The Joy Of Discovery: A Good Starting Point in Planning Social Media Strategy

Ruth Bastedo, September 21 2012

Ruth Bastedo is Director, Business Development at Social Media Group. Follow @rutbas

I come across a lot of business owners and marketers who are wondering how to tackle social media. I spoke last week to a group of women business owners at the Go for The Greens Business Development Conference at Walt Disney World last week, and next week I’m talking to a group of SME’s at The Financial Executives International Conference, “Leading Economic Growth” next week in Toronto. What I hear, is that while most companies instinctively know that they need to address social media in some way, it is still hard to know where to start.

In the immediate term, social media may or may not have an important impact on your business. It’s when you start looking at long term trends, and at the deep impact that social media is having on our fundamental communications infrastructure, that you start realizing that love it or hate it, you cannot ignore potential depth of social media on the way your clients and customers are going to live in the future, and interact with your business.

This is the place to start. Take the time to figure out how social media could potentially impact your clients and customers, as they connect and interact with your brand, products and services. How can you leverage this social interaction to move your business objectives forward?

We call this process “Discovery”. During our Discovery sessions with clients, we go through a number of exercises to look at this problem from a variety of perspectives- but one of the exercises I love the most, is called an “environmental scan”, where we go look at how the future could impact the client’s business, from a variety of different perspectives (demographic, technological, regulatory etc.). Discovery has become a key part of our planning process.

A 2012 comScore report, “Canada Digital Future in Focus” states “Social is quickly moving from a supporting role to a key pillar in monetizing digital.” It sounds like a platitude, until you start looking at the numbers.

According to the research in the report, Canadians on the whole spend an average 45 hours of time online a month, and lead the world in online engagement. Time spent on social networking has now surpassed the time spent on any other category of activity online. If you look at younger demographics, the 18-24 age range, you can see the strongest surge of time spent on social media quarter over quarter. Viewers under 35 also account for 57% of all videos viewed online. Smart phone penetration has reached 45 percent of the Canadian market.  If you’re not familiar with the report, I urge you to download it, and take a quick browse through.

The pace of change is wild. As a business owner or marketer, where do you start?

At the moment, according to a recent US based survey on “Social Software and Big Data Analytics in Business” by Mzinga, Teradata Aster, and The Center for Complexity in Business on how companies are using social media, 64% of companies are using it for marketing/brand experience, 47% for customer experience/service/support, 39% for employee collaboration and 27% for sales.

Those areas are likely baseline areas to get right first, and to use as a starting point to develop meaningful measures of success, that map to your business, and to your strategic business objectives.

In the same survey, 77% of companies said that they currently DO NOT measure the ROI of their social media programs, and 49% say they are not using social media to its full potential.

We are all only at the very beginning of all this. Engage in the “Joy of Discovery”, to make a sensible and manageable start to tackling long term planning, and determe what measures of success are going to be right for the future of your business. It’s a challenge for all organizations to determine what level of investment in social media is appropriate, but the question is no longer a “should I”, but is moving to a “how should I”.

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Group Buying …..Still a Good Idea for Businesses?

Wangari Kamande, August 23 2012

Wangari Kamande is a Research Analyst at Social Media Group.

If you’re an avid group buyer, you are all too familiar with the lure of buying trips to those random vacation spots in the middle of winter as the deals role in on an early, gloomy Monday morning, or buying that dinner deal at 4pm in the afternoon when you could eat a sack of potatoes or better yet, that massage deal on Friday after a long work week and you just want to get pampered because you DESERVE IT!  These are the moments where I stare at my credit card as if it were a person and say to it, “Are you going to hurt me for buying this?” the answer is usually “most likely”…so I take a deep breath and let it slide…

So how is group buying working out lately?

State of the Industry in Canada

There are a number of group buying sites. I personally subscribe to Groupon and TeamBuy; other popular sites are: Dealfind, WagJag and LivingSocial. Here are some interesting facts from GroupBuying Canada:

• Canadians spent approximately $400 million through daily deals sites in 2011
• Group buying in Canada has a current market size of $415 million
• There are about 140 daily deal / group buying sites in Canada and over 40 aggregators (more than the US on per capita basis)
• In any given city or province, there are different leading sites e.g ,Tuango completely dominates in Montreal and the province of Quebec
• Over 50% of all group buying sites have been launched from Toronto
• The majority of deals and sales are also from Toronto
• Niche sites are not as popular in Canada in comparison to the US where niche sites for golf, pets, kids, food are popular

Source: Canadian Coupon Saver

Given that the industry is ripe with opportunity, is it all fair game for small businesses?

Pros

• The model appears to work best for attracting new customers as many discount seekers purchase what they would normally not try because they are getting a good deal.
• Creates an awareness and provides exposure for businesses, especially small and medium sized ones.
• While customer loyalty is not promised, if customers get a good experience they are likely to provide repeat business and thanks to the Internet and social media, word of mouth recommendation is limitless.

Cons

• Customers are spoiled for choice, there is a new deal every day and customers are likely to go with the best deal of the day, so customer retention might be somewhat of a pipe dream.
• Some small businesses are not always prepared to deal with the influx of customers as a result of the deal; this could harm your brand’s image in the eyes of customers and negate any positive results you hoped to gain.

According to dealassessor.com, the list of questions below are useful for businesses who are considering using group buying sites as a marketing or selling strategy:

1. What are your goals and objectives that make group buying sites a good strategy for your company?
2. Can your business afford it?
3. Can your company meet the expense of offering products or services at a discounted rate?
4. Do  you have a high profit margin?
5. Can you up-sell or cross-sell other products and services for potential profit?

Outside of Canada, the industry in general appears to be facing some challenges. Recently there have been articles surrounding consumer fatigue on daily deals, according to a New York Times article, when Groupon reported its second-quarter results this week, it said that active customers grew just 3 percent, a significant slowdown from previous quarter-to-quarter customer growth rates. While traffic to Groupon was higher at the beginning of 2012 than last year, it was down almost 10 percent in May and June from the same months in 2011, according to comScore.

Further, groupbuyingcanada, has been reporting a number of acquisitions in this space with Teambuy purchasing Fabfind and Wagjag and Tuango just announced the acquisition of the assets of DealoftheDay from the Yellow Pages. While other Daily Deal providers seem to be shrinking or selling and investment firms and groups want nothing to do with the Daily Deal business, it seems that for Tuango and Wagjag that is all great news. They, unlike others, are growing and on a buying spree.

What do you think about the future of group buying sites?

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