Seems like all the stars were aligned for us last week here at Global Vision. The World Cup and a miraculous recovery from a foot injury (playing football nogal!) by our guest speaker enabled us to pull off a very last-minute event on Social Media Marketing in Cape Town and Johannesburg with fantastic attendance and feedback.
Forrester Research, US based leading business and technology analysts providing research and consulting services to marketers and IT managers, had agreed to host a joint-event with us on Social Media Marketing. Guest speaker Nate Elliott, a Principal Analyst at Forrester, was planning on visiting South Africa for the World Cup – a plan that was almost foiled by Nate’s foot injury suffered while playing a friendly game of football in London.
Nate – a seasoned conference speaker and regularly quoted industry expert in media including the BBC, CNN, The Economist, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal - had agreed to make some time for us and some key companies while out here for the World Cup to speak about marketing in the Social Media space, pitfalls to avoid, and Forrester’s recommended approach to developing a solid Social Media Marketing strategy.
The half day event, held in Cape Town and Johannesburg over the past week, managed to draw over 70 attendees mostly from the Retail, Consumer Goods and Financial Services sectors, as well as a select number of SA’s leading digital and above-the-line agencies who were busy formulating their own strategies and approach to engaging with consumers across channels such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
A key take-away from the session was Forrester’s POST system – taken from the book “Groundswell” co-authored by Sr. VP of Idea Development at Forrester Josh Bernoff - to developing a social media strategy. The POST system outlines the four steps for developing and implementing a solid Social Media marketing strategy
- People: determine first what the needs and capabilities are of the people you want to target,
- Objectives: decide on the objectives of using social media to engage with your audience, such as to listen to customers , talk to them, collaborate with them or support them, etc.
- Strategy: develop the strategy to outline why you want to use social media, how you are going to use social media, what processes social media will support,
- Technology: decide on the technology relevant to your specified target, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Nate backed the POST system with a few real-life examples of companies following this process and successfully using Social Media channels to engage with their consumers and improve businesses processes. Of course, the more fun examples were those of companies losing face online due to customers taking matter into their own hands using Social Media and causing damage to companies’ brands. One of the more memorable examples of this was United Airlines and the now famous “United Airlines Breaks Guitars” music video composed by an unhappy United Airlines passenger who happened to be a country music singer. The song has been viewed more than 8 million times now and the number keeps growing.
The final discussion point raised was that of the impact of Social Media strategies on the bottom line. At some point Management will ask this question before making more budget available to marketing via these channels. Marketers are looking for any metrics they can use to justify spend in Social Media. According to Nate, we need to focus on metrics that actually equate to real value. 5 000 people liking your brand page on Facebook means nothing until you can begin to relate the number of fans to the number of widgets sold.
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