I often also see companies try and execute social media marketing without a proper plan or understanding of the components to a social media strategy. For example, if I meet with a digital communications person and they draw a blank  when I use the word Persona or talk about re-purposing content …it is apparent that they may need some help in refining their own process.

Those scenarios are not uncommon, and they often lead a company to the point of understanding that they need help from and outside person. That is part of the reason my phone rings. (yes, in this day and age I would way rather have a potential client call me, than tweet or email)

It the latest episode of the UnCut Marketing Podcast, Ernest (@ebarbaric) and I (@kevinhayesca) talk about social media consultants and their role. In addition, we share some tips on Twitter and competative analysis, and touch on Deloitte’s TMT Predictions for 2012 and Ernest’s new book that should be out in a short time called: Engagement Formula: 5 triggers of social media engagement.

Check out our podcast below:

Check it out and don’t forget to add us on iTunes HERE.

Did you like this Article? Check out a previous podcast: Get in the game, get a corporate blog!

I am often confronted with a statement that goes along the lines of “Sentiment? Really? Can you measure that? Does it really affect your company?”

And the answer is, YES!!!!

It REALLY affects:

• customer acquisition…you know…getting new people to pay money for your product.
• employee retention
• recruiting
• stock price
• so much more

Let’s look at an example:

Anyone heard of the Costa Concordia? You know…the cruise ship that is currently (at time of this posting) half under water because the captain of the ship crashed it into rocks. Apparently the captain was show boating, though I believe that is allegedly. However, in the news world and perception world, most people buy allegedly without digging into the facts.

Let’s look at what that means for the owner of the cruise ships, Costa Cruises.

Using a free monitoring tool like socialmention.com, we can clearly see that Costa Cruises is not doing very well in the Sentiment department. If you are unfamiliar with sentiment, it is the ratio of positive conversations happening online verses the amount of negative conversation happening online.

As you can see, Costa Cruises is not doing very well as they have one negative conversation for every one positive conversations.

<– Costa Cruises

But if we look at a competitor of the troubling cruise ship, Silversea Cruise, we see that they are doing quite well in the sentiment department. For every 5 positive conversations online about their brand, there is only 1 piece of negative conversations.

The information presented here clearly indicates that Silversea Cruises is in a position to sell more cruises when a potential customer is presented with online information about Silversea and Costa.

You may be saying “It’s only natural that Costa is having a ton of bad press given the current circumstance. It will eventually bounce back”. And that is a true statement. In 12 – 24 months from now, everyone will have completely forgotten about Costa Cruises and the questionable captain.

However….

How much money is Costa going to loose while it’s reputation recovers itself?

How much revenue will a cruise liner not loose if it recovers it’s reputation in 12 weeks, instead of 24 weeks? A lot.

Minimizing revenue loss, employee loss, and recruiting loss is a realistic objective.

According to this review of keywords being searched in the past 30 days, using Google’s keyword tool, a lot of people are searching for cruises.

(Click to Enlarge)

And lets take a look at how many people are searching for Costa Cruise Lines

Click to Enlarge

You will notice, searches that include the brand Costa Cruises, has searched over 40,000 times in the last 30 days.

And not to mention, the following articles are the type that come up when you search Costa Cruises

Click to Enlarge

The reality is ALL companies, regardless of how well meaning they are, have employees who do stupid things that affect the whole company’s reputation, and ultimately the cash coming in, the employee retention, the future growth, and the list goes one.

So here are a few, of many, easy steps for Costa Cruise to recover quicker from it’s reputation problem.

1. Update the new section - The news and “Official Statement” section on the website is boring, unattractive, and not ready for public use. The news statements is on one page, the videos are only on YouTube. This needs to be organized in a much better fashion so media can get the story that Costa wants to tell, and share it.  Potentially interested consumers need to get the story in a manner that is interesting to them. No researching consumer is going to read your long boring press statement to give you a chance, they’ll just move to your competitor.

2. Create a strategic 3 month, 6 month, 12 month Editorial plan – This will include an content creation plan that will build on things like: Current loyal customers great experience, the safety checks that all crew go through, the evaluation process to make sure the ship is safe, any records or awards the cruise liner has received, the wonderful experience that you will have on the ship. All content is created to restore faith and showcase safety, and to help the audience understand that this was a one off experience…without actually saying that.

3. Create new digital real estate – Costa needs to start diluting the bad press with good content. This will come in form of a SEO and SEM strategy. News will always rank high in Google, however, there are a ton of cruise related search terms that are not pulling news results. A strategic combination of populating blogs, social media sites (flickr, youtube, to name a few), and even Costa’s own website, can help to dilute the negative conversation and restore brand equity.

4. Offline integration – Mixing in the offline component is a must. I would be focusing on getting the attention of main stream journalists. After all, journalist want a good story, with a good angle, served up in a manner that is easiest for them. Can you blame them? No! So give them what they want.

There is more to a reputation recovery or online crisis communications plan for Costa, but the point here is that every day that a company does not recover from it’s negative relationship to the web, is another day of lost employees (current and future), lost revenue, and lost <insert important items to your company>.

-

Did you like this article?

Check out We are still learning about social media…kinda.

I have been accepted as one of the 4 finalists to pitch my idea to Awesome Calgary for micro financing of $1000.00!

Want to know what my idea is?

Come to the pitch night on Thursday January 26th!

Here are the details:

Where: UBU Lounge (Grand Theatre – 608 1 Street Southwest)

Time: Pitches begin at 6:00pm on the 2nd floor (open area above the bar)

Do you know what Awesome Calgary is?

History of Awesome Foundation

Created in the long hot summer days of 2009 in Boston, the Foundation distributes a series of monthly $1,000 grants to projects and their creators. The money is given upfront in cash, check, or gold doubloons by groups of ten or so self-organizing “micro-trustees,” who form autonomous chapters around geographic areas or topics of interest.

The Foundation provides these grants with no strings attached and claims no ownership over the projects it supports. It is, in the words of one of our trustees, a micro-genius grant for flashes of micro-brilliance.

Since its humble beginnings, many Awesome Foundation chapters have sprung up globally to conserve, sustain, and support the worldwide ecosystem of awesomeness. Projects have included efforts in a wide range of areas including technology, arts, social good, and beyond.

We’re still waiting for something with dinosaurs (hint, hint)

Awesome Foundation Calgary

Awesome Calgary was literally founded on Bow Trail in the midst of West LRT construction on a freakin’ cold last day of January 2011.  I was listening to CBC radio and Matt Galloway was chatting with Matt Thompson about AwesomeTO and I slammed the brakes on (ok, I was actually stopped in traffic so it’s not as dramatic as it sounds), went home and contacted Tim Hwang (@Awesomefound) founder and got things rolling. What a way to end the January blahs!

~Lori

—

Hope to see you all there!!

- Kevin

The real question to me though is, how are businesses going move their organizations forward and generate more revenue using social media marketing and digital communications?

Below are two pieces of data from eMarketer.com that tell us:

a) what companies think of digital communications and

b) how companies measure success

The interesting part in these two pieces of data is that:

a) companies so far, have been ok with not really understanding their return on social media, but know that they need to throw their hat in the circle and play.

b) The number of friends, followers, and likes, is still a huge indication of success. That can be a huge misleading KPI. Without proper context of what that numbers means, and actual engagement from your followers and friends, the number is meaningless.

Can I throw out a couple of trends for 2012?

I see that companies will:

1. Demand results this year. Enough of playing in the waters to “see what happens”. Companies will want to see some type of tangible return for their investment, or will stop doing social media.

2. Start to understand metrics better and develop adaptable capacities to match adaptable campaigns…which will equal more revenue and attainment of goals.

3.Dedicate some type of  full time staff to properly execute social media campaigns. From content creation to metrics. Either this will come internally, or companies will outsource part of the work. Yes, outsourcing social media is ok in some instances.

4. Will leverage their staff more when communicating their corporate message to main stream media. Organizations will understand that their best brand advocates are often sitting right in their own office and create strategies to leverage their employees network.

That is!

Not as sexy as the top 10 apps of 2012. However, generating more revenue and hitting business objectives is sexy enough, don’t you think?

Also, if you liked this article, you will also like my new Uncut Marketing Podcast. Check out an episode here!

Ernest and I talk about how a corporate blog or business blog can really help your organization in a time of crisis, or in the good times! Though we only scratch the surface of blogging for business or corporate, it all comes down to what your business goals are and how to tie this into the long term health of your company.

Before we get into that though, Ernest tells us about his plans for the rest of the year and we talk about some new “Twitterheads” joining the Twitterverse. We also talk about our first time experiencing twitter.

Give me, or Ernest, a shout on twitter at @kevinhayesca @ebarbaric

The Kevin and Ernest show has retired…well…not at all, the name has though. Ernest and I took name ideas from our audience, we both came up with a laundry list of names of our own, and it turned out that we ended up picking one that came up minutes before recording this podcast. Go figure.

So officially…welcome to The Uncut Marketing Podcast, where we’ll share ideas and insights about the digital marketing and social media industry.

In this episode, we touch on a question about personal branding asked on Twitter by VinceFowler. So have a listen below:m

Maeghan Smulders – Truly excellent example of personal branding. This MRU graduate took her future in her hands and is making it happen! Be sure to check out her blog and website. Thanks Ernest

Seo-Browser – As suggested by myself, you can use this excellent resource to dig deep into the SEO aspects of your website, including how Google sees your site, who is liking to you and much much more.

Give me, or Ernest, a shout on twitter at @kevinhayesca @ebarbaric

We are also looking for suggestions on a potential re-brand of the name of our show. Personally, I love the Ernest and Kevin show. No need to beat around the bush with a title such as that. However…not sure of the stickiness factor. Please tweet us, go to Ernest’s blog, or comment below on potential names you have for us.

PS: My sincere apologies to Calin Daniel whose name was butchered several times!

The value of the internet is not that it is so big and vast and you can target the world.

The value of the internet is that you can target niche communities. Guess who is in your niche community? People who care about your product and service and are likely the people who will talk positively about you, spread your news, and…oh yeah…spend some dough with you!

That means this: if you sell quilting supplies, you can target quilters. If you are a mortgage broker, you can target home buyers. If you sell books on gout, you can target gout buyers.

However, a lot of businesses have the idea that “If I target everybody, something has to stick”. Or…”If we only get 1% of the 655,000 people who are searching for our product, we will be a success!”

Well I suppose if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, something will stick. But…how much time are you going to take throwing spaghetti…and how much spaghetti are you willing to buy?

One of the first ecommerce websites I owned, the data showed that for every 569 visitors, I would sell one item or get one conversion. So, that meant that for every 2,200 visitors I would sell 4 items. Than for every 22,000 visitors I would sell 40 items.  Sounds nice doesn’t it? The reality is, that if all those years ago I understood who my buyer was and how to target them correctly, I could have probably sold 40 items for every 1,000 visitors.  Which makes 880 products for every 22,000 visitors. I like those numbers better.

Know your audience and save yourself some time, money, and increase your profits.

How do you know your audience, do some research on creating personas which will help you execute your marketing plan more effectively.

If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy my article on Old vs. New Metrics.

We have a very special Thursday November 17 event which we are calling #OccupyMelrose – here’s the deal:

Click here to check out the podcast on iTunes (soon to be re-branded) or just click on the play button below to listen!

Ernest Barbaric is a Digital Communications Consultant in Calgary. Follow him at @ebarbarc

Kevin Hayes is also working in the world of Digital Communications and can be found, outside this site, at @kevinhayesca