Search, Social, and Content Convergence: Developing Hybrid Marketing Skills

The search marketing environment has evolved and converged to such an extent that in order to survive and succeed, marketers now need adopt a whole new set of working habits. Search is no longer the silo that it once was and the modern-day search marketer now has to build a whole new set of hybrid skills sets to keep themselves, and their organizations, ahead of the digital marketing curve.

The convergence of paid, owned, and earned media has meant that the relationship between marketers and consumers has become significantly more complex. For example - according to theGuardian article on Google’s ZMOT, on average a consumer engages with 18.2 pieces of online content before making a final purchase decision.

Organizations, agencies, and consultants, as a result, can struggle to keep their skills, learning, and training up to date and in line with such a rapidly developing and complex digital marketing ecosystem.

Did you know that 40 percent of marketers want to reinvent themselves but only 14 percent know how?

Hybrid Marketers

The answer lies in developing cross-channel marketing experience and building hybrid marketing skills and competencies.

Hybrid marketers are (in essence) converged media marketers who are highly proficient writers, analytical, and tech-savvy and have strong competencies in business, IT, and human behavior.

The Converged Media Mind

Two different sides, or hemispheres, of the brain are responsible for different ways of thinking and as soon as we look into the difference between the left and right brain hemispheres, it clearly becomes apparent why some people are more technically driven than others and why gaps in talent in some organizations widen. It is also the reason why, for example, SEO and content marketers battle for ownership.

Left-brain marketers who tend to be analytical collide with right-brained marketers who think holistically and are more open to conceptual thinking. The converged media mind that hybrid marketer’s possess utilizes both the left and right part of the brain and applies this thinking to the appropriate channel with the appropriate approach and subsequent metric.

From the diagram below you can see that analytical and technical PPC and SEO disciplines utilize left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking can be associated with social and creative content.

Hybrid marketers understand and view the role of search, social, content, and digital media, in the above, as integrated holistically but fragmented by skillsets.

People who master hybrid marketing can:

1. Understand the different marketing channels
2. Identify a point of overlap/convergence
3. Manage and matrix manage people and departments who have different skill sets - they bring skills, people, and departments together and foster collaboration

The result is a happy, motivated, and successful set of team members who do not only just understand the multiple components of integrated marketing campaigns – they understand each other.

In my next post I will tall through how best to set up attribution systems for content and hybrid marketers. After all, we should also optimize for people and ensure "organizational attribution" systems are set in place to allow hybrid marketers to measure performance and flourish through an organization.

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Can You Handle the Truth About Social Media Leads?

There are hundreds of differing opinions regarding the effectiveness of using social media for lead generation. This is mine and comes from over two years of trial and error using what I consider to be the best tools available for the social media marketer.

Social is an essential channel for the modern marketer to have a presence, but it’s not going become your company's number one revenue driver anytime soon. Instead it should be part of an overall marketing mix and, even more importantly, be integrated.

Social Leads are not ready to buy

Social leads are generally not ready to buy and need to be nurtured properly. Throwing thousands of unqualified leads into your funnel every month is a complete waste of time if they are never going to buy you product. So target appropriately and keep your content strategy focused on the pain points and hot topics around your target personas. Content fuels social for sure, but having too much content that is way too broad is a waste of resources.

Social plays a key role throughout your entire sales pipeline, beginning before prospects are event identified. (while they research or follow thought leadership on social media sites), to after they become customers (as they remain loyal customers through retention and cross and up-sell opportunities)

Inbound is not enough.

I cannot stress this last point enough. Using inbound alone to generate leads with social media is like hanging out with the same group of friends from high school your entire life. Adding a bit of paid promotion is the only way to break through to the coveted friends of friends, or second degree connections, while targeting social users and growing your overall reach. Inbound alone is not your answer, it’s part of the equation for success.

If a lead falls into a funnel and no one is around…

What good is putting all of this into practice if you cannot track your success and determine if these leads are turning into customers? It’s not. Make sure you are using a platform such as marketing automation to track lead source. I prefer to track each channel individually so that I can tell which one if more effective. Then I break down the cost per lead and compare it to other sources.

In a nutshell

So there you have it. The truth around social media leads straight and to the point. The bottom line is that social needs to be integrated across your entire marketing strategy in order to be effective. It’s also not going to be free as it requires staff and a budget.

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Pinterest offers new tool, lays base for money-making features app, Pinterest, socia

Online scrapbook Pinterest is rolling out new tools that will show businesses the number of visitors it delivers to their websites, part of the fast-growing start-up's efforts to build a base for the introduction of money-making features.

Pinterest does not currently display any revenue-generating advertising on its website, but retailers and large brands such as The Gap, Patagonia and Dell are increasingly using the site to promote their products.

Providing companies with data about usage is a "pretty clear step in the direction" of monetizing Pinterest, said Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research, a San Francisco-based market research firm.

"They couldn't really start charging people without some way of measuring the efficacy of the spend," he said.

Pinterest is "building foundations to monetize" its service this year, Chief Executive Ben Silbermann told The Wall Street Journal last month.

In February, the company raised $200 million in funding from venture capital firms that include Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. The funding deal valued the three-year-old company at $2.5 billion.

The new tool, which will be available free to businesses that use Pinterest on Tuesday, will also provide information about user activity on Pinterest as it relates to a particular company, such as the frequency with which people are clicking on a company's online photos.

Pinterest, which allows users to create online bulletin boards of images and photos based on various themes such as travel, decorating, or sports, was the 38th most visited website by U.S. Internet users in January, with roughly 30 million unique visitors according to online measurement firm comScore.

"The goal is really to help websites understand what content is resonating with people on Pinterest," Cat Lee, a product manager at Pinterest told Reuters in an interview.

Pinterest has not disclosed how many companies have set up official business accounts on its service since it began offering the feature in November.

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How To Take Back Social Media Marketing From Facebook & Twitter

It's 2013. Social media is no longer new. It's a mature medium, one that has been woven into the fabric of consumer life online. So why are brands still determined to act like naive tourists, blundering around a foreign land and upsetting the natives? It's time to take back control.

Brands have been lectured for the last few years on the need to let go of the vice-like grip on their brand, to hand over control to their customers in social media. And it's true that social media has ushered in a new age of transparency, where customers want a far greater stake in any brand they interact with.

But this doesn't mean you can shrug your shoulders and simply launch your brand unguided onto a social network. In fact, it's your responsibility to guide your customers' social experience. And that means welcoming them back to your home online.

Almost all of the most embarrassing recent social media blunders took place on Facebook and Twitter; which offer brands little control over their campaigns or messaging.

Forget Likes, Fans & Followers

It's frankly shameful so many brands are still asking social media to deliver likes, fans, followers, views and channel performance indicators, not business results.

Forward-thinking brands ask social media to deliver things that make business sense. Things like higher customer satisfaction, greater loyalty, reduced support costs and increased revenue.

Social media can be a game-changer, but only when we get serious about the social customer experiences. It's really not that difficult.

First, we must face the facts about social networks like Facebook - they just don't constitute a viable social media strategy. They're almost certainly not where you want to make your home. Only .5% of fans ever mention the brands they like on Facebook and just 2% of fans return to Facebook brand pages a second time.

If you really want to engage with your customers on social channels, you need to engage on your own social hubs: customer forums, blogs and communities.

When cosmetics retailer Sephora realized it had little ability to truly engage its nearly 1 million Facebook fans, for example, the company built its own social hub, Beauty Talk. Sephora now has the ability to engage and enlist their social customers to participate - and Beauty Talk members spend 10x more than the average customer.

Driving this kind of outcome is simply not possible on Facebook.

Social Media Is Not A Silo

Today, only a shocking 11% of companies say their social strategy is guided by insights from other business groups. This means 89% of social strategy happens in a silo. To drive social customer experience to the strategic level, it's essential to get others involved - across marketing, support and sales.

Next, stop playing. Experimentation is great. Endless experimentation is not. Make social engagement a core part of how you interact with your customers. Some 63% of consumers now search for help from other customers online. For example, Hewlett Packard has saved $50 million since launching its social support solution.

Measure What's Important

Now, start measuring the actual impact of your social media strategy. Ban the pointless hunt for buzz, likes, comments, high fives - what do they really mean for your business?

Instead, move to the same metrics you apply to any other area of your business, like reduced costs, greater satisfaction and increased revenue.

Once you have these foundations in place, it's time to scale. A single Twitter campaign can create an ocean of comments. How do you deal with that flood? By enabling your social customers to help each other. Skype community members help more than 3 million customers per month and resolve 70% of cases on first contact. Hewlett Packard's social customers handle 20% of the company's global support. 

With nearly 1.5 billion people using online social networks today, social media can no longer remain an afterthought - a sandbox for dabbling. Brands need to treat their social media investment as a core part of their long-term business transformation, not as a specific activity that you want to check off the list. Anything less just isn't serious.

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Small Business: If Not Facebook, Then Who?

We don’t think there are any true alternative social media networks to Facebook, at this time, including Google+. This is largely due to the numbers of fans in the Facebook network, how entrenched those fans are, the diversity of the fans in the network (demographics), etc.

That said, the one possible contender for the ‘alternative SM networks’ role is Pinterest.

Why Pinterest?

Here's a few reasons:

• Those who use Pinterest tend to LOVE the network. 
• According to a November 14, 2012 CNBC article "The site drew 26.7 million unique visitors last month, up from 3.3 million in the year-ago period, according to research firm comScore."
• Pinterest may be the fastest growing social network ever, according to an eMarketer article.
• Internet users followed more retailers on Pinterest (9.3) than on Twitter (8.5) or Facebook (6.9) in March 2012, according to comScore, in the same eMarketer article.

A June article in Forbes magazine "Why Pinterest Could Be The Next Social Media Giant" included this information from "recently released data by Modea" about the demographics of Pinterest users.

68% of Pinterest users are  women, and 28.1% of users have an average household income of over $100,000. Furthermore, about half of the users have children and more than 27% are between the ages of 25 and 34.

According to the CNBC article mentioned above, Pinterest's "rapid growth has drawn businesses, especially retailers, to expand their presence on the site."

In fact, in mid-November Pinterest announced Pinterest for business.  Some small businesses, and many larger ones, had already discovered the benefits of having an active presence on Pinterest. Pinterest has now opened the doors wider by creating a Pinterest for Business option.

Many small business owners wonder how they can make it work on Pinterest, especially when what they are selling doesn't easily translate into a visual. 

First, like most social networks it's not all about me or you. It's about our fans, followers, connections, clients, potential clients. Pinterest, as with other top networks, provides a way for you to build your brand and image as well as sell your products, by sharing content that others will find interesting, helpful, valuable and/or shareable - make that 'likable' or 'Repinnable'.

The best way to see this in action is to check out and get a sense for Pinterest before you get too far down the road. Check out a few of the brand pages already active on Pinterest: Martha Stewart,Starbucks, Lamborghini, Walmart, Amazon - there are many more!

Pinterest URLs are branded so if you have a name you really want, grab it now. Big brands like CocaCola, Pepsi, Mazda and Toyota don't seem to have gotten on the bandwagon soon enough as typing in these URLs brings up individuals not the brands. Ouch!

Pinterest users, according to the Forbes article mentioned above, spend more time on the network than on Facebook and Twitter. This is good news for business because Pinterest (at least right now) let's the user decide what they would like to view.

These are the options:

• Everything being pinned by those you are 'Following'
• Everything being pinned in certain 'Categories' by everyone
• Everything - really, everything!
• Everything that is 'Popular'
• 'Gift' ideas by price groupings - or EVERY 'Gift' idea unsorted

YOU choose - Pinterest doesn't choose for you. (Yes, that was a bit of a dig at Facebook.)

Anything that can be shared using a visually appealing image is ripe for Pinterest. And, you can add text too, up to 500 characters, and a clickable link (URL) back to your website, or your e-commerce site (to make a purchase), etc. You can also pin saleable products from your website to show up on Pinterest.

From a small business point of view, Facebook is losing some of its luster as a place to invest a lot of time and energy for meager results. Social networks like Pinterest are opening up new opportunities for them.

Pinterest is gaining traction with users and with businesses, assuming they don’t mess too much with the way things are, other than improvements of course.

Google+ is a different animal compared to Facebook and Pinterest. It doesn’t seem to have the huge buy-in, usage and time spend that Facebook does. It does have large fan numbers, considering the relatively short time it's been around, but the amount of time users spend on the network isn’t impressive.

An article in Search Engine Journal earlier this year, reported the average number of minutes users spent on Google+ was 3 minutes. I'm sure it's more now but not enough to make it any kind of a threat to Facebook or Pinterest, at least right now.

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Social Media Isn’t About Campaigns It’s About Strategy

4 ways to use social media in your intelligence gathering

1. Find your curators – Information curation has been a part of the social scene for years.  Whereas most of this curation is done around topic areas, if you can find (or create) someone who curates the relevant topics around you and your business, then it can serve as a significantly better source of information than trawling through a database.  By collecting information from a variety of sources you avoid the groupthink that is so pervasive.  Recruiting these curators from outside of the company is an easy way to avoid company centred thinking.  Of course, this curation doesn’t just have to be about you, you can also do it for competitors as well.

1. More engagement, less data collection – Whereas previously data gathering took up a significant chunk of time, with social listening tools, and fine curation, you’re freeing up a lot of time to actually engage with people.  This is the respond part because it frees up time to solicit ideas and get feedback from your customers, and get them co-creating new products with you.  Therefore the ability to engage with a community is now a key skill for the modern employee.
2. Drive insight – Do you still use SWOT when doing strategy?  How about empowering social media to try a different approach.  More and more analytics products are hitting the market that will analyse the social web for you.  They’ll be reading blog posts or discussion forums, they’ll be checking out Twitter and Facebook.  They’ll give you great insight into what really matters to your customers.  They’ll tell you where your strengths and weaknesses are.
3. Drive action – I’m sure many of us have been handed reports stuffed to the gills with data.  Whilst no doubt thoughtfully produced and full of nice insight, they don’t make it easy to actually make changes.  Social media offers you a way to get insights delivered in such a way as it makes driving changes much easier.  New social software automatically curates important information collected from the social web and delivers it to decision makers in an easy to understand format.  The nice thing is that this information no longer has to exist on a ‘need to know’ basis, it can be shared throughout the organisation, therefore democratising intelligence.

As you can see, there is so much more to social media than merely running campaigns.  Your task is to ensure you utilise it to its fullest.

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Related articles

• Visual Social Media: Evaluating Pinterest vs. Instagram
• 24 Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools
• Pew Study Highlights Explosion of Photo Sharing
• Social Media vs. Social Engagement

HootSuite: 4 million users can now manage Instagram & SlideShare too

HootSuite, the service that 79 of the world’s Fortune 100 companies use to manage their social media presence, just added apps for Instagram, SlideShare, Edocr, and Zuum in its App Directory.

The company provides a unified interface where social media managers can monitor and manage their activity across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Additional social networks can be added via apps in the HootSuite App Directory, enabling users to manage YouTube, Flickr, and others.

Instagram is a big integration for HootSuite, as the service continues to grow in popularity, currently adding five million users a week. And SlideShare is a major platform for sharing presentations and PowerPoint decks.

Plus, since HootSuite already helps its clients manage their LinkedIn presence, and LinkedIn purchased SlideShare for $119 million earlier this year, it was a natural next step.

In a statement, chief executive Ryan Holmes said the company picked these networks to add to the App Directory because they enable the sharing of rich media content that aids engagement:

“We’re excited to welcome these popular social networks because they’re centrally focused around the easy sharing of multimedia content.”

The Instagram app will allow users to view and search photos, read what others have written, add comments, like photos, and share them to other social networks. Similarly, the SlideShare app helps users upload, find, and share content

The App Directory is one of the ways HootSuite distinguishes itself from competitors such as SproutSocial and Involver. Perhaps the only competitor with something similar is Radian6, with its Extension Gallery. Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners, told VentureBeat that “roughly 10-15% of new users install at least one app within the first week.”

Created in December of last year, the App Directory features apps for integrating email marketing, surveys, RSS feeds, and more into users’ social media management activities. There’s even an app to manage Orkut, the Google-owned Brazilian social network.

The additions of Zuum and Edocr are a bit surprising.

Zuum is somewhat interesting, as it is a platform for social media marketing strategy, which is somewhat competitive to HootSuite, but it also provides insight into guaranteed-to-be-engaging content, helping social media managers know what kinds of content they should post.

Edocr, on the other hand, is a tiny business-document sharing site focused on lead generation, with only some thousands of monthly visitors. I’ve asked HootSuite why it chose Edocr and Zuum, and I’ll update this post when the company replies.

[ Update: the response was inconclusive. According to Holder, "Instagram and SlideShare have been among the top requested apps from our Free, Pro and Enterprise clients.” ]

I did ask the company when full Google+ integration is coming to HootSuite, but there is no specific timetable yet. Holder had the following to say via email:

We are not able to provide a specific date at this time as to when Google+ will be available to all HootSuite users. HootSuite was selected as an official partner by Google+ Pages, and we are currently working with their team to gather data from our current Enterprise clients actively using the integration.”

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has almost 200 employees. In March of this year, the company raised $20 million from OMERS Ventures.

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