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Debbie DeGabrielle is the Chief Marketing Officer at Visible Technologies. She is responsible for executing marketing, communications and branding strategies to drive increased awareness and revenue growth. She believes social intelligence has the power to accelerate business outcomes, resulting in heightened awareness, loyalty and profitability. Throughout her career Debbie has focused on creating tangible marketing results for a broad array of companies. From mature businesses focused on growing market share and revenue, to start-ups with a nascent competitive position and the need to accelerate time to market. With successful start-up experience in the analytics space, she brings firsthand experience to applying analytics to improve marketing, customer service and business
outcomes. She has the added perspective of having held executive positions at Eddie Bauer, First Interstate Bank, WRQ, and as CMO at Intelligent Results, which was acquired by First Data Corporation and subsequently became the catalyst for their Analytics Center of Excellence. During her career, Debbie has worked extensively in Europe and Asia. She is a graduate of NC State University, the Executive MBA finance review at UW, and holds a Diplome de Cuisine Provencale—from L’ Ecole Megalithes, Gordes, France.

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Making the Most of Social Media

Written on
Mar 4, 2011 
Author
Debbie DeGabrielle  |
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Making the Most of Social Media

juggle_smallADOTAS – Working with successful global 2,000 brands has taught us some valuable lessons on what are the most critical things businesses can do to make 2011 their most successful social year yet. Here are 10 of our key learnings:

1. Be a social company and do it at the enterprise level.

Don’t just take a project-based approach to social media that is focused on a single campaign, product launch or one-off promotion. This means that your whole company considers social media as a fully evolved channel to be considered right alongside all your other established and better understood channels.

It means you have worked through regulatory, organizational, promotional and servicing considerations. And that you are ready to engage your market both in the moment, and over time to build brand affinity.

2. Integrate everything.

In some regards this is just another way of repeating what we said above. But integration places its focus squarely on the actual implementation side of things. Resolving to be social is all about organizational, structural and strategic considerations. Integration means connecting people, processes and systems for more efficient outcomes.

3. Think long-term and act in the moment.

If you have a solid strategy, you’re poised to take advantage of the minute by minute changes social presents to act opportunistically, without confusing your audience or working at cross purposes with your goals.

4. Be transparent and be absolutely honest (no corporate speak).

The power of social conversation is that it is genuine. Say what you can do and then do it, don’t ignore what’s uncomfortable and don’t say you will do something and then not follow through. Transparency means that sometimes the things you would prefer to suppress are the very things you should surface and resolve. Problems can provide opportunities for “heroes in the making”.

5. Break down the silos.
 Your followers, customers, admirers and detractors don’t care how you’re organized; they want clear, immediate and honest interactions. They are talking one-on-one to you, not to an entire company. They want a response, not a non-answer or to be foisted off on someone else. If marketing creates expectations about the brand as part of its promotional mandate, then servicing those expectations is an integral part of effective marketing as well.

6. Take risks and ‘fail fast forward’

Social media provides an “in the moment” opportunity. It is a chance to test things, to monitor, adjust, to learn on the fly and to attempt things that other channels are not designed to accommodate. This is AB testing at its finest.

7. Know who matters and why.

It isn’t always the person with the most followers. It isn’t always the most vocal person in the crowd. Influence may be one of the biggest nuances to understand.

8. Be clear about your goals for social media and demand business return for this investment.

You can’t measure your success if you didn’t have clear expectations about what you hoped to accomplish. Other channels, such as the web, have well established metrics. You know who visited, how many people visited, what content they interacted with, what they responded to, what they bought and you know for effort expended what came back to you. In its own way, social has the ability to deliver against specific business metrics. So set clear goals and measure constantly.

9. Analyze everything.

We think of it as getting below the strategic objectives and considering the nuances. Is there a word, a phrase that resonates more effectively with your audience? Is there an offer that returns a better and faster response? Is there a timeframe to solve problems that is seen as “heroic” and how much longer is seen as unacceptable? Can you improve a campaign design, refine your offers; reinforce your brand promise more effectively? Analytics make it possible to perform at your best.

10. Optimize every channel with social data.

Understand where social adds to the mix and where it doesn’t play. Incorporate social data at the front end to design a more effective campaign. Apply feedback to test the message effectiveness and fine tune. Deliver social insight through brick and mortar channels.

We define success as delivering measurable business value through social channels and leveraging these lessons in social intelligence is going to be critical to optimizing investments in social media and driving long-term brand affinity and sales.





Reader Comments.

Hi Debbie – Great points.

I believe #2 “Integrate Everything” and #6 Be clear about goals are the top two of this list.

That said, I think the description for #6 “fail fast” is too vague. Social media does provide ample opportunity for companies to test strategies, but not to simply fly by the seat of their paints and post whatever they want.

It’s important for companies to A. Learn/understand the channels they’re engaging in and B. Create guidelines for “how” they’re going to engage. Otherwise, a company can quickly find themselves in a crisis like Kenneth Cole.

Posted by Kristof | 9:37 pm on March 4, 2011.

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