So while a social media strategy is no different to any other marketing tool in that its success or otherwise needs to be measured, its conversational nature means some of the greatest benefits cannot be measured in clicks or dollars. And (take a deep breath, marketers) that’s okay.

So what does success actually look like?

Success is best measured against a set of objectives that have been clearly defined before setting foot in the social media environment, and that are aligned with the broader business objectives. This will be different for everyone and depends on the type of business involved and social media tools implemented. Some starting points might include:

1. Traffic – to a website, a blog and the number of Twitter followers or Facebook friends. These are raw numbers that can be used to gauge the growth of activity around social media channels.
2. Interaction – how many comments were made? Reviews given? If people are responding via social media channels, then the content is working.
3. Search marketing – social media channels can be used to increase SEO rankings, so measure relevant key terms before beginning and as a metric after launching social media channels.
4. Sales – measure the traffic from social media channels to the online store, and the conversion to sales.

Once implemented, it’s important to monitor progress and adjust a digital strategy as you go. Whether via an agency or an internal team, it’s critical to the success of social media channels that the execution is a) working and b) informed by the latest developments in digital.

The digital landscape is the broadest of churches – if it exists, it’s online somewhere. That means there is already a community of people out there who would like nothing more than to engage with your business about what you do, how you do it and who you are. Social media is simply a way of reaching out to these communities and starting a conversation, and anyone can do it.

artwork from Burberry's artofthetrench.com

The Art of the Trench video from Burberry highlights just how deep retailers should be prepared to dive in order to create a digital platform that delivers compelling customer experiences. While many luxury brands prophesise on the future of retail, Burberry has realised inventive concepts, such as instant e-commerce while watching the model walk down the catwalk, and interactive 3D advertisements. View it here.

The Senior Producer is responsible for the overall management of a client’s program of work, and in particular will:

• Be the primary client contact as well as the IE team leader, which requires the ability to effectively balance longer-term strategic issues with day-to-day tactical project issues
• Be detail oriented with superior project management skills, flexibility, resiliency and the ability to manage client expectations through proactive communication, status reporting and scope management
• Be a natural leader with experience managing multidisciplinary project teams and a proven track record delivering projects on time and on budget
• Ensure that projects are signed off within realistic and profitable milestones, and resourced accordingly
• Act as a key internal stakeholder to ensure the project is delivered on strategy, on time and within budget
• Identify and evaluate new business opportunities within current projects

You have a passion for digital and social media – you should have LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts – and 5 years’ experience in project management. But what makes you special are the following characteristics:

• Technically competent with a development background; you’ve cut code at some level
• Your UX and design exposure; you understand best practice
• Your effective risk planning and scoping experience
• Your ability to workshop with a client to find digital solutions to their business problem, then use that information to effectively and efficiently brief the teams within IE
• Your ability to hold strategic conversations with business leaders

Please include a response to these questions in your cover letter:

• What do you love about digital?
• What frustrates you the most about digital project management?

Clearly, content should work in parallel with functionality to deliver the overall experience that takes a user’s breath away, but it’s worth remembering that content is usually more critical to brand building than functionality. It’s difficult to succinctly express your brand through a function, while it can be done with a well-chosen image or word.

When used consistently across all channels content also has a multiplying effect. This means that even seemingly unlikely customers may eventually find your message compelling after viewing it across a number of platforms.

For any brand serious about the interaction they have with their customers, and this should be every brand, managing content becomes important. That’s not to say it’s a simple matter – any business of any size will have multiple content creators or contributors, internal and external sources, multiple messages to express and of course a range of different personalities delivering it. With all of these factors in play one approach to ensure consistency is to nominate a Content Coach.

This person isn’t necessarily responsible for producing content themselves, but works from the sidelines to encourage, cajole and guide the key players out on the field who are responsible for content. Acting as a funnel, they can then filter and disseminate content out to where it needs to be. That might include websites, print and email communications, public relations, internal communications, advertising and so on. What’s particularly useful is that these processes can be documented, so everyone knows their role and how it fits into the overall communications picture.

Ultimately, the objective is great user experiences no matter what the touch point with your brand may be. Thinking of content as a glue to bind channels together will go a long way towards strengthening a brand and enhancing user experience design.

So we need the following capabilities from the Zend Framework Routing:
1.    http://country.movember.com/
Country homepage, default language English.
2.    http://language.country.movember.com/
Translated country-specific homepage – Option 1
3.    http://country.movember.com/language/
Translated country-specific homepage – Option 2
4.    https://www.movember.com/country/donate/
Country-specific donation page, default language English.
5.    https://www.movember.com/country/language/donate/
Country-specific donation page, language provided.
6.    http://www.movember.com/
International sites directory (Fine, it’s a splash page…)
7.    http://www.movember.com.country_suffix/
Country homepage, default language depends on the country.

First of all, I ask, what do you think?
Route all traffic through www.movember.com or even just movember.com using a Locale URL structure /au/en/ or /en_AU/, or split traffic to sub-domains? This is not required from an infrastructure perspective, although potentially for analytics.

Should sites where the domain is available (www.movember.com.au) redirect to the www. or au. or just host the entire site from that domain (except for secure traffic)? As a programmer I like setups to be consistent, so it’s very hard for me to support (for example) movember.com/ca (defaulting to English) and movember.com/ca/fr/ (French) and movember.com/ca/en/ (English) As I’m not sure what will be used in the end, I’m currently writing a router setup that supports every format mentioned above, and we’ll be able to develop the site without ever needing to think about which of the configurations (above) the user is using.

James Turle

My thirst for news takes me on this international journey through my browser, but I am not always able to get what I want – news.  The BBC recently took a step in the right direction in making me feel better about reading online news by profiling their new site design before it goes live, reminding me that online brand and usability are key components to a brand’s website experience.

I love how the BBC’s main site shows a sneak peak of the ‘New Look’.  In addition to profiling PM Gillard in their images which brings out the (freshly minted) Australian in me, the BBC is proactively interacting with its audience, showing them what it is cooking in the background.  This transparent communication, and the drive to improve their user experience, gets two thumbs up from me, and more of my confidence that they are doing the ‘right’ thing.  Too often companies and brands tell their audience what they want without asking them how they feel about changes they are planning to make.

The new BBC site features a less cluttered page and a focus on headlines – the meat that keeps me coming back.  Other news sites remain cluttered with ads, preventing me from getting information and constantly causing me to close the page without reading the headlines.  A site, and the way visitors interact with it, is the reason people keep coming back.  The ability to keep visitors on the site is an evolution, but one that improves the site experience.  I love how the BBC wants to make their site easier for me to use, and for showing me how they are doing it.  The more a brand can communicate this, the better people will feel about talking about it online.

Arieh Singer

A simple website will involve a number of static pages full of prepared content ready for the user to browse. This is enough for a lot of businesses who just want to put a heap of information online and update it every now and then.  If they do need to update the content they will get in touch with their web provider who manage the website updates, or will update the HTML themselves and upload the changes.  This process is simple, safe and reliable but also has many possible drawbacks that you may not have considered.

First, relying on a third party to update and deploy your new updates will take time and cost money.  Don’t you want to be able to jump onto your site, make changes to your content and have it available immediately?

Second, if you want to refresh your content regularly each change will take time to be completed by your provider and of course you will be billed for that time.  With a CMS you could make the changes yourself, saving both time and money.

Third, are there risks with your content not being accurate at all times?  What would you do if you are promoting a product that you now find you no longer stock – you would want to have that product removed ASAP as you don’t have an association with it any more.  This is an especially important consideration when you are displaying legally-binding information that must be kept up to date and accurate.

There are many types of CMS available, each with a different set of functionality and each with their pros and cons.  Many CMS options work well for some purposes but not so well for others – it all depends on your business, requirements, budget and staff capabilities.

Dean Mehmet

But that is just social media. Gartner research recently stated that the mobile device is predicted to overtake computers as the most frequently used tool to access the web in 2013. I think it will happen sooner. You only need to take a trip on public transport to see the number of people staring down at a screen whilst on their daily commute. Twelve months ago it was a different story – there were a lot of people texting, and talking loudly and obnoxiously, on their phones but not a whole lot of people were web browsing or using web-accessed applications. In fact, mobile application and search usage has doubled on a year-on-year basis**.

With the increase in mobile web browsing, there is also the increase in online purchases using a mobile.  In Japan, the online shopping mall Rakuten makes 19% of their sales from a mobile**.  In the US, mobile commerce accounted for $18.3 billion in 2009. In 2015 it’s expected to reach $119 billion and Ebay has stated they expect their sales through mobile to more than double this year, up from $600 million in 2009 to $1.5 billion in 2010***. Any way you look at it, this is phenomenal growth for a device that a large part of the population still sees as just a phone.

The mobile buzz is definitely all over the software vendor space with most companies I talk to either having the first version of their mobile sites released or in testing. Magento, an open source eCommerce application IE recommends, have recently announced they will be launching a mobile version of their application.  This is serious business; thinking that having a mobile version of your site as a ‘nice to have’ is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

I feel the same when faced with yet another list and while this might not have the quick punch of Letterman’s daily top 10, it will have more substance than an episode of Seinfeld.

For those of you with a 10-second attention span, here is the Top 10 list. These are topics I’ll be covering below, in roughly the order I’ll be approaching them. Hey, there has to be a list, otherwise this article’s title wouldn’t make sense!

1. It’s about the people
2. Engage
3. Keep it real
4. It takes time
5. Create content
6. Reward
7. Act local, think global
8. Social media takes many forms
9. Measure, measure, measure
10. Social media is a means, not an end

Before I start on how to engage an audience through social media, you might still be wondering why you would want to.

According to a new report from Lightspeed Research:

• 30 per cent of Australian survey respondents said their opinion of a brand would improve if the brand provided a social network where they could ask questions.
• 20 per cent of Australians would have their opinion of a brand improved by talking to bloggers directly about relevant products and services.

An opportunity to improve your brand’s standing with consumers by 30 per cent seems too good an opportunity to pass up – it is – but to engage in social media in a way that will achieve these results requires thought and planning.

According to Adam Sarner of Gartner, over 75 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies with web sites have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative, but 50 per cent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

“[Businesses] will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said.

This is where thought and planning comes in.

Social media is about the people, not how you interact with them. It’s about individual members of communities and their culture within local, physical and global, virtual neighbourhoods.

Today, people are joining global communities online, building real connections with people they may never meet in a manner that redefines relationships.

We are only just starting to analyse these groups and their behaviour, which allows us to gauge how to interact with them – to find not only who your real customers are, but how to influence them.

Companies often approach social media as a shopping list of items such as a blog or a Twitter account to be used only as required to achieve a marketing driven goal and then abandoned after the specific campaign has ended.

This ad-hoc method is not only confusing for the consumer, but ultimately designed to fail. Social media must be undertaken as a long-term, coherent strategy in order to gain traction with your customers.

Start with your target audience and determine how they approach social media in general. You also need to determine the type of relationship you want to have with them.

Forrester Research categorises social computing behaviours into a ladder with six levels of participation, which they call “Social Technographics” to describe analysing a population according to its participation in these levels. You can analyse your customers’ participation level, and then create a social media strategy based on that information.

The ladder will help you select which social strategies to deploy first and allow you to encourage your audience to climb the participation ladder. Remember though, not everyone is cut out to be a creator, and some will never move beyond being a spectator – don’t push your audience to do something they aren’t ready or willing to do.

To participate effectively in social media, you must evolve. PR no longer means “Public Relations”, but instead stands for “Personal Relationships”.

Consumers today are very aware of marketing. They have grown to distrust faceless ‘company speak’. They fast forward through commercials and pull content that interests them from the internet rather being told what to consume by traditional media channels.

Being a content producer with global reach is no longer the realm of media moguls, as anyone can create and publish their own content.

Seeking advice from strangers is not a new phenomenon. We have been reading the New York Times bestseller list and the travel guides, asking a local for directions for years. The one thing that hasn’t changed in the jump to social media is that, despite the person the consumer seeks advice from being a stranger, they are also a trusted source. In the examples above, this trust is earned in the case of the New York Times and a travel publisher such as Lonely Planet, or local knowledge is assumed in the case of asking for directions.

In social media, consumers pay close attention to (and are influenced by) word of mouth. Earning a positive reputation and becoming a trusted source takes time, effort and patience.

So how do you go about creating this reputation and earning trust? Let’s take Facebook as an example. You create a profile, make friends and reciprocate when people friend you. You add applications, join groups and RSVP to events. This helps to define your identity. The interaction, content and comments you produce help build your reputation.

Part of this reputation is based on being transparent. Be honest about who you are and whom you represent. If you have a blog or Twitter account with personal branding, and a member of your team writes your message, acknowledge it’s not from you.

The information you provide when building your reputation in turn allows other users to gauge your trust factor.

This building of reputation and trust happens over time which is why social media is suited to long-term engagement, not for quick campaigns. User-generated content takes time to spread and the last thing you want at the beginning of your experience are angry customers, because they only just found out about a campaign that has already ended.

Interacting with your existing customer base is a great way to kick-start your social media strategy and to keep it rolling. Not only can social media prove a cost-effective way of keeping loyal customers up to date with promotions, but also it enables them to easily share their love of your company and products and become champions for you.

Once your social media strategy has started to take off, you can reward your customers, followers and fans by creating promotions that can only be accessed via social media channels. Discount codes, competitions, newsletters and sneak peeks all help reward loyal followers and entice new ones.

So now you have built a loyal social media following. They are entering your competitions and referring friends, so it’s time to take one of the hardest steps for any business and that is to, wait for it, stop and listen to what your customers want.

We all know that traditionally you are going to receive more complaints than praise via feedback such as customer questionnaires and letters. Social media makes it easier for people to sing your praises as well.

Set up a discussion board or actively engage in one (or more) that already exists and are relevant to you. Create a blog and monitor others that refer to your industry or brand. Leave comments. Note the key word in both of those last two sentences is engage.

While we’re talking about bloggers it’s important to note that more than eight in ten bloggers post product or brand reviews, and almost nine in ten blog about brands that they love (or hate).

No matter what social media platform you’re using, don’t shout the naysayers down. Don’t delete comments that you don’t like. A mix of good and bad comments shows your customers that there really is a place to express their feelings. Embrace the feedback, ask for more information and offer suggestions and resolutions.

Ask your customers for advice. Trying to decide which colour will sell more than another? What size or style is most popular before you order stock? Set up a poll and let your customers vote. Polls and quick surveys are an easy way to gain knowledge of your customers likes and dislikes.

By announcing when you have acted upon the results, it gives your customer a feeling of contributing to the company and increases their brand loyalty, taking them a step closer to being a brand ambassador.

Your social media content (and that of your happy or dissatisfied customers) can be seen as easily by a person from England or Australia. If your product is sold internationally, or you are the local distributor or retailer of an international brand, it’s important to remember this when setting up your social media strategy.

If you are representing a global brand, be sure that competitions are open worldwide, or that there are enough competitions to make your overseas consumer not feel like they are being punished for not living in the same country as your head office.

As with any other global marketing campaign, it is imperative that you take into account regional differences and behaviours.

As shown in the Conversation Prism below, social media takes many forms from social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to blogging and micro-blogging services such as worpress.com, Google’s Blogger and Twitter. Video services such as YouTube and Vimeo, image sharing sites like flickr.

Your social media efforts don’t need to (and shouldn’t) cover every platform or every segment of the prism. Like any marketing campaign, you need to choose your platforms and your engagement levels.

Remember: social media is two-way and you need to have the time to interact with, and gain insights from, each platform you select.

The ability to monitor and measure not only the effectiveness of your social media interactions, but also what others are saying about you and your brands, is becoming more and more important as the impact of social media grows.

Most agencies now have social media monitoring offers that can find discussions about your company on millions of blog posts, videos and photos, forums, mainstream online news, and life-streaming channels such as FriendFeed and micro-blogging services such as Twitter. Real-time monitoring brings critical insights and the ability to quickly discover which conversations are having the most impact online.

Not only can you monitor the general ‘buzz’ but also many of these services will let you deep drill through the statistics to find actual conversations and the people behind them, giving you previously unheard-of power to engage quickly and directly with social influencers.

A survey by Equation Research recently asked 50,000 marketing professionals to take part in a 10-minute online survey. When asked, “How are you measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts?” less than 34 per cent reported measuring social media buzz.

As you gather reports on the success of your social media reach and analyse them it’s important to remember that social media is just one component of a broader communications strategy.

Social media delivers a number of new two-way communication channels that allow consumers to not only have a voice, but to be heard both by their peers and by brands. It’s a teacher who constantly has a new lesson for you – the question is, are you ready to listen and learn?

Richard Taylor

Sources: atiattractionmarketing.com; briansolis.com; forrester.com; jeffbullas.com; laurelpapworth.com; nevillehobson.com

Whether they do this in the online or “real” world, this same pattern is followed, particularly for purchases of higher value.  Half of all Australian consumers conduct their research online, with 25% nominating online as their most crucial research tool*. Their research includes not only what to buy but where to buy it.

If you’re not online and putting effort into giving your consumers what they want, then you’re dead in the water, floating along wherever the current takes you.

Why? Because in the online world you have a chance to capture the user at the research phase, help them to narrow their selections, purchase online and keep them engaged through ongoing communication via post- purchase email.  If done well you’ll have happy, loyal customers that spruik your brand on social networks and become your brand evangelists to their friends.

Understanding your customers and serving them relevant products through email and promotional areas on your site will result in higher user satisfaction, greater sales and better insight into your consumer segments.

Amazon.com is often referenced when describing how these features work.  They use a few different tactics to provide you with value as a customer by doing some of the thinking for you. On a product page they show:

1. Frequently bought together – within the one transaction
2. Customers who bought this item also bought – based on customer profiling may be over multiple transactions
3. Products that a customer ultimately buys after viewing this item – providing insight in to other users research on what is the best product
4. Editorial review – professional insight in to the product
5. Customer reviews – peer assessment of the product

Doing all of this is probably overkill for your site, and it could be tricky to convince your brand manager that having people rate your product on your site is a good idea. Plus, the design of Amazon pages is actually pretty messy. But they haven’t become the most successful online store for no reason; they are giving consumers what they want – convenience, selection and price competitiveness**.

The most impressive part of Amazon for me is the post-purchase emails I receive to entice me to purchase again. They know what I like, they send me emails with new releases from authors I have bought before and topical books within categories I have purchased from.

So what are you doing in the online space? Are you providing value to your customers or simply putting up some pretty imagery with some basic content and hoping that the customers make their own way to your store?

*Australian Centre for Retail Studies & Google, 2008

**Forrester Research 2008