The Dealer Impact Blog

Social Media Success: 5 Lessons From In-House Corporate Teams

While implementing a successful social media campaign is something to celebrate, longer term, policy-based programs (which may not garner as much immediate publicity) can be even more rewarding.

Here we are highlighting five companies that have enjoyed long term success with their own social media teams and taking a look at some of the measurable returns they have seen as the results of their programs.

Key personnel from within the five companies below (in alphabetical order) have commented on their teams’ successes to offer you an insight into their various processes. Meanwhile, please be sure to let us know in the comments about any other companies that you feel should be recognized for having strong in-house social media teams.

Via: Mashable

Dell Has Some Interesting Twitter Sales Numbers

It looks like Dell is having great success with their @DellOutlet account.

Dell continues to be one of the more visible corporate behemoths actively using social media, and today they’re out with new numbers to demonstrate some of the success they are having.The company tells us that they’ve now generated a total of $6.5 million in revenue from their Twitter presence, where they have nearly 1.5 million followers on their @DellOutlet account (and 3 million “connections” across all social sites).

Via: Mashable

Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign

Here is an interesting article about calculating the Return On Investment of your Social Media Campaign.

First the bad news: If you’re going to calculate the ROI of your social media campaign, you’re going to have to know math. That may come as a disappointment to people who thought social media was only about accumulating Twitter followers or monitoring Facebook “Likes,” but it’s true. The future of social media is about math, metrics and monetization.

The problem is that most companies aren’t doing an effective job of measuring the value of their social media campaigns. In fact, a recent survey by Econsultancy found that 47% of the companies it surveyed said they were “not able to measure” their campaigns and that “the jury is still out” on the value gained from their social media investment.

If you’re one of the people who isn’t measuring your social media campaigns on an ROI basis, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Here are some tips, advice, and a little bit of simple math to get you on the right path to ROI success.

Via: Mashable

10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring

Here are some Social Media Monitoring strategies to try:

1. Define an Objective
2. Decide Where to Monitor
3. Decide What to Monitor
4. Prioritize
5. Develop a Plan
6. Involve Others
7. Listen First
8. Inbound vs. Outbound Conversations
9. Build Relationships
10. Select Tools that Match your Strategy

Via: Mashable

Top 5 Emerging Brand Trends on Facebook

1.) Facebook Exclusives
2.) Facebook Places Experimentation
3.) Facebook Commerce
4.) Facebook Support Centers
5.) Facebook Giving

Field of Dreams may have popularized the notion that, “If you build it, they will come,” but in today’s Facebook  generation, brands are beginning to go where the masses are, instead of relying on the masses to come to them. With 500 million members, Facebook represents real-time access to the online mainstream.

For years, brands have been using their Facebook Pages to connect with customers. As Facebook blossoms, so too does brand ingenuity, and in recent months we’ve seen a surge in campaigns that inspire Facebook giving, incorporate Facebook Places and feature Facebook as a prominent part of product reveals and fan exclusives. Application makers are also building tools that small and big brands alike can use to sell their products and offer Facebook-tailored customer support.

What follows is a deeper look at how and why these five emerging brand trends are bubbling up on the world’s largest social network.

Via: Mashable

5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now

What’s the first thing young women do when they wake up? Check Facebook. How do enterprise employees pass the time at work? With social media. With so many studies highlighting ever-accelerating social media usage rates, the conclusion is obvious — social media is everywhere.

What follows are five of the hottest social media trends right now. Each are influencing our social, online and mobile behaviors in significant ways.

Entertainment checkin services are changing the way we watch television. Mobile loyalty applications are helping us connect the dots between our real-world shopping behaviors and digital rewards. A new breed of Q&A services are changing the way we search. Barcode scanning applications are making products social, and deal-of-the-day sites are giving us ways to save by recruiting our friends to the party.

1. Social Scanning

2. Q&A and Intelligent Information Discovery

3. Group Buying

4. Mobile Meets Loyalty

5. Checking-In to Entertainment

via: Mashable

HOW TO: Avoid a Social Media Disaster

If there’s one thing that keeps social media marketers up at night, it’s the ever-present threat of a PR disaster. By now, every marketer is well-aware of how quickly dissatisfied consumers can turn to the social airwaves to vent about a brand. Nestle, BP, Domino’s, Southwest Airlines, and many other brands have witnessed the unbridled power of social media as a platform for disgruntled consumers to rally around an anti-brand cause.

1.) Create a Social Media Policy/Community Management Plan
2.) Have an Escalation Plan
3.) Plan for the Worst – Expect the Best
4.) Respond Quickly, Personally and Directly
5.) Don’t Play the Blame Game

Via: Mashable

Why Some Companies Don’t Get Social Media

1. Senior executives don’t use or get social media. If you’re an older, hard-working senior executive, you probably don’t have the time to really check out social media.

2. There is no simple way to measure ROI. If companies are trying to apply traditional ROI metrics to social media, it’s a lot like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Social media is a different beast with “hard” and “soft” metrics.

3. Many companies cling to belief that if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it. With the global economy appearing to be in recovery mode, many companies have been able to stick with traditional marketing and advertising tools.

4. As Lee Oden also pointed out, many companies have a difficult time trying to understand that social media means they have to change their behaviour.

5. The social media ecosystem has done a pretty lousy job of putting the spotlight on social media “success”.

Via: Sysomos blog

Barry Diller: “We Spend Every Nickel We Can On Facebook” [Video]

If you need to know how Facebook is performing among large brands, look no further than some of the leading brand marketers who are singing praise about Facebook’s ad platform. In an interview with CNN Money, Barry Diller couldn’t speak highly enough about Facebook’s advertising offering. Diller stated, “Facebook’s great advertising. My company, which spends a huge amount on advertising, we spend every nickel we can on Facebook. They’re effective. The targeting of the audience is precise enough.”

While Diller doesn’t believe that Facebook will be able to replace traditional advertising, he also didn’t believe that Twitter would be able to attract brand advertisers, so it just goes to show that Diller doesn’t know everything. You can view the full interview posted below.

Via: AllFacebook

Advertisers to Spend $1.7 Billion on Social Networks in 2010

The latest numbers from eMarketer project that advertisers will spend nearly $1.7 billion in the U.S. on social networking sites in 2010. Worldwide, spending will hit $3.3 billion according to the report.

The numbers represent a significant bump up from estimates published by the research firm at the end of last year, when it projected $1.3 billion would be spent on the space in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, eMarketer sees about half of that money (in the U.S.) going to Facebook, with MySpace continuing to see a smaller share of the pie. Separately, the firm estimated that Facebook’s 2010 revenue would hit $1.2 billion in a report published last week.

Earlier this month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that some of the social network’s biggest advertisers had boosted ad spending by 10x this year; a trend that’s apparent in the eMarketer report.

Via: Mashable