Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

• Why are CMO's afraid of social media and social networking?
  
• How can they leverage social media for marketing success?

This panel will be a combination of forward vision and practical advice from vendors and enterprises that are successfully leveraging social media today for business results. We'll discuss the pros and cons of growing a social media effort from within or hire a "ringer" to be part of the team. This is a new area for marketing manegement so the panelist will give their best advice on how to work with a manager who has no social media experience.

Other questions to discuss will be:

• How do you deal with the essential truth that in social media sometimes everyone won't love you and say positive stuff about you?
• What is the best metric to focus on to gauge success of a social media effort?
• Does social media contribute to lead and revenue generation directly or indirectly?

• Tom Parish CEO, Tom Parish Inc
• Brian Magierski Chief Dev Officer, BSG Alliance Corporation
• Michael Smith Exec Dir, USAA
• Ynema Mangum Exec Producer, BMC Software Inc
• Rohit Bhargava SVP, Digital Marketing, Ogilvy

Getting approval from the C-level people. Why are they afraid of social marketing - how do you approach them on metrics - knowing there is not a clear answer on it?

Focus:

1. Loss of control (CXO question) how do you deal with it and still control it (you can't)
   
2. Measurement impressions versus engagement. Time spent, commenting, etc. Getting the right 10,000 people has a much higher lift.

CXO types: each one has a different perspective and observes different risks.

• CMO looking at brand control.
• Senior Leadership for HR is worried about losing people. You are putting people in a social context and he has to retain talent.
• PR guy - knows exposure can be the biggest friend or largest nightmare - damage control
• Chief Sales guy - only cares if it brings in sales
• CEO - if I dont do anything is it going to hurt me. They are looking at it from the company standpoint. Dont get to talking about metrics. Is it in the company or share holders best interest.

Seth Godin - metrics - gives you a lot of good stuff to think about.

Most companies don't know how to deliver a good customer experience.

People driving social media from the bottom up and the top-down. Excited manager does not mean action. Peer pressure as a last resort will work.

Use a phased approach to determine readiness:

1. start listening
2. start participating and continue listening
3. start leading

Demonstrate metrics internally before demonstrating externally. Show productivity gains. (you can do this through corporate intranets, etc)

If you have problems with your products, fix the product and then dive into conversation marketing.

METRICS - without the right strategy, you don't have anything.

• looking at news articles
  
• community participation metrics
  
• blog metrics
  
• metrics for executive staff that show the value that is being communicated.
  
• evaluate the number of bad comments to good comments

Multiple opens and forwards are better than clicks and opens, but everyone looks at clicks and opens. Clicks and opens don't measure the viral aspect of it. It is not that we have the wrong metrics - it is that we are looking at the wrong thing

Focus on sentiment marketing; pro, negative or neutral. Aim these tools at the watering holes to see if the message gets accross.

Start with traditional metrics and then move on. Traffic to blogs generally supercede traffic to the regular site. How many people are visiting a blog? A blog can easily have a listening audience of 15,000 people because new messages are broadcast every day.

Of note: This panel ended up opening the session up to the twitter crowd because everyone was complaining (on twitter) so much that the session was not focusing on what they wanted it to focus.