NVBC seminar 6. Social Networking for Startups
Tonight, the New Ventures BC seminar series presents Social Networking for Startups with Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo of Capulet Communications.
Darren Barefoot, Julie Szabo
Capulet Communications, which has been in business for seven years, works with many local and national software startups as well as corporate clients, and started the evening by asking several questions of the audience:
- do you have a dedicated marketer on staff?
- do you use a PR agency or consultant?
- do you currently use social media for marketing?
- do you use traditional media for marketing?
Things You’ll Need to Get Started
Don’t simply jump into the available tools and use whatever your competition uses. There are myriad tools, all of which represent different channels in social media, and not every tool is appropriate for every organization.
You need:
Buy-in: Internet usage is surpassing TV viewing. Offline advertising is expensive and hard to measure, CMOs will heavily invest in social media in 2010, and your competition is already investing in social media. All these statistics are reasons you (or more accurately, your management) should buy in to the concept of using social media for marketing.
A budget: As time goes on, marketing budgets are decreasing for direct mail, trade shows, and other “old” marketing techniques, and spending is increasing for online marketing.
Resources: Social media SHOULD take up to 25 per cent of your marketing efforts, resources and budgets. While many if not all of the tools are free, the time you spend does have a cost. Who do you assign responsibility to for social media marketing? Simply throwing a salesperson at the problem won’t necessarily get the desired results.
Inspiration: Throughout their talk Barefoot and Szabo highlighted various organizations using social media effectively, several of which appear below.
Six Objectives for Startups using Social Media
1) Increase Audience/Spread the Word
Blogging is the obvious example and almost always a worthwhile endeavor for a startup. Ideally you should blog at least twice a week. When you blog, you’re blogging less for the immediate audience, and more for the “long tail” of potential clients. Every time you add a blog post, that adds to the archive of the site and creates a page, giving a much bigger bucket for search engine users to find relevant content you want them to see.
Blogs also have to deliver value. If you went to a cocktail party and talked about yourself for a half hour, you wouldn’t add value, but if you talk about things people will be interested in and that will help them, and if you curate good content, you can also deliver your message. Use 80 percent of your time to curate, and then you can use the other 20 percent to deliver your message
2) Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise
Blogs are a great way to show you’re an expert in certain subjects. Someone with a blog is much more “discoverable” by journalists and is more likely to be cited as an expert, thus increasing exposure.
LinkedIn is another good way to establish your expertise, by joining and contributing to relevant groups. Twitter also works as an opportunity to establish your credentials, though with only 140 characters it can be a more challenging marketing platform.
E-books are another good platform to demonstrate expertise, and in the case of Barefoot and Szabo their e-book led to a physical book about social marketing called “Friends With Benefits”.
3) Build Community around your Audience
Barefoot and Szabo were involved in “tcktcktck”, a web campaign to get a comprehensive agreement on emissions in Copenhagen. Though no agreement was made at the Copenhagen conference, in terms of marketing the campaign was a success. “tcktcktck” is a unique word, which made it easy to find via search engines. A “small pieces loosely joined” approach where “tcktcktck” was spread across many different social media platforms extended the reach of the campaign.
Szabo also stressed that you never really owned your brand, but the internet put that fact into sharp relief. But, Barefoot stressed, you can define the brand ahead of time, before the web gets a hold of it, then “open source” the brand and allowing end users to do what they like with it, creating more community buy-in and the brand is actually extended. For example, in the Philippines the logo was changed to “tcktocktcktock”, which made more sense within that community.
4) Managing Reputation
Managing reputation online requires a delicate touch. Szabo showed a poor review for a hotel on Tripadvisor, where a guest complained about the staff, the decor and a food allergy problem. The hotel’s manager went onto Tripadvisor and made a point of singling out the guest for ridicule. Clearly this is a perfect “what not to do” example of reputation management. Always try to solve the problem and defuse the complaint, not start a flame war. Which leads to…
5) Increase Customer Satisfaction
Starbucks created mystarbucksidea.com to find out what their customers like and how Starbucks can help with those requests. It’s a simple way to poll opinions and gather new and useful ideas that practically any organization can implement. Barefoot and Szabo highlighted Idea Scale as a good online tool for user polling.
6)Generate Leads
Dell uses Twitter as a platform for lead generation. By announcing “clearance sales” they are able to clear inventory because people who are interested int he products are already following them. Many people are also immersed in Facebook, so try to replicate that experience in your contact forms and other points of possible sale.
Tactics for Quality Traffic:
There are many tactics for creating traffic, but what you want is high quality traffic. If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you won’t distinguish yourself. The main things you want to do are:
Engage in social media channels
It’s important to especially engage with niche channels. You can go to Digg or other big sites, and you’ll get plenty of eyeballs, but they aren’t pre filtered or targeted. You want to target the specific community for your product. For Example, Capulet markets for many software startups, so they sometimes market on DZone and post to Hacker News, social sites targeting software developers. The key is to figure out where your “tribe” is, and focus on those core customers first.
Online outreach to influencers:
Target the most influential niche bloggers, just as you would a community journalist for a local event. Outreach online also means you aren’t stuck with simply contacting local media. You can contact blogs with smaller but influential numbers.
Influencer outreach generates traffic, and there are also fewer opportunities to spread the word in the mainstream media. The web audience is growing, and in any case your competition is surely using online outreach. Most importantly the web never forgets, which provided you do a good job of outreach means increased rewards over time.
Gimmicks:
In order to promote Dreambank.org, a crowdsourced social cause site, Capulet sent out tiaras to specific individuals to raise awareness. Using a tactile real world object was a good way for an otherwise obscure site to get noticed.
Rules for a good pitch include keeping it personal and conversational. You should lead with a link, and include an incentive, such as early beta access or a test-drive of a product. You should always ask yourself “is it genuine news?” and never, ever treat bloggers as second-class citizens.
Building Gimmicks:
The mantra to live by is “safe is risky, and risky is safe.” If you’re doing the same thing as everyone else, you won;t get noticed. Barefoot highlighted viral or “meme” culture as a way to spread your message, but viral = outreach. “If you build it, they will come” isn’t true. You need to do outreach to get people to come to your site. “Will it Blend” is a perfect example, where a blender company was able to drive sales of a blender by throwing objects into a blender and destroying them. An example of an online/offline viral marketing strategy was a site called “Tubetastic” which was a fake website to promote Thoughtfarmer, an intranet site. Capulet even snail mailed satirical org charts to top tech influencers starring those same influencers in order to generate buzz.
You can riff on existing web memes, trade on trends in your industry, and make sure to “find the funny,” aiming at the in crowd that will get the joke. Try to make it useful, and go to extremes. Try to find the most extreme example of something that demonstrates the versatility of your product (again, look at Will it Blend.), which also demonstrates the extraordinary skill of your product. You can also use the old adages of “sex sells” (such as “Obama Girl”) and adding a patina of mystery to a campaign.