Success Factors in Social Media Marketing

a Lecture held by Clemens Koeltringer and Christoph Berg


Social Media is a topic that regards us all, but how does it effect companys that lay trust on those specific networks/programs in order to promote their company, hotel or organisation. 


In the Lecture held by Mr. Clemes Koeltringer and Mr. Christoph Berg exactly that topic is being discussed and explained.


The first question I want to engage you with is "What are the true motivators to engage in social media for private persons and companys, that actually try to do promotion for their companies??

• direct contact (being able to connect directly with your potential business partners)
• information (easy and simply access to information about an organisation)
• modern image (we all have to adapt to Web 2.0, and so do companies)
• interaction (using letters and emails is not enough, it has to be brought to another level)
• and last but not least feedback (knowing how people feel about you/the comapany that you work in, or you own)

In a case study in which 10 different countries participated, facebook was on place 1, the followers right behind that were twitter, youtube, flickr....etc. When it came to the question on how much time people actually spent with the applications of Web 2.0 the highest number was 40 hours per week. Which is amazingly high. What was interesting to see was, that the most time spent in the WWW was around the middle of the week, during working hours. 

Mr. Koeltringer suggested that 3 levels of SoM expertise could be detected which are:

1. Level 1:  which is basically learning by doing. Sometimes also contracting online marketing agencies to kick of SMM activities
2. Level 2: People who follow a predefined Social Media strategy, contracting online marketing agencies to cover specific predefined target markets, people like this invest up to 10 hours per week in SMM
3. Level 3: SoM stretegy in line with the overal strategy, Contracting online marketing agencies to creat and implement buzz building campaigns or to cover specific predefined target markets.

Another really interesting question was "How does social media really deliver visitors and reveue for city tourist organizations and convention bureaux?" and "What do we truly want from the Social Media Market"

The answer to that was simply to define sucess, the define the indicators for success, and last but not least measure and compare the success. But how can that be done. 


An simply example can be given. e.g on facebook or twitter and other Social Media websites the daily or weekly traffic, the interaction between members, recomendations of a specific website, or what the true PR value or a website is can be measures by tracking the number of visits and what was clicked on. And that right there is the answer to the above asked questions. 

And exactly those "User Behavior Matters" help understand how a company works and how compatible it is. The online world is transparent and leaves traces everywhere. 

Traffic Sources Bounce Rate

• Useful segments
• acquisition (where do they come from)
• Behavior (what do they look at, what topics are most interesting)
• Outcome (are they just interested in information or what are they really looking for)

A very interesting point Mr. Koeltringer also suggested was the fact that quantitative data has limitations in understanding  the WHY. What is meant by that I believe is, that primary data can not "understand" the data it gets. Which means, why are people visiting the website and what is the primary purpose behind it.  Another question would be weather the visit was successfull, did the visitor find what he/she was looking for and if not, why? And last but not least, was there a good site experience and did it satisfy the customer.

Besides twitter, facebook, myspace and all these social networks another Web 2.0 application is emerging more and more - blogging. But on what does the success of a blog depend on - I guess the number of unique blogs that link to your blog and how many people forward your blog and make puplicity for it, is a good start i believe.

When making a website, what are the most important things you should consider?

• whats the purpose of the websites
• what are the business objectives
• set specific goals for your website
• and last but not least, focus on measureing your macro (overall) conversations, but identify and measure your micro conversions well.

Possible tools that show a company how it does, in comparison to its competitors:

• Benchmarking
• Google trends (compare different websites on how they perform)