Advanced Social Media Marketing: How to Lead, Launch, and Manage a Successful Social Media Program

by Tom Funk

Hundreds of millions of Americans are using social media (SM), and already some 70% of businesses have joined them there, using Facebook and other SM platforms to connect with their customers, and attract new ones. So the real question isn’t whether to take your business onto social media platforms—but how to do it quickly, effectively, on a budget, with smart goals, and a road map for success. 

Advanced Social Media  How to Lead, Launch, and Manage a Successful Social Media Program cuts through the hype and fluff about how social media is changing the world, and it gets down to what really How you as a manager can best use SM to benefit your business. Written by a veteran online marketer and ecommerce professional, the book shares practical strategies and tactics to let you launch and scale a successful corporate social media program.  



Advanced Social Media  How to Lead, Launch, and Manage a Successful Social Media Program is for the manager who already knows something about social media and wants to roll up his or her sleeves and get down to business. In it, we simplify tasks that might otherwise be complicated—like adopting and tracking key performance metrics, developing online ad campaigns, or creating Facebook apps like games, giveaways and sweepstakes with the capacity to go viral. Businesses can harness the unique advantages of this new medium, but they need a practical, no-nonsense guide like this one. Otherwise they risk being ignored, wasting time and money or, even worse, damaging their own brand and seeing a well-intentioned online program blow up.   



The book is heavy on the how-to, case studies, campaign results and other statistics, and interviews with ecommerce managers at businesses large and small. It also includes the author’s own experiences at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Wine of the Month Club, and others. While this book will be accessible enough for someone implementing a social media program for the first time, it’s ambitious enough to benefit experienced SM hands who are looking for good ideas and techniques to push their online community to the next level of size, interactivity, and buzz.  

Genres: Internet

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 7, 2012

About the author

In his digital marketing and ecommerce career, Tom Funk has played management roles at some of Vermont’s best-loved brands: Gardener's Supply Company, Keurig, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Ann Clark Ltd, Vermont Teddy Bear Company, and PajamaGram.

Funk teaches digital marketing at the University of Vermont Grossman School of Business and Champlain College Stiller School of Business, and is the author of three business books: Advanced Social Media Marketing (Apress), Social Media Playbook for Business (ABC-CLIO) and Web 2.0 and Beyond (Praeger).

Funk received his BA from Middlebury College and his MBA from Champlain College.

Reviews

[Stephanie Hiddleston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it for College.
Really easy to understand.

[Danijela Jerković · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Notes on Advanced Social Media Marketing...

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”
~ Tom Fishburne, Founder of Marketoonist


1: The Business Case

Social media offer an affordable, fast, and high-impact way to promote your business, bolster your brand image and strengthen ties to your most ardent customers.

True, it remains challenging to make an ironclad return on investment calculations for the social channel.

The ROI is one degree removed, but it is real and growing.


“Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.”
~Beth Comstock, Vice-Chair of GE



2: Best Practices

The best practices are meant to help to build the social media program on a rock-solid foundation. The program should be centered on a meaningful “story” about your brand, a story that should matter personally to your audience and inspire them to join and participate in your online community.

Encourage member engagement through careful listening, a customer service orientation, smart posting practices, and careful cultivation of your most influential fans are basic disciplines that should be in place, so you’re ready to drill into the specifics of the leading platforms and find out how to turn them to your advantage.


“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
~ Peter Drucker, Marketing Consultant & Author



3: The Platforms

There are literally several hundred social networks and social media websites out
there.
The top seven: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Foursquare.
Between them, these“magnificent seven” cover almost 100% of the social media audience.

Choosing your platforms and deciding how you’ll allocate time, effort, and budget between them is like being a pro baseball manager, rostering a team of stars and utility players.


“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
~Peter Drucker, founder of Drucker Institute



4: Advertasing and Promotion

One of the main attractions of social media—especially for smaller companies, start-ups, and others with few dollars to spend—has been the access to millions of consumers, free.

To truly expand your impact and make the most of promotions and other campaigns, you’ll need to harness paid media in addition to free.


“These days, people want to learn before they buy, be educated instead of pitched.”
~ Brian Clark



5: Facebook Advertising

Social media advertising is as new today as CPC search ads were back then.
We’re already witnessing hits and misses and a rapid-fire pace of change. The cost and value of a social media click or impression are still proving themselves; in coming years they will come nearer to equilibrium.

Facebook is the clear leader in paid social media placements.


“If you can’t explain it to a 6-year old, you don’t know it yourself.”
~Albert Einstein, 72. Genius


6: Advertising on Twitter and Other Networks

While Facebook offers the dominant market share and greatest variety of ad units, the other social platforms have rolled out compelling opportunities you can’t afford to ignore. If you leverage multiple platforms for their unique strengths, you can build a comprehensive social media marketing plan that reaches the widest possible audience, with the fullest spectrum of media types.

The other platforms can round out your Facebook ad presence and work in concert:
- Twitter
- YouTube
- Google+
- LinkedIn
- Smaller niche players
- Foursquare

While no other social platform offers quite the advertising muscle of Facebook, it’s important to recognize the unique benefits of the other networks.

Twitter offers reach, simplicity, and value for the dollar, and it should be part of the toolkit for any news, culture, information, or media-oriented business.

YouTube is perfect for visual markets, and it has an unmatched ability to build a cookie pool for display advertising across the broader Internet.

Google+ is all about boosting the impact of your Google AdWords program.


“The buyer’s journey is nothing more than a series of questions that must be answered.”
~ Analyst Firm IDC


7: Operations

Social media advertising campaigns get all the attention—but it’s the behind-thescenes operations management of your program that will really set you up for success. This field is a complex intersection point of technology, marketing, and customer relations management, or CRM. Making a positive impact requires financial and personnel resources, planning, and crisp execution.

Having a positive impact also requires savvy operations that can avoid or quickly defuse the public relations disasters that so frequently hit brands today and that can whip through social media, spreading like a virus.

Community interaction, marketing campaigns, and promotions are the exciting aspects of social media—the stuff that happens in the glare of the spotlight. But what makes it all succeed is the unglamorous, backstage work of operations management: solid planning, budgeting, and staffing—and damage control when things go awry.

Social media marketing is no passing fad. It’s here to stay. To succeed takes the same discipline, structure, allocation of resources, and cycle of continuous improvement that you apply to other aspects of your business. In fact, operational excellence can separate winning programs from losers. While other businesses may be throwing money and effort pell-mell at social media, you can
conduct your program with foresight, strategic thinking, and clear goals in mind.

Of course, establishing goals can be tough in the social media space.


“Content marketing is like a first date. If you only talk about yourself, there won’t be a second one.”
~ David Beebe, branded content producer



8: Measuring Success

You need a strategy, clear and measurable goals for success, and a means to track your progress.

The particular metrics to follow in aggregate, from all social media channels combined:
- Reach
- Engagement
- Share of voice
- Share of media
- Share of sentiment
- Net promoter score
- Net sentiment
- Social influence measurement (SIM)
- Net brand reputation

Thankfully, a number of software tools are now available to consolidate much of that data and enable you to report it within your company as an indicator of the impact of your work.

But numbers alone won’t tell the story, because social media are still evolving.

With a measurement and reporting process in place, you’ll be ready to tackle two of the most ambitious social media initiatives:

1: Comprehensive social media campaigns, and
2: Software development projects that feature social “hooks,” or integrations with the major social
networks


“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, plus a social media overreaction.”
~ Anonymous



9: Advanced Social Media Campaigns

An integrated social media campaign does the following:
- Begins with sound strategy and specific number goals for success (fan growth, sign-up, votes,
coupon redemptions, sample requests, revenue, and so forth).
- Embodies a strong, single campaign theme and message, with a clear call to action.
- Harnesses the power of your existing network and the dynamics of viral social media
transmission of your message.
- Centers on an engaging, interactive technology solution for consumer engagement, data capture,
and viral spread. Online sweepstakes, games, free-sample distributions, voting or polling, and
fundraising campaigns are the tactics that engage and inspire people on social media today.
Pulling them off requires robust, specialized technology platforms.
- Benefits from promotion, paid advertising, and buzz-building across every channel. Your
postings on all major social platforms, your website, promotional e-mail program, online and
social media ads, press releases, print media, and other consumer touch points must all speak in
concert in support of the campaign.
- Is complex and time-consuming, requiring financial and technology investment and skillful
execution. That may sound discouraging, but it’s your secret weapon. Because social media
campaigns are complicated, they present a barrier to entry to your rivals, who may not have the
know-how or dedicated financial resources to compete with you on the social stage.

The campaigns from grassroots efforts to big-budget extravaganzas, from charitable campaigns to sales efforts have in common is that they’re tailored to the emotions, priorities, and situations
of the ordinary folks who make up our social media fan bases.

Facebook tabs and Facebook apps support your campaigns in the social media space.


“It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.”
~ Jeff Bezos



10: Power Up Your Platform

Building a thriving online community requires investment in your page and development of tabs,
posts, videos, and more—a seemingly endless stream of content. All that activity pays off in leads, new customers, and increased customer loyalty. But it can be unsettling to invest so many content assets in a platform you don’t own or fully control.

You can hook your website into the social graph—and benefit your business in three ways:
1: You’ll improve customer engagement and conversion rate on your website, thanks to the social
proof of friends who bought or recommended certain items
2: You’ll generate positive word of mouth when your customer activity is posted to the Facebook
and Twitter newsfeeds
3: You’ll gain valuable data on the likes, interests, education, jobs, friends, and countless other data
points of your customers—data that you’d never see were it not for Facebook integration

To be successful in social media, a brand must be on social media-participating in the major social networks, establishing connections with fans. But your presence on Facebook, Twitter, and the rest is only part of the equation. We’ve come full circle.

To be truly successful and maintain a 360-degree view of your customers, you must incorporate social features into your own website: social sign-in, coupon sharing, gamification, social proof—and richly personalized marketing based on your knowledge of each customer’s likes and interests.


“Our head of social media is the customer.”
~ McDonald’s


11. Bringing It All Together

Developing a social media presence today will position your company for success in coming years, when virtually everything—phones, electronics, cars, and homes—becomes interconnected. All those connections will have a social dimension. Our digital experience will be entirely personalized to our unique tastes and interests.

The emergence of the World Wide Web—call it Web 1.0—was characterized by static web pages. Web 2.0 has witnessed an explosion of dynamic web content, quick and easy to publish, including people-powered blogs and social media.

A smarter, more social, and more personalized web will be a more powerful web.
Walls are coming down all over the Internet.

Eventually, most of our online lives will be tied to a single account with a universal username and password. The idea of unique usernames and passwords for each website we frequent will be as quaint as a horse and buggy.

Just as social is becoming inextricable from the web experience, it’s becoming permanently embedded in our work lives. Eventually there will be no corporate “social media team”—because social media tools and techniques will be so broadly distributed across your entire company.

Social media are the biggest story of the Internet in the last ten years.
They are now one of the biggest, most timely topics in marketing.

Certainly, the landscape is still changing and evolving. There is no sure blueprint for business success in this space.

But if your company approaches social media in a customer-centered way—listening more than talking, patiently cultivating relationships with customers rather than closing in for the quick sale—you will win in this game. If you develop campaigns that entertain, or stir cause-related passions, you will capture new leads and delight your existing customers. In the end, you’ll find social media will be among the lowest-cost, fastest-impact, and highest-return channels
in your business.


“The beauty of social media is that it will point out your company’s flaws; the key question is how quickly you address these flaws.”
~ Erik Qualmann, author and motivational speaker



“You cannot buy engagement. You have to build engagement.”
~Tara-Nicholle Nelson, CEO of Transformational Customer Insights

[Heather Starr Fiedler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm using this book as the textbook for my advanced social media class this fall. It focuses heavily on utilizing Facebook as a social media strategy, which I tend to agree with. I found it very interesting and even learned some new things myself.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Won't this book is dated oh, it has many Concepts that should be applicable in any year for social media marketing.