Following the seminar I did with Marketer magazine at the start of the summer, I have answered some of the questions that we had no time to do on the day, as have the other 2 guest presenters. Here is a link to the Marketer site with all of the answers and below is a transcript of just my responses....
I recently read a blog on LinkedIn where people were discussing the difficulties of gathering statistics about your audience on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Do you have any tips on capturing this information?
There is not a perfect solution. Facebook and Twitter provide limited information, but there are tools available that can help you. In fact, monitoring social media and online PR is challenging, not just Twitter and Facebook. There are many sentiment-tracking tools available that scan the web, including social media, for mentions of your brand or products and produce reports. Most of these are subscription based, such as Radian 6 and Buzz Metrics. They are not perfect, but provide a wider view than just individual social media mentions. If you are in B2B, you may well get more mentions on blogs than in social media, so you should keep your analytics as wide as possible.
We have a Facebook page and my boss wants us to keep it very bland, with no mentions of client names – she is worried that our competitors will see them. For example, we have to say “pharma company in Swindon” rather than Pfizer. Doesn't that fly in the face of the open nature of social media?
Yes it does, however you also need to be aware of commercial sensitivities. You need to treat social media as you would any PR. So if you need client permission to mention them in PR, then you should also get it for social. I would be driven by client issues rather than competitor issues. I am sure there are many other ways that a competitor can use to find out who your clients are (they only need to ask one of your employees for an interview for example). So if your clients don’t have an issue with it, then I would be as specific as you can be, without giving away any commercially sensitive information. If in doubt, check with your clients first. Social media is all about content; you need to have an opinion, a view of some kind. Bland content will probably defeat the object of doing it. So try to persuade your boss to ask your clients if they have any objections, in fact whether you can help them by talking about them in your PR. Find a story or two which helps your client relationships and the benefits with your client should outweigh any information that a competitor could use. If you are helping your clients, why would they want to switch, even if they are approached by one of your competitors.
If you operate in both B2B and B2C markets, can you combine your social media approach or should you have a separate presence for each market?
This is a good question. It depends on whether you have different products, brands and distribution networks. My advice would be that if you operate in different markets, whether the markets are B2B and B2C, or UK and abroad, or high-end and low-end, then you should have different tailored communications for each audience. Therefore the logic is that you need different communications channels. In B2B you may focus on blogging and Twitter for example, with a B2B Facebook page just being a hub that drives viewers to the blog and tweets or the consumer Facebook page. Content should be relevant and specific for whichever markets you operate in. Your social media activity should be thought-leading, using whichever expert you have in your organisation who has credibility in that sector. Bear in mind that this person may not be the marcomms person. It could be the technical expert, engineer or sales person, for example.
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