Here’s a list of activities that every marketer (including myself) should take extra attention of when crafting a social media marketing campaign:-

Objective of Social Media Marketing Campaign
Social media cannot deliver results like online advertisements, so it has to be made clearly understood that social media marketing has got different objectives.  Amongst them are increasing fan base, a personalized engagement with users/fans, additional tool to deliver messages and more.

Deliverable
What the campaign can deliver, in what intensity and timeframe needs to be spelt out carefully and cannot be over-promised.  The bosses expect deliverable with every of their investment (with our without monetary investment) and its important to use some statistics & mathematics before commiting to a deliverables.  This is especially if your deliverables are leads generated or total sales generated.  Be honest and truthful, there is no point over promising if you already know its impossible or if you are completely not sure of the results.

Monitoring the Results/Deliverable

Any marketer knows that every campaign needs to have ROIs, so make sure that you are fully aware of how your campaign is performing.  Some of the items you want to monitor include total clicks on the links you posted, total retweets, total followers/fans and others.

Consistent Plan to Increase Followers/Fans

I always believe that I need to increase followers/fans because this equals reaching deeper and further into the already established base.  So, there must be a consistent & persistent plan to increase the total followers and fans.  While it is ideal to churn out huge figures to impress the bosses, it is also important to be very level-headed when it comes to commiting such figures.

Daily Monitoring

Its ideal to have tools to monitor the social media for keywords and your business name.  Not only will you be able to do damage control if anything negative is being said about your business, but at the same time you can also know what is being said about your competitors or about the industry in general.

This morning, I searched for tools to do bulk unfollow because I have close to 1,000 followers and going through all these one by one is going to be a very time consuming task.  Here are the few that I found :-

Twitter Karma
URL : http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

This tool shows you the whole long list of those whom you are following & whom are following you.  You will instantly know whom you are following that are not following you and vice versa.  You can tick boxes beside the names to do a bulk follow or bulk unfollow.  Oh yes, you need to key in your twitter ID and your password to get this done.  Its simple, fast & easy.

Friend or Follow
URL : http://friendorfollow.com

You only need to key in your twitter ID and they will show you a list of (1) FOLLOWING – Those whom you are following but is not following you (2) FANS – Those whom are following you but you are not following them  (3) FRIENDS – Those whom are following you and you are also following them  .  From this list, you can then click on the respective icons that brings you back to their twitter profiles and you can make a decision to follow / unfollow.  Ok, so you can’t do a bulk unfollow or follow but you have instant information on your fingertips to make a decision.

Untweeps
URL : http://www.untweeps.com/

With this tool, you can see whom has not been actively updating their tweets.  This tool allows you to specify the total days of inactivity ~ so your report is customized according to your own criteria.  They call it ’stale tweeps’.  With the whole long list, it is by default checked so you can just click on bulk unfollow if you want to.  I had a long list, and I was thinking to myself.. if they are not updating their twitter for 30 days, I believe they have permanently abandoned it?  If you have a long list of people you are following, you’d be surprised how big this pool of inactive tweeps can be!

Buzzom
URL : http://www.buzzom.com/

Once I key in my twitter ID, it gives me an option to Flush, Grow or Reciprocate.  The idea behind it is quite similar to the rest – follow those who follow you stuff.  An interesting add on is that it has a Twitter Statistics to measure your influence, retweet efficiency, retweet rank.. etc.

I used Twitter Karma and Friend or Follow to keep my list ‘clean’.

On the other hand, I’m now using Qwitter [URL: http://useqwitter.com/ ] to be notified of whoever is unfollowing me.  I just signed up for this service, whereby I only need to key in my twitter ID and email address to be notified of those who unfollow me.  I can stop the service anytime by clicking on the link that has been emailed to me.

For now, I just want to keep my Twitter list clean.

In fact, when we first spotted the signboard, it reminded me of those eerie movies whereby you bump into a rundown motel beside some highway.  The location is off the Hulu Langat highway, somewhere about 1km away from the famous Ampang Look Out Point.  The best part of it all is that it has no proper signboard and just a dingy looking “Open” signage lighted dimly which was clearly visible in the darkness of the jungle.

As our car went past the “Open” signage through a gate, it was entire darkness and we felt not-so-right because there was no lights, and nothing was visible in front.  The road is not tarred and bumpy all the way.  Its a village road by passing some private lands (according to the signage) and you are charged RM2 upon arrival at the carpark.  If not for the advertisement that said that there is a restaurant inside, you would have to literally kill me to drive into such place for dinner.  To illustrate what I meant by how scary I felt, refer to the location map I plotted using Google Map below.  Its really thick jungle and its something like one kilometer into the jungle before you can see some lights.  *phew*

As we approached the restaurant, there was something like 40 cars parked in the darkness and the restaurant was full house!  Unbelievable!!  We ordered 6 dishes in total excluding the desserts.  The food is good, I took a pic of four of the dishes and forgot about taking the remaining two when I got into eating.  Its always like that ~ once I start to get into the mood of eating, I forget the pics.  Hahaha… One thing to note, as soon as we ordered, the food arrived in 5 minutes which was timely since we were already starving.

I snapped some photos but it was really too cold to even have non-shaky hands.  Because it was really really dark (it was close to 9:00PM when we arrived), so you can’t really see much from the pics.  The restaurant is built around a fish pond and is really breezy and cooling.

Its a unique experience ~ having dinner in the middle of the jungle.  This restaurant has a nice ambiance & “feel” but would be almost impossible to locate if you have no proper directions.

“It depends…”

“You mean…?”

Its funny how people expect a quick one liner answer to a question like this. I wished there is a quick answer but unfortunately its not as simple as it sounds.

Social media is not just about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, internet, online banner advertisements. These are social media tools. To get into social media, the first thing you must have in mind is your goal and what strategy you want to use. The strategy must be unique to your business, and no blind copying because a strategy custom-tailored for another business (though might be in the same industry) might not have the same effect to yours.

There is an interesting article I came across, “Social Media Not The Answer for Weak Brands” which quotes that social media is akin to better weapons & bigger army strength in a war, but ultimately it is the warfare strategy that leads to a win. The emphasis is to get the strategy right, then use social media as a platform to execute the strategy.

Although I truly believe in the strength of social media, I’d not want business to think and believe that social media IS the ULTIMATE everything to help improve businesses. Social media is a tool and a platform that can help businesses reach out to target audience, engage with them, interact with them, understand them, maybe even as a channel to test responses for new product/service roll out. All these information leads to better understanding of the business, which can then be used to improve business processes, realign products/services offerings, offer new products/services and of course (hopefully), lead to a bigger bottomline.

Thinking about using social media for your business? My advise – start with the end in mind, that is what is your goal, then think about the strategy to deploy, then only which social media platform to use.

(1) Build a network who agrees to receive your broadcast of marketing messages & engaging with your customers & potential customers
Those who has done direct emailing know that every email address must opt-in to receive your marketing messages.  Unsolicited messages can lead you to a lot of sticky issues ~ getting a call from the internet provider is not pleasant & damaging, having your domain blacklisted means that even your emails will not reach your customers (these days email servers subscribe to these blacklists to keep spam low) and you definitely don’t want to have your email server blocked (I’ve experienced this in my previous company).  But with social media, they are following you voluntarily and you can broadcast your messages to them ~ of course with a proper strategy & execution.
(2) A channel to listen to feedback/comments
The truth hurts, and some companies choose to ignore constructive feedbacks or ‘listen less’ of such feedback, and assume that they are the minority.  With social media, even the minority’s voice can become major if not handled carefully.  People are talking and sharing thoughts/ideas/experiences all the time ~ you don’t want a multiplication effect for the wrong reasons.  So, listening is important, and social media can help you reach out to listen.
(3) Knowing what’s hot / being discussed in your industry
Because of the nature of social media, news and latest updates gets discussed so very quickly and you want to make full use of these conversations – to know the latest trends/issues/challenges so that you can make a business decision on how to react to it.
(4) Opportunity to clarify/correct misconceptions
You can immediately rectify misconceptions by offering clarifications and these messages are going to be read by all who follow you.  Your voices gets heard and you can reach out to many at one go.

(5) Participate in the conversations, reinforce your message
When you see a topic concerning you being discussed, this is your opportunity to strike while the iron is hot.  Not only are you able to participate, you can even reinforce your message and subtly promote yourself.

(6) Opportunity to be the voice of authority
Its not easy, I know.  People don’t trust you overnight, it has to be done consistently over a period of time.  Start with providing good information with interesting information and real value.  If you can offer tips that can help and yet subtly sell yourself, that would be best! Track your click-through rates for your to know the effectiveness.  When you offer tips/interesting information, people tend to take note. Now you’ve got their attention and their trust!

I’ve seen some companies thinking and believing that social media is HARD SELLING when its not.  No one wants to be a fan of Facebook to be continuously bombarded with endless promotions and hard-sell marketing messages.  You have to engage with your audience, build the trust, and listen in order to get people to buy the idea.  Some get impatient by the day because the expectation has been set wrongly in the first place.  The other things is also the tendency to OVERDO because its a free tool.  A strategy in mind and proper execution is key to successful social media use.