I would agree with the sentiment that radio is social. Let me rephrase this, good radio is social. It uses talk shows, open’s the lines up for conversations with listeners and is a great medium to connect with people in a personal manner.

Social media does the same, arguably with a bit more longevity to the conversations taking place. Through online conversations, that are the catalyst for opening up engagement with followers, social media touches its followers in a very unique and personal fashion.

Social media and radio are two peas in a pod. Social, engaging and exciting.

In my experience, when two social people get together the party just gets bigger and better. The same is true with campaigns, shows and conversations that utilize both radio and social media platforms to meet people.

How to best optimise radio and social media

DJ Fresh on 5FM

• Use the live nature of radio to build fanfare
• Everyone likes a bit of fanfare. It excites us and makes us interested in getting involved in something. The problem is that it normally dies down quickly.

Radio is a great medium to create fanfare for its listeners. I would suggest coupling your radio campaign with social media based calls to action (tweet us, message us on Facebook, etc) in order to introduce your platform to listeners of radio. Once these people get caught up in the excitement they may join your social media channels in order to ‘get involved.’ Opening up the opportunity for you to keep your fans involved in your brand over a longer engagement period than your radio campaign (assuming your content and engagement is useful, interesting and inline with your radio campaign objectives).

Building better brand engagement

In the book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” the Heath brothers explain how the human brain works in remembering and idea.

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has,the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. Your credit card number has one, if it’s lucky.

Using radio and social media will allow you to build deeper brand engagement and more hooks in your customers mind. I think the biggest challenge would be to build a creative campaign that leveraged the live nature of radio and then extended it to a deeper social media engagement that allowed willing customers to spend a lot of time entrenched in the campaign.

Why social media and radio are best friends originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

The Green Apron Book is a booklet that Starbucks gives its baristas.  It outlines Starbucks mission: “To provide an uplifting experience that enriches people’s daily lives,” along with 5 Principles for doing exactly that:

1. Be Welcoming: Offer everyone a sense of belonging.
2. Be Genuine: Connect, discover, respond.
3. Be Knowledgeable: Love what you do. Share it with others.
4. Be Considerate: Take care of yourself, each other, and the environment.
5. Be Involved: In the store, in the company, and in the community.

The principles promote that good business and great customer experiences come out of a personal connection between people. Social media relies on this principle as fundamental to your social media strategy. Without being personal and considerate you will struggle to build community.

Community is the centerpiece of your social media strategy, everything said and done by people inside your community will shape and define how your community evolves. By applying principles like the one’s outline here you can be sure that your community online and offline will grow and evolve into a very valuable business proposition.

Yes, this does mean that you need to allocate resources (mainly people) to manage the social media engagement for you business. Automation will just create a flat community with no energy and even less business interest.

Social Media principles from The Green Apron Book originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

This information comes from the Buyershpere report which I believe shows great insight into the platforms neccessary to create business to business sales leads from the internet.

A Summary: How important is your company website?

When looking at buying business services there are three stages of the purchase that have been identified:

1. Identifying and defining the need
2. Indentifying potential suppliers
3. Final selection of the supplier

In all three stages a company’s website was the primary channel used to gather information, even more than web searches. In stage one industry press, word of mouth and events were next in line as channels used to identify and define the need for the purchase.

The company website in this case has the opportunity to establish brand, share product details and specifications and add value to the different purchase stages. the interesting fact that rose oot of the study though was that the company website had very little influence on the conclusion of each stage.

The effect of social media on business to business purchasing decisions

It’s all about influence!

Every stage of the purchase cycle revealed that  social media channels and word of mouth were the primary influential channels that influenced the decisions made.

Stage one indicated blogs and word of mouth as the primary influencer, whilst stage two and three showed a preference towards twitter, blogs and Facebook.

How valuable is your website in business to business purchasing decisions? originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Consumer 2.0

New Keynote on Social Media – Consumer 2.0 originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Touch Durban saw the opportunity to leverage the Currie Cup by doing something that can only work on a social media platform. They supported another Twitter profile!!

@touchdurban put all their effort into getting as many people as possible to follow @just_sharks. This helped the @just_sharks claim the number three position on the SA Twitter Trends and take @touchdurban into the Top 10.

The Royal Hotel, who runs the @touchdurban profile, gave a weekend away to a sharks supporter for showing their support to the Sharks rugby team. This helped drive the interest towards the @just_sharks profile and promote the hotel and their twitter profile.

There are a few things to take away from this:

1) When promoting yourself in social media circles it can be very beneficial to run joint promotions rather than trying to “go it alone”

2) Competitions are a great way to generate excitement on social networks. When running your competitions make sure you in,clued a way for people to follow your profiles

3) Join the passion – people promote what they are passionate about.  Aligning @touchdurban to the Currie Cup Final bought the Durban events profile to the awareness of rugby fans during one of the most passionate times for the sport in South Africa. As people promoted their love for the sport @touchdurban was taken along for the ride.

Well done to the team at Touch Durban for doing such a great job.

Join Touch Durban on Facebook of Twitter

Touch Durban and Currie Cup Case Study originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Bearing in mind alot of the content here is just my opinion but we looked some case studies, why social media is important, how I launched my consultancy, the most important asset to social media and B2B marketing online.

You can download/listen the podcast here

Mike Saunders and Barrie Bramley talk about Social Media in South Africa originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Marketing Research

Marketing research needs to take place before the campaign begins and continuously thoughout the campaign activation process. If the correct metrics are not in place you are in danger of creating the wrong kind of return. Even worse, you may not generate any return on your campaign.

Facebook has done a very good job in providing its Facebook Insights on pages created in Facebook. These metrics can provide valuable information to the campaign and its return.

A Willingness to Change

All this research is available all the time. Some of it is even available in real-time. My suggestion when building your marketing strategy would be to identify your marketing decision maker and make sure that they are integrally involved in the strategy. You can make changes to your internet marketing campaign almost instantly, why not take advantage of this flexibility and make sure that your team is ready and willing to make quick decisions to activate intuitive marketing ideas as soon as possible.

Clear Project Management

There is nothing worse than a strategy activation where the team involved in carrying out the campaign are unsure of their responsibilities. Put someone in charge of making sure that all the task happen at the right time and make sure that everyone is clear about their responsibilities. Internet maketing campaigns often have alot of small but vitally important tasks that need to take place and these can easily fall through the cracks if not properly managed.

Good project management will also put the accountability in the hands of those responsible.

Content Creation

Differrent people use the internet in different ways. Some watch video’s, some read and other may prefer looking at images. A good internet marketing strategy will incorporate a combination of internet media to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Make sure that you have the resources in place to create blog articles, video and photo galleries. A well created content campaign that is engaging and that covers all your online media will put you in good stead to drive interested traffic to your website. Just remember to keep your content original

Keep It Simple

My favourite quote when it comes to internet marketing strategy is

“The role of the marketer is to remove choice”

I have no idea who said it first but it doesn’t really matter. The principle is made of gold. If you clutter you campaign with too many options you may destroy any chance of generating leads.

5 Fudamentals of a Good Internet Marketing Strategy originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

According to the report your top users of Twitter are:

• Designers
• Students
• Engineers
• Entrepreneurs
• Artists
• Writers
• Photographers
• DJ’s
• Managers
• Journalists
• Consultants

It would seem then that if you are looking for intelligent, young and creative individuals then Twitter may be where you can find them. Makes me wonder why recruitment agencies are not on Twitter in force.

You can download the entire report here: http://www.fuseware.net/reports/sa-twitter-2010/

Well done to Mike and the guys at Fuseware for putting this report together

Whose on Twitter in South Africa originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

Warwick Junction lies on the edge of the Durban’s inner-city and is the primary public transport interchange in the city. On an average day the area accommodates 460 000 commuters, and at least 6000 street vendors. Given the confluence of rail, taxi and bus transport, this area has always been a natural market for street vendors. The Markets of Warwick includes between 5000 and 8000 vendors trading in 9 distinct markets. Currently this is the only informally structured market in a public space of this magnitude, and thus establishes itself as the single most authentic African market that South Africa has to offer.

I was intrigued by the business and enjoyed working on this project because they seem to have found a niche in tourism that I have not seen yet. The tourism element is only a small part af a great vision for the founding company Asiye Etafuleni. I would encourage you to check this out and learn a bit more about the project. Even book a tour around the market (for a mere 50 bucks!).

A note on strategy

On a strategy side, due to time constraints, a full internet marketing campaign will be put into affect at a later stage. So the initial efforts were best spent in creating a simple, easy to use website that drove people to booking tours. The website also shows additional information for those looking to find out more about what the tours entail.

Marketing Warwick Junction originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach

What has become more interesting is that in South Africa 82% of the online population are on Facebook and 74% of the population are actively involved in social networking.  In March we also saw the launch of Google real-time search in South Africa, which brings social media updates into Google. There are also develoments, made by google, that mean you have better search potential in Google if more people are following you on twitter.

What is taking place is a fundamental shift in the way people use the internet. People are choosing to network, search, discuss, aggregate and understand the internet through social networks, of which Facebook is the largest. This has meant that Google has had to go to the social networks to get the information that people are intesteted in.

So the question: Is Facebook getting bigger than Google? What about in a South African context?

What do you think?

Is Facebook getting bigger than Google? originally posted on Mike Saunders - Keynote Speaker and Social Media Coach