Jon W Chin – Analytics, Social Media & SEO/SEM

In my earlier post Social Media Marketing went “wrong”: Case: “Langham Hotel Steps in to Calm Online Storm” (Hong Kong) I wrote about how Langham Hotel’s campaign  triggered a social upheveal online.

A month has passed since the event, it has taught a lesson to all – to take note of cultural sensitivities when engaging in a campaign and that one should not have retreated without an explanation.

I’ve always said that social media is a double edged sword, it can be your best friend and it can be your worst enemy. However having said this, don’t just treat the online marketscape or social media networking to be your foe only and forget the opportunities it entails. Embrace it and treat it an an opportunity to better understand your customers, cause people are going to talk about your brand regardless.

Just yesterday, to my pleasant surprise I received an email from Langham’s director of corporate communication.

Here is snippet of the email and I quote:

The videos were wrong.  You were right to tell us so, and we’re sorry.

I thought that was a very amiable step and one worth applauding. I didnt expect this email (and its sincere apology) but I believe it will go a long way.

People make mistakes but most importantly is that one realizes it and make steps to heal it. For that – you have my respect, Langham, cause you have done just that.

All the best!

Below is the YouTube interview conducted by Marketing Magazine (Hong Kong) with Langham Hotel.

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A very interesting reality check podcast on social media marketing.

Click here for the podcast: MIS: Social Media for Businesses – A Reality Check

Summary

(For those who are unable to sit through the 28 minute podcast)

1. Engage in conversations (interaction), the idea behind social media.

2. Use tools (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc) to better engage your customers, and these are just tools. Social Media marketing is a strategy in itself.

3. Nothing will replace a face to face meeting – not even Social Media marketing.

4. No longer to talk to them, now is I listen to you – from company to customer “what do you think of my products?”

5. Markets are getting smarter – you listen to the customers – and there is also alot of unhappy customers out there. You can get an anti-your company blog. But hey which company doesnt want to listen to those unhappy customers. On the contrary these companies give you a chance to better improve yourself.

6. Use Social Media to understand the customer and give it to them better. They use Social Media tools to listen to the conversation about the company in real time.

7. Companies should embrace the opportunities Social Media entails – think beyond the unhappy customers, on the contrary convert those unhappy ones to happy one and they will be your evangelists.

8. Listening is one thing, participating is another. Its very important to listen first and understand first and then response especially in this fast paced world we live in now.

Closing comments – Should companies get into Social Media?

- it depends on what you want to do and where your customer hang out.

- large organization cant afford to sit on the sideline, have to get in now before you get left behind especially now that a growing number of customers are spending a fair portion of their time online.

- Social Media gives you untapped opportunities and allows you to listen in to conversations about your brand and as a result allow to you understand where you stand, how you can improve and as such deliver better value.

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Every morning, I would have my coffee beside me and my MacBook Pro as a defacto “ground hog” day start for me – prowling through my emails and of course looking forward to a great positive start…

Till I saw this news and got me ‘excited”

“Langham Steps In To Calm Online Storm”

and I quote

Hong Kong – Langham Hotel is today rethinking its approach to marketing in the social media space after a series of viral videos caused an online storm overnight.

Geesh what could have possibly gone so wrong? After all, not without a day passes by, that on blogs, e-news and twitter that social media is not mentioned. Its THE “IN” thing now. Everyone is talking about it and companies are jumping into it (without really thinking it through).

However, to be fair, its us marketers that have promoted this wonderful media as the next BIG thing (the recession also helped in a way), the new media promotion as well and also last but not least the perceived low costs of social media.

In my previous post, I blogged about reputational management, when something negative is said about your brand in the social space: what are you going to do? Click here to see the post. In that post, I’ve listed a number of steps one can do to ‘remedy’ the situation but one other alternative I omitted (failed to) is, retreat from the online space. This is exactly what Landham Hotel did. They retreated. Was it a sound move? I don’t know. To me I felt they should have responded to all these bad press. But then again, I may be wrong.

So what went wrong? In my view (for the sake of brevity, I’ll just touch on three points):

1. Perhaps a misleaded interpretations of blogs/forum posts/interview excerpts that cause this. If that is the case, they should have vetted it in depth and considered all angles in which the content can be interpreted.

2. I guess a not throughout enough research was performed on its customers specifically, how the targetted customers interact in both online and offline and what makes them tick (how and why)

3. Cultural Considerations: They failed to take that into account. Remember Social media is social and being social – human take cultures into play (think Hofstead’s Cultural Dimension). This is a case, whereby (going back to point 1 & 2), they failed to understand and appreciate how their customer interacted and as a result received a backlash of negativism to their campaign.

Oh well, I guess this may serve a wake up call for all that Social Media in itself is a strategy and its requires a lot of preparation and commitment to see it through.

I wish Langham Hotel well in this regards and may this be a lesson to be learnt.

Study your audience intimately

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and hear any experiences you might have. Feel free to comment/share!

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I’m sure most of you have seen the viral effects of the Domino Pizza employees having a ‘good’ time at the kitchen and the damage it has caused to Domino Pizza. The clips ‘enjoyed’ a million views before Domino Pizza management was informed of the YouTube clip. This was an instant viral marketing success (well for all the wrong reasons).

This to most companies is a situation where they dread most. However this is something very real and this could happen to any company.

Imagine years of building your baby brand to what it is today take a lot of hard work but it only requires one serious episode to bring it down. Similar to the notion of trust. Trust takes incremental steps to build but when the trust is lost, it drops by leaps and bounds.

Well my view is though one may completely take control of its brands in the online space, one can minimize these negative effects, i.e. control the negative spread of viral marketing.

How you might ask. Here are some tactics I recommend:

1. Craft an internal social media policy for all employees — this would signal to your staff that your actions offline and online concerning your company brand name is made answerable – unfortunately no many companies have one, if you dont, dont you think you should have one soon? After all, research suggests that social media is growing at an exponential rate.

a. Well ideally you would have someone listening in the online space that can inform your company at a moment’s notice.

Well the first one is not really a tactic but a good pre step. Do have one.

2. If it does happen, adopt the “SUN-SET” rule, make sure you quickly respond to this. In the online world, speed is of utmost importance. You need to craft an official respond.

a. If you know who the originator of the spread e.g. it was a blogger, perhaps you could get the blogger to link back to your official response. Most readers appreciate the other side of the story.

b. Well if you don’t (in most cases), do craft a response on your webpage and submit that page to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – yes do some keywords. This would ensure that user would be able to see your response on the first page of Google. Typically most users would click on the official response.

c. Engage Twitter, Twitter has been known for its speed! Use that to your advantage.

As you can see, all these revolves around prompt action. Do not ignore it and do act on it fast.

I’m sure you do not want the Domino Pizza effects happening to your company.

That’s all I can think of for now. But I’m keen to hear what you would do (or have done) to control the negative spread of your brand name.

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Do you marry for love or do you marry for money?

I think the question is flawed to begin with, I think it should be to what extent do you marry for love and to what extent do you married for money.

You must be wondering what on earth am I talking about? Read on and you will understand the logic behind it.

A recent article titled “Paid search down?” by econsultancy.com caught my attention and got me thinking. After reading through the article, Being a natural hardcore tweeter decided to tweet it. Within minutes, I have an explosive number of tweeters RTing it (e.g @digitalengage, @BobKeyman). To me it means, this is HOT news and something that resonant with the market.

I felt that this article came at the right time, the time where marketers have been told that the marketing budget is slashed and so forth. So if that is really the case, a simple explanation to this fall in Search Engine Marketing – PPC could very well be attributed to this recession after all one can say we now need to priorities our spending. Gone are the days where we can pay a staggering 5 bucks a click (sheer madness by the way). Following this logic, its does make sense that PPC is going south.

BUT could there be another explanation? Could it be companies are getting smarter, they have in house SEO specialists that have been optimizing their search campaign after all SEO is not that new anymore. After years of experience, they have gotten the SEO skills right i.e. dirtied their hands and all, and as such they don’t really need PPC (that much anyways). They are ranked typically on the first page. So if that is the case, why do they need to embark on a PPC campaign – its such a waste of money (do I hear the CFO suddenly shout – “WOO HOO”) – they are not optimizing their strategy if they engage PPC if we follow this school of thought.

However (yes there is always a however), in my view, well though the figures do show a decline in PPC (according to econsultancy.com), PPC still has its place in the search engine world. Its SPEED, its ability to quickly (or fastest way) get the required amount of traffic to your site, in fact, it can be instantaneous. It allows you to start getting traffic right away, allowing one to build its customer base. But the drawback can be the pricing, the strategy to it is to use less popular key words (lateral ones or long-tailed ones) and as such the PPC cost will fall accordingly – well you need to work on that strategy cause I always believe that Search in itself is a Strategy. Apply this to your SEM/SEO and you could go a fair distance.

I think ultimately, firms have to go right down to their inner self and ask this question before they embark on any execution tools.

Ask themselves this very simple basic question* What is my objective?. Get this right in the beginning and alot of wastage can be minimized and thus develop an effective solution to meet your organization’s communication and strategic marketing goals.

So going back to the introduction of marrying for love and marrying for money, now you should (hopefully) understand why I wrote that. In my view, we digital marketers should ask ourselves this very question, to what extent do we use organic and to what extent do we use PPC? of course this is dependent on your organization’s objective and marketers being accountable for every dollar they spend and measurement results, yes you guess it ROI.

Say this to your CFO and board members, “My strategy is to use as much organic as possible and use PPC as necessary”With this, I foresee you will be able to see some nice smiles on their faces.

Well thats all from me now, I’m keen to hear your views.

*I’m sorry it still amazes me though that a fair number of companies fail to do this and even if they do, they fail to appreciate the magnitudes of tools out there and that “SEARCH in itself is a STRATEGY”

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Social Media Marketing has received centre stage in most of today’s marketer’s planning plateau, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube etc. Not is it without a day passed without a mentioned of them.

Marketers are curious about this ‘new’ media channel, proponents of it highlight its strong ability in improving the bottom line. Well to be honest, it’s really not a surprise, given that that many studies depict a sense of positivism in it. For example, TNS USA study in 2007 found the following…

“if you had 15 minutes of free time…”

1. 17% Social networking
2. 17% Talk on Cell
3. 14% Watch tV
4. 10% Surf the internet etc.

and Forrestor Research’s highly positive report on social media. For more information please view my previous entry found here.

If these numbers hold water, it definitely paints a picture that social media networking is a force to be reckon with and companies should engage them, afterall one of marketer’s many tasks is to seek customer engagement though many of the touch points available at its disposal.

However the reality is social media marketing is something of a black box, marketers inject programs into the black box and cross their fingers at the output. Though we appreciate the art of it, there should be some science involved to track. After all in the boardroom, numbers do the talking and in addition, there has been a saying, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.

If this mantra is true, does this really hold water in the social media networking or marketing world? Well maybe, well maybe not. I do not know. But what I can offer is if we were to approach the measurement, we could perhaps look at alternatives – after all there is no such thing as a one off solution, no?

Perhaps the standard quantitative notions of approach to analyzing data (bounce rate, CTR, regression, path analysis etc) may be cast aside for qualitative methods? afterall social being social requires the need for verbal and face checks, no? or perhaps we should just get companies to state their objectives and we just track certain metrics. Do we really need to measure it? that is the question. Or shall we just let social media play its role and just cross our fingers and hopefully the spread of it is positive and will correlate positively with profitability and hope that we can control the spread if its negative.

Well what are your thoughts? I’m keen on hearing them.

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Datran Media conducted an survey late 2008 and found these 12 most important online marketing decisions that executives will make in 2009; They are as follows:

• How to engage customers and be more relevant in their everyday lives.
• The proper way to speak to our customers.
• How to maximize behavioral targeting in our email and display marketing efforts.
• How to better leverage email, search and social networking
• Increasing the budgets for online media in areas such as affiliate marketing, search and email
• Finding a way to monetize social media.
• Diversifying our online advertising campaigns to include more emerging technologies
• We will be discussing going all digital with our marketing efforts.
• Targeted direct marketing based on user online behavior.
• The decision to increase on our email marketing spend to enable better segmentation and targeting.
• To make on-line marketing even more measurable for increasing sales…proving it’s ROI….every dime counts.
• How much of our offline budget should be shifted to online to supplement what we currently have.

Which of these do you think is the most important? and perhaps what others are important? but one take-away point is social media is on top of most’s radar attenna.

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Forrestor Research presents encouraging data for social media. Very interesting data.
­­
Andy B­e­al­ at http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/ re­ports­ on a Forre­s­te­r Re­s­e­arch pre­di­cti­on that b­as­i­cal­l­y s­ays­, “I­t’s­ gre­at to b­e­ a di­gi­tal­ m­­arke­te­r!”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC4CXRLfrso

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Its been nearly a good three years since VAGSG a forum that is created to serve the Singaporean (and Malaysian) motor enthusiasts. Vagsg has come a long way – from his humble beginning where whenever one posts, one can “FEEL” echos in the forum. HALLLLLLOOOOO…..

Now VAGSG stands strong at around 9000 members where activities have been planned both online and offline to foster growth and of course least but not least CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT – THE word in the marketing arena. VAGSG enjoys a strong return rate and it is a highly interactive forum as well.

How does one do that, the operating philosophy is very simple, just make users create contents (user generated contents) and let the spiders crawl through your web. That’s IT.

Actually thats not just it. I wish it was just that (haha). It was really a painful but challenging journey to make VAGSG what it is today. It is the de facto Audi and VW forum in Singapore.

The planning phase included:

1. Differentiate – USP – unique selling proposition. We are an independent forum run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.
2. Excite – By generating fun activities (online and offline), chat about the latest models, modification of the cars etc.
3. Connect – this is done via offline ways, the intent is to get the forummers to meet one another and develop relationships and form a TRIBE. Its a long term engagement, encouraging customer loyalty and last by not least advocate positive word of mouth (yes viral again).

Our bounce rate of the forum is very encouraging (very low – I compared it with a fellow local automobile website) and the time spent on the forum is very encouraging.

That’s all from me for now. Will update more when I get the chance on the VAGSG forum story from its humble beginnings to what it is today. The e-strategies involved to drive traffic, attract and retain the forummers (offline and online) and of course will share the web analytics side of it, SEO and SEM as well. What I have learnt.

Lastly VAGSG has an army of supporters who cant wait to tell people about the forum and of course their rides and spread the positive word of mouth – yes its viral again.

Didnt Xerox research show, that is cost 5 times more to attract a new customer than to serve an existing, just let the customer do the job for you afterall your potential customer will trust them more, no? viral baby. The power of WOM.

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Many seem to have ignored the fact that the digital space has been around for more than an decade. It is no longer a new media as what the traditional media owners are trying to paint in the corporate world. A new generation of digitally savvy users are now every ready to experiment, explore and participate as a global online community citizen.

This maturing digital community has created a critical mass that is sufficiently large enough for marketing professionals to measure and make inferences on the behavioural aspects of different segments within the community. This is the insight which is sadly not practiced (as much as we would like) in the marketing profession as measuring and analytics is not a discipline which most practicing industry marketeers prefer to engage in (sad but true).

If so, is there a reason why?

Personally, I feel that this lack of discipline will come back to haunt them as the digital space (moving forward) offer the best and most effective means to measure and assess their customers’ preferences. It is only through this insight that the marketing professional can make evolutionary changes to their products and services to match their customers’ changing needs.

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