How much advertising $ is enough?

I recently read a very open-ended question that was posted on a forum. It was simply "How much should I spend on advertising?" That's a good question. But, you can only answer the question in the context of:

• What are your advertising goals?
• Who is your target market?
• Where is your target market?
• How do you enter the conversation with your market?

Is the answer multi-millions, and you are spending like crazy to promote new software (e.g. the Windows XP roll-out a few years back, or the Microsoft Bing roll-out of late), or is the answer almost nothing, and you build through word-of-mouth (e.g. Apple's iPad).

You can't know how much you need to spend until you set your goals, build a strategy and a plan.

The next big question, is what is your return on advertising spend? Advertising should be an investment, not a cost.

Responding to Social Media Buzz - Step #4 ==> Determine if you should engage

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

You’re out there watching for Social Media Buzz about your company now, and you start to find content. Now it’s time to determine if you should engage with Twits, Bloggers, Vloggers, and so forth.

On average, each blog post is looked at something like 25 times. Now, that makes for a pretty big cross-section as most blogs are looked at once or twice (and one of those may be the person who wrote it), and some are looked at hundreds of thousands or even millions of times.

One of your first questions might be, “Is this guy important?” There are few ways to really determine if any one Social Media activist is important in the overall scheme of things. One proxy to determine if a person’s blog is important is Technorati.com’s “Authority” ranking. Technorati calculates authority by looking at all links from unique blogs from the past 6 months. That means a blog’s rank will change daily based upon the blog's activity from 180 days ago up to today. As older links fall off the count and new links are added, the blog’s link count may increase, decrease, or stay the same.

Perhaps a good rule-of-thumb is to not spend your time trying to determine a given post’s or poster’s importance, but simply to spend your time engaging with them.

What about Social Media that is filled with profanity or cursing? When customers are unhappy they may tend to write with words that would make your mother blush. The challenge is to figure out if it is worth paying attention to this type of feedback. One way to do this is to take some time to engrain yourself in the other content from the contributor. Do the words that were used spill from bad habit (and consequently reduce the credibility of the contributor), or do they come from the passion or pain of the experience with your company? In the latter case, you really should respond. However, you need to tread cautiously.

Another good rule-of-thumb when experiencing Social Media is to pretend you’re experiencing a customer walking up to you and complaining about their experience with your company. If the person is using the F-bomb as an adjective, adverb, and a figure of speech, then you probably don’t want to engage with that person. On the other hand, if they are using it out of frustration, then you may quickly recognize the need to grit your teeth and engage in the conversation with them.

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• How To Successfully Track Your Way To Blog Success (beatschindler.com)
• Technorati on the Authority Changes (blogherald.com)

Responding to Social Media Buzz - Step #3 ==> Build out your Tactics

Now’s the time to get into the nitty-gritty of how you’re going to respond to Social Media Buzz. There are several points to consider.

• Brand your blog responses ... Your blog responses must reflect your brand, and must be from your brand. You must never masquerade as a third-party trying to shout the praises of your company. You must always be up front about who you are, and that you represent your company. But, you may not be the person who is actually responding to the Social Media. So, before you even write your first Social Media post, write up a description of the "persona" - the person and his or her personality and "voice" - that you want to respond to Social Media. For instance, if you are responding for a stodgy old bank, then your perona should use a greeting like "Good Afternoon", and always use full and proper grammar. On the other hand, if you are a mountain bike company, your persona should use all the right slang: "Hey dude", "shred", and so on. Everyone that is going to respond to Social Media Buzz must present this branded persona.
• Set a standard and branded greeting ... like “Hi There – It’s from ”. In addition, you might hyperlink your company’s website into the name each time.
• Define the name of your responder ... You have a choice to make here: for the sake of consistency, you may want to use the same "virtual responder" so that all of your responses have the same pen-name on them. The advantage of this is twofold – first off it is easy to search for and find your Social Media responses. Secondly, if over the years you end up with 3-4 people responding to Social Media, they can all respond under the persona's name like "Thanks, Ivy". On the other hand, you may want to use the names of the actual responder. The upside of this is that it is more personal.
• Find the Social Media Buzz … Blogs, Vlogs, comments, reviews, and so on - using Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and other suitable searches and feeds. Set yourself up searches and RSS feeds so that it is easy to find Social Media Buzz in the future.
  
• Set up accounts … Each social media service typically has a defined account. By using an account, rather than an anonymous response you build a history on each social media service and also build credibility with people who follow Social Media.
• Staff and train your team … Assuming you get a team. Otherwise, perhaps you are training yourself.
• Join the conversation … Now you’re ready to get involved with social media. Search out good and bad feedback about your company, and get ready to interact with it.