The Rovrr Blog

Social marketing is unlike any form of advertising.  It requires a different perspective and different sets of tools to achieve success.  There is a higher risk of failure and there is also a greater potential reward.

Let’s begin with some distinctions:

• Advertising is called Paid Media.  Basically, you pay for people to see it.  This generally has little inherent relationship to the viewer or the website that the advertising is being displayed on.
• Social Media is called Earned Media.  You plant the seed and your customers become your brand advocates.  They spread your message.  A good example of this is a viral video that achieves front page placement on Digg.

Advertising is a numbers game.  You can pay for the raw number of impressions, per clicks, or some hybrid measurement of the two.  Success is simply reaching an audience more efficiently using one vehicle than another.

Advertising works.  When David Ogilvy laid the foundations for contemporary advertising in 1948, he came with the concept of “360 Degree Brand Stewardship.”  The goal of advertising was to gain the consumer’s trust by reaching them through every available channel.

Clearly his strategy worked; Ogilvy Group (then called Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather) became the largest worldwide agency in the 1960’s.  It is now a subsidiary of WPP which is the world’s second largest communications agency in the world.

Social Media marketing is the next step in advertising.  Customers no longer trust advertising.  Instead, they trust their friend for product review and new product exposure.  The following graph is originally from emarketer.com

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007067

Trusted Sources Online

People have become callous to advertising but they still trust their friends.  This forces a major overhaul in how we look at advertising.  Exposing your message to large audiences still works, but it is becoming less efficient.  More impressions are needed to generate a conversion.  To solve that, we have placed more ads online.  More advertising leads to more clutter and more clutter leads to a lower signal to noise ratio.  Your message is now more likely to be lost.

Traditional Advertising Approach

Rovrr’s approach is to focus on what people trust.  People trust their friends, as the EMarketer research above shows.  Therefore, the way to reach people is through their friends.   The trick, however, is doing this in a credible and socially acceptable way.

At Rovrr, we tell clients that “We take your fans and turn them in to your brand advocates.”  The power in social media is that the focus is on the community and the interpersonal relationships within it.  People are the content.  This is the basis for the Rovrr Social Growth Approach

The Rovrr Social Growth Approach

I am not going to discuss specific tactics that work well for social media.  No one knows your customer better than you do.  All tactics derive from your relationship with your customer.

In terms of execution, this can take many different forms.  Rovrr specializes in creating tools that allow your content to be spread virally throughout a network.  We create strategies and applications that allow people to share their positive brand experiences with their friends.  Maybe for your company, it is an application that allows people to brag about their purchase to their friends.  Maybe it is a small game that encourages friends to interact within the context.

There are, however, some basic guiding principles that Rovrr has developed to assist in our strategy:

• Engage the customers in a way they want to be reached
• Give the customers a reason to talk about you
• Respect your customer
• Thank your customer

The key takeaway is this: Advertising still works and has its place in an integrated marketing campaign. Social marketing enables deeper customer interactions and has the potential to convert your fans and customers in to your vocal brand advocates.  The most trusted source of information online is one’s friends.  If you can find a way to make your customers your brand advocates, you will have an efficient new customer acquisition tool.  The caveat is your existing advertising tools are ill-equipped to take full advantage of a full social experience.

Looking for help getting started with a social marketing campaign?  Maybe we can help.  Contact us.

Creating a Facebook Fan Page is a great way to engage your customers.  From a business perspective, it functions similar to a normal Facebook user profile except that multiple people can administer the account.  Creating the fan page is the easy part.  The trick is figuring out how to make it valuable.

Below are a few quick tips to get you started:

1. Let people know that your page exists!  Use tools such as the Fan Box to embed “Become a Fan” links and content your page.  If customers are coming to your website, this is an easy way to start connecting to them through Facebook.
2. Give your users a reason to keep coming back.  Give them valuable information or coupons.  For example, Punch Pizza does a great job of using the existing photo sharing tools to distribute coupons to their customers.
3. Don’t overwhelm your followers.  When you publish a story, it appears in their feed.  If you have a lot of content you want to publish, do it over time.
4. Connect with customers; don’t simply use it as a method to spam them.  Facebook allows you to interact and to talk with your fans.  Engage them; ask them questions and listen to their responses.
5. Be nice to your customers.  Don’t do anything on a fan page that you would not want published in print.
6. Keep it fresh.  Regularly update your content.  If a fan or customer visits your page and it has not been updated in a long time, the are likely to not return.
7. Facebook provides many options for reaching fans including sending messages to their inbox.  Use these features wisely.  Items sent to a user’s inbox has a much higher probability of being seen than a feed story but it also has a much larger potential for backlash.

Need help setting up a fan page?  Looking to do more with your existing one?  Contact Rovrr.