Conference social media campaigns to increase outreach and lead generation [Possible now]

The early bird registration for an association’s annual meeting just ended. Registration numbers are lower than expected, even accounting for the trend for people to register later. The Social CRM team works with the conferences department to create a Tweety Bird Registration promotion. The promotion extends the early bird rate by giving a discount code to anyone who sends an email reminder to register to one of their colleagues. Their colleague also receives the discount code, so everyone wins. By the end of the promotion, which runs on the association’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages, an additional 238 registrants have registered using the discount code. Nearly half of the additional registrants have never attended the conference before.

The recipe:

• Your goal – to improve slumping conference registration numbers by promoting the conference more widely through social media.
• ROI = increased registrations; increased registrations from first-timers
• Level – Intermediate
• Tools – Social Media Management System
• Low hanging fruit – colleagues of members with lots of followers (influencers)

What you need:

• Landing page with great usability and form design, so your “evangelists” know where to send people and they can sign up easily
• A community of followers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Discount code tracking.

This use case is about knowing who your evangelists or influencers are, meaning people with decent numbers of followers, but also people who you can specifically ask to help you promote your conference.  This use case will not work without having built relationships with these people first!  This is also an online version of a “member get a member” campaign… with discounted registrations for both the old and new registrant.  Discount codes are very handy for tracking where your new influx of registrations have come from – either generally from Facebook versus LinkedIn, or very specifically down to the individual influencer you gave a code to.

What do you think? Are you doing this already?

What other ideas have you seen for conference outreach using social media?

Optimize and socialize your member services [Possible Now]

USE CASE: Two full-time junior staff people man an association’s member services center. They spend the majority of their time answering the phones and directing calls to other staff members. Turn over in the position is quite high–it’s not the most fulfilling job–and one of the staffers is set to leave to attend grad school in the fall. The Social CRM team turns to the new community platform to create a member question center. Working with the two junior staffers, the team builds a comprehensive, searchable question and answer list, plus a way for members to easily ask new questions or use live chat to interact with the member services center. Since the member question center has gone live, the team has also seen members answering other members’ questions. The Social CRM team changes the job descriptions for the junior staffers. The new goal is to keep the database up-to-date and accurate, plus handle 50% more inquiries without assistance from other staff, saving time for everyone.

The recipe:

• Your goal – responding quickly to customer service questions, wherever they may appear.  Reducing repetition of the same answers to individuals.
• ROI = more questions answered, faster response time, reduced man hours through better efficiency.
• Level – Intermediate
• Tools – community platform, social media management system for team access to social accounts
• Low hanging fruit – website search queries with few results (meaning the answer was not found), basic monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

What you need:

• Online Frequently Asked Questions – can be a page on the website or a database or forum, but must be searchable and outside the member wall.
• Ability to respond on social media sites (member services staff must have posting privileges)
• Metrics for search queries, views, response tracking.

This use case has to do with matching basic monitoring capabilities with proactive customer service.  So if someone asks, “what’s the registration cost for the Annual meeting?” or “how do I update my email preferences?” on Facebook, there is a process in place and a standard FAQ to point not just that individual to, but anyone else who might be lurking on the Facebook page and wondering the same thing.  One association we work with has a young customer service team who has been given the go-ahead to not just create an FAQ but try manning an online chat window, based on their observations that they answer the same few questions all the time by phone.  This use case might allow you both streamline (better process) and expand (more members served) your customer service abilities at the same time, and provide space for your customer service team – who are closest to your members – to gain more valuable community management skills.

What do you think? Are you doing this already?

What other possibilities have you seen for improving customer service using social media?

Our [SocialFish] definition of Social CRM is “the discipline of applying social media to membership management”, and the 12 use cases in our white paper, ROI and the Impact of Social CRM, show this in action.  Here’s the second of a series of blog posts for Avectra on the use cases – including four completely new ones – and we want to hear from you if these are possible for YOUR association.  In ALL cases, you should be building your community on social media sites before you even think about ROI.

Socializing educational content for member retention [Not so distant future, with the help of new technology]

USE CASE:  A trade association had been hosting 45 webinars per year using a well-known webinar platform that is not integrated with any other systems. The archives were seldom accessed, but the webinars were viewed as one of the top membership benefits, and many organizations use them to train their staff teams. The Social CRM team decides to implement a community platform, integrated with the AMS, that will serve as the new hub for webinar content. Members must log in to the community platform to participate in the webinar, and afterwards, they can access (and share and review!) the webinar archive in the same place. They can also have ongoing, asynchronous discussions about the topic in the community site. Since the change, webinar satisfaction has gone up, more member companies are accessing the webinars, and the trade association has identified several hundred new member contacts who accessed the content asynchronously after a “strong suggestion” from their boss.The recipe:

• Your goal - to improve member engagement around your valuable educational online content.
• ROI = reduction of costs for creating new content by surfacing existing content; extending the life of existing content; increasing retention rates attributable to educational value of the association membership.
• Level – Advanced
• Tools – AMS, community platform, webinar platform
• Low hanging fruit – existing content buried in archives.

What you need:

• Great content! None of this will work without top-notch educational content that your members want and need.
• Great usability and design – this MUST be easy for members to use or it won’t work.
• Tracking of metrics: sign-in, views, discussions, renewals, new webinar registrations.
• Community management for ensuring members know about webinars and the discussions around them.

We’re calling this use case advanced because it requires a holistic, social view of educational content.  Instead of members passively watching a webinar (or recording it for later and forgetting to watch it), and then having the archive lost to the midst of time, this use case is about making sure your webinars are engaging and participatory.  Interaction around this educational content happens during and after the actual day of the webinar, and new ideas for topics are easily surfaced, keeping your educational value fresh and top of mind.  There is a big technology piece to this one – hosting your webinars inside your community platform (we can recommend vendors that provide this service), and making sure engagement data is tracked.  This is a big focus for us – our Think Tank webinars are designed like this.

What do you think? Are you doing this already?



What other possibilities have you seen for member retention using social media around educational content?

Our (SocialFish) definition of Social CRM is “the discipline of applying social media to membership management”, and the 12 use cases in our white paper, ROI and the Impact of Social CRM, show this in action.  Here’s the first of a series of blog posts for Avectra on the use cases – including four completely new ones – and we want to hear from you if these are possible for YOUR association.  In ALL cases, you should be building your community on social media sites before you even think about ROI.


Using LinkedIn for member recruitment
[Possible now]
USE CASE:  An association has a members-only group on LinkedIn. Each time a member joins the LinkedIn group, the community manager updates the LinkedIn Group field in the members’ AMS record, and adds their LinkedIn profile URL. 5-10 times each month, a person who has never been a member of the association requests to join the group. The community manager adds their name and information to the LinkedIn membership prospects list, and sends them a private message with information for how and why to join the association. A year later, the LinkedIn membership prospects list proves to be converting at three times the rate of lists the association purchased.

The recipe:

• Your goal – to identify member prospects who engage on social media and convert them to members.  ROI = low-cost, high-quality leads
• Level – basic
• Tools – Association Management System
• Low hanging fruit – new requests to join your Linkedin group

What you need:

• Time
• Access to the AMS
• Field for LinkedIn profile
• Copy for membership information (for reaching out to prospects)
• Tracking URL (for membership offers to the LinkedIn group)

This is a pretty simple use case, that most associations on LinkedIn should be considering.  If you have chosen to have a members-only group as opposed to an open group (which can also be fantastic for recruitment), the key to turning this into ROI is simply to be proactive about tracking your interactions with member prospects.  These leads are very high value because these potential members have self-identified a people who are potentially interested in your organization.
What do you think? Are you doing this already?


What other possibilities have you seen for member recruitment using social media?