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Amber: Social Media Roadmap Part 1

Lesson 25 from: Social Media Bootcamp

CC Chapman, Kim Garst, Ariel Hyatt, Amber Naslund

Amber: Social Media Roadmap Part 1

Lesson 25 from: Social Media Bootcamp

CC Chapman, Kim Garst, Ariel Hyatt, Amber Naslund

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Lesson Info

25. Amber: Social Media Roadmap Part 1

Lesson Info

Amber: Social Media Roadmap Part 1

So we're going to move into the actual How on earth do I build a plan to pull all of this together? And what are the elements that I need to keep in mind now? Ah, planning process like this is actually not It's specific to social, but you'll find that this kind of a process is really applicability to your business as a whole. And what you'll also notice is that we're going to talk about things that should be considerations for your business as a whole. So this is the part where I'm not going to give you. A lot of you should use Twitter for this and Facebook for that. What we're going to talk about here is a strategic level plan. That is how you should integrate all the different aspects of social and your business. So they work together in a beautiful little framework, and strategic planning is sort of what I do for a living. So this is the stuff that I geek out on. So if you have any questions or if I assume knowledge that you have that that doesn't make sense to you If I use the term...

that doesn't make any sense, please interrupt me and ladies. Of course, if the Internet gets restless, just let us know. First and foremost, we talked about the importance of having a vision. Now, a lot of times, when we talk about vision in business, we start thinking about the beautiful little plaque that somebody put on the board room wall somewhere. Or a bunch of crusty executives got together in an office, used as many business buzzwords as they could all at one time in one sentence, posted it to the wall and promptly forgot about it. And vision in business is actually much more critical from that. And it's so not the thing on the border wall. But when it comes to trying to build a social media framework or a plan. Too often, what we start immediately diving for are the tools. The first thing you think of is like I need a Twitter strategy and now you don't. What we need to do is stop thinking in terms of this ships that are going to take us somewhere and instead thinking about our destination where as a are we going as a business? It's the most important thing to ask yourself, regardless of social media or whether you need to be marketing or selling or finding investors or whatever you're doing. Having destinations is so critical, that means for you. We were just talking off camera before about the kind of business that your platform you're trying to build, you know exactly what you want to build on. Why. So this always answers the question Why? And whenever you delve into a social strategy for your company, the first question you should be asking yourself is, Why am I doing this? And I don't think we do that enough. Frankly, in business, I don't think we ask why, because we get into our habits and we get into our routines and we get into the thing that we write in the business book that said we should. So we just sort of assume that we know what we're supposed to do. But if I come to you and say Kelly, why are you doing that thing in your business? Sometimes people look at me and go. I'm not really sure, actually. Now you mention it because Bond told me I was supposed to, But vision has a lot more importance truly than just setting a course and setting a big picture of what you aspire to. It actually becomes an anchor. So this is something that's really important. As you plan in the future, when you go to make decisions or build additional strategies on top of strategies on top of strategies, your vision becomes the one thing you come back to to say. Is this on course for what I am trying to accomplish? Because again, we can get so overwhelmed by so many of the tools. For instance, I'm really lousy. Surprisingly on video, I hate video. Some people are really great at video blogging or making YouTube videos or whatever. I'm terrible at it, so I don't do it. And one of the reasons is that I go back and say The vision I have for my business is to transform companies and help them adapt to the Social Web. Is video going to get me? They're probably not. So it's not something that I'm gonna invest my time in, and I actually use that for all sorts of things in my business. Is this a good marketing strategy? Is this the right meeting to take Is this the right conference to go to? So vision becomes that thing that sticks everything together that you can always count on to come back and say, All right, I need to reset and sitting, look and figure out where I'm going. So one of the things that we do in our business all the time is we come in and help facilitate workshops and we do lots of kind of interactive stuff. And one of our favorite exercises is something we call on the cover. So this is an exercise that you can dio with your business, no matter how teeny, tiny or gigantic it is, and go home and dio. So here's the idea. You as a company, Are you planning your social media strategy today? Two years from now, you are on the cover of Forbes Fast Company. Pick your favorite magazine and what the idea of this exercise is get you to think about. What would they be saying about you? What would the headlines say? It would say that this business accomplished X and it's so amazing. What's so revolutionary about it? Who would they interview? What would they talk about? What sorts of things would they want to showcase about your company's success? And if you want to take it down to the level of social strategy, you could certainly ask whatever company you're building. What would they say about how awesome your social strategy is? What does that mean? What is a killer amazing content strategy look like? What are they saying when they say you were so spectacular on Facebook? Because or you built this incredible blawg and why is it so awesome? And this is a really enlightening exercise to go through because, as a matter, you can sit down and think, Well, Steve Jobs is now in my interview saying how I inspired him to create Ah, whole new business strategy unit it Microsoft apple, whatever you know. So you get the idea is that you go in the to this thinking huge as big as you possibly can, because you want this to be. That thing that you aspire to visit is the what if it's the super big picture aspirational pie in the sky Deal. Do you guys will feel like you have one of those for your business. A lot of head shaking Internet Are you shaking your heads Because truly, a lot of people, I think, miss this step and which baffles me frankly, because it drives everything in my world What I'm having a day where I don't know which end is up. And I have 400 emails and 75,000 phone calls, and the tweets are exploding and my blawg hasn't been written on and I have a proposal on strategic plan. My vision for our company is the one thing that always helps me take everything down to its most simple roots. So I know exactly where I need to focus. If you don't have a vision for your business, build one, be brave and be bold and be a little bit irreverent about it and say, What could I be given all of the things at my disposal? What could this business become? Who my helping? Why am I doing this? Why am I staying up late at night? Why am I giving all my time, money and energy to this, though the reason you get up every day should be baked into your visit. That's why you're doing this. And I know it sounds very like Tony Robbins. motivational speech. But the truth is, this is the thing that is the glue that's gonna hold everything else together. And even when we're talking as small as social media, it is directly hinged to the vision of your company. And if you look at people because, no, who Gary Vaynerchuk is, so Gary V is the most explosive personality you could possibly ever imagine. He's he's larger than life. And the thing that drives Gary and what he'll tell you is that he's not good at 99% of the things in the world. But the 1% of those things that he's good at, he kills, and he knows exactly what he wants. He knows what he wants for his business. He knows what he wants for his life, and he goes after it with everything he's got. So his vision is his kind of grounding route strategy that drives everything else that he does. Everybody knows what Gary V stands for, and he'll get up here and be the most passionate, crazy person. But you always know that you're getting all of him, and that's something that we have to remember. Social is just a reflection of our company culture and even as independent people, small businesses, we have company cultures to, even if we're small and socialism is an amplifier like we talked about before, and it's also a reflection of who we are as a company and what we believe. So having a vision is so critical to making sure that it ties all of those little tiny tactical things together in the long term. Cool. Any specific questions about visit before we move on? From that? I don't think questions, but just really people resonating Teacher Tom who? It turns out E. O just says, I have thought about all these things, but I have never expressed them out loud. And then he says, maybe Amber should try your hand at therapy. I think the first time somebody's that, oddly enough, but this is actually something we really enjoy doing with companies because we sort of get in our day to day routines and we're doing our thing. We know all of the operational things we need to do to get our day done from from a to B. But re tapping into people's vision is the most enlightening exercise because you get burned out cynical, crusty people who have been in their cubicle for the last 15 years. Suddenly come toe life. When you start asking them, why do you do this like more than a paycheck? Why do you get up every day and still come to this office and do what you dio? And so one of two things happens? People quit their job the next day, or or hopefully if we do our jobs right there reinvigorated by remembering their purpose, remembering why they're doing all of this. So when you're mired in Google Facebook e U plus Google tube, the thing that you have to remember is all of those things are completely irrelevant. At the end of the day, they're all going to be different in chains. But what's core is why you decided to do what you do professionally for a reason. I love what I do. You can really tell. I love what I dio, but I couldn't do it if I didn't have some kind of driving vision to get me there. And nowhere I want to be. So if you haven't gone through that exercise, draw yourself a little magazine. Put your little picture in the front and start writing those headlines and write the cover stories and talk about how should somebody be talking about you 35 years from now? Because that is your anchor for your social strategy? All right, so moving on to the second piece of our social strategy framework is inputs. Now, when I say inputs, what I mean is the process of listening to the Internet. Now this is a time consuming thing, and it's actually one of the more fundamental elements. I think of any social strategy is a listening program, and it's not nearly as exciting as posting and creating content and getting likes and tweets and all that kind of stuff. But it is really core to understanding the communities that you want to be part of and serve. So I used to work for a company called Radian six, and they build social media monitoring software. They're now part of Salesforce, Um, so they're more geared toward big companies in big enterprises. But the idea is fundamentally the same. You have to be listening first before you're doing anything else. Now, if you're building a company from scratch, this is the key to finding out what is there a market? Am I solving an existing need? One of the ways that we figured out what to do with our company was that my business partner and I worked in social media kind of as a whole. I was working in social strategy for radiant six. He was working a technology consultant, and so we were all kind of tangentially touching this world, and we were listening both actively online and sort of passively in our communities to the problems that people were griping about. One of the most magic things in the world is to listen to what people complain about because those air called unmet needs. So for us, the problem was that businesses were getting all of this information about you. Social media be on social media, do social media things. But they were realizing that that had big time implications for business. Like I don't know who to hire. I don't know how toe work this into my process and my policies and guidelines we don't have the resource is for this and we don't know how to adapt to it, and we have saying somebody will fix that problem someday. Where are the people that are gonna fix this problem? So finally, about a year later, we decided to start our own company, and we continue to keep our ear to the ground in Social Teoh here. What companies air saying about what issues they're having integrating Social into their operations. That's what drives our content. That's what drives our service offerings. All of that is business intelligence. It's the fast moving, real time business intelligence of the Web. It's not pretty, is not structured. You'll hear a lot of stuff about big data. It's Massey. It's, um it's really subjective, you know, and lots of people are talking about lots of things, but there's an incredible amount of insight that you can actually find by listening on the Web. Now the question is, how do you do that, right? So think in terms of buckets. So if you're gonna build a listening strategy for your company, this doesn't need to be big. It doesn't need to be complicated, and you don't need gigantic software that costs a fortune. There are some great free tools out there. One of my favorites is mentioned dot net. Uh, is it I think it's free up to a certain point, but you can type in any key word, whether it's your business name or your own name or a brand you're interested in. And when it comes back with is people who are mentioning that keyword or phrase anywhere on social media. So it's really cool. You go out there and go while who's talking about my business, that's important. And that's usually the first place people start when you're building a listening strategy. Most people want to know, Is anybody talking about me? And if so, what are they saying? Good, bad, indifferent And of course, of nobody's talking about you. That's kind of a signal in and of itself, right? So you have some work to do on that front. But listening for brand related mentions is important. Now that's not just your business name. Consider putting in your own name. If you're affiliated with your business, consider putting in your client's names or your customers names your product names, brands that you carry services that you offer all of those sorts of things. So what you're doing is creating sort of this little halo of listening around what's happening that's relevant to my company, my work and me specifically. So, for instance, I have searches set up for city air works for Amber Naslund for Amber Cadavra. Because again, that's like my name that stuck forever. Um, the now revolution, which is the book that I wrote because I want to know if somebody is talking about my book. Did they love it? Did they hate it if they loved it? I want to say thank you if they hated it, I want to get some feedback So it's a great opportunity for me to and wow when you do that. By the way, you were gonna shock the pants off of most of the people on the Internet because you'll come in and say, Hey, I saw that you posted about my dog treats and you love them. I would love to send you a sample of the new ones were making, and they're like, Whoa, like Internet magic. It's the coolest thing ever. So listening is actually a really great way to not just get intelligence, but find opportunities to talk to people. Of course, you want to look for your competition. This is some of the best intelligence that you can get on the Web. It's amazingly rich, and you'll find some surprising things sometimes when you look up your competition online, because sometimes you'll hear what people are raving about and what they're talking about your competitors and why they love them. So that's something that you should look to aspire to want to pay attention to. They'll also talk about the things that make them unhappy, which are huge opportunities for you to step in and fill in. Need that somebody else isn't meeting. So if your competition people are complaining about their prices and you can be competitive, that's important. If they're missing a product offering that you could possibly fill has a huge opportunity. So there's lots of really interesting invitation opportunities you confined with competitive stuff. You have a question I just wanted to add something is something I found really useful. A setting up Google alerts. Yes, and then that just gets emailed right to my inbox. But here's what I'll tell you about Google Alerts. If you're not familiar with what's happening with Google these days, it's all kind of getting upended. So Google Reader went the way of the dodo and is gone. Bye bye. Google alerts may very well be disappearing, so yeah, so and it's not. It's not really perfectly reliable. To be honest, I used to rely a lot on Google Alerts, but they've gotten to the point where they're kind of delayed. You'll miss stuff. They're great. If you're doing nothing else, at least do that. But there are great tools, like mentioned like I talked about that are, I think, a little bit more comprehensive, and you can also get those results. Email Teoh on Don't give you. They'll send you email notifications and I get him in a digest. So it'll say severe works that mentioned 10 times today, and I can just go and look through. Was it somebody retweeting a block poster? Did they have a comment? Or so we'll give you the body of the The comment They It's a really neat to on there, several of them out there. So just look up free listening tools or free social media listening tools and you'll find, and some are better than others. Some have features that others don't. If you're willing to spend a little bit of money There's also lots in the mid range, so you can use kind of a double hitter platform like Hoot suite you can use as a Twitter client. But it also has some monitoring capabilities baked into it that I think that, um, at a relatively reasonable price point you can get access to. So there's all kinds of tools that air, and there's always new ones cropping up, and then some get bought. And who knows? So it changes all the time, but there's lots of great resource is out there. And, um, I keep hoping that Google is gonna build something new. I'm waiting. I'm not mean, especially with Google Plus and how integrated that is into their whole ecosystem. I'm waiting for like the now you can just search Google for social media mentions like you know, I can't I wouldn't be surprised if that shows up at some point. The next thing is to listen for your category, and this is the part that lots of folks sort of neglect because it's really easy to think about brand, and it's easy to think about competition. But category is the broader landscape of the business sector that you're in. So for me, I'm listening. Teoh A few different things. I'm listening for social business related conversations, but I'm also listening for the categories that my clients are in. So we work with a pharmaceutical company. So I want to know what's happening at the top of mind of Pharma executives. So I'm paying attention to some linked in groups I, which is where a lot of former executives are active. I have a couple of searches set up for Hashtags on Twitter that talk about health care, social media. So start thinking creatively about tangents to your brand and different ways that you can fit into other conversations that might inform how you decide to do business in the future. So these are the kinds of things that will make a decision making easier. What kind of content should I create? What questions air out there in the world, and can I answer them? Can I address them with my expertise? Is there a huge new innovation on the edge of my industry? And should I be aware of that? Talking about it said. I have an opinion about it, those sorts of things so this can be a net that says broad or is narrow as you want it to be. But the point is that setting up a listening station like this is sort of the lifeblood behind your social platform because it gives you intelligence on content. It gives you intelligence on business indicators, and it also gives you a pulse of where people are. So if you can't decide what platform to be using, should I be in Twitter or a Pinterest or whatever? What you'll find is that setting up a listening program will help answer that for you. It will help you find where the concentrations of the conversations you want to be part of our happening alcohol. So one great exercise for you to try. I call it points of need mapping. So one of the best places to one of the best methods, I guess, for listening on the Web is to listen for what we call a point of need. If I'm in the market for a car, my point of need is when I get on Twitter and say Anybody have a let's get big, anybody have an Aston Martin because I'm looking at buying one, and I'd like to get some opinions and feedback on it. Now, if you're an Aston Martin dealer, you have a huge opportunity toe bop into that conversation and say, Hey, Amber, my name is Bob and I sell Aston Martins and I would love to talk to you. I'm an answer. Any questions that you have? So I have expressed a point of need, and Bob came and found it and met it. Now there's a fine line sometimes between listening and stocking, right? And so we're not always comfortable with companies coming in like interrupting our conversations. Hey, so this is not about jumping into a conversation and saying, Hey, you just said this. I'm gonna sell you something. The whole point of point of need mapping is trying to figure out what needs your clients and customers might have to build listening phrases into your systems that will look for them to say, looking for a car, looking for a baby sitter, looking for anything that's related to what you do. Um, think in terms of questions, people might ask if they're comparing products or services. Look for words like, can anybody recommend? Does anybody know those kinds of key phrases. Does anybody know? Dentist? You'll get a whole bunch of people saying, Does anybody know a good dentists in ST Louis? Does anybody know a dentist that's good with kids? So if you're a dentist, suddenly that's a gold mine for you to be able to say, I'm not sure what your needs are. But here's a little information on our office, and I'd love to talk to you. So it's an invitation to sort of politely present information about yourself or your company. Do you have questions? I do question Great. Back to the mention dot net. When you're searching for for the things you're searching for, Is it just the hashtags that come up or anything that's in the text? Anything in the text? And now the natural language processing in some of these search engines is getting better and better. So right now they're not very good at things like sarcasm, and they're not really good at things like slang. So today we call something sick if it's really good, you know, like that was a totally sick bike. I just saw, um, the computers are really good at that because they'll think that's a bad thing. Um, so you have to be a little bit mindful of how you put those terms and but think of it in terms of it being a search engine specific to social media. So just do a search like you would on Google. It's usually built on Boolean phrases to get a little technical. So those are the kinds of things this and this. Or, you know, Bob and Christmas Bob or Christmas Bob. You know those kinds of things so you can build a little search string, and it'll find those mentions of those words anywhere in the text. Now, of course, if you're a company, one of our former clients was UPS, so you can imagine looking for mentions on UPS, online push ups, pull ups, sit ups, major ups. You know, they had some issues filtering out things. So if you have a really common name or we have a really common brand or really common terms that you're trying to search for, you're gonna want to qualify around them a little bit. So try to make those phrases as specific as possible so that you know that you're getting the best information available, like I don't recommend going out and doing a search for dog sitting because you'll get nine million results. So try to be, you know, dog sitting with a location or a dog sitting. Um, you know, getting specific about that stuff. Thank you. You're welcome this out high and then going on that as well. Is this where we're searching for point of need? Mapping is on. So point of need mapping, which I didn't even get to explain fully at this point is the exercise of doing this. Sit down with a blank piece paper and say I today I'm a customer of my own company. What sorts of questions? What I have if I was looking for your business. So you're a portrait photographer, right? So if I'm looking for what you dio, I'm gonna go online and say, Does anybody know a great portrait photographer in San Francisco? So your point of need is people who are asking for recommendations. They're looking Teoh. They might be looking to shoot their kids for end of year school pictures or graduation pictures or who knows what. So start thinking of all of the different needs that your customers would have and do a little tinkering online to listen for those things. So go into photography communities or parent communities. And look at those conversations. How do they word those requests? You know, you can get a little crafty with that and say, Like, How are they asking for photographers? Are they asking their friends? Are they doing searches online? And if you think through all of the different intersections where somebody is need is going to match up with what you do and have, that's what I mean by point of need mapping. Because what that ends up doing is helping direct how you search and how you listen online because you're looking for those opportunities that somebody is not reaching out to you directly there simply expressing something that they need, that they may not know that you serve but you dio. So if I'm looking for do you do organic dog treats by? So if I'm looking for organic dog treats for my dog, for you, a point of the would be somebody saying, Hey, listen, I just got this in Doug and I. I like to feed them organics. So how do I find an organic dog treat, and that's a great thing for you to be looking for because you could be finding people who are asking those questions. Don't get discouraged at first if there's only a few of them and if sometimes you get no hits at all, because sometimes in this listening process it's kind of an iterative thing. You learn as you go because your first searches are likely to either be really broad and far too broad or they're likely to be far too narrow and you'll be frustrated that nothing is happening. So you've got to kind of tweak it as you go. But the more you map the point of needs. Here's the big today you're mapping point of needs for a listening program. But guess what's gonna happen. You're going to start building this list going. I should totally have a new products or any service or a new page of my blog's or whatever it is. An e book. There's a visit informs so many things in your business that it's going to be a shockingly enlightening exercise, and I promise you it's gonna be really painful at first, cause the first few are hard to get out and you're like people need a photographer. Okay? But then you start thinking about things like graduation pictures, wedding pictures, pregnancy pictures. Who knows, You know, So the world of photography is so massive that you start getting really creative about how people might intersect with what it is that you dio, and it actually becomes a pretty fundamental X I exercise for the rest of your business as a whole. I have so many diverse types of businesses that might not be my expertise about thumb, but it's like you know it. And aside from bringing them hard numbers, which is very difficulty, it's nice to be able to say, Hey, I did some mapping for you and here's some customer needs And here's a way that we could kind of bring in some new people and address something you didn't even think about before. Exactly. That's that's amazing. That's a wayto bring something to a company that's really useful and we take their time. But really probably wouldn't take is that it's a very time consuming to do this. It's time consuming thing to start, but what? What you find is that once you start, it's kind of addicting because you start thinking about that. It starts pervading all of your planning process, which is actually a really good thing, because what it does is this is what creates customer centric companies. If you want to be. The kind of company that puts the customer is the focus of everything you dio. This is how you can do that, because understanding customer needs is the Holy Grail of having a business that works. Obviously, if I don't have a need that I can meet and somebody will pay me for it, that's the only thing that works. So point of need mapping is in this particular case. It's really applicable to building a listening strategy. But it's a hugely important thing to understand for your company as a whole and for your clients. So if you have other clients that you're doing a social media work for, you should be doing this for yourself. So what kinds of social media problems that they're having and what are their needs cause we tend to assume an awful lot about pretending that we are our customers and I am not my customer, and I get it wrong. All the time. If I'm gonna guess nobody will pay for that. And then I'm like, I have six people going. Why don't you have a thing? And I'm thinking that they would never buy it. Um, if you have existing customers, another way to do this is to ask them. Now, this is a crazy idea, and we tend to forget how simple. You know, simple things could be really effective. But get online, get into your block community, get onto your Facebook page and say What kinds of needs you have not just a Zaha, a pet parent, but if you're an animal person, you might also be an outdoorsy person. And you also might have kids. And you also might, you know, have a day job. So what other kinds of needs do you have in your life that my business maybe can't fulfill directly, but that I need to be aware of so that I'm creating products and services for your lifestyle? Not just for this purpose? Does that make sense? So the point of need mapping stuff becomes really it can be really simple or really sophisticated, and there's actually companies that you pay millions of dollars to get consultants to come in and do this for big companies to do market research and customer profiling and things like that, and we're taking that boiling it down. Teoh one really specific exercise, but it's a very valuable one. Yes, ma'am. Programs or anything. Photo diva LV says. What programs are good for a point of need. Mapping a pen and paper. There you go. Yeah, let's not make it complicated. Know that really aren't there may very well be if there are. I'm not aware of them this. We're big fans of white boards and post it pads and markers and pens and paper and sticky notes. And we actually do a lot of low tech tools in our workshops because something sometimes there's nothing better than just taking a pen to paper and writing stuff down. So we do that a lot, So the next one is the is. The bugger for a lot of people and companies is measurement now. You must have measurable objectives, and I cannot stress that enough whether you're a little tiny blawg and the only thing you really care about is getting advertising placed on it. So you could make an extra couple 100 bucks a month. That's a measurable objective. If you're a huge multinational company, your measurable bull objectives are obviously a much different scale. But every business and I would argue, almost every creative endeavor that has a purpose needs to have measurable objectives. So I'm gonna help you figure out how to build them, because what I find is a lot of people don't understand how to uncover a measurable objective. And it's one of these kind of business 101 things. But it's super important, because when we talk about measuring social media, this is how you get to social media that can actually be measured. So first, let's talk about the hierarchy of goals and objectives and all those things. We throw these terms around a lot, visit goals, objectives, strategies, tactics. And they all are distinct. Now some people might argue that it's just a bunch of semantics, and who cares? Goal vision, What's the difference? But it actually matters because the terminology doesn't really make a difference. You could call these things whatever you really want them to. But what's important to understand is how they all fit together and this again is noticed that this is applicability. Social media. But this is something you can take back and do not just for social media, but for almost anything you dio. The first thing is the goal. A goal, as a result, that we want and will actually invest time and energy in achieving. So it's not really a goal. If I'm not gonna go after, it has more kind of like an interesting thing over there. But goals in our business need to be actually things that we're willing to give time, money and effort toward achieving. Now the rub is that goals aren't always super measurable. They could be things like, I want to be a successful blogger. What a successful me and I don't know, You know, I want to be a published author. There's a lot of roads that can get you to be a published author, and there's a lot of ways to define published, self published published through ah publisher. There's lots of ways, and it could also just be I want to be famous, you know, being I guess it's a goal if that's your thing, but it doesn't it's not necessarily immeasurable it's a little bit more aspirational, so vision is huge. Big picture goals are the things that are that still feel within your reach, but they may not. There be a little squishy Sometimes you know, that kind of thing. Objectives are the next step down. Objectives are the specific targets that we're trying to reach. So if using my published author example, my goal is to become a published author, my objective is to get published by a certain label and sell X number of books. That is an objective because it's something that can actually be measured against. So I will know whether or not I hit that target. So if I set a really good concrete objective, I will know whether I hit it or not. You guys, I know Kim went through the smart goals, didn't she? Um, the whole smart goals methodology. The most important part of all of that is that you can derive an objective that lets you know whether or not you've achieved it. That means that usually has to have a time frame. It has to have a specific number or a measure to track against. I want to increase sales by 25% in the next six months. That is a measurable objective, meaning in six months I will know whether I made it 25% or not. So when you're planning social media stuff, it should be things like I would like to grow my Facebook engagement by 20% and this is the key. Tie it to something else in your business to integrate it. So I'd like to grow my Facebook engagement by 25% so that my email list will also grow by 30% those air measurable things that you can track. And that's how you know whether or not you're actually getting anywhere near the right direction. The next piece of strategic planning is the strategy, which is the action plan that you're gonna put in place to achieve those objectives. So it's kind of the map. So if my objective again is to become a published author and to publish through a certain publisher and sell a certain number of books, my first point of action is that I'm going Teoh, write a proposal. I'm going to come up with a book concept. I'm going Teoh do all those things and those will become part of your strategy. And of course, the component parts of that, then, are the tactics, those of the nuts and bolts pieces. So if I'm going Teoh, if part of my strategy is to develop a really killer proposal, my tactics are going to be. I'm going to write the proposal. I'm gonna have the proposal edited. I'm going to do some research for the proposal. Those air, the tactics that feed the strategy to achieve the objectives that drive toward the goal, got all that. I see. Some exploding brains are good. Any questions about any of that? I know it's a lot to take in, but it actually this is really fundamental. No matter what you're doing. This is really fundamental stuff that's really critical, and people swing and miss it. This and social media all the time because they say all we want to do is get more Facebook fans, and I'm like, Great Why? And they can't tell me. So doing this process going through this measurement stuff is all about tracking impact and behavior, not just activity. So I posted 12 times on my block this month. That's either awesome or it's terrible, depending on what happened as a result of that. So if nothing happened, my 12 posts aren't so awesome now. On the other hand, if I posted 12 times and I got 15 new clients from that, I'd say that's pretty awesome. So understanding that what we're trying to achieve through social is for people to take specific action or to exhibit a certain behavior. We want them to join and participate a community in a community. We want them to download and share our content. We want them. Teoh, sign up for our newsletter. Whatever it is, we're trying to drive them toe a next step, which is why I get like gray hair from people saying My goal is to get more Twitter followers like That's not a goal. That's an activity. What you're tracking is people clicking a button and you know how hard it is to follow somebody on Twitter. Click and I don't know about you, but I'm not considering that a blood oath with somebody in my world and so a Twitter follower is great, but it's certainly not a huge, massive metric I need to be carrying about. If I'm going to cultivate a great Twitter community. What am I hoping that community can help me achieve? Is that community driven toward building my audience? Am I trying to get those Twitter people to then come to my blawg and be part of that community? Those air actionable progress steps, but just collecting people like marbles? Look, I have all these pretty marbles. Um, it always kills because people freak out about somebody unfollowed me on Twitter, okay? It's gonna be all right. Do you need a hug? You know, because Twitter followers and Facebook fans and YouTube people and those are meaningless metrics in and of themselves because they don't tell you anything of value in and of themselves. They tell you nothing about the impact those people are gonna have on your business. So if you're going to measure something, make it measurable in quantifiable terms. Now, before I scare you too terribly much. What I'll also tell you is people will always say what should I track and how should I measure? And how many of these things doing need to be paying attention to pic three three metrics? If your goal is to increase awareness, pick three metrics that will show you that your audience base is increasing. If your goal is to drive sales, pick three metrics that will show you that you're driving sales Now. The other thing, I will tell you. If you're going to build a goal for a social media strategy, you can build awareness. You can drive sales where you can drive loyalty, but you can't do more. So the hardest thing that a lot of businesses get into is the whole. They're trying to get social media to do everything for them. They want to raise audience awareness. They want to engage people, and they want to take care of their current customers, which is almost impossible to do. Unless you have an armada of people doing a social media for you and you have a whole team on the awareness and some of the big companies is exactly what they have. They have whole departments dedicated toward customer acquisition and customer loyalty and sales, and you'll don't have that, so you need to pick what you're hoping social media can do for you. In a lot of cases, social media is really good at driving awareness, and it's really good. It engendering loyalty. I'm not so bullish on it for sales, like it works ish, but it's kind of the roundabout way, like all roads eventually lead to sales. But this is more of a cultivation in a nurturing thing, so picking goals that match that is really important because social cannot be all things to you. If you try to do it that way, it will be much too diluted. And you'll have a real trouble finding actionable kind of results because you'll feel totally lost in the wilderness so big he pick what you want it to dio. I promised I would tell you a story about a company that did just this, and we interviewed these guys for our book because they were this tiny little company out of Canada. Little tiny town called Monckton in New Brunswick does all the way on the Eastern's Far Eastern Seaboard in Atlantic Time Zone, which I didn't even know existed until I worked for Radian. Six. They're out and New Brunswick to but Dan Martell. They had this home development business and back several years ago, 2006 ish. The housing market was not doing so well, it had just taken a big nosedive, and suddenly they were having a tough time. How sales weren't doing what they were supposed to dio. And they started looking at their business trying to figure out what they could do next and social became something that was viable for them. Because I say, Well, people who are buying homes do a lot of research online and that would be good for us. But they also realize that one hindrance to that was that a huge percentage of their sales were still coming through real estate agents. So they said, You know what? We can increase our bottom line if we actually go through and remove the middleman and sell direct to these customers. So we're not paying out real estate commissions. So what do we need to dio to get our customers to actually come and buy homes from us? So they built a social strategy and did all kinds of things, like YouTube videos on the moving process. You know how to pack what it's like to move into a new neighborhood and what you might need to know they would block about things like selecting schools and how to buy a lot if you're gonna build a house. So they built all this content around being helpful and useful in the home buying process. So it wasn't about. Here's the cabinetry we have. It was about. Here's what it's like to build a house and move, and we're gonna try to be your resource for that. Well, they succeeded wildly, but what was most important is that they knew a couple of things they needed to reduce the number of sales that they made through real estate agents and increase the number of sales they made direct to consumer. And they did that so they knew it worked. They also knew that they needed to reduce the time to close because buying a house is not a short process. Usually it's also a maddening process if you've ever been through it. But it's also usually home. Sales were like months, you know, when you're dealing with real estate Asians and the whole process is kind of long and convoluted, and their goal was to really shorten that time so they could increase the volume of sales. So what? They were the one metric they picked to track was time to close, so they knew that their social media efforts were working. When they started seeing that shrink and shrink and shrink from 90 days to their record, which is several minutes like 30 minutes, they closed a sale online because people are coming to them saying We saw your YouTube videos and all this kind of stuff, and I know that I want a Martell home. So what do I do to sign like, you know, that that's the power of doing really amazing marketing, So but they only tracked two or three different metrics. But it's pretty compelling evidence right to say that this is working. So they didn't have big spreadsheets in Matrix software and all this kind of craziness They had two or three metrics that they knew were important, tracked them and watched it work.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

CreativeLive 7 Steps Handout.pdf
Social Media Pyramid Paragraphs.jpg
Social Media Pyramid.jpg
All Star LinkedIn Profile In 7 Easy Steps.pdf
Facebook Content Tracking.pdf
Graphic Content Ideas.pdf
Image Cheat Sheet.pdf
Pinterest Book For Bizzy Babes.pdf
Post Analysis Worksheet.pdf
Social Media Goals Worksheet1.pdf
Twitter Dictionary.pdf
Twitter Speak.pdf
Amber PDF Keynote.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Starts With Me
 

Well, looks like i'm 2 years late but this is a great and helpful course. ps. there are a few spelling mistakes on the slides that the presenters are showing. Seems funny!

Victor Osaka
 

How very timely for me. Kim Garst is totally awesome. The PDFs are soooo good. Yeah CreativeLive!!!!

Angela Hardy
 

So, I don't want to give this a thumbs up, but I don't want to give a thumbs down. It has a lot of good content for people that are just dipping their foot in the pool of social media for marketing and branding, BUT it is 4 years old, and I had to go online and find the relevant numbers and content to some of the things stated her. Also, I felt as though some of the content was redundant and even contradictory. I would say that the most value in this course are the parts on Thought Leadership and all of the pdfs to use. All of the presenters were great, but I think that this course needs to be refilmed.

Student Work

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