Live from Email Evolution Conference 2010: Developing Successful Social Media Strategy

Salmat’s national sales manager of Targeted Media Solutions Sean McDonell attended day one of the 2010 Email Evolution Conference in Miami Beach Florida. Here are the key takeaways from this session. 

In the mid 90’s Yahoo had two thirds of the search market in the US. As a new decade arrives, Google has flipped that stat on its head, while four other players in the market at the time have disappeared. We have all watched the rise and rise of Google.

Google continue to invent. They know that what they have today doesn’t mean success in the future. This thinking can be applied to Social Media.

From Friendster and MySpace to Facebook and now Twitter, we need to listen to where our customers are and how they want to engage us. Well at least that is what is being discussed at the 2010 Email Evolution Conference in Miami.

Attending a workshop that explores developing a successful social media strategy and synergistic integration, it is clear that the best practice is to listen. When your customers talk about you in social media, whether they talk about your brand, staff, industry or even competitors with limited key strokes the message cuts to the point. It will generally be really, really good, or flat out terrible.

The good news is the tools that are available to report on your social media activity.

Socialmention.com is one such site for real-time social media alerts and analysis (similar to Google Alerts, but for social media).

Tweetbeep is another tool available to monitor Twitter conversations that mention your keywords such as brand terms. You can keep track of these terms every time they appear in a Tweet.

Flowtown.com is the next stage of email marketing, allowing you to connect with your contacts in the social web to assist with more targeted campaigns. It is a service where you start with a customer email address or indeed your entire database and it will look at where your customers participate in social media, their location and demographic information.

These tools enable you to manage your online reputation and bring back some of the power to the organisation.

But remember, creating a Facebook page and recruit a few fans, Tweeting to some followers and starting the framework of a blog doesn’t equal a Social Media strategy.

Like most planning, the why should come before the how. Reporting on friends and followers doesn’t necessarily mean social media success, answering your why – awareness, sales or loyalty can then determine the how and what that success will look like.

A great case study is what Best Buy’s have created with @Twelpforce on Twitter. Identifying that help with many of the products they sell was a key topic of conversation in social media, rather than product sales details and offers, has resulted in Best Buy’s building a network of ‘twelpers’ that reply to queries or issues shared on Twitter. Interestingly Best Buy’s have moved from the brand URL in their TV commercials, to the customer service positioning directing consumers to the ‘twelpers’ domain!



The technology we use will continue to evolve and platforms change. There is no secret ingredient to successfully using social media as part of your media mix, but like all good advice the key is to plan and answer the question why?

The facilitators of this workshop were great, you can find them on Twitter:

@mikecorak @djwaldow @jaybaer