When starting a business or launching a new product it is important to create a strategy for getting found on the web and generating interest and sales leads in your products and services. However, there are always lots of questions that come up with regards to the strategic implementation of a web content or SEO strategy.
One of the things that is regularly discussed is, what is the value of blogging to a good marketing strategy or business plan?
By way of a practical example, it is easy to go out on the web and find lots of articles and blog posts on how important blogging is to an inbound marketing strategy, companies such as Hubspot, whose product we use is a great example of the hows and whys, but most people probably prefer concrete examples, so here is one from our company.
We operate in the strategic plan implementation space, meaning that our software helps companies to easily implement a strategic plan. When we first started we knew the generic terms like "strategic plan" would have lots of competition in web search so we looked at other words that were very powerful and came up with terms such as; "strategic plan implementation" and "strategic plan execution".
Now, when we first started our web site we only really had one or two pages where it was actually practical to use those terms as keywords or H1 tags so we needed a good strategy to drive search to our site and get more leads.
This is of course was where blogging came in. Over several months we wrote blog posts on topics such as:
In each of these cases we talked about ideas for implementing and executing on various aspects of a strategic plan. The result of this work was that RapidInfluence became the number one search term on Google for "strategic plan implementation" and the number 4 search term for "strategic plan execution" and all of our competitors were found on the sidelines paying for those terms via Google Adwords. Of course we need to keep writing and optimizing to keep our position in the search world but that is a whole different strategy.
In terms of web site content (content about the product or the company) versus blog content (content regularly written and distributed about strategic concepts) in our own case the top pages visited overall breakdown as follows:
- Blog content - 6 of the top 10 pages viewed
- Web site content - 4 of the top 10pages viewed
So you can imagine where we would be from a strategic point of view if we had only considered web content in our content and SEO strategy. We would have missed numerous chances to interact with potential clients because we would have just had the standard web pages (probably only one or two) that would have covered strategy implementation. This would have meant that we would not have been able to work our way up in the search realm, people would have not had a reason to link to our content and potential customers would not have had any sense of whether we really knew much about strategy implementation aside from the normal salesy drivel you see on most web sites.
So, bottom line, blogging needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy, it needs to take a big spot in the overall content strategy, and it will likely be your largest source of web page views when done correctly.
Thanks,
Ed
Thomas Thurston is billed as a Startup Predictor, someone who can determine whether or not a company will succeed or fail, and he certainly has the track record and the ears of many in the venture capital space to prove it.
I recently read an article in XConomy titled:
How to Predict Whether a Startup Will Succeed or Fail: Testing the “Disruptive Innovation” Model
Where his ideas and strategies for making these predictions were opened up.
In essence it comes down to this:
Startups are nimble and flexible, which rather than being an advantage, Thurston believes is actually one of the main reasons for their failure. His idea is that companies, rather than focusing on the most leading edge capabilities, can achieve better success by coming into markets at the lower end of performance, capitalizing first on being lower cost, with the knowledge of their customers that the product is going to improve over time. This strategy can potentially keep you from being perceived as a threat for long enough for you to gain traction and in fact become a sustainable threat.
So the question is how would you develop a strategy inline with that idea; coming in lower cost and then improving over time under the noses of the bigger players in the market?
To start, you can look at two stategies that are gaining in popularity; Minimum Viable Product and Lean Startup both of which are championed by Eric Ries.
The MVP and LS ideas focus on getting a product into the market quickly, in order to test the viability of an idea and then expanding on the successes in such a way that large amounts of capital are not immediately necessary to gain traction.
To do this you need to look at the overall market and say things like:
- What are 2-3 things that we could do to test this idea, do we take something that is currently desktop bound and make it mobile with a simple feature set?
- Do we create a product readily available in the enterprise market and bring its top 2-3 functions down into a simple interface for the small and medium business market?
- Do we take a tool that is used by business primarily and adopt it for consumers, in a very simple form?
All of these things if done in an MVP fashion and combined with lean operations and early monetization can bring you traction and users while still being considered a non-threat by large companies. Nothing raises the eyebrows like being top angel funded and then large scale VC funded early as it forces you to say "hey here we are" painting a large target on your door.
The key to this type of strategic implementation is small steps, quick tests and capitalizing on the ideas that work.
Thanks,
Ed
Meri Gruber from Competing on Execution makes a very good observation about game mechanics with her trip to a kids science fair, one that actually reminded me of what people are doing in location based products like Foursquare.
Her original blog post is titled Game Mechanics at Work and Play
As noted Meri had two experiences, one in which she attended an event that had a list of all exhibitors (art fair) and another (science fair) that had a similar list in the form of a passport where you collected badges once you had seen the exhibitor, similar to location technologies like Foursquare.
In the end the passport badge format of the science fair provided a much better experience because she didn't miss any exhibitors and there was a sense of accomplishment at the end, no reward mind you, but just the knowledge that she came to an event and saw all that it had to offer. In the end Meri wrote about the science fair, which in and of itself says a lot.
From a strategic marketing standpoint there are some good takeaways here:
- Are you making it easy for customers to navigate all of your offerings - checklist, tracking process, making a game out of it?
- Are you providing a reward or recognition for being a great customer - Meri was a great customer of the science fair?
- Could you tie into the game mechanics of a partner for both of the above?
I would also add that this is more than just a traditional loyalty club question, it really goes beyond, it's about a higher level of engagement, in essence a game!
So, what should you be adjusting in your
strategic plan overall or your
marketing plan in particular?
Start by updating your plan to reflect new action items for testing some game mechanics ideas.
In particular look for low hanging fruit, can you highlight top users in some way? can you create rewards for more purchases and referrals made by your customers? There is a lot of information being produced in this area that can really kick your growth strategies into high gear.
Thanks,
Ed Loessi
Google Streamlines, Targets Search: Its Biggest Change in Years
In his Fast Company review Dan Nosowitz did a good job of highlighting the key points of Google's newly update search interface. In my opinion, one of the strategic points that may actually pass over the heads of many people was:
"Novice users may finally try out the different types of Google search, now that they're sitting right next to the general results and are targeted more specifically."
So, why is this so important? Well, let's look at the realities of search at the moment:
- The millions of average searchers today generally go to web and for the most part Google, since it is now a verb, and they type in some words and then they see what comes up on the first page or in the top 1-5 Adwords positions and they click on something that catches their eye.
- Marketers of course covet these positions and spend millions/billions of dollars a year in SEO and PPC programs to be on that first page and get the clicks from people who have largely been blissfully unaware of the other types of web content that were up above their eye line (at the top of the web page) or mixed in with the rest of the content further down the search pages.
So, what has changed with Google's major update?
Well for many web searchers they are going to suddenly find out that for their keyword searches there are actually videos, blog posts, Twitter (and other micro-blog) updates and discussions that pertain to what they are searching for, essentially many pages not just one, in essence a whole new world of content just a few clicks away.
However, the real change is going to be for marketers. There is now no longer just one page to try and be in the first 10 listings of, there are at least 5 pages that first page relevance is going to be required because Google has essentially added a first level filter right on the left hand margin where people can actually see it.
This means that as a marketer you will need to be producing video content, blog content, Twitter conversations etc. because millions of people can now easily filter you right out of the equation.
Give it a try, if your company currently appears on the first page of a Google search, enter in those keywords and bring up that page. Now, click on the filters along the left and see what happens to your position (or should I say lack of position) and now you will have a good feel for what will be happening now that it is both apparent that there is other content in the world besides your SEO optimized web site.
I've tried this with a few sites I regularly visit and for those companies who have primarily relied on having had a web site for a long time or having gotten lots of links to their home page, it's ugly. All of a sudden your competitor who has 50 YouTube videos or 3000 Twitter followers is all over page one of the video or updates filter and they are no where to be found.
So, what should you be adjusting in your strategic plan overall or your marketing plan in particular?
Start by updating your plan to reflect new action items for producing content where you have been lacking, because that nice SEO authority that you enjoy now will quickly be disappearing and your competitors will be madly producing content to gain that first page advantage in the filtered areas.
In particular look for low hanging fruit, if your competitors haven't been producing videos then create some really basic videos that cover important concepts, such as how to do X. As well, look at bumping up your blog posting to cover important ideas in your market. Essentially always be thinking about producing and distributing more content because now content is even more searchable and being filtered in a way that was not so apparent before.
Thanks,
Ed
As a company that has relied on lead generation via a social media strategy we are often asked "how can I get started implementing social CRM?". In general I like to respond in a way that is true to our strategic manifesto, in other words by giving the simplest possible action that can taken to get a measurable result.
So, here goes. The simplest Social CRM action is to establish 1 connection with a lead immediately upon their initial inquiry, which could be via them completing an online request form or signing up for a free trial of your product. This is not rocket science nor is it a new revelation, but it is the simplest action that can be taken to get started in using social crm strategies.
So, how do you do that? Well first, you have to determine what ways that you can connect to this potential new customer. For those who are active social networkers and there are now 100s of millions of us all you need to be able to determine is what social networks you or your company have in common with this prospect; Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or a myriad of other niche networks globally.
So what if your CRM system doesn't have social discovery (the ability to determine or record membership in a social network) built into it yet? Well in the case of Gmail users (both regular and enterprise apps) you are in luck. Tools like Rapportive http://www.rapportive.com can give you a simple discovery capability because it will actually look at incoming emails and try to locate the background information about that person and then provide you with some reference points to connect.
There are other similar tools if you still use Outlook (just kidding) such as Xobni http://www.xobni.com/ that will do roughly the same thing.
In our case when people sign up for a free trial of RapidInfluence the system sends us an email along the lines of "a new company has signed up for a free trial of RapidInfluence using the following information: first name, last name, company and email address" and since we use Rapportive it looks at the person's email address and locates them in their publicly available social networks and since many of our potential customers are Twitter users, the first thing we do is "follow them" in our own Twitter account http://www.twitter.com/rapidinfluence
Now, the uninitiated might think that this is a bit creepy, all this person did was sign up for an free trial of your software and now you are following them on Twitter? Well, I hope time continues to prove this out but to date no one has ever said anything negative about being followed by us after having signed up for a free trial of our software.
After all, we are trying to engage with people who are having challenges with strategic planning so the more we can engage during the discovery process the better the outcome for both parties.
Remember, once an individual or company has made contact with your company you know that for the most part they are ready to be engaged. By making a simple initial connection you can gauge the level of that interest and worst case position yourselves for a future purchase by reaching out to them in a timely manner and sharing things with them over a period of time.
Thanks, now go connect with a prospect :)
Ed Loessi
A few months back at TechCrunch 50, the launch pad for many newly minted startups, there were a few people who asked "are these new companies really trying to change the world?". This was in response to what seemed to be a less exciting group of presenting companies than in past years, in particular Sarah Lacy posed the issue below:
Memo to Start-ups: You’re Supposed to Be Changing the World, Remember?I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world.
A comment that we really liked was:
A start-up's only edge is that it's not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.
When we started RapidInfluence we did so as many people do, because we saw a problem in the market that had affected us and we thought we could do it better by a wide margin. Now the real question was could we move the ball forward in a significant way, a notion that Tim O'Reilly pointed out in a recent video interview, in which he said he is not interested in companies that are making only minor changes to markets or problems.
In our case, the fact of the matter was that people have been consulting on strategy and business planning as well as implementation for decades but as we pointed out in a previous post - Strategic planning is boring .... exciting .... useless .... essential - the whole idea can send shivers down the spine of even the most experienced business person so much so that a large percentage of strategic and business plans actually fail, wow! if that is not a market ripe for change then nothing is.
So, what does it mean to change the world? Well, there are probably some general things that could make something world changing. BTW, I've always disliked the use of the word "world" in this context because of the chance for hyperbole but let's just say that the world really means the arena in which you are working in. So, the criteria or metrics might be:
- There is a radical change in how something is done - Zipcar comes to mind for car rentals, you walk up the street, get in the car drive it around for a few hours then take it back to where you found it and you pay an hourly rate that includes everything, no fuss no muss, not your typical car rental experience
- There is a radical change in the outcome - everyone's favorite Twitter is another example, people have used various forms of messaging for as long as the Internet has been in existence and some things like email and IM have been immensely popular all Twitter did was say what if I have a short something to say and there you have it a radical change in the outcome of messaging
- The thing that is being changed is removed from obscurity - Kiva is a company that fits this perfectly, we all know that there are poor countries but what about the entreprenuers and small business people in those countries who are willing to build something for themselves and their families, through Kiva we can see them and we can loan them money at the click of a button and now 1000s of people are all of a sudden out of the shadows.
Now, given these rather tough metrics you've got to ask yourself, "what would it look like if the strategic and business planning and implementation world were changed?
- It would become exciting - as mentioned previously the general tendancy is to run for the hills when people start talking about strategy or business planning, this fear :) has got to stop
- Anyone could do it successfully - as we have also discussed in the past the academics and MBA's (some of my best friends are MBA's) have hijacked the whole process such that most people feel that it is too hard to successfully implement a strategy or business plan effectively, this too needs to change, it's important that success is 9.5 out of 10 not 3-4 out of10 or how can you build efficient economic engines
- People could share their plans and collaborate on them anywhere they were working - most people freely admit that strategy is created on a white board and typed into a pretty document, which goes immediately to dust collection duty on the nearest shelf never to be seen again, surely if we can share music, pictures, and our every movement we ought to be able to share a simple strategy or business plan?
So, it became our goal to change the "world" of strategy and business plan implementation, making it exciting because you could get started right away, with the expectations of a great reward upon completion, making it so everyone could do it via a simple process of defining goals, creating some actions and then following them through and finally making it easy to share what was going on with the process.
These are really simple things but in the end we hope that it is in fact the simplicity that will allow us to change the decades old ideas on strategy and business planning and how these things are implemented acrosss organizations.
Please join us as we shake things up!
Thanks,
Ed Loessi
You've just finished your strategic planning sessions, the whiteboards are full, the mission statement is clear, the vision statement is inspiring, the corporate strategy and strategic initiatives are agreed and aligned and everyone is smiling and nodding at what a wonderful outcome.
Fast forward 3 months and the shine is off the apple, people are busy again and it seems that things just aren't getting done and the plan is wallowing. Unfortunately this is the outcome of most strategic planning activities; great excitement and efforts being overtaken by lack of action and collaboration.
So, what are the signs that your strategic plan is in trouble from day one and what can you do about it?
- Sign #1 - The outcome of the strategic planning sessions was a Word doc - the only real use for a Word doc is for it to be neatly hole punched and placed in a binder, filling that space on the shelf behind your desk, a fitting tribute to hard work and brilliant minds. But seriously, this is what happens to so many strategic plans and it is the first sign of things going off the rails when the plan is expected to be executed by referring to a document periodically
- Sign #2 - It's Monday morning and you don't know what the first step is - my favorite thing to ask people who've just told me that they have finished their strategic plan is "what are the next 3 things on the list?", which usually returns sort of a funny look and some mumbling like "well I have these goals and we all agreed that we needed to achieve X". Unfortunately goals and objectives are not actions, which is why knowing what you are supposed to do on the Monday morning after the strategy retreat is so important
- Sign #3 - You don't know what anyone else is doing on their parts of the plan - so, you can imagine if you find yourself being a victim of Sign #2 you are also highly unlikely to know what it is anyone else is doing on their parts of the plan. Given that most strategic plans don't entail only one strategic initiative or element it is pretty important that people are aware of what others are doing if for no other reason than to be able to help out if they can.
It's simple really, strategic plans require action and action needs to happen immediately or you are going to have a difficult time creating the right environment for change and growth.
If all you have to go on is a Word doc, some vague but nice sounding goals and you are operating in a microcosm only aware of your own or your group's own progress you are headed for a train wreck when it comes to strategic plan implementation.
So, what can you do about it?:
- Get the plan in a collaborative format - as soon as the plan has made its way from the white board to a set of notes it should immediately go into some sort of collaborative working environment, preferably Web-based so that it can be shared and edited over time, this can be as simple as a Wiki or a more tailored software solution for strategic plan implementation
- Get the specific actions in place from the beginning - don't leave the planning session until each person or group that is responsible for a part of the plan has actual action items written down so that they can be actioned on Monday morning. Don't confuse the process of creating objectives such as "increased sales" and goals such as 25% growth in "X" market as being actions, get down to specific actions such as "implement inbound marketing software solution to increase sales leads"
- Track and share where things are - in setting up your collaboration around your strategic plan implementation you need to check off action items as they are finished and have that information within easy reach and display of any person in the company involved in the implementation process. People need to see and be aware of what is going on around them in order to maintain forward movement
- Target resources where the challenges are cropping up - finally, if you have done all of the above start looking for the bottlenecks and challenges. In a past blog post - The Most Important Thing to Know About Your Strategic Plan - I mentioned a conversation with Ian Smith of Portfolio Partnership, where he indicacted that the most important thing to know about any ongoing strategic plan was what was "behind" in getting done so that he could go back to the teams that were ahead of schedule and get some help in the problem areas. The fact is if one part of the plan fails the rest of the plan will fail so knowing what is going on and getting all hands on deck goes a long way towards successful strategic plan implementation.
In summary, watch out for the signs and you will greatly increase your chances of successfully implementing your strategic plan.
Ed Loessi
I know that the idea of One Page "X" for business has been touted for quite some time but it seems to be all the rage again, at least in the Blog and Twittersphere that I have been hanging out in lately, a quick search of the One Page world shows that there are:
and the list goes on (see an entire compilation at Amazon). There are even entire works of Shakespeare printed on one page, but that is probably a different discussion.
So, why are people working so hard to get everything down to One Page?
Simply because so many things have been made too darn complicated.
In our area, strategic planning and strategic plan implementation, we like to say that somewhere along the line the MBA's and Academics hijacked the whole strategic planning process and made it too complicated for people to do without an incredible amount of angst (see recent blog post "Strategic planning is boring .... exciting .... useless .... essential").
Once the intellectuals start driving the agenda, watch out, everything is likely to become 3 times as complex and will mostly like take 3 times longer to complete. Now, I am not here to blame them it's in their nature, business actitivities are interesting areas to study and hypothesize on but at some point the rest of the us need to take back the agenda so that we can actually Get Something Done.
So, what is the essence of One Pagers and how can it be applied in strategic planning?
In short, break things down into manageable components , manageable in both understanding as well as in the ability to complete. Take the standard strategic plan as an example:
- Simple explanations - things need to be clear to every level of person in an organization - in the case of strategic planning it can be things such as, explaining that you want to grow market share, and the 2-3 things that will make a difference in that quest; the right customers, high satisfaction levels, existing customers driving new customer aquisition. Express the ideas in such a way that it is easy to understand even to people not in your organization
- Key Elements - group things in ways that they relate well - I've seen some strategic plans that were as long as 30-40 pages and seemed to go on forever, brilliant work and very thorough, but completely unable to be implemented! When I see something like this I just say "stop, what is the most important issue facing you today" You then take that issue and fix it first then on to the next most important. People can only manage a few things well, having 30 or 40 pages of well meaning activities means that "nothing" is key and that just won't work
- Simple Actions - the final and most important item in the One Page concept - People, it's all about the actions, once you have broken down the complexity you should have this nice little one page cheat sheet on actions. If you only have a few key elements to work on then you should only have a few actions to complete for each. The actions should be so clear that you could stop any one of your colleagues walking down the hallway and they should be able to rattle off those actions without hesitation.
In summary, we love the concept of One Page Everything, it makes sense, the key is to make it doable and make it memorizable.
Ed Loessi
Having created and implemented strategic plans in a number of company and organization types I have often noted the Jekyll and Hyde complex that seems to surround the strategic planning area.
My recent check of the Twitterverse and Blogosphere highlighted again the wide variation of opinions on the subject of strategic planning:
"All this swot etc is crap ...I can t believe mbas do this sh....t for 2 whole years"
"thinking of swot analysis. shoot me now!"
"We did some strategic planning earlier this year but no finished doc yet"
"Strategic planning at work this week - good stuff; big plans"
"Strategic planning meetings are a bunch of people talking just to hear themselves talk.... No value chatter monkeys"
"looking forward to upcoming strategic planning weekend"
"Playing lego with son - strangely more fun than strategic planning"
"just finished strategic planning sessions, 2010 is going to be a great year"
In looking over the various comments they seem to fall into several categories:
- Those that had never been involved in strategic planning before but were really ready to go - this group seems to be strangely euphoric about the whole idea and is ready to make change and do great things in their organizations
- Those that had been involved in strategic planning but seemed to have had bad experiences - this group is quite vocal about their agony and given that most strategic plans fail it is quite understandable that they would be so vocal about the potentaial of wasting their time and in some cases boring themselves to death
- Those that derive a living from helping others with strategic planning.
It's fairly easy to assume that people who derive their living from strategic plan facilitation would be out and promoting the benefits of strategic planning but it is clear that with a large number of people strategic planning ranks right up their with going to the dentist for a root canal, necessary, yes, and quite a lot better than doing nothing about that aching tooth.
So, why is it that this great idea of strategic planning seems to crash and burn with so many people?
In short, the experience is not consistent for people and neither is the outcome.
The fact of the matter is everyone knows intellectually that having a strategic plan makes complete sense. The challenge is that for many their experience has been one of absolute boredom and mundane chatter followed by the failure of a useful outcome.
By contrast with the dentist, even though that root canal is painful, most people will happily recommend a dentist because the outcome of a root canal for 99% of the people in the world is fantastic, not so with strategic planning.
So, what can be done about it?
To put it simply: reduce the complexity and get to the outcomes quickly.
- Breakdown planning into simpler concepts: the fact of the matter is people need to master things in segments in order to get good at them, this is no different with strategic planning skills.
A common cry that I have heard is SWOT, Capabilities Analysis, Mission, Vision help! If you are just starting your first plans or you are a planning consultant you've got to bring people into the planning and implementation process at a speed that makes sense.
It may be fun for you as a consultant or skilled person within a company to build a well documented and masterful plan but odds are the other people involved are going to be overwhelmed and Twittering out comments like the ones above. A plan that takes too long or is incomprehensible to the people who are most affected by it is useless.
- Get to the actions: in today's business climate we are measured by outcomes and outcomes are the result of specific actions, the plans that sit on the shelf because people don't know where to start on them are a waste of time. If you can leave strategic planning sessions with an actual list of do this, then this, then this, you will be able to increase the success of the overall strategic plan.
People are good at following steps, so get to the specific actions and give people a sense of accomplishment along the way.
In our business we live by a Manifesto, which covers both how we operate the business and how we build our strategic planning solutions. This Manifesto is very much based on the simplicity of concepts and the getting to actions.
It's up to the entire industry whether it be consultants or product providers to reduce this Jekyll and Hyde complex that surrounds strategic planning and get more plans completed and successfully implemented.
Ed Loessi
As many of our readers know, we believe in eating our own dog food and we are regularly documenting our own strategy implementation
process as a startup company to share with our customers and readers.
The following post focuses on our social networking
strategy, which is an action item within the strategic element we called Develop/Implement Marketing Strategy.
Social networking is still a relatively new concept for many businesses and falls into two very wide oponions, that of being essential and that of being a waste of time. As a company we had previous experience as individuals using and participating in social networks so we were fairly clear as to what value they would bring to us and how they could improve our business. As you will note we have come down on the side of essential for business.
There are many sources of information on social networking (here is good article from HubSpot) and how to go about it. In our own experience and based on our own research we came to the view that there are 3 primary areas where social networking can be an important part of the business strategy for startup and emerging growth companies:
- Building Community of users and influencers - one of the big challenges for companies is how to gain awareness for your company with a range of people, from users, to partners to influencers. Social networking sites can be great sources of these types of contacts
- Establishing your agenda - for many emerging companies, you went into business to solve a problem or change an entire market. In order to do this you are going to have to find a way to change the norm and in order to change the norm you need to establish your agenda; how you think about things, how you think things can change for the better and all of the ideas that you have to make it happen, in other words your Manifesto
- Interacting with people already in the market and discovering the real contributors - one of the things that the Internet has brought is the ability to find out lots of information. The challenge with using search engines to find information and to connect with people is that it is very rare that a general search is going to display conversations on the 1st page of Google. If you want to know what is live and relevant to your market you need to be where the conversations are happenging and that is in the social networking sites and the tools that aggregate that information. Once you plug into those channels then you can find out what it is people are talking about and what is interesting at the present time to your market. Then and only then can you start to build new customers and begin pushing forward your agenda.
So, we had things pretty clear as far as what our strategy needed to be: build a community of users, establish our agenda and plug into the existing conversation.
We then translated this into several action items:
- Seek out relevant business social networks that we could join
- Establish accounts at those sites
- Get involved in the communications process
- Adopt tools to help us manage the interaction with the networks
As far as Action Item 1 was concerned we focused mostly on business oriented social networks such as Linkedin and Twitter because we already had individual presences there and it made it easy for us to get up and running quickly.
For Linkedin we established a RapidInfluence Company Page and a RapidInfluence Company Group and for the group we invited some people from our personal networks to seed things. As a strategy, having a Linkedin group is important because it provides a communication point for people where you can use both discussions and news submissions to spur conversations on your company's area of business (create an agenda) it is also a way for people to find out about your product (build users and influencers).
Similarly we established a RapidInfluence Twitter account and we went the extra yard of spending $100 to have a nicer background created. We used several Twitter tools to find people who are speaking about strategy and strategic planning and we then followed those people and in turn many of them followed us.
Once various social networks were establised we had to set up a regular plan of interaction which included:
- Monitoring the conversation - keeping track of what is said and commenting on those conversations is important, if you have something important to say, say it and say it regularly
- Following new people - we regularly search for new people who are speaking about topics we are interested in and we subscribe to their groups and we follow them on Twitter
- Distributing our own content - one of the great things about social networking tools is that they allow for relatively easy distribution of the content that you are creating. This could include blog posts, white papers, news etc. all related to your company. The more people that are following or subscribing to your information the more points of contact you can create
- Distributing other's content - the other great thing about joining the conversation is that you gain access to other people's content and since social networks are all about sharing you can easily share relevant content that you discover with your following. Remember this is all about building a presence and supporting your agenda for change. The more information that you can distribute that supports your thoughts (real thoughts not fantasy) the stronger your position becomes.
For us we determined that 1-2 man hours per day was a good amount of time to put into our social networking strategy with a focus initially on gaining new sales leads. When viewed in this manner it was easy for us to say that of course we would spend 1-2 hours per day if not more in the pursuit of new customers.
Along the way, we realised that we needed tools to become efficient. While we checked out a number of tools for managing Twitter in particular (Cotweet, Seesmic) we settled on a product called HootSuite. This product essentially allows us to manage a number of Twitter accounts as well as people and topic searches and it saves us a tremendous amount of time (the other products work quite well also).
The Results - so, a few months into this what has been the result? Well, as you can see by our Web site traffic sources (a key measure for us in generating leads), we are receiving nearly 60% of our traffic from the social network Linkedin followed by Google and then by Twitter. Overall we are fairly pleased with the outcome of this work. We've used social networking as both a sales tool and an awareness tool and we have relatively quickly generated traffic to our Web site and Blog.
It is important to note that over time we would expect that the Google traffic percentage will increase but what you have to remember is that when you are a new company with a new Web site it takes a long time to rank effectively for keywords on Google, so the big advantage of the social networks for us has been lead traffic while we build out organic search capabiblities on the major search engines.
What next? - quite simply we will keep with the current strategy, building out the community and distributing our message. Early indications are positive and we are gaining traffic and leads 24/7 using this current strategy. We will constantly monitor and change our tactics and look for a major review in another 6 months.
For now though, we have knocked off another series of action items from our strategic plan!
Ed Loessi
