Conquering the Social Marketing Frontier with Oracle Social Relationship Management

It’s hard to believe that the first social media site was created just shy of 20 years ago. Six Degrees was created in 1997. It enabled users to upload a profile and make friends with other users. Sound familiar? As social media has evolved into what it is today, the marketing landscape has changed drastically. Nowadays, digital marketing is a critical component of marketing strategy and social media marketing has become a staple in every marketer’s toolbox. In fact, according to MarketingProfs, over 2/3 of companies have a dedicated social media team.

It’s no wonder. According to this same study, more than half of B2B marketers have generated leads using social media campaigns. Almost 3/4 of prospects that “like” or “follow” a company on social media buy a product from that company. Your followers are interested in your brand, product, or service… and they are waiting for you to engage with them. If you’re not part of the conversation, you’re missing valuable opportunities to learn more about their needs, wants, and complaints. Social can have a serious impact on your organization, from marketing and sales to product development, HR, and customer service.

If you’re like most marketers, you’re planning to get deeper into social throughout the coming year. You may be wondering which strategies to employ, what tools to use, and/or what action items you can take to kickstart your endeavors. You’ve come to the right place.

I’ve been lucky enough to secure my certification in the implementation of Oracle’s Social Relationship Management Platform (SRM), and even luckier to have worked with a number of wonderful companies to implement the SRM platform inside of their marketing organization. I often get asked what is required to implement SRM. Where do you start? What should you prepare? What are the requirements? If you’re thinking of getting into SRM (which I highly encourage) or you’re ready to embark on an implementation, here are some tips to getting started.

Start with Strategy

As the famous saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Although it’s a bit cliche, it’s true. Similar to any marketing initiative, you need to define your goals, strategy, and plans before diving into SRM. Remember, similar to Oracle Eloqua, SRM is a tool – a means to an end. You need to define your destination and path so that the SRM platform can drive you there.

1. Clarify Your Mission – What are you trying to accomplish through social media? What are your goals and objectives? What strategies will you implement to reach your goals? What challenges will your social media marketing plan help you solve? Once you’ve set a clear vision for your social media initiatives, define the key performance indicators and metrics you need in order to show success. Once these questions are answered, written down, and agreed upon you can begin to strategize the best way to utilize SRM.
   
2. Identify Your Ideal Customers and Main Competitors – You may have this clearly articulated as part of your overall marketing strategy, but if it needs a refresher, now is the time. In order to effectively utilize social media, and SRM, you’ll need to know how your target audience thinks and acts, and more importantly, how they interact in the social space. The same goes for your competition. Think about who you’d like to research, who you need to run comparisons against, and which products matter most in your competition.
3. Choose Your Channels and Tactics – Once you’ve identified the above, you’ll be in a better position to define the channels you want to utilize (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.). Where do you want to engage? How will you engage? What tactics will you employ to market to, advertise to, and engage with your online audience?
   
4. Create a Content Strategy – Marketing automation folks are all too familiar with the importance of content. Without effective content that resonates with your target audience, you will not be successful. In the social media realm, content can be traditional articles, blog posts, white papers, landing pages, etc., but it can also be a topic calendar, post schedule, and social editorial calendar.
   
5. Allocate Budget and Resources – Just like any other marketing initiative, social requires its own budget and plan. What is your total expenditure for social? How will you allocate your budget? In which channels will you invest? Equally important is describing your internal resources. Who will manage your strategy? Who will monitor your listening topics? Who will engage with your audience? Who will post content to your various social media channels?
6. Set Social Media Implications throughout Your Organization – Social is not just for marketing and sales. Social media can have importance for your product development team, HR, and customer service teams, among others. Information you glean from social media listening and engaging will be extremely beneficial to share with your team members. Consider establishing a workflow to follow-up on certain items you read – perhaps a product idea, product malfunction, or customer service complaint.

Choose the Right Social Management Tool

Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) is a powerful tool that gives you the ability to engage with your audience on a multitude of levels. As Oracle states, SRM is “…the industry’s first unified social platform that delivers a seamless experience across listening, engagement, content creation, community management, paid media and the all-important analysis of a company’s social media efforts.” In short, SRM lets you listen to, engage with, and market to your audience through all of your social media channels.

Although there are a number of social management platforms on the market, Oracle SRM is the one platform that unifies the entire social engagement from beginning to end. Oracle SRM is broken into five main sections, in addition to the Social Station which gives you the power to create and manage visualizations and custom dashboards.

• Listen and Analyze gives you an in-depth look at how users are interacting with your social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. It also gives you the ability to “listen” for topics that are discussed in the broader social media space so you can learn more about your brand, your competitors, your products, and your industry. It even gives you context (indicators) around each topic so you know the sentiment behind the post, not just the words.
• Engage lets you see content from your social media channels and perform an action against the content. You can reply, comment, retweet, etc. from directly within the platform. You can even create workflows that allow you to “assign” content to various team members for follow-up – be it someone in marketing or another department such as customer service.
• Publish gives you the ability to schedule and manage your social media posts. It sounds simple, but it’s actually packed with features and functionality, including the ability to create approval workflows, tag your posts with specific values for reporting, and integrate with Oracle Eloqua, Oracle’s marketing automation platform, to share content and/or report on campaign metrics.
• Content and Apps gives you the ability to create your own branded Facebook tabs on Facebook. There are a number of advanced features, including a calendar of upcoming events, videos, and contests and sweepstakes.
• Workflow and Automation sets the foundation of SRM. W&A is where you configure your instance. Whether you need to add social media channels, setup tags for your posts, configure users and roles, establish workflows, etc., this is the place to go.

Implement Your Plans with SRM

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely interested in augmenting your social marketing programs, and, hopefully, considering Oracle SRM as your platform. If so, here are a few tips on how to best prepare for your implementation.

It’s best practice to define your foundation and follow a “crawl, walk, run” approach. Start with Workflow and Automation so you can plan the basics –  account settings, resources (teams, social properties, bundles, etc.) and users. Even if you aren’t ready to implement the platform, you can begin to plan the following:

• Bundles – Do you have a need to separate various groups (business units, regions, etc.) into their own bundle? Think of bundles as groups of social properties. You can assign different users, social channels, and workflows to each bundle.
• Users – Who will have access to the platform and in what capacity? What role should they be assigned?
• Resources – Which social media channels (social properties) do you want to utilize within SRM? Do you need to create teams (groups of individuals that work in certain social properties)?
• Workflows – What workflow(s) do you need for posting content to social channels? Who will be involved at each stage? How do you want to collaborate with team members from within the platform?
• Automations – Do you want to configure an automated process to handle certain incoming messages? Which labels do you want to apply to these messages? Which keywords should trigger these labels? Who should handle messages in each label? What should that process entail?
• Plugins and Integrations – SRM gives you the ability to connect natively with such platforms as Bitly, Oracle CRM On Demand, RightNow, and Siebel. Consider how you may use this functionality, specifically as it relates to interacting with your internal teams for follow-up on specific online messages. Also, how do you want to connect with Oracle Eloqua – to track social body language, share content, utilize tags for in-depth campaign reporting, or something else?
• Social Advertising – Is this something you plan to do? If so, plan your strategy before you move forward. SRM allows you to connect to your media accounts in order to create Facebook ads targeting your audience. You can even utilize look-alike audiences based on specific segments in ELQ. Before you begin implementing SRM, define your goals and process for social media targeting.

In addition to defining your configuration, you should begin planning your use of the platform’s main functionalities, including Listen & Analyze, Engage, and Publish. One of your first tasks during implementation will be to define which topics you want to follow and analyze. Topics are search queries that collect mentions of your brand, product, industry, etc. from the social space. You can even add listening topics for industry phrases, events, competitors, etc. – whatever is important to you.

What do you want to learn about your company, products, competitors, and industry? How can you benefit from learning more about your target audience? If you could understand one thing in greater detail, what would it be? Don’t forget to engage other members of your organization, including product development and customer service. Listening to key topics can teach you a lot about your audience and potential business opportunities.

Also, think about which indicators matter most in your analysis. Indicators mark the sentiment behind the messages you’re pulling. Are they positive or negative? Are they related to price or quality? Do they imply loyalty to your brand or, conversely, an intent to switch? Indicators analyze your messages to a whole new level. What would be most beneficial for you to know?

Last, but certainly not least, plan your engagement strategy. Who will be monitoring the conversations on your social media channels? Who will be responsible for responding and/or assigning responsibility? Is there a corporate/marketing policy on how individuals can respond, whether marketing, sales, HR, product development, or customer service? Most importantly, how are you planning to establish meaningful conversations that amplify your brand and ultimately increase revenue?

Wrap It Up

Embarking on a social media journey and implementing a management tool like Oracle SRM are no small tasks. You’ll need to set proper expectations internally, have a clear plan, and set aside valuable resources. Whether you are implementing SRM yourself, or working with a partner like Relationship One, make sure to do your pre-work. The more you strategize and plan prior to your configuration, the greater your chances of success as you dive into the world of social media. Just like anything, expertise comes with time. Social media success comes with experience – fine-tune your topics, engagement plans, publishing strategy, etc. until you’re meeting and exceeding your own expectations.

(Shameless plug!) For more information, or for additional assistance with your SRM implementation, reach out to Relationship One.