Is Your Social Media Marketing Evergreen?

In case you skipped biology in high school (or blanked it out deliberately, like me), evergreen refers to trees which keep their leaves year round, while deciduous refers to those that lose them seasonally.

What the hell does that have to do with social media marketing? I’m glad you asked, obviously.

Evergreen vs. deciduous is a handy way to look at two major flavors of social media marketing in practice, flavors which often get lumped together under a generic umbrella. They do however have important differences which both agencies and clients should keep in mind.

Evergreen Social Media

In a sense this is the “old school” definition of social media, the stuff written about in so many books, articles, and case studies. Evergreen social media marketing is never-ending, the foundational efforts you absolutely need to embrace in today’s world. They form the backbone of your core strategic communications, public relations, branding, and customer service efforts.

In practice evergreen social media efforts are:

• Reputation monitoring and measurement tools and programs.
• Listening programs, tracking selected hot keywords, influencers, or sources..
• Brand-level presences on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and so on.
• Support efforts – think of the oft-referenced @comcastcares, Dell, or Zappos case studies.
• “Engaging in the conversation” to drive thought leadership, handle crises, or just build relationships with your communities.

It’s the stuff you should be doing all the time – establishing a presence in key channels and conversations, paying attention, responding and engaging. Evergreen social media efforts are absolutely critical come crisis time, and lack of them are the stuff for so many of the social media horror stories you’ll find floating around. As a result you’ll find these efforts heavily pushed by PR and communications agencies, along with speciality monitoring and engagement shops, and often are driven on the client-side by PR, brand, and support groups.

Deciduous Social Media

On the flip side, some social media marketing efforts are tied more directly to outbound, short-lived marketing and advertising campaigns. They extend the campaign creative, messaging, or calls-to-action out through social media channels to drive traffic and buzz. Smart efforts piggyback on the evergreen foundation described above, to leverage monitoring, measurement, and engagement efforts already in place. And, like the campaigns they are funded by, they expire after a while. The leaves eventually fall off these guys, so to speak.

In practice, these efforts include:

• User generated content campaigns, often tied to a contest (create a video, win a car; submit a photo, win a trip; etc.).
• Anything and everything the marketer is hoping will go “viral” – YouTube videos tied to a product launch or supporting creative currently airing in :30 second TV spots, for example.
• Audience participation (fan favorite voting, for example) contests and promotions.
• Blogger outreach in direct support of a new site or product launch.

Deciduous efforts are by definition short-lived, seasonal, campaign-driven examples of social media marketing. On the agency side they – mostly – live in the land of advertising and digital marketing shops, while on the client side they are driven out of the product marketing teams and ad groups. Deciduous efforts live and die by the metrics of the campaign – conversions, clicks, responses, registrations, sales, and so on.

Why does that all matter?

As you consider who should “own” social media marketing within your company – or what kind of agency you should tap for help – step back and consider what kind of social media marketing you’re really aiming to implement. While they may share much of the same oft-confusing lingo, evergreen and deciduous efforts call upon very distinct skills and competencies and drive for very different results. Know what you’re to accomplish first, in order to select the right flavor of social media marketing.

Photo via Wikipedia.

Social Media ROI and ROMI

Social Media ROI is one of those “oh God will it never die?!?” subjects that engenders endless debate across the blog and twitterspheres, very often with seriously suspect results. It’s just a damn hard question to answer – how do you determine the financial impact of all that time, energy, and budget your organization is investing in tweets, posts, comments, podcasts, and so on?

In doing some client research on the subject last month, I found it useful to consider the subject in terms of Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).* That helped me break down my understanding of potential Social Media ROI (smROI**) into two parts:

Short- and long-term smROI

Short-term smROI is loosely defined as when you use social media right alongside traditional demand generation elements within the marketing mix (think direct mail, email campaigns, etc). Companies like Dell use Twitter to drive direct, trackable sales through accounts like @DellHomeOffers and @DellSmBizOffers that offer up targeted product discounts and specials. Thousands of brands use blog posts in a similar manner, and you can see the same across pretty much every social media channel there is.

Calculating short-term smROI is the (relatively) easy part – you can make a pretty clear, compelling, and defensible ROI argument for these kinds of activities (X tweet generated Y sales). Unfortunately for us, that’s not really the kind of smROI that’s the subject of so much debate. That pain-in-the-ass kind is what I’ll call long-term smROI, which is really a fancy way of asking what all that “engaging in conversations” brouhaha is really worth.

Long-term smROI is akin to long-term ROMI – it’s all about brand awareness, loyalty, and other very difficult to quantify – in terms of bottom-line financial impact – activities. In traditional marketing these are the brand-building 30 second TV spots and conference sponsorships, among countless other activities. To create impact metrics many brands use survey-driven scoring such as Net Promoter, satisfaction, and so on. The same applies for social media activities that fall outside the definition of short-term smROI – they’re just hard to really measure, and as such marketers, consultants, community managers, and so on are constantly working to justify and defend them.

So what’s the solution to determining long-term smROI? Run NetP or CSAT surveys all the time? Maybe – I won’t pretend to have a firm answer, though I obviously have an opinion (a later post). One line of research I am fascinated by however is found in the ENGAGEMENTdb report from Altimeter Group/Wetpaint (PDF), released in July 2009. They paint an interesting picture to claim there is a direct correlation between brands that are deeply and broadly engaged in social media and financial success (more or less – read the report). That’s still a hell of a leap to take to management: lots of SM engagement —> analyst report! —> ROI, done! But they have some great data in there and filled an important gap in the debate.

A debate which I’m sure will continue for many years to come…

As a side note, some of the best thinking I’ve seen on the subject in a long while is by Oliver Blanchard. You can find just his smROI videos up at http://smroi.net/. Well worth the time invested.

*This isn’t to deny other ways to realize ROI from social media, such as through decreases support costs. My focus, for now, was on marketing.
**Using “smROI” based on the Twitter hashtag in use of #smROI. Seemed handy enough.

Olivier Blanchard on Social Media ROI

This is a fantastic presentation that Olivier Blanchard did at Social Fresh – sorry I missed this, but I had to help spread this one around the Interwebz: