Not for profit and not waiting for anyone: The Humane Society's forward thinking tips on social

This is part two of notes from the Facebook ROI event as part of Social Media Week London #SMWUK. 

Carie Lewis of The Humane Society (US) was one powerhouse of a (social) woman! Here I've tried to get down as much as I could of her rapid-fire goodness. The Humane Society are getting very strong results, so I highly recommend taking two minutes to cast an eye over her tips below.
Please forgive the rough notes and over to you Carie...

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The Humane Society

- raised 500K via FB fan based fundraising (2009 - 2011)

- stimulated 100K to take action in the 9 months of 2012

- have a self-funding social team! All the people working on social are payed through revenue gained through social

Structures and working practices that work for The Humane Society:

- have a dedicated social : PR liaison "social communications manager" (from my experience - most of the industry is too silo'ed and missing this opportunity to massively amplify social and PR content and activity - this is a brilliant idea!)

- SM is a small part of everyone's job, but we are the (friendly) gatekeeper. 

- The Humane Society have over 100 presences on FB in addition to our fan page. This is great and we manage it by requesting they all  sign an admin contract so we have shared expectations. The clear agreement helps communications consistency and shared improvements

- response time - FB = 2 hrs and Tw 30mins

- no automated tools. The team craft appropriate messages for each platform

- not afraid to make mistakes. And have a crisis plan.

- every single piece of content is shareable on FB, twitter and via email

- Home page has live feed of social content

- have a daily comms meeting every morning - 9mins - so they each share what each person shares what putting out that day. Integration!

- have a content plan (ensuring good content). Flexible but ensures continuity

- don't measure success by number of fans / followers. This is just the beginning of the relationship

- do people who you engage with do what you want? (tie your activity to your goals)

- how can you get them to do it

- how are you making it valuable to your fans?

- how will you get them to come back

- post once a day >> relavent, interesting and ??

How we use social 'channels':

Twitter - customer service and relationship tool

FB - our action oriented community and deeper, sustained relationship tool

Monitoring - across all channels (and all versions of the Humane Society name)

The Humane Society's social philosophy:

- provide what our audience want

- make it fun with competitions

- show audience ways they can make a difference

- use polls for simple engagement

- listen to all posts

- answer every question.

- Have creative additional engagement opportunities - have regular fun stuff i.e. fun fridays or questions for the audience such as "how did your pet get their name?" Which got 1000 responses

How we convert from Fans to Constituents:

- bring all asks inside FB (don't redirect to site etc i.e. forms, entries.

- give them options 

- use explicit call to actions

- allow comments but have a policy and monitor

- ask people to share immediately after they take action

- don't dismiss custom tabs yet (1% of people go there) i.e. put magazine in the custom tab and handle questions there

- use promoted posts (which will increase £) to increase base. v. targeted 

- close the loop on previous posts - i.e. show the audience impact of their vote

- make it personal - tie it to them. i.e. their top campaign, "I will not leave behind my pet behind" about what happens in personal household emergencies

Measures that The Humane Society Use

- no. of actions taken

- no. of donors

- amount of donations

- no. of new names to file

- customer service wins

- sentiment %

- growth rate

- most popular content

- no. mentions

- notable mentions (i.e. celebs, supporters, orgs, companies) Supporters with influential bases

>> do a weekly reports for the execs. 

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There you have it, a bullet list of useful goodness from a team clearly well ahead of the curve in using social to build their engaged audience.

You can find more of Carie's thoughts and presentations here: http://www.slideshare.net/cariegrls

Thank you Carie!

Social media strategy, metrics and tips from Play.com

The over-subscribed Facebook ROI event as part of Social Media Week London #SMWUK yielded some great advice and some handy benchmarks for those thinking through their social strategy. The impressive triple act of Chris Howard of Play.com, Carie Lewis of The Humane Society (US) and Tejay Patel of Nokia had these words of wisdom for us... (please forgive me if I have missed a wee bit here and there as I was getting it down)

This first post will be learnings from Chris Howard, Head of Online Marketing at Play.com. Over to you Chris...

Thinking about social media ROI and Metrics

There are so many myths around social ROI. The two most common ones are 1) that it is impossible to measure and 2) you can measure ROI, but it's not worth it because the impact is so small. 

These myths are perpetuated because of laziness, location and lack of urgency. What does this mean?

• if measure based on last click effectiveness, yes results are limited, particularly in comparison to  search and affiliates. Search is essentially funnelling existing interest / purchase funnel. Affiliates are effective as they they do the same, driving conversion, often based on discounts and offers. But this is not the whole picture. It is just measuring the last step in the consumer purchase funnel. 
• Social - In social we get to speak not just to people ready to buy, we speak to people not in the existing purchase funnel (earlier), therefore the direct last click impact is limited. On the other hand, we reach and activate potential new / repeat buyers and therefore can gain more incremental sales. 
• Location - where social media sits in organisation. Often in areas that not commonly held accountable to sales targets i.e PR, customer service v sales or commercial. 
• Lack of urgency - often no clear spending on social vs. the £5million you are spending on TV - therefore limited urgency to measure ROI of that channel vs. traditional media

At Play.com they have a new version of purchase funnel with additional metrics:

1. Fan acquisition

2. Post engagement

3. Campaign engagement (metrics generating customer insight re customer interests and permissions)

4. New customers (which is where the standard sales business metrics sit)

Tips and results for each stage of the Play.com purchase funnel

1. Fan acquisition

Tips: Use competitions, 'like gate' to ensure FB fans, cross promotion on email, leverage owned media.

2. Post engagement (engagement being likes, shared etc) 

Tips: most posts drive conversation rather than purchase (around the categories). Each post has multiple calls to action, limited to 2-3 posts per day (timed for greatest engagement - lunchtime, mid pm and as people are leaving work.

Results: by optimising the timing of posts they moved from 5K talking to 20K talking about this

3. Campaign engagement

Tips: Run multiple campaigns in parallel for wide appeal. i.e. trip to NYC with a film or exclusive clothing to different demographic, incentivise sharing to drive reach into friends of fans, ensure data capture for future retargeting. 

Results: 

- Play.com can have 50K users entering competitions per month. 

- Customers who have interacted with Play.com on FB on average spend 24% more than customers that have not in the subsequent 6 months.

4. New customers

Tips: only integrate product offers within conversation posts if it is a truly exceptional offer, include buy now CTA, exclusive time limited offers relevant to our fans interests

Results:

- Customers acquired via FB - on average spend 30% more 

- FB is their best channel for fan acquisition - more than 50% higher likelihood that sale will be (?? apols, missed the rest)

- Currently more than 1% sales on Play.com are via FB and it is their fastest growth channel.

Planning your social media strategy

Steps recommended as your plan your social media strategy:

1. define the business objective your social media will address

2. plan measurement into your SM activity

3. feed the top of the funnel with new fans and use your existing fans to help

4. learn from what works and optimise accordingly

Thank you to Facebook, EngageSciences and Chris for their generosity in sharing this practical and insightful advice.

Up next, the fabulous tips from Carie and Tejay. Stay tuned...