eCommerce Marketers: How does your social media measure up?
February 28th, 2008 by Kelly Rusk
The internet is ablaze with the latest ‘here’s what’ and ‘how-to’ articles on social media. The whole concept is glamorous–A new way to communicate with people on the online. Everyone’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, MySpace, [Insert social network of the day here]. They are all talking through blogs, Twitter, social apps, etc., and you (your brand) could be missing out!
And since eCommerce marketers really, truly WANT people to interact with their sites, it seems like a natural fit–in many ways it is–but before getting caught up in the excitement, you need to consider two different ways to launch a social media program:
The wrong way
Jump right in. Hire an expensive consultant/agency to take care of everything(Update: here’s why…). Don’t let employees get involved. Back out once at the first sight of criticism or negative feedback. I won’t name names, but sadly there are already a few good case studies of social media gone horribly wrong…
The right way
Understand your audience. Build goals and objectives. Take the time to understand the medium and the two-way dialogue social media creates. Understand that you may get negative feedback and learn how to deal with it appropriately (hint: Jeremiah Owyang has some great advice for this) Build a sense of community for your customers and get employees involved too.
Sure this may seem obvious, but good brands & marketers have been blinded by the hype…
Measurement is key
Engaging a social media strategy may be a lot cheaper than a television commercial or outdoor advertising campaign. But if it’s not producing meaningful results, it’s just a waste of money and/or resources. Social media is far from tried and trued, but for eCommerce marketers, assuming you have the right audience (which I’m sure you would know) there’s a few techniques you can test run before diving into a whole strategy.
- User Generated Reviews- you may already have some sort of testimonials on your site, but the user-generated review is even more powerful. (PowerReviews is a leader in this space)
- Share/Bookmarking widgets–I’m sure we all agree Word of mouth marketing is the most coveted and valuable form of marketing–and fortunately social media makes it easy for your customers to share products they are interested in with their friends. (AddThis is a cool one which covers many popular bookmarking tools)
These are low risk tactics to explore before working on a greater strategy, so testing and measurement are key. For reviews, you can split test so that some users see them, while others do not, and compare to measure effectiveness. For sharing and bookmarking widgets, you can see how much traffic those tools are generating, and how much of that traffic converts. Once you see success with these tactics, it’s time to start thinking bigger picture…
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