ECircle: brands need to effectively integrate email and social media networks

The digital marketing company’s report, conducted with Mediacom Science, analysed responses from more than 1,000 UK consumers to reveal how they interact with brands via social media and email.

It revealed that 73% of respondents could be reached through social networks and 95% check their emails once a day, yet very few brands were effectively integrating email with social networks.

Almost three-quarters of the respondents used email to receive notifications for social networks, and the majority still used email for private communication and online purchases.

The research also found that 32% of those active on social networks were fans or followers of a brand. The majority of them were motivated by functional reasons, such as gaining a discount, while 25% were motivated by the desire to demonstrate and share their attachment to the brand with contacts.

It found that very few people were using sharing features, suggesting that brands were also failing to effectively optimise email marketing tools.

Volker Wiewer, chief executive of eCircle, said: “When effectively integrated, social media and email can create a potent combination. However, our research suggests that brands are yet to truly utilise the power of these channels working together.”

(This post was firts published at BrandRepublic)

Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010, announced NMA magazine today.

The FMCG giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities. While both companies will continue to create campaign sites for certain brands in the immediate future, they have said the long-term future lies with social media on platforms populated by their target consumers.

According to the magazine, Coca-Cola will position its official Facebook and YouTube pages as the lead online channels for upcoming international activity for its Coke Zero and Fanta brands, new media age understands.

Prinz Pinakatt, the Coca-Cola Company’s interactive marketing manager for Europe, said, “In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site. In most cases these will still exist as it’s the most obvious destination for a consumer, but it might only be a page linking to YouTube encouraging people to join the community there. “We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,” Pinakatt added.

Unilever is also abandoning campaign sites in favour of long-term community engagement platforms. Cheryl Calverley, Unilever UK’s senior global manager for Axe Skin, said “It’s natural online to go to the place where people are already consuming media. It’s less effort to ask people to leave an environment they’re already in.”

So the question for us as digital marketing specialists is whether developing a site for every campaign is cost-effective and worth-doing it. Community-based platforms prove more engaging and long-term beneficial for the brand visibility and consumer loyalty. Online brand experience will now become even more important part of the marketing mix and proper digital strategy planning focusing on consumer journey will be necessary more than ever before. Sounds challenging, but it’s rewarding.

No doubt 2009 was the year of Social Media, when lots of companies recognised the need of participating in the online conversation. The importance of this marketing discipline brought the role of Social Media/ Community Manager to the agency or company team structure. Some agencies preferred to transform their digital or online PR staff into a social media strategists, however there is more than digital and PR experience a social media guru would need. If you are a marketing specialist, wondering if your skills and experience would qualify for that juicy and probably 2010’s most wanted marketing job, or if you are an employer looking to hire someone to be responsible about the company social media strategy, here is the job description.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Research

• Constantly monitor and be aware of current trends in social media, networking and monitoring tools.
• Be on top of industry trends; monitor most engaging topics – most re-tweeted, most downloaded, most shared, etc. by industry.
• Research on key competitors for every new client – where are they active, what social media tactics do they use, how do they engage.
• Research on best practices – what works best and what- doesn’t.
• Identify key/targeted networking platforms, forums and blogs by industry and solution area.

• Research on target audience – what are their interests, where the target public is: online spaces/ networks/ communities; how many hours on average they spend online and where

Implement

• Be the eyes and ears of the brand as if your own reputation depended on it
• Minute by minute participate in conversations that surround the brand content, answer comments, be a mediator.
• Identify threats and opportunities in user generated content surrounding the brand.

• Establish and cultivate positive relationships with key/targeted bloggers, and/or identify brand marketers and PR managers who should be monitoring and influencing these relationships.
• Develop and manage pages on popular consumer social networking websites such as Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, MySpace, etc. (depending on targeted channels) as well as popular technology sites intended to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to the site.
• Coordinate social media activities by actively engaging in consumer and industry conferences, blogs, video sharing, online chats, wikis, etc., to promote brand messaging and increase brand awareness resulting in driving brand traffic to the site.
• Engage in regular participation within the customer community, including the review of user blogs, wikis and communities such as sascommunity.org.
• Recruit, develop and coach new bloggers and blog editors.
• Manage the day-to-day blogger activities; proactively identifying and developing blog posts, recruiting bloggers and assigning blog ideas to others.

• Create content for feeds and snippets in various social media sites.
• Help with making corporate website social media and search-engine friendly – from fan badges, share/save buttons, to optimising tags, page descriptions, RSS feeds

Monitor and Report

• Track and monitor the success of online initiatives both qualitative and quantitative resuls (i.e. impressions, reach and influence)
• Prepare case studies and campaign results presentations
• Create and update daily, weekly and monthly reports

• Analyze campaigns and translate anecdotal or qualitative data into recommendations and plans for revising the social media campaigns.

Internal relations

• Develop company social media policy, as a part of the employee guidelines.
• Educate staff on the implementation and use of new technologies.
• Promote social media activities internally.

Skills

• Demonstrated experience with Web 2.0 channels & great affinity for learning new technologies.
• Strong relationship building skills, including negotiation & executive interaction, ability to coach others.
• Have excellent project management skills.
• Ability to develop a business vision for social media, including goals & results
• Leadership/decision-making: skilled at articulating to executives and internal teams the importance of social applications and is able to make calm recommendations during crises. Be able to exercise good judgment with quick response time.
• Flexible communication skills: Strong editorial writer. Able to present needs and plans and communicate internally, has a distinct, personable voice for external engagement. Manage negative situations toward positive outcomes.
• Be a team-player and a positive-thinker.
• Be budget-savvy: manage budget while hitting performance goals.