Don’t be one of the 64.5% of marketers who say, according to a survey from R2integrated, that their companies have not increased revenue or profited from using social media. They’re doing it wrong.
MarketingProfs said 60.1% “marketing and business professionals cite lead generation as their primary source for using social media”, followed distantly by conversation monitoring at 26.9% and keeping up with the Jones at 5.1%
Generating and monitoring conversations about your business/products/brand are both good ways to be using social media, but that’s small potatoes compared to the potential. R2integrated’s survey sample was a mere 262 professionals, but I’d be willing to guess most businesses out there aren’t thinking big picture when it comes to social media. So it’s a good thing you’re here; you’re already ahead of the game.
Today, Matt from the team at 37signals posted a quote from Merlin Mann on the company blog that I think illustrates what’s going on here:
“I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people…if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.”
Are you producing (and consuming?!) potato chips?
Do you spend hours of your day refreshing your Google Analytics results? Are you feeling crispy from the unfocused effort you’ve been putting into your business’s social media marketing plan without many tangible results? Instead of trolling networking sites, spamming members, and scraping the bottom of the barrel for ways to make social media pay -
- develop meaningful content and
- cultivate a community that will promote it for you;
- think about ways to use social media within your business to increase efficiency, buy-in, or morale;
And if you need it, we can help…..
As the Dialogue team ramps up for SXSW (the Super Bowl of Social Media Conferences) we’re still interviewing some great marketers out there. Mike Volpe is our featured Social Marketer today. If you haven’t already, take 30 minutes on a Friday afternoon to watch Mike and Karen Rubin talk Inbound Marketing on their weekly television show/podcast/live-streaming event, Hubspot TV
About Mike
I’m Mike Volpe, and I love Marketing! I work as VP Inbound Marketing at HubSpot, where I get to lead a team of marketers as well as create a lot of content on our blog, for our TV show, and by speaking a lot too.
1. What one trait or habit got you to where you are today?
Passion! You need to find a job that allows you to leverage your passion. I mean it’s late at night right now, but I’m having fun writing about marketing because I love it. Focusing on your passion makes everything else a lot easier.
2. Your work day just started, what’s the FIRST thing you do and why?
Read. I read my email. I read blogs and news in my RSS reader. I read Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. I read my reports in HubSpot analytics. You need to know what is going on before you can do something productive.
3. What makes you efficient with your day?
Seclusion time. I need at least 1 hour a day where I have zero interruptions and I just crank through all my inboxes and tasks. If not, it starts to back up and the problem gets worse. I tend to really focus in on things, and if I get distracted, I have a lot of trouble refocusing, so I need to comepletely uninterrupted time to be super productive. I actually book this time in my calendar, and if I am in the office, I will go hide someplace so no one can bother me.
4. Your Favorite Business book of all time?
New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. He recently rewrote a lot of it to update it for a new addition. The month that book came out, I sent him and email with the subject line “Our company (HubSpot) was based on your book”. While HubSpot was founded before the book came out, it was a true statement. We had lunch the next week and David and I are friends now, and he’s been a great advisor. I should also mention that “Inbound Marketing” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (the foreword is by David Meerman Scott) is another take ont he same subject, with probably more “how to” examples.
5. 3 things on your desk right now/3 things you can’t live without
iPhone – Not because I am in love with Apple (I don’t like them much) but because it makes me a lot more productive, I’ll replace it the second something better is available (please Google… help!)
Google Apps - I used Outlook for years, but once I converted and got used to Gmail/Gcal, I am faster and more efficient
DropBox – Having all my important files available anywhere, and collaborating with my team more easily is great
With the combination of these 3 things, I have stopped carrying a laptop and a bag except when I travel on planes. I just walk out of the office. I have a laptop that mostly stays in the office, a desktop in my house, and also a netbook for around the house and sometimes travel.
6. Habit you want to kick in 2010
Checking Twitter too much! It is usually pretty distracting, and can be addictive. And to be honest, most of the super important stuff there ends up getting to me through other channels. But, I do need to make time for it, just in a few 10 minutes chunks during the day (TweetDeck on the iPhone helps a lot with this).
7. Habit you want to form for 2010
Inbox Zero. I have been getting better… around 100 messages in my inbox on average the past few months, rather than 300-ish – but I want to really try to keep it under 10-20, and maybe even hit zero. We’ll see… I mean, I just got rid of this message!
Some data hit the interwebs last week breaking down recent trends in corporate social media use. With the amount of time we spend working with and talking about social media, it’s easy to forget not everyone thinks these tehcniques are valuable and is willing to integrate them into a larger corporate strategy. The good news is, that according to Burson-Marsteller, most Fortune Global 100 companies are using social media platforms.
It reported Twitter as the most popular, with 65% of the largest 100 international companies having active accounts, compared with 54% on Facebook, 50% on YouTube, and just 33% with corporate blogs. That pattern was reversed in Asia. More businesses there were likely to rely on corporate blogs than Facebook pages or Twitter. The study also showed that only 20% of these companies use a combination of these platforms together.
So, progress has been made: businesses have tried these tools and sticking with them long term. The remaining challenge, then, is for companies to find a comprehensive and definitive way of defining and measuring success. That’s where Paul Gillin comes in.
Since December, Paul Gillin has been conducting his own study on multi-channel social media strategies. His quick findings are that:
- The metrics companies are using are all over the map
- Few organizations are taking a disciplined approach to measuring ROI
- There is a consensus emerging on what’s important and that companies are starting to focus on the metrics
What the Burson-Marsteller study doesn’t show(as an article on ReadWriteWeb pointed out) is if social media marketing techniques are gaining “significant corporate acceptance”. There are people at these companies using these platforms, but we’re just not sure how integrated their tactics are with the company’s overall strategy.
What interests me is the gap between the industry interest in Twitter and the low number of young users, teens and college students. According to the New York Times, and my own experience with teenagers, they prefer texting to tweeting. Will they see the light when they get older, or will we have forgotten about Twitter 10 years from now? That’s something for another day….
