I recently presented to senior management of an educational conference of colleges on using social media as Satellite Marketing™. I also shared the strategic thinking behind the approach.
If you’re not familiar with the term its one that I use to help describe a shift in the way we distribute content. In the past we’ve added content to a site and pulled traffic via promoting the URL in print ads, billboards, email, print ads, etc. The hope was that they would come to the content. Using marketing “satellites” that “orbit” around our site we take the content to the prospects / audience. Using the form fields available we parcel the headlines, tag lines, links, calls to action, and in particular, the branding, and we entice them at the point of contact. The thought is that these “taste tests” of content will drive traffic to the primary site, or at least engage at the satellite to start the conversation that is sales.
commdiagram-mojo1This download and corresponding PPT is a 10,000 ft view of the social media scene and a (40:00) in-depth discussion about how and why I’ve used these free sites / services to augment marketing strategies for my clients in varying markets. I also discuss the role and importance of branding consistently throughout the properties.
You can download an MP3 (53.5MB) “USing Social Media for Satellite Marketing™” using this link;
*
The corresponding PPT presentation is available from my SlideShare account for download if you’d like visuals to follow along;
* http://www.slideshare.net/ideahaus
I’ve also continued to see research on the growth of social networks during the recession and their projected role in not only sustaining business but in customer growth in b-to-b and b-to-c relationships;
* http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/socnets-grow-93-since-2006-poised-to-play-role-in-recession-7521/#comment-56930
I thought you may find this interesting to help shape your efforts, and I’d be interested in your feedback on mine. – kp
———————————————————————————————
For those of you who still read here is the transcript from my presentation:
Marylu Zuk, Director of Admissions, Pittsburgh Technical Institute: “When people were brainstorming and coming up with different things, in this school somebody said “Send me something on my MySpace account”. I was thinking how do they do that? How do I send them something? Do they collect that on there? I never got any answers before I left that day, but as I reviewed the agenda on Saturday in preparation for today, I thought, well we are covering Social Media, there was an offer out there to talk about it.
I know people in this room, Linda and Greg on my team, are exponentially light-years ahead of me when it comes to me on Social Media. I am assuming there are one or two people in this room that are behind me, so I figured Kevin could share some information and is currently doing a project with the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and there might be something we can all take away from this today.”
“Hi, Kevin Popovic. I am the Communications Director and President of Ideahaus. I have been fortunate enough to have worked with PTI for the past 8-10 years. So when Marylu asked me to come out I thought it is always nice to be able to come out and talk about things that I am trying to drag them into… sometimes kicking and screaming.”
“What I have been sharing with Marylu and Greg through emails is my project with the Academy. What I have tried to help the Academy with is to stay contemporary and get a different type of advantage over their competition. Like many of your sites that I reviewed before coming in here today, everyone is trying to figure out how to use Social Media, and what do you use it for.”
“I have quite a few ideas and we use it for our clients, we have been using social media for probably 2 -3 years in varying amounts and in different ways depending on who the client is. You can’t just send any client in to use Twitter and jump in on MySpace, making friends and all that. You can, but many times you end up with poor results.”
“I am going to give you a 10,000 quick view of the different opportunities that I see in Social Media for use as Satellite Marketing™. I will go in and explain what we think satellite marketing is and how it works.”
“First of all I have my big disclaimer, I don’t do conversions. My first 10 years in the business I played John the Baptist, trying to convert people in believing in communications. I am done converting, I put my time in. You either believe in communications and you combine it with Social Media. You don’t have to understand it, but you have to believe it is going to work, or you don’t. I am looking for believers that are prepared to invest.”
“Satellite Marketing™; I found this slide last night at 2 o’clock in the morning last night, because I was too tired to draw one. In your instance your .edu, your domain is your center of the universe, right? Social Media are the satellites that are spinning around very quickly, and there are new ones coming and some burn off. What those satellites do is they work around all your activities about your content, your messages and your people, your activities and your branding. What they allow you to do is, they increase your chance that one of your prospects are going to sample something from your marketing arsenal. What you have to realize about Social Marketing is that they have to opt into participating. It is different from how we used to buy a list with their phone number and we used to send them stuff, cause we are important to them, and they just don’t know they need us yet. Well they don’t care. What is the percentage of return on Direct Mail? 3-5%?
What is the hit ratio of the lists that we were buying? Not much better.
On all these instances they have to opt into participating.”
“Communications has changed. Content rules. If you have content, you are gold. Content meaning, things that are important to them. Not just your brochure, not just your ads, just not just any of the marketing stuff that tells them why they should come to you. Content that brings value to them. It can be pictures, it can be games, and it could be forms they can download that help them do things. That’s what people are looking for.”
“The basis for the relationship has changed. With Social Media you can’t just pummel me to become your client… I can block you, and you can never ever get to me again. That is quite easy to do. Technology is the medium; it is not just being on the Internet, not just email, not just an iPhone; all of that stuff is new media. If you can not connect, if you can not communicate over all of those devices, not just “I have a great website that’s great”. What about the other things? What about the 10 you don’t have? I think that is something important to start embracing and you can not get set on one subject, on one technology, on one application, on one website. You have to take it as a whole package. And the point of all this is that the words are sharing, joining, groups, choosing – people want to participate, they don’t want to be spoken to. My mother still tries to speak to me…it still does not work. But when it joins into things it might work, do things together, then the relationship changes. When you join a group, when you choose to go somewhere and do something with her, the whole mental attitude changes – “I got to go do this thing”.
“For a bunch of information for why you should be doing this and the marketing trends visit MarketingCharts.com. Those are some of the sites that we look at on a consistent basis as a clearinghouse for information from a number of different resources. If you want to know about specific technology, what’s hot, and who did what percentage these guys are great for stuff along those lines.”
“The old way we did things was they came to us. We had a website and we were going to promote that URL. PTI.edu was on TV, radio, outdoor boards, everything we did when we were “Technically Different”. We were buying lists, people were searching for us because they were coming to us, and people were putting tons of money in search engine optimization. Anyone thinking they put to much money in SEO and did not get their moneys worth out of it?”
“The new way is all these little icons on the right. The new way is we go to them; we go to where they are. We’re using RSS feeds. RSS is “Really Simple Subscriptions”. The little Orange Square thing with little white radio buttons is the universals symbol for RSS icon. People read that feed and ours is a feed of Google Reeder, they are called Blog Readers and a number of different things. People are getting updates and they are notified when things change. The days of pummeling people with emails are very passé. We are using Facebook and Twitter; we are using YouTube, LinkedIn, 12 seconds.tv. Has anyone heard of 12 seconds TV?
From there, there is a list of things that I have not even checked out yet. There are so many different opportunities. Facebook is the new MySpace, Twitter is somewhere between websites and texting. YouTube, everyone knows YouTube. LinkedIn is the default clearinghouse for professionals. 12Seconds is the video version of Twitter. 12 Seconds allows you to use your web cams to take 12 seconds of video and upload it and distributing it. And the best thing of all those things is and what they all have in common…they are all free. They don’t cost you anything and that’s where everyone is.”
Question: “What about some of the wall communities that you hear about reaching out using some of those video games that we hear about. Worlds of Warcraft?”
“There are many sub-communities and you get personality types in that, but you get sub-communities.”
“We have been focusing more on the larger ones, the most popular on the list. Even on Twitter, I found a knock off of Twitter last night. My clients called and said they signed up for this new one, and I asked, why? Answer was, “I don’t know”. It is a knock off and no one is using it. It is one more property that my client has to worry about managing her identity on, and she is not going to use it, and nobody is there. So I made her go un-register.”
“The things I am looking for are the more popular ones, with the most amounts of people on. Because it is very easy to get sucked into this stuff and end up spending so much time, I got 20 different things, and more than likely you do not need 20 different things. Pick the top 6-8 that you are going to use, and where your prospects are, and do them really well.”
Question: “You said Facebook is the new MySpace. What is the shelf life of these top six, six months from now?”
“Twitter is just getting hot and I see a little difference in markets from west coast to east coast. I think west coast is leading Social Media markets a bit more. Probably by about 6 months.”
Audience: “That is good…we are the Northeast so that means we are last.”
“YouTube by default it is so darn big…but there is better services. I like Veoh better than YouTube. It depends on what you are using it for. Veoh has syndication that feeds YouTube anyways so I do not need YouTube.”
“LinkedIn is going to be around for awhile, and I think it is going to be tough to displace it. They are really doing a nice job on it.”
“12 seconds is going to come and go, but 12 seconds feeds Twitter, Twitter feeds LinkedIn and Facebook and I get all my clients to feed WordPress. There are some different benefits, some a little bit more obscure ones like 12 seconds, my one client is a speaker/author and I am trying to get her demos in front of everybody and to use video is a great asset, because it integrates with Twitter and five others, and it’s free and she can do it off her desktop whenever she is feeling funny.”
Question: What is WordPress?
“That is a whole other presentation. WordPress is an open source software that is most noted for bloggers. We started using it about 12 months ago as a content management system. Because it is open source which means anyone can develop it and it’s free, it makes it horrible easy to write all this cool stuff. It cuts your development time in about 25% on the site and it is based on mySQL database. It is rock solid. It is what we are using for the Academy in Chicago. Not only are we doing their site in WordPress, but also we are going to enable all of their students to have websites as part of the value added, an enterprise version of WordPress. WordPress is also free.”
“This is all different from what we have done. Different how? Advertising… we want something from them. Social Marketing… we are giving them something. What are they more apt for? That is something that in Social Media people have to embrace. A lot of people think, “great, I have 20 people following me on Twitter. I am going to start telling them that I have student tours on Saturday”, and they are going to un-follow you as fast as they can. It is the same thing on Facebook, you make a lot of friends and then you start telling them,”Hey, I see you like guns. You should go buy my security class”. How you do it and those subtleties will make or break you in Social Marketing.”
Question: “What is the whole following of businesses? I have a sense of what Twitter is.”
“I just got a notification from Twitter that someone is following me, and it comes to my inbox.”
Twitter is basically 160 characters and you create a profile.
Question: “What do you mean following you? Do they know you?”
“No. Twitter is somewhere between text messaging and website. As is soul predicated on the question, “what are you doing?”
“So, what I did is I posted that I am at PTI presenting about Social Media Marketing. That message went out to 130 people that are following me.”
“How do they start following me? It started with a few clients of mine and some friends that I knew and my friend Rodney Rumford that got on Twitter almost a year ago. I was following what he was doing and some people are using it for business and some people are using it for personal use, and some people are using it for both. I decided to just use it for work. I let people know what I am doing which is the premises, but I always put a little value added, what is the take away of knowing what I am doing. If you follow me I teach you something every time I send what I call tweet out. I have 130 followers. You want to have more followers than following.”
“My strategy is that I want people to know what I am doing, and I want to be able to tell people that they should follow me to learn about what I am doing because they are smarter every time I tell them what I am doing.”
“I get a notification every time someone new is following me, it increases the number of followers and I am able to take this outside of Twitter. Not only does 130 people know what I do, but also my Facebook account is updated, and everybody in my LinkedIn knows that I am on here which is over 600 people. If I take over 140 characters that is targeted now, thus impacted 800 people. What would you have to do to positively impact 800 people?”
Audience: “Our challenge is how do we do the same with prospective students”
“This is a great lead in to my next slide.”
“How do you start conversations with your markets? We are still talking about sales and lead gen, and we are still talking about multiple markets, because your different prospects are going to be in different places. We have more markets than just students who have not come to our schools yet. We have prospects, we have the students that are there, we have alumni, we may have government local officials in the districts that we are at, and we have parents and guidance counselors, employers. All these multiple markets. So you start making some notes, here are the people I want to effect, where are they on the net, and how given who they are and who I am, can I positively impact them?”
“Things are the same but different. We still have content and branding but we still need to talk to them. We have to do it in different ways, right? Anyone have an iPhone yet? Go out and get an iPhone. The phone is not what it used to be, my Treo is outdated, now the iPhone and apps and social media, you can get from your phone. You can update Twitter from your phone, when friends say something about you on Facebook it come to you on your phone. The phone is quite honestly not a phone anymore. I don’t know what to call it anymore.”
“You have to take in consideration porting you content out to these different Social Media sites, your branding, are you going to put a logo up there, a picture, where do you put that snappy new tag line that your ad agency just came up with? In some instances you get 60 characters to talk about yourself, and in some instances you get 360 characters. You have to use your content and apply that and your branding in a continuous fashion, because you don’t know who is going to find you.”
“For the Academy I think we have seven different social media satellites selected that are all inter connected and go back to their main domain, but we are managing how we use each of those, but there is that continuous theme. Also, you have to make sure there is authenticity and transparency. If you come off marketing they will smell it miles away, they will bad mouth you, they will do every bad thing they can do if you come off as a fake, and unauthentic. That is not such a bad thing; I am here, I am in this school and this is what we do and we help students do this. Just be honest about this stuff. There has to be some sort of quid pro quo. Why are people following me that don’t know me? Because they are getting something out of it. You have to look at it very objectively. What do we have to offer?”
Audience: “It is almost like your first day at school and you are trying to fit in with the junior class.”
“Exactly, that is the perfect analogy. I use high school as the closest analogy because it is as unfair, it is still a popularity contest, the cool kids want to hang out with the cool kids, the nerds hide out in a corner and nobody ever talks to them. So we get to re-live that great time we had in high school now in Social Media.”
Audience: “The nerds are now making money off all of it.”
“The American Academy of Art.com is going to be their new domain name. Anyone remember what their old one was? (Silence) Exactly my point. Everyone wants to come up with these cute little acronyms because it would be less to type. Most people type it in once anymore, remember Outlook… when was the last time you had to type any of the email addresses that you knew? The American Academy of Art has a lot of those key words that get reused. There is so much confusion and all people know is that it is the American Academy of Art. So we are switching that over very quickly. We just got the .com. For some reason they did not even have The American Academy of Art.com, so it cost them a lot more had they registered 5 years ago. Someone has bought it and is charging them an arm and a leg for it now.”
“Here is a tip. Buy every domain that has the full spelling of your name.”
“We are using Facebook, LinkedIn, Flicker, Twitter, 12 seconds and Feedburner for the Academy. On Facebook we are taking advantage of being able to put a profile up, everything about us, and pictures, and emails, and contact us here, we will be able to make friends with people. We are going to be able to join groups that are how we are going to participate.”
“In LinkedIn we are going to network with people and share things with people.”
“On Flicker we are going to be able to network with people and share pictures.”
“On Twitter we are going to follow people and have followers.”
“On 12 seconds we are going to be able to tie in RSS feed with their readers and with feed burner we are going to take all of this and put it into Feedburner which is a service that not only rebroadcast all of our updates to what we are doing to these things, but becomes kind of a clearing house for content so when people are looking for things related to what we have, they may not come looking for us, but they may be coming looking for our type of content. So we are going to put it where everyone is looking. Again, all of this is free.”
“Facebook. The Mac guy and the PC guy, which one do you think your students want to hang out with? Everyone is on Facebook, and on face book we get to create a profile, post pictures, make friends, join groups, link to a RSS, link to Twitter and LinkedIn. So even if they are one thing we are able to interconnect all these different technologies and what you end up doing is getting very much of this spider web, instead of just one destination where they are going to find you I am on eight different places and anything I do on one gets shared on all of these five, so it exponentially creates new content and new activity and that is search engines are looking for , that is what RSS feeds are any time anything new comes up, they find it and they report it to everybody in this interconnected network as supposed to I made a change on my .com on this one single web page I hope somebody finds it. Very different strategy.”
“On LinkedIn, profile, pictures, you can create a network you can join groups, you can market your groups. You can now add a company profile. So come Monday when I look up this Technical Institute and I see Marylu and Greg’s profiles fully completed and all of their names underneath the PTI Company profile, you will be able to take a look at them. And I probably even offer up a how to install some of these applications that Marylu’s Twitter feed will go into directly into her profile. And all those things can be pulled down on Blackberry’s and on iPhones. Prospects don’t even have to be in front of their computers anymore. We can get them when they are walking to class.”
I put together some samples that I am going to show you. One of my clients out in La Jolla, she is a speaker/author and a registered nurse – Karyn Buxman is the woman’s name. She is one of the 30 women in the speakers Hall of Fame, and she is just funny, and her niche is nursing. She is a registered nurse and she focuses on using her humor for nurses to deal with all the things nurses has to deal with. We have her at .com, RSS feed coming out of Feedburner. I have her using Twitter, LinkedIn, at Veoh and another direct feed, all those things are interconnected.”
“I am going to show you guys some samples.” (Refer to the PPT for the web addresses for each).
“We use WordPress to create her site. We change her header every month based on the different holidays or seasons. All the pages that we have about Karyn, just like a website would be, and then secondary bar is different categories of content. We have emergency laugh here, which feeds to YouTube, we have different content, we have Flickr photos that Karyn can upload to Flickr and it updated at her site. Karyn is responsible for most of the content. When you sign up here it joins your email list in Feedburner. Every time Karyn posts new content on her website, anyone who is signed up to this email subscription gets an email that says “Hey there is something new at the site”. Instead of hoping they come back to check out the new content we take the content out to them.
“We go to Karen’s LinkedIn profile from here and we have a Twitter feed which comes from Twitter directly into her site.”
“LinkedIn is great for third party credibility. Everyone walks on water on their own website; “We are the best school we have the best product I swear!” On LinkedIn there is more impartiality, what are you saying out there in front of everybody in your space tends to differ when here than on your .com. Here you are able to create networks and people are able to give recommendations which you can use for a number of different things.”
“Karyn is here on Twitter. Here she is on Veoh, which I am a big fan of. I have to rethink this a little bit because Veoh used to syndicate to YouTube and 10 other sites. We have rebranded all this for Karyn and it leads right into Karyn’s demo. We put all of the video on Veoh because now we do not have to worry about storage issues, we do not have to worry about throughput and they gave me the coding where I am now able to share this RSS feed and drop it into a web page. I do not have to worry about taxing my client’s server. I can put as much video up there as I want. Plus I can also take it to Facebook. See how you have all these different icons, and how you can continue to link this stuff. And really what this does there is a lot of deficiencies in the market, so instead of worrying about doing ten things, I do one thing and ten things link into it and get updated. This is nice for clients with smaller budgets.”
Question: “Say you have multiple Facebook pages or groups, can you push content to those multiple profiles?”
“Yes you can.”
Question: Should you have multiple Facebook accounts?
“I have a single one, because there is no reason for me to have multiples.
For the Academy we are going to be changing that. because we are taking the staff and faculty to Facebook. Then we will probably start working on some different groups there. But anyone that is making student contact we are going to have him or her on a profile at Facebook and they are going to start participating. I am going to start coaching them trough all of this. We are going to create one Twitter feed for them, because I can’t see them needing more, and I rather have everyone seeing what is going on with the school and a bunch of prospects when you pick what sales person you want to follow.”
Karyn Buxman on Social Media:
“Six months ago, my knowledge of social networking was next to zero. I’d heard of Facebook and LinkedIn, but had no idea how to leverage them for business. Since working with Kevin, I now have over 500 LinkedIn connections, am active in over a dozen LinkedIn groups—and adding dollars to my bottom line. I’m spreading faster on Facebook than a cold in a crowded daycare center! I’m utilizing the posts and groups to get the word out about my business. And through Twitter, I now am being followed by past and potential clients, colleagues and media. In a time where demands are high and resources are tight, I can’t imagine trying to build a business without the use of social media.”
How can I help you?
“Students are using Facebook in high school and some are using MySpace. Percentage doubles from 12% to 24% once they apply and have been accepted. If they are accepted they are going to these places and they are reaching out to other students. It is an environment that you can not really control should you try to, because that would not help.”
Question: How can it from an enrollment marketing standpoint, how would you approach Facebook if you were to have it here at PTI?
“I would start by figuring out who is going to be your face on Facebook, or your faces on Facebook. I would not just put everybody up., because that would be an awful lot to manage and you always get some people that start putting up personal stuff in with the stuff, the whole reason that they are there is for business.”
“I would also create or find a group of Alumni. And they might be a resource for you. Then I would start to create groups for my Student Organizations on Facebook and empower them to run those groups. You want to be more of a facilitator than a leader. Unless for some reason you have to or you should.”
What did you learn today?
Audience: “I am more overwhelmed than I was when I was ignorant about this.”
Question: “What if someone is already using your organizations name on Facebook? How do you get control of that name again?”
“You can’t.”
This is your homework.
“Protect your social identity from poachers. Go out and grab it even if you are not going to do anything about it. Go out and secure your branding. If someone has grabbed up your .com, you got a better leg to stand on than you used to.”
“I got a client in San Diego, EasiHair, and someone has EassHair.com and Paul did not think he could do anything about it. But EasiHair is a registered company so we are going to go get them now.”
“As far as user accounts, you are out of luck.”
“Go to all Social Media that you heard about today and any other that was mentioned and go grab your accounts. When you fill out your profile, that is kind of the next step, register your name on the social sites. LinkedIn, don’t try to hard, put your logo up there, put a picture up, here is a link to my site, here is our address, start with these basic things, but at least you secure so that you have it, because you can’t get it back and then link everything to everything. Facebook has a number of applications that you can get a blog to feed into, you can Twitter into it, or flicker into it. All those different types of things. And then when you get that set up it’s simple, participate, tell the truth and be nice. You will be surprised how many people actually want to learn about things, but they have to choose to do that, you can’t force that on people. That is how you get started.” – kp
About kp
