DSA Online | New Media Updates

On Monday, I headed to Burnaby to give a talk to Les Dames d’Escoffier about social marketing. A client and friend of mine, Angie Quaale, invited me to speak
and told me that I would be served an excellent (vegetarian) meal at the Pear Tree Restaurant. Since I already had a workshop published from a few weeks ago, I was happy to exchange some tidbits for some tidbits. Even better was the Booster Juice gift certificate as a thank you!! I have been hopped up on Macha Monsoons ever since.

The talk was called “Top 10 social tools that small/medium businesses should have on their radar”.

1. Facebook
2. Flickr
3. YouTube
4. Twitter
5. WordPress/Blogger/LiveJournal
6. Digg/Technorati/Boingboing/Fark (social aggregators)
7. Meetup/LinkedIn (other social communities)
8. RSS feeds
9. Tumblr & browsers that integrate social tools into one place.
10. Skype/Instant Messengers

Since I wanted the talk to be very casual and conducive to conversation, I avoided slides and powerpoint presentations and instead hand-drew each of the “top 10″‘s logos. Any excuse to pull out the felt pens is a good one. I talked about what each tool was, what it was for and how small/medium businesses could integrate them into their marketing plans.

I was often asked the following questions: “Are my peers really using this tool?” and “Who has time to manage all of this?”

Are my peers really using this tool?

I want to remind all of my readers of a very important rule in media/marketing:

You are not necessarily your target demographic.

It is very difficult to separate our own habits from the habits of our customers. Since we are working with or around a product or service everyday, often times, we are blinded by how *we* interact with the creative, our website, or the product itself. Can I get a “hell-yes” from everyone in media land who has ever had to counter the following: “My wife reads this magazine so it needs to be on the media plan”. It’s frustrating for professionals who are experts at media and marketing to try and keep everything separated, but it’s very important. If I was to buy media for my clients as I consume media, we would be targeting a very limited, nerdy section of the population. So, on this note, I had to counter-ask the group “Are your peers your audience?”. Just because your friends regularly frequent your store or buy your products does not mean that they represent your customer base. How many times have you bought a craft or bake sale item from a friend at church or the local community centre only to wonder what you are going to do with it now? While your product or service are probably worth more than a .25 cent cookie, it’s probably safe to assume that your friends and family are just a bit biased when it comes to your offering.

Once we had properly identified who our “real customers” where, I was able to talk straight numbers. If we use Facebook as the example (since it’s definitely the most well known and popular social network today), often times people assume that there isn’t anyone over the age of 24 using the service. In fact, the highest number of users on Facebook in Western Canada are between the ages of 25-44, a very important buying demographic; however, with CPC (cost-per-click) being the pay model of choice for most advertisers using Facebook it is hard to ignore the numbers from any demographic pie (mmm, pie).

Facebook users in Canada: 18.3 Million (translation: Facebook reaches 76% of Canadians using the internet)

Western Canada (the stuff we care about):
2+: 5.7 Million users
Under 24: 1.8 Million users
25-44: 2.3 Million users
45-54: 1 Million users
55+: 716,000 users (51% reach)

When you display these ComScore (January 2009) numbers like this, it’s easy to discount the older population using Facebook; however, I don’t know a single business that would say no if we told them we could target 716,000 eyeballs and only pay for people who click on the ad. It’s madness!! Are your peers using social media? The answer is a big whopping yes.

Who has time to manage all of this:

I’m glad that this was asked during the talk. I am currently reading Christopher Hitchens, an author I have come to respect for his opinions and the way he argues. He says that “the most educated person in the world has to admit…that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more”. While he was not talking about the internet in any way, the internet has certainly contributed to the increase in accessibility of information. Information is readily available to everyone from the small pizza vendor down the street, to the multi-million dollars corporations, and I believe the smaller business person feels the time crunch more than larger corporations. A larger ship takes longer to turn, so while the bigger guys have more dollars to put towards new initiatives, it’s the smaller guys that have the mobility to put new opportunities into play which means that they have to be even more on the lookout at what their competitor is doing, chewing up vital time. I could see I was stressing out some of the more successful business women in the room who already had their plates full with their existing initiatives. How were any of them going to integrate all of these initiatives and still find time to sleep? Simple. They weren’t.

The purpose of most social sites online is to start a conversation. If you try and start multiple dialogues online and then are too busy to respond, you’ll just be mismanaging the conversation and you’ll tick people off. If you want to add social media to your marketing and media plans, you need a goal. If the goal is to help your customers become better informed about your free events, why would you be taking the time to manage a vlog? If you have a product that doesn’t change, why are you spamming twitter? Choosing a social media should solve a problem, so if time is a problem, adding a slew of new social tools to your portfolio isn’t going to do the job. However, if you have several existing marketing strategies in place that could be replaced by a free and customizable social tool, now is the time to check it out.

Excerpt from “Social Media; Start the Conversation, January 2009″.