How often do we see social media campaigns that appear clever, creative and cool? First the social media geeks discover it, pass it around, eventually the non-geeks get enticed into the campaign and its only a matter of time until the campaign life cycle starts dropping down and then there's that dreaded silence. No activity on the social networks!
As we all are aware, it doesn't take too long for people to unlike/unfollow/undo you. For newbies, treading through the waters of social media is almost like dealing with a bi-polar lover. It is easy to find yourself in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Apart from absolutely keeping away from sending out 'Hard Sell' messages, you have to ensure not to annoy your fans/followers/readers with robotic nonsense. Your brand has to be a real life person, it can't be a 'friend' because that is getting too personal but it has to play the role of that 'friend of a friend'!
I am a fan of the British high street brand, Dorothy Perkins, on Facebook. Every now and again they have some offers going on, there's always updates about someone winning something and even though I never visit their Facebook page, I always read their feed updates. I am a fan of 350+ things on Facebook but the first name that comes to my mind when I think of audience engagement and continuous improvement is Dorothy Perkins!
Kaizen, thats the topic I want to address in this blog post. Can the philosophy of changing for improvement be applied to Social Media Marketing?
Kaizen is "... a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes. "
The five elements of Kaizen are,
1. Teamwork
2. Personal Discipline
3. Improve Morale
4. Quality Circles
5. Suggestions for improvements
Within the context of social media, your readers/fans/followers become your external stakeholders thereby, making their contribution highly essential. How are you affecting their morale and over a prolonged period, as a result of your interaction, has their level of activity improved or diminished? This is just one question that popped up in my mind when I thought of how Kaizen can be applied to social media.
Of-course every action has a reaction, nature's law that applies to business! To best work with what social media is offering to you as a business, you need to make sure you are truly using what is being offered and not over-looking some aspects. More often than not, companies have a traditional plan and stick to it, with social media, you have to think outside the box. You don't have to be the flashy hipster but being a wall flower won't help either. Customers don't want a dancing monkey but they do want something different, as I mentioned earlier, the customer is your bi-polar lover!
So, how can Kaizen help you?
Start at home
Focus on your internal stakeholders. These are the people that shape your business. The littlest activities they do, stabilize and keep your business alive. Kaizen is about improving in small steps, concentrating on the little issues to tackle the bigger issue. Begin by asking your employees how they would like to see the company's social strategy shape up. It is easy to think you have all the answers until another person walks into the room and throws a curve ball, a point of view you never thought before, that is brilliance of being human, each one of us has something new to add.
Now move onto what your customers want. You can start by running a campaign to ask your customers for a feed back. People like me love filling feed back forms and I can guarantee, there are plenty like me out there. Get your sales team to do what they do best and bring back those feedback forms.
Introduction to social media
Run a company wide training session to ensure everyone and anyone is aware of how social media works. It is an important part of our future, things are only going to get more connected. Most people are aware of how social media functions and there's always that little percent who don't like social media (my best friend included here), you still have a majority of your employees who will support your social media campaign. Little by little, every voice, every post on your social network will send a message to the customer that there's some 'engagement' going on!
Keeping up with the momentum
When you view social media from the traditional marketer's point of view, you run a campaign, generate interest and increase ROI. This can apply to some new media channels but not to social networks. Whatever you do, keep the momentum!
Some weeks you might not be able to generate as much interest as you would in other weeks but the moment you start lagging behind on updates, you stop being relevant. You don't have to run offers every day, Starbucks doesn't but it does a great job of engaging with the audience every day on the Facebook page.
Fair enough, Starbucks wouldn't have to post anything engaging and could still generate user content but as a smaller organization you have a better chance of building more genuine and stable relationships. Nothing better than knowing your customer by their name and who doesn't want to be treated special?
Momentum in this context requires that you review your past decisions and moving forward apply the little changes. You'll learn that some things just aren't working for you, may be you are posting information the readers are not interested in, this is when you go back for creative input to the people who had ideas -your employees+your customers. May be it is time you start talking about more industry relevant information than selling your product. After all, social media can only engage, it is not an aggressive medium for marketing.
If your outreach is wide and you have quite a few things you want to do with your social media strategy, you can assign a Kaizen event to each individual issue. This should make reviewing and evaluating their effectiveness a lot simple.
As mentioned earlier, Kaizen is very human centric. We as people are funny, each one of us is capable of being that bi-polar lover. You will get overwhelmed when you hear 10 different views on how your social media approach should move forward. This is when the smart people who know their stuff and who you pay, find balance between the ideas and generate an approach that will be best suited to a majority.
Apart from having an extremely creative Facebook presence, OPI (nail lacquer) have a brilliantly engaging page. Highly interactive and posting discussions that aren't only about selling their products, OPI does a great job of fascinating girls like me!
As we all are aware, it doesn't take too long for people to unlike/unfollow/undo you. For newbies, treading through the waters of social media is almost like dealing with a bi-polar lover. It is easy to find yourself in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Apart from absolutely keeping away from sending out 'Hard Sell' messages, you have to ensure not to annoy your fans/followers/readers with robotic nonsense. Your brand has to be a real life person, it can't be a 'friend' because that is getting too personal but it has to play the role of that 'friend of a friend'!
I am a fan of the British high street brand, Dorothy Perkins, on Facebook. Every now and again they have some offers going on, there's always updates about someone winning something and even though I never visit their Facebook page, I always read their feed updates. I am a fan of 350+ things on Facebook but the first name that comes to my mind when I think of audience engagement and continuous improvement is Dorothy Perkins!
Kaizen, thats the topic I want to address in this blog post. Can the philosophy of changing for improvement be applied to Social Media Marketing?
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| Image from Kaizentek.com |
Kaizen is "... a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes. "
The five elements of Kaizen are,
1. Teamwork
2. Personal Discipline
3. Improve Morale
4. Quality Circles
5. Suggestions for improvements
Within the context of social media, your readers/fans/followers become your external stakeholders thereby, making their contribution highly essential. How are you affecting their morale and over a prolonged period, as a result of your interaction, has their level of activity improved or diminished? This is just one question that popped up in my mind when I thought of how Kaizen can be applied to social media.
Of-course every action has a reaction, nature's law that applies to business! To best work with what social media is offering to you as a business, you need to make sure you are truly using what is being offered and not over-looking some aspects. More often than not, companies have a traditional plan and stick to it, with social media, you have to think outside the box. You don't have to be the flashy hipster but being a wall flower won't help either. Customers don't want a dancing monkey but they do want something different, as I mentioned earlier, the customer is your bi-polar lover!
So, how can Kaizen help you?
Start at home
Focus on your internal stakeholders. These are the people that shape your business. The littlest activities they do, stabilize and keep your business alive. Kaizen is about improving in small steps, concentrating on the little issues to tackle the bigger issue. Begin by asking your employees how they would like to see the company's social strategy shape up. It is easy to think you have all the answers until another person walks into the room and throws a curve ball, a point of view you never thought before, that is brilliance of being human, each one of us has something new to add.
Now move onto what your customers want. You can start by running a campaign to ask your customers for a feed back. People like me love filling feed back forms and I can guarantee, there are plenty like me out there. Get your sales team to do what they do best and bring back those feedback forms.
Introduction to social media
Run a company wide training session to ensure everyone and anyone is aware of how social media works. It is an important part of our future, things are only going to get more connected. Most people are aware of how social media functions and there's always that little percent who don't like social media (my best friend included here), you still have a majority of your employees who will support your social media campaign. Little by little, every voice, every post on your social network will send a message to the customer that there's some 'engagement' going on!
Keeping up with the momentum
When you view social media from the traditional marketer's point of view, you run a campaign, generate interest and increase ROI. This can apply to some new media channels but not to social networks. Whatever you do, keep the momentum!
Some weeks you might not be able to generate as much interest as you would in other weeks but the moment you start lagging behind on updates, you stop being relevant. You don't have to run offers every day, Starbucks doesn't but it does a great job of engaging with the audience every day on the Facebook page.
Fair enough, Starbucks wouldn't have to post anything engaging and could still generate user content but as a smaller organization you have a better chance of building more genuine and stable relationships. Nothing better than knowing your customer by their name and who doesn't want to be treated special?
Momentum in this context requires that you review your past decisions and moving forward apply the little changes. You'll learn that some things just aren't working for you, may be you are posting information the readers are not interested in, this is when you go back for creative input to the people who had ideas -your employees+your customers. May be it is time you start talking about more industry relevant information than selling your product. After all, social media can only engage, it is not an aggressive medium for marketing.
If your outreach is wide and you have quite a few things you want to do with your social media strategy, you can assign a Kaizen event to each individual issue. This should make reviewing and evaluating their effectiveness a lot simple.
As mentioned earlier, Kaizen is very human centric. We as people are funny, each one of us is capable of being that bi-polar lover. You will get overwhelmed when you hear 10 different views on how your social media approach should move forward. This is when the smart people who know their stuff and who you pay, find balance between the ideas and generate an approach that will be best suited to a majority.
Apart from having an extremely creative Facebook presence, OPI (nail lacquer) have a brilliantly engaging page. Highly interactive and posting discussions that aren't only about selling their products, OPI does a great job of fascinating girls like me!
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