Social is the New Search

“Social is the new search,” per Gail Horwood, EVP Digital Programming & Strategy for Martha Stewart at 6/10 Publishing Point meetup. Highlights:

Successes of Martha Stewart Social Media Strategy

• Facebook Fans: In 6 months, when they started actively programming on the Facebook page, fans have organically increased 1,275%. And this is without any contests, just real fans of the brand.
• Referrals to Web Site: Social Media had less than .5% of referrals to web site, they increased it to 3%.
• Referrals from Social Media: While they haven’t been able to quantify results from social media, the Friends of Martha program didn’t exist 6 months ago and is now sold out.

Tips for social media success:

• Audience: This about them first and always
• Authenticity: Engage to assure your fans that your accounts are genuine. If someone else tweets for you, should make it clear who it is.
• Recognition: If someone tweets that they like a recipe or segment on TV show, say “thanks.” Acknowledge and engage fans. They only started doing this in the last 3 months. They now identify, follow, retweet, and thank those who link to, tweet about, or mention Martha Stewart content by using search.twitter.com, Omniture referrer data, backlink checker tools, and the PR mentions. If comments are just negative and nasty they usually don’t respond, but if there’s a real problem they will look at resolving.
• Information: Use the medium for information-gathering and to help steer programming decisions.
• Ease of Social Registration: Make it easy to connect to Facebook from your site.
• Own Your Brand: Do you own your brand online? See Fred Wilson’s advice on owning your brand. If you don’t take responsibility for your brand, someone else will. Conan O’Brien didn’t own his domain name – see www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/arts/television/07conan.html.

What works for Martha Stewart:

• Twitter: Live tweets and snapshots from Martha’s busy social events, contests and promotions, solicitation of questions for the #askmartha segment on the show, cross-promotion of other MSLO blogs, applications and products launches. They have tweeting themes, where they ask questions such as, “what is your favotie thing to grill?” They promote trending tweets like the Martha Stewart Grilling Cookbook from @martharadio. Also, it’s not much work for an Editor to live tweet at an event, according to Horwood, and they saw followers increase 383%.
• Facebook: Status updates with photos of Martha and her whereabouts, simple reminders (happy new year, set your clocks, recipes); Purina ad deal – post a pet profile and Purina’ll give $1 up to $500K.
• iPhone app: They made a mistake with the frequency of alerts and users were very vocal. They invited users to send feedback through Facebook comments and they monitored and mined the responses for useful suggestions for the next release.
• Ning: They started a Ning community for a marketing contest, but people were still signing up when the contest was over. Now they profile someone in a newsletter and keep this community active.

Metrics for Social Media

• Off site Measurement: Facebook likes, comments, wall posts, fan boost, post quality, video/photo views
• General: Blogger covereage, sentiment: positive vs. negative
• Twitter: Followers increase, re-tweets, mentions, direct messages, Hashtag use
• Trendrr: Tracks Twitter trends, influence in real-time and over time. Track hashtags vs. competitors
• What the Trend: Constantly updated list of trending topics from twitter
• Google Analytics: A real-time analytics tool
• Radian6

– Kathy Sandler

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