experience matters

Scott Shamberg | Critical Mass Executive

Recently I attended an event that was classified as a “marketing forum”  designed to match marketers with vendors for two days of one-on-one networking. We met with 38 marketers representing brands from all over the world.

The biggest take away for me was pretty clear – everyone and their mother want to know how to “do” social media.   Literally everyone we talked to asked us about social–from Visa to Trump, Western Union to Scotts Lawn Care. Here were the top 3 questions we heard at the event and that we are hearing on a recurring basis from marketers.

1.    My executive team doesn’t understand it.  How can I convince them?
2.    How can I do social media on a local level?
3.    Can you tell me how to measure social media?

Clearly brands big and small know they need to participate but are not sure how just yet.  But I’m seeing the irony in these brands wanting to understand a new channel built on authentic conversations in a business environment built almost exclusively on short, relatively shallow conversations. Nevertheless, let’s look at those three questions.

Convincing Executives
This is no easy solve. Many CMOs would still rather shoot a commercial than develop a Facebook page. Try the 3 E’s.
EXPERIMENT: Get your execs to play with Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.  Let them see for themselves how influential they are.
ENGAGE: Get your agencies involved with your executives when you can and let them do the heavy lifting.
EDUCATE: You know your executives better than anyone.  Find ways to get them educated through articles, conferences, examples and stats.  The more they know they more involved they will get.

Local Social
This is a big push through media right now and is slowly making its way into social (see Foursquare, Gowalla, or Groupon for examples).  A Facebook page for a local pizza parlor doesn’t make a lot of sense.  But executing Tier 3 automotive programs does.  The key to local social is relevance – any offer or service that is relevant to me in my geographic world will resonate and I will seek out advice on who can help me.

Social Media Measurement
There is no silver bullet outside of what is already being talked about for measurement.  Engagement is a starting place but that is even  outdated already.  Anything driven by content will always come back to engagement.  So right now it is important to manage expectations for measurement AWAY from ROI.  You can’t tell how many cars are sold from the number of fans you have on Facebook.  But you can start to measure brand perception and opinion.  These are good starting places to show success.

If you want to learn about social media as a brand, I commend you. Just please don’t expect to go to a three-day conference and, as one attendee said to me, “come home with the secret sauce of social media measurement in your recipe book.” Experiment with the channel, listen to what your customers are doing, follow influencers on Twitter and read the myriad of blogs and articles being written by everyone from The Times to Arianna Huffington.  Figure out the secret sauce for you and your brand, because everyone has different taste buds.

Scott is the SVP of our Experience Distribution practice. He is based out of our Chicago office but belongs to our Global Executive team.