly that theres much more to social marketing than posting a pithy comment whenever inspiration strikes. In fact, 59% of marketers work on social more than 6 hours every week, 33% spend over 11 hours weekly, and 15% dedicate a full 20 hours or more to social efforts every week.5

Cost of social campaigns without the scale of social software: Short-term campaign: $1,500 to $20,000 Long-term campaign: $25,000 to $75,000

With full functionality software, you can efficiently create integrated campaigns across social networks by building pages, scheduling and sending messages, running ads and viewing results from a single interface. Youll be able to deploy the same content across multiple networks or create custom content targeted to individual networks. And you can create custom workflows that automatically notify team members when their input and approval is needed to keep a project moving.
59% of marketers work on social for 6 hours or more every week.

Even if youre part of the 59% right now, youll need to commit more attention to your social initiatives to keep them healthy and on track as they begin to gain traction. And the more successful your efforts, the more complex the challenges youll face. For example: What content will be most effective and where will you get it? How should you schedule your messaging? Whos going to have editorial oversight? How long is it going to take to get everything created, approved and ready to go?

Mountain Dew Mountain Dew, the popular soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo, learned about the power of scalability when it wanted to launch what it expected to be a simple promotion. Mountain Dew had 80 Diet Dew bean bag chairs it wanted to give away to customers, but was surprised to find out it was going to cost tens of thousands of dollars to run a single contest. Then Mountain Dew discovered that Wildfires technology could help its social team do far more while spending less. Wildfire gave them unlimited access to create multiple pages

5 Social Media Examiner, 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, April 2012 6 Mack Collier, Cost of Social Media in 2012 January 2012

and promotions across all the most popular social networks. Plus, Wildfires technology came with unlimited user accounts and built-in creative and technical services. Mountain Dew also gained powerful analytics and the ability to free up brand managers by letting them schedule posts ahead of time.

Applications let your users interact with your content and let you capture user data so you can follow up with participants, identify influencers, and gather information to build moreprofitable relationships. Annies Homegrown Annies Homegrown is an organic and all natural foods company based in Berkeley, California and is best known for its bunnyshaped macaroni and cheese. To celebrate its new Rising Crust Pizza, Annies sent a fully equipped pizza truck on a cross-country Slice of Happiness Tour and promoted the event on Facebook. To create its Facebook promotion, Annies combined two of Wildfires 90+ page and app templates. When users clicked on the Request a Stop tab on Annies main Facebook page they were taken to a customized landing page where an entertaining YouTube video explained what the tour was all about and encouraged them to participate. Beneath the video viewers could enter their information and request a special detour of the pizza tour. If you were one of the lucky winners, Annies rerouted its pizza truck to your town and served up a pizza party for 120 people. The tour was a big hit, generating over 325,000 likes.

Mountain Dew used Wildfire to run a sweepstakes that took users from Twitter to Facebook.

Harness the full power of scale When it comes to organizational efficiency, social software adds value in more ways than we can list here. To identify the greatest benefits in simplest terms, though, we say that technology helps you scale your content and scale your resources. The one thing that cant be stressed enough is this: The key to social success is a constant churn of fresh and original content. To maximize engagement, you need to create, launch and maintain lots of great content all the time. Basic communications like posts and tweets are an important part of any ongoing social conversation. But, if youre going to grow and engage fans and followers and encourage sharing, its essential to up the ante with a regular stream of fun and rewarding interactive experiences such as polls, surveys, contests and giveaways. Creating a rich interactive experience from scratch is extremely time and resource intensive, but social software makes it easy to: Launch a variety of campaigns on a variety of channels Keep the content visually appealing and on brand Create unique and memorable experiences Capture user data Social software provides all the templates you need to create customized tabs and applications for your social properties. And these templates are already fine-tuned to optimize the placement and impact of your interactive content. Tabs allow you to add depth to your existing social channels by including multiple landing pages and experiences on each site.

Annies Homegrown used Wildfire templates to promote a crosscountry pizza party contest on Facebook.

Whitepaper | H  ow Technology Can Take Your Social Where Its Never Been Before

Stretch your editorial resources Once youve figured out how to keep your inspired content coming, youre well armed for social success. But the battle is far from over. In fact, it never ends. Every piece of content you create is simply an invitation for engagement, just one step in what you hope to be an ongoing relationship thats rewarding for both you and your customers. Your goal is to spark relationships and then keep them going strong, but the sheer volume of content it takes just to get things started can make it nearly impossible to keep up with the responses. Heres what youre up against: On average, every enterprise brand of 1,000+ employees has 178 corporate-owned social media accounts.7 Businesses with over 40 different landing pages generate 10X more leads than those with only 15 landing pages.8 70% of all fan questions posted to social media channels are not responded to by brands. 9 These numbers raise three key issues that technology can help you address: 1. Most brands have very few people responsible for managing an overwhelming number of social accounts. 2. The payoff for creating numerous landing pages can be huge, even if the pages vary only slightly in messaging or other elements. 3. A staggering potential for social return on investment (ROI) is being wasted, because social teams dont have the resources to follow up on the majority of conversations they initiate. Social software can help you address these issues by making the most of every resource available to your social team.

Use access control to increase your resources. Social software allows you to give different team members different roles and permissions, so you can maximize your resources while protecting your brand. In other words, you can assign specific responsibilities without providing unlimited access to your social properties. For instance, you dont want an intern responding directly to customer comments or questions. But, you can use that same intern to sort through the messages and queue them up, making it easier for a senior member of your team to respond quickly and appropriately. Scale your messages. With the right software, you can create content once and then post it simultaneously across multiple pages and networks. A single person can add fresh content to numerous accounts as quickly and easily as updating a single account. And creating and maintaining multiple landing pages requires a fraction of the work it would take if they were developed one at a time. Flexible templates allow you to quickly customize and go live after adding just your logos, images and textor they let you access the code and get more creative if you have the time and need. Filter conversations for specialized attention. Not all conversations are created equal. Youd like to answer every question and acknowledge every comment, but some youll never get to. Others, you simply cant afford to ignore. Software filters let you use keyword or moderation checklists to flag the messages that absolutely demand your attention. You can put out fires like unhappy customers, or snap to attention if a hot lead comes along.

The Washington Redskins The National Football Leagues Washington Redskins have some of the most faithful fans you could wish for. The team has sold out every home game since 1968 and has broken the NFLs attendance record for the last nine years running. In a football season with new games and plenty of surprises every week, the Redskins often need to turn on a new promotion in a matter of days to stay relevant to their fans and provide the excitement and sense of community fans are looking for. If we didnt have a platform like Wildfire, says the Redskins top social strategist, wed have to spend a lot of lead time to build out these pages, and that could take a month or more.

Wildfire clients: Save hours per day using geo-target presets Can schedule a months worth of content in just a few planning sessions Receive unlimited access to Pages and Promotions as part of a monthly fee

7 Altimeter, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, January 2012 8 Econsultancy, The Inbound Marketing Explosion, March 2012 9 Simply Zesty, 70% Of Brand Fan Questions On Social Media Arent Responded To Live at Le Web 12, June 2012

Prior to using Wildfire, the Redskins were also impacted by an artificial resource crunch. Because Administrator was the only role available to access the social accounts, the social team had to be very careful about who could do hands-on work. Now that Wildfire provides different levels of permission, the social team can open up different roles to interns, designers, staff, and even partners. With more people on the job, the Redskins can respond to opportunities faster and make the best use of all their resources.

Increase lead generation, reach and advocacy. Adjust your strategy to improve success.

Keep a constant eye on industry benchmarks, property and page data, tab and promotion metrics, and referral sources.

Get optimal results with optimized technology When you work with an internal team or a third-party agency to build complicated and customized one-use applications, you may end up with a social campaign that looks great on your desktop but falls apart online. Theres simply no way to thoroughly test one-off applications and optimize them for the best user experience. When they go live, these pages or applications may even break due to unforeseen code changes made by the social platforms themselves. The result can be an awkward and inconsistent user experience that causes users to abandon a campaign before they even enter. Many custom applications also lack an optimized viral functionality, and that means participants cant easily share the campaign with their friends and followers. Either one of these issues can seriously slow the momentum of an otherwise brilliant campaigncombined, these problems can stop a campaign in its tracks.

Improved access control helps the Redskins get more staff involved with their social.

SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS

By efficiently scaling your efforts, social software provides the immediate reward of reaching a larger audience. But it also delivers better results in two additional ways that are equally important. First, it helps increase lead generation, brand reach, and brand advocacy by optimizing the technology that you use to run your campaigns. Second, it provides comprehensive and integrated measurement and analysis tools that give you insight into your results, so you can continually adjust your strategy and increase your success.

Whitepaper | H  ow Technology Can Take Your Social Where Its Never Been Before

When you build a campaign using social software, you keep the ability to create something unique, innovative and on brand. But you eliminate the risk that your end product will not function as intended or that it will be incompatible with the social platforms it was intended for. The tab, page and application templates that come with your social software have been used and tested hundreds or thousands of times in live campaigns. They incorporate best practices for all of the most popular and effective promotion types. Their results are constantly analyzed and their coding is continually updated and optimized to work perfectly with the social networks theyre intended for. And, because sharing is the key to social success, the latest and greatest viral functionality is seamlessly built into the templates as a basic component.

Poor tools are one of the top three obstacles to measuring social success.

Six methods for measuring social In its Social Media ROI Cookbook, Altimeter Group identifies the six methods that organizations use to measure their social results on a day-to-day basis. Three of the methods are categorized as top down methods and three as bottom up. 12 Top down The top down methods, which rely on the user to draw conclusions based on their own observations, are: Anecdote: Specific examples where it is known that social media influenced a sale or had some other identifiable effect. You cant fix what you cant measure In a recent survey by the Association of National Advertisers, 90% of U.S. marketers say theyre using social networks for their marketing efforts. Five years ago that figure was only 20%.10 Despite this steady increase in adoption, 75% of organizations lack a holistic measurement strategy for their social media work.11 Why is there such a huge divide between the number of marketers using social media and the number successfully measuring their results? An Altimeter Group survey sheds some light on the subject by asking those responsible for measuring social media results to identify the three biggest challenges they face: 56% of respondents indicate the inability to tie social media to business outcomes; 39% say there is a lack of analytics expertise and/or resources; and 38% say they have poor tools.12 Correlation: Comparing two data sets to see if there may be a relationship between them, for example the number of Likes versus revenue. Multivariate testing: Comparing a group exposed to social media content with another group exposed to different content or no content. While top down measurements have their place, they are time and labor intensive and fall far short of being able to provide reliable and comprehensive data on a regular basis. Bottom up Bottom up measurements are technology driven and can provide metrics that are instant, comprehensive and exact. These methods are: Links and tagging: Shortlinks, tags, custom URLs and cookies identify when a user buys something from your site and where they came from.

Compared to Wildfires top competitors clients, Wildfires clients see: 25% more people sharing their posts 21% more engagement with their content

10 Association of National Advertisers, 2012 Digital/Social Media Survey, July, 2012 11 Altimeter Group, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, January 2012 12 Altimeter Group, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, January 2012 13 Altimeter Group, Social Media ROI Cookbook, July 2012

Direct commerce: Social commerce apps allow users to make a purchase from you on Facebook, from links on Twitter, and via other social properties. Integrated: Specific apps that you purchase run in the background and measure conversions, identify where leads come from, score leads, and so on. Measure, monitor and analyze Integrated technology includes the measurement, monitoring and analysis tools that come as part of your primary social software product. Because these tools are designed from the start to work with your pages and applications, theyre often able to give you the most powerful, insightful and actionable measurements and analytics available. Social software can provide: Property and page data for each of your social pages, allowing you to analyze trends over time and across multiple variables Tab and promotion metrics that let you quickly pinpoint whats working, so you can repeat successful strategies and optimize results Referral sources, so you can identify demographic data for campaigns and develop content that matches audience preferences Audience engagement metrics for specific messages, so you can fine-tune future messaging for maximum impact Industry benchmarks that help you understand your performance in comparison to competitors

When it comes to service, Esurance takes advantage of the personal assistance thats built right into its contract. For upfront strategic guidance or last-minute technical tweaking, Esurance always knows exactly where to turn for help.

Esurance chose Wildfire because it needed deeper analytical capabilities and high-end service.

CONCLUSION
By its very nature, social is a medium that requires a higher frequency of interaction than any other form of marketing. The challenge may be daunting, but the payoff in terms of engaged and loyal fans, followers, customers and advocates cant be beat. The good news for marketers is that recent advancements in social marketing technology are making it easier and more affordable to build, grow, engage, and monetize audiences using innovative content thats optimized for the most popular social networks. The key to success is social software that scales both your content and your resources allowing you to: Create content once, then launch it everywhere Segment promotions, target content by region and language, and schedule posts Control user permissions and access to make the most efficient use of your social team and partners Test, measure, and analyze campaigns and competitors in real time to adjust your strategy and ensure success

Esurance As an insurance company, Esurance fully appreciates the value of meaningful data and great customer service. So, its no surprise the Esurance social team was looking for those two things in its social software. Esurance was able to get some data directly from the social networks it was using, but that data wasnt providing the deeper insights necessary to understand what its fans and followers really wanted. With Wildfire, Esurance easily gets up-to-theminute data on all of its social properties at any time, and the social team is able to run the analysis it needs to continually optimize its pages, promotions and messages for better results. Better yet, Esurance can now compare its social performance with its competitors and adjust its strategy accordingly.

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