Michael Porter (@porteronportal) and Saren Sakurai (@saren) of Perficient spoke at the last day of IBM Connect 2013. The title of the talk is the Social CMO: Engaging the Consumer. The goal of digital marketing is the right message to the right audience at the right time on the right device.
4 primary objectives of social: Awareness, Engagement, Acquisition, and Retention.
Awareness
Saren talked about how to get your message out you must
- Define a specific target
- Set a specific goal
- Craft the perfect message
People usually engage with brands they already know, whether that’s through having already done business with the company or a recommendation from somebody they know or trust. 
Saren talked about the Movember campaign for men’s health. Nick Offerman was used in commercials, videos and images as a familiar brand to engage people would already associate him with great mustaches.
Mike offered several tips for IT to support marketing:
- Make content easy to author by providing templates, training, quick turnaround, and reporting
- Support video in your websites
Engagement
In the engagement area, you need to seek out the audience, listen, be native and sell last. Saren gave an example of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Philadelphia recognized that the audience they wanted reach for a recipe exchange campaign were people who were active in social communities that focused on food. They chose Paula Dean’s site to run the campaign. While they thought they would engage maybe 500 people in video exchange of how to make food using cream cheese, they ended up with 5,000 participants. The end result was a 5% increase in sales for the next two months.
Measurement is key objective with engagement. Start with a baseline and collect more than just page hits. You can use Active Sight Analytics within WebSphere Portal and WCM to feed data to Coremetrics and other analytic tools.
Analytics will help you segment your audience and then provide personalized messages to each segment. You can use the event driven data from the user interaction to personalize the experience.
Acquisition
Here you want to test and learn new social channels. Your own web site is no longer enough. So you must place content into forums, social activity streams, etc. But you also have to be aware that each new channel has its own set of formal and informal ways of connecting with users, so be “native” when engaging on those platforms.
For your own site, make sure you nail down SEO, offer signing on to your site using OAuth or OpenID, publish your content to your own site and others. WebSphere Portal and WCM now offer all theses capabilities for marketers.
Retention
Saren explained several techniques to help with retention via social media:
- Show that you are listening, but also make sure you act when needed
- Be proactive
- Stay close to customers
- Produce exclusive content
- Become invaluable
- Help customers succeed
As a personal experience, I recently tweeted about internet problems I was having a hotel. I included a link to the preferred guest program at the hotel to make sure they were aware. Immediately I got a tweet back from the guest program showing sympathy and letting me know they would contact me soon. That was a great example of listening. On the flip side, nobody followed up with me as promised. That let me know they weren’t really listening, but probably had some automated response sent to me.
Your IBM web experience platforms offer a variety of tools to create communities where you can stay close to customers, produce exclusive content, etc. You should also enable, promote, and coddle community champions.
Gamification is another technique for improving retention. Badging, rewards, competition and cooperation are all components of gaming that help retain people and encourage engagement.
Mike and Saren summarized the presentation this way:
- Clearly define objectives
- Set strategy by objective
- Select channels based on strategy
- Message at the right time, to the right device, with the right message.
- Drive all activity back to the hub.
