Social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ present benefits and dangers for businesses, according to panelists at the third annual Providence Business News Social Media & Marketing Summit. The Feb. 27 event at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Providence-Warwick attracted more than 250 members of the Rhode Island business community.
Speakers at the two-panel event sought to provide insights and advice for companies hoping to use social media in an integrated marketing plan that increases leads and generates business.
“We’re in the trenches all the time with our LinkedIn,” said TribalVision Founder and CEO Christopher Ciunci. “You’ve got to really make sure that you’re treating LinkedIn as a vibrant, living, breathing organism, just like your website,” said Ciunci, adding that LinkedIn is especially useful for companies whose main website is relatively static.
The danger comes when companies’ LinkedIn profiles aren’t indicative of the current state of their actual business. “Just like any network, these are things that are … reflective of you,” said Corissa St. Laurent, Constant Contact director of regional development for New England.
“If your information is out of date, it shows that you’re out of date. If you’re taking the time to create a social profile, keep it up to date,” she urged attendees. “Don’t just do it because you read an article somewhere that said you should.”
But social media is about more than just creating and updating a profile, agreed the panelists. “Once you feel like you’re credible and dressed appropriately to the cocktail party, what do you do now?” joked Ciunci.
LinkedIn’s mail service InMail was lauded by Ciunci for its response rates. According to TribalVision’s presentation statistics, LinkedIn’s mail response rates are 30 times higher than cold calling and 10 times higher than a standard email. The other benefit, he said, was that LinkedIn searches can be filtered by many parameters, including industry, company size and location.
With all its benefits, LinkedIn isn’t the perfect site, warned Brian Lamoureux, partner at the law firm of Pannone Lopes Devereaux & West LLC. He said that while answers from LinkedIn are “great for the target audience” he can think of “a whole population of folks under 25 or folks of a certain socioeconomic status that aren’t on LinkedIn.”
Bonifacino said Facebook was his company’s biggest revenue driver, while Twitter took the No. 1 slot regarding customer engagement.
The important thing, according to Bonifacino, is to figure out how to attribute a “time out, dollar out” amount to a “dollar in” figure.
Bonifacino explained the evolution of the Alex and Ani marketing brand from a small Main Street business to a multimillion company.
“Alex and Ani was a small business not that long ago. It was one store, it was Main Street, and we try to keep the Main Street, the local-business feel as we expand the brick and mortar side,” he said.
According to Bonifacino, Alex and Ani’s success is based on shaking up its marketing techniques and doing something different. “We invested in time to learn. We invested in spending time with vendors and understanding how to build a digital program and digital team that could operate as a digital silo that can operate and pay for itself.”
Lamoureux said, “Social media is certainly growing, but the meat and potatoes is what will drive most of your business. People make a mistake on skipping over a lot of the hard work because they think that social media is the low-hanging fruit.”
Even with successful engagement through social media, one of the best ways to turn a connection into a paying customer is through email, said St. Laurent. “Social media is great to drive word of mouth … but those Internet strangers won’t become customers until you engage them a little more deeply,” she said.
“When you really take a step back, social media still only accounts for… 4 percent of the leads being generated for your company,” said Ciunci.
“Social media has a power, but … it is just one piece of your marketing puzzle,” he said.
If Ciunci and St. Laurent were the voices of experience and Bonifacino was the voice of company success, Lamoureux was the voice of caution. The discussion turned legal with Lamoureux, who described a new bill in the General Assembly that would restrict the type of information that employers can get through social media on their employees and what colleges and universities can find on their prospective and current students.
Current data-privacy statutes are 15-20 years old, said Lamoureux. “From a business perspective, the law in Rhode Island is certainly going to change as to how you interact with your employees, how you engage with your employees and the kind of information you can get for them.”
The legal discussion took an unexpected turn toward personal social media use and the panelists’ experiences with social media mammoth Facebook and its promoted post advertising. The panelists agreed that Facebook’s formula of using users’ “friends” as an advertising mouthpiece had a “creepiness factor.”
St. Laurent added that she still thought of Facebook as a “very powerful way to engage,” while warning summit attendees that “Facebook pages have changed a lot. People who like your page don’t have an instant connection to your content.” Items posted on business pages don’t immediately show up in the news feed of Facebook users who have “liked” the page, said St. Laurent.
“The power of social media is that you can reach your customers’ friends, not by a creepy way, but by real engagement,” said St. Laurent
The power of social stems from the fact that the engagement is chosen by the user, she said. “You can’t go gather a group of followers on Twitter, they have to make that decision. So give them great stuff, give them great content, give them great information, give them a reason to pay attention to you.” •
