Process Issues Plague Marketers When Tackling Social Marketing Establish Distinct But Interdependent Processes For Social Demands Establish A Process To Master The AlwaysOn State Set Up Protocols To Serve AlwaysOn Activities That Require Hyperquick Turnarounds

employees, the brand was able to capitalize on a customer tweeting, “Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?” 7 Wendy’s quick response: “18 million,” propelling #NuggsForCarter to most-retweeted-tweet-of-all-time status. 8

› Unsuitably long lead times. Marketers who are accustomed to traditional media’s prolonged processes may have difficulty thinking in accelerated social time. Multiple approvers outside of marketing who can’t move at social marketing’s speed exacerbate the problem. One social media agency told us that stakeholders “who have not had their ‘gears greased’ don’t understand that social has to be up and running in a matter of days instead of weeks,” which creates bottlenecks and delays.

› Divided attention. Social marketers find their priorities split between managing inbound communications versus planning for outbound content. Companies ill-equipped to handle a large volume of incoming messages default to reactive mode, pushing proactive mode to the back seat. “The inbound volume is daunting if you don’t have the right resources or right structures and processes in place to manage that day in and day out,” states Andrew Caravella, vice president of strategy and brand engagement at Sprout Social.

Establish Distinct But Interdependent Processes For Social Demands

Marketers must implement workflows that can handle unpredictability and react quickly while still facilitating future planning. To achieve this balance, branch social marketing workflows into two separate but connected states: always-on versus campaign processes. We define these as such:

“Always-on” social marketing processes are a steady state of activities that are unpredictable and customer or industry initiated. Examples include customer inquiries, brand mentions, cultural moments, industry breaking news, and crisis management.

“Campaign” social marketing processes are time-bound efforts that are planned and brand initiated. Examples include integrated branding efforts, regularly scheduled social series, new product launches, contests/promotions, holiday/seasonal messaging, and live events.

Consider a fictional shoe brand, “Kicks,” that builds separate but related processes to handle both always-on and campaign social marketing needs fluidly (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1 Always-On Versus Campaign Social Marketing Processes, Illustrated With Fictional Company “Kicks”

Cadence

Initiator

Examples and triggers Always-on

Unpredictable

Industry or customer

• Customer inquiries Customer tweet: “@Kicks, where can

I nd the green in size 8?” • Brand mentions

Instagram photo and caption: “Loving my new @Kicks!” • Cultural moments

Fashion blogger Tumblr post: Star athlete spotted buying Kicks • Industry breaking news

Retail publisher Facebook post: Sneaker technology reaches new heights • Crisis management

Global news outlet tweet: Kicks defect forces a recall

Campaign

Planned

Brand

• General brand messaging Facebook ad: generic “Kicks means performance” brand platform • Social series “How to” video series: “How to care for your Kicks in 30 seconds” • New launches

Instagram photo: Sneak peek for the upcoming new Kicks co-lab line • Contests/promotions

Tweet incentive: 20% off with code • Holidays/seasons

Pinterest board: Gift ideas for December holiday shopping season • Live events

Facebook Live video: Kicks-sponsored athletes competing at the Olympics

Establish A Process To Master The Always-On State

Brands typically begin their social presences with always-on because they are compelled to respond to unexpected customer or industry prompts. After realizing demand for social customer service, Apple finally joined Twitter with an @AppleSupport account to assist. 9 Whether activities are customer initiated (e.g., inquiries, comments, brand mentions) or industry led (e.g., culturally relevant moments, industry breaking news), the always-on state is one encompassing process (see Figure 2):

Plan diligently to avoid social media stumbles. Social media’s unpredictable nature makes planning critical in the always-on state, but time pressures tempt marketers to rush this step. Do your due diligence by creating a master social marketing playbook that maps all of your always-on processes. Include key information such as people, workflows, timing, and templated responses. Digital transformation agency SapientRazorfish works with its clients to establish a red-yellowgreen customer response framework indicating an urgency level and dictates steps for how to react to each color state. For customer service activity specifically, apply Forrester’s recommendations on social customer care. 10

Monitor your social footprint. Fielding incoming customer messages is table stakes but also look for proactive opportunities to engage. According to Dan Moriarty, former director of digital strategy and activation at Hyatt, “Instead of responding only to those who @mention or tag our social channels, which often meant they had a problem that needed solving, the past few years have been about proactively responding to anyone who mentions our brands with or without our social channels included.” 11 Rely on your social listening platform to push relevant brand, competitive, industry, and cultural alerts so you can detect early brand crisis and join pertinent conversations. 12

› Respond to deliver on your brand promise and manage your social reputation. For common issues covered in your playbook, use templated responses to deliver fast answers. For unique questions, cultural moments, or opportunities to avert crisis, loop in other departments and dictate a deadline for action and response. Safe Auto Insurance Company assembled lists of insurance FA Qs and bucketed common questions into three categories to allow for faster access to answers and improved response times internally and externally. It routes customer-specific questions to its claims or customer service groups to take the conversation into a private environment and replies within hours.

Measure to assess your always-on performance. Regularly track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics established during the plan phase to get a pulse on how your process is working. For example, if your company measures customer satisfaction (CSA T) using a time-toresolution metric, customer service agents will focus on average speed of answer (ASA ). From 2010 to 2013, BNP Paribas increased its number of mentions and subsequently its brand visibility by 5,000% by alerting its services team of negative feedback in real time, allowing the company to quickly resolve those issues. 13

Optimize to improve process efficiency. An effective process requires adjustments and iterations.

Assess your process against business objectives and KPIs. For example, has your streamlined process decreased ASA but failed to improve CSA T? Set up experiments: Isolate distinct stages of your process, change a variable, and track progress toward the goal. Additionally, audit employees and ask if any part of the process is cumbersome or unclear. Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC ) registered 800,000 new individuals in the Affordable Care Act’s first year but lost $800 million in that business line. HCSC looked to call center, survey, and social data to assess ASA but determined that it actually needed to decrease customer effort scores (how conveniently and easily customers could get information and answers). The company adjusted processes, like its call center’s automated prompts, and saw improved CSA T. 14

FIGURE 2 The Always-On Social Marketing Process

Plan

Steps

• Create distinct tracks for: — Customer inquiries and brand mentions. — Cultural moments and industry breaking news. — Crisis management. • For all tracks, include RACI charts, ow charts, key approvers, permissions, templated responses, creative and voice brand guidelines, and expected turnaround times. • For crisis management, also include SWAT team chart and crisis escalation steps.

Needs

Master playbook

Monitor

• Set up alerts for brand and competitor mentions, industry news, and cultural keywords. • Field incoming customer messages or brand mentions. • Sort and tag messages. • Direct to appropriate internal teams and mentions.

Respond

• Whenever possible, use templated responses. • When impossible, activate designated teams to create quickly approved content.

• Social listening platform • Social media management solution

Social media management solution

Measure

• Track KPIs that serve business objectives. • Report metrics via social, marketing, and other enterprise dashboards.

Optimize

• Assess process against business objectives and

KPIs. • Set up experiments to test variables if needed. • Interview colleagues. • Adjust as needed.

• Any social tech tracking metrics • Marketing measurement and optimization solution • Business intelligence platform

• Efciency metrics reports • Internal surveys and feedback forms

Set Up Protocols To Serve Always-On Activities That Require Hyperquick Turnarounds

Certain always-on social marketing activities require even more timeliness due to their higher risk or reward profile. To achieve even greater speed-to-market, implement additional protocols for these efforts:

Crisis management when your brand’s reputation is on the line. Crises do not abide by a 9-to5 work schedule. Proactively define a SWAT team and circulate names and contact information to involved parties, especially for off-hour situations. Identify a social administrator empowered to take quick action, such as removing posts. SapientRazorfish worked with a prominent consumer packaged goods (CPG) client to address a health issue concerning one of its products. The brand activated its SWAT team of marketers, agency representatives, PR agents, and lawyers, and all hands on deck worked through the weekend to respond to the crisis in an appropriate and timely manner. For further detail, read Forrester’s recommendations on how to manage social crisis. 15

› Timely cultural moments that allow for brand relevance and potential breakthrough. Legal approval and too many cooks are often holdups for quick responses. Activate a pre-identified legal representative to fast-track creative and media approvals. Identify which stakeholders you can bypass to publish content faster. “Some organizations aren’t designed for real time and require multiple sign-offs from executives, but social content has a very short shelf life,” explains Josh Rickel, former vice president, product marketing at Spredfast.

Establish A Separate Process To Master The Campaign State

Brands and agencies incorporating social into brand planning must rethink the entire campaign process instead of treating social media as an afterthought channel. Travelers Insurance’s digital marketing team worked across the organization to develop integrated marketing plans in these steps: identify business objectives, distill audience insights from all channels, create a narrative for business units to deliver content, develop a channel strategy that includes social media, and plot a master editorial calendar before moving into review and activation stages. Campaign activities vary from planned social posts to full multichannel communication efforts, but the process to implement those activities in a social media environment remains the same (see Figure 3):

› Plan using social media for insights, testing, and distribution. Don’t think of social media as only a place to push content. James Gross, cofounder of Percolate, says: “Marketers are coming out of treating social as a customer service channel and trying to move it to brand marketing. Ultimately, a marketer’s goal is to move social into the strategic part of the overall planning process.” Use social media to vet ideas and better understand your customers. Test different messages with a small budget before committing bigger spend. You may even realize that social media is not the right place for this particular campaign — and that’s OK.

› Produce unique assets for each social network. Do not subscribe to a one-size-fits-all mindset where TV commercials are repurposed for Facebook as is. To maximize user engagement, assets should be unique to each social network. This requires foresight in early production stages (e.g., photo or video shoots). Brands also need to create templated assets for dexterous campaign use. Global beauty company Henkel created a principal story that served as a master asset template for the duration of a certain campaign. From there, Henkel’s local marketing teams could pull from the pre-produced templates and adapt creative assets to fit the social channels important in their local markets.

Distribute social posts using automated tools. Automation streamlines the approval process compared to emailing spreadsheets. When publishing content to social networks, schedule posts through social networks’ native dashboards or via a third-party platform covered in Forrester’s social marketing playbook tools and technology report. 16 Companies with quieter social media activity may publish directly to social networks, whereas global consumer packaged goods (CPG) company Unilever relied on an SMMS to post large volumes of diverse social content by brand. 17

Measure to assess your campaign performance. Using metrics instituted in the plan phase, assess whether KPIs have moved the needle on your campaign’s business objectives. For example, after running a brand reputation campaign to boost favorability, use social listening to see if brand sentiment improved by comparing pre- and post-campaign sentiment. Or your goal might be to increase seasonal sales. The Four Seasons Hotel New York needed to offset business travel decline in the summer. Using a targeted social campaign and highlighting family-friendly amenities, the hotel saw its year-to-year summer revenue grow by 5% and its social community increase by double digits. 18

› Optimize to improve process efficiency and efficacy. Improve your campaign process by conducting a postmortem with internal stakeholders; internal feedback fosters understanding for future improvements. Ask participants to complete a scorecard on what worked and what didn’t in your campaign process, and assess performance gaps in content quality, timelines, team dynamics, and your team’s general sentiment. Additionally, bring in other parts of the organization, like product, legal, compliance, customer service, and agency partners, to improve understanding and to uncover other optimization opportunities in the campaign process. Smoothing this process with the marketing group and beyond will set you up for success with your next campaign.

FIGURE 3 The Campaign Social Marketing Process

Plan

Produce

Distribute

Measure

Optimize

Steps

• Gather audience insights across channels, including social. • Identify business objectives. • Craft an integrated brief. • Develop a channel strategy using social as a testing ground. • Plot a master editorial calendar. • Map the production schedule based on channel strategy. • Create a measurement plan.

• Create assets unique to each social network’s purpose, audience, and formats (e.g., size, length, orientation, sound, etc.). • Incorporate stakeholder feedback, and get approvals. • Create and execute a tagging strategy according to the measurement plan.

• Schedule social content to go live (organic or paid). • Assign a budget amount for paid posts.

• Track KPIs that serve business objectives. • Report metrics via social, marketing, and other enterprise dashboards.

• Assess process against business objectives and KPIs. • Set up experiments to test variables if needed. • Interview colleagues. • Adjust as needed.

Needs

• Social listening platform • Social media management solution

Production resources

• Social media management solution • Social adtech • Word of mouth marketing platform

• Any social tech tracking metrics • Marketing measurement and optimization solution • Business intelligence platform

• Efciency metrics reports • Internal surveys and feedback forms