Dave Evans - Social Media Guru

As of this writing, Wikipedia lists over 150 social media networks - all with an incredible variety of themes and topics. How can your business leverage this social space and use it to actually increase revenue?

As it turns out, social media expert Dave Evans has the answers. This guy is sharp (a physicist by training) - and he's written the ultimate guide for helping business owners leverage the power of social media.

His book Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day takes the reader through the entire process of integrating a comprehensive social media plan into their overall marketing program.

The best part of the book is the appendix. Here, Evans summarizes the entire planning and execution process with more than 40 pages of worksheets and step-by-step instructions.

When you're ready to add social media to your overall marketing mix, or simply want to learn the potential social media has to increase your business profits, then pick up a copy of this book today and let Dave Evans show you the way to social media nirvana.

A Discussion With Dave Evans

Here's what Dave had to say about social media and its application to business owners.

Corte Swearingen: Tell us how you got involved in the world of social media?

Dave Evans: The quick answer is that I was looking for a better world for my son and the next generation. That's how you think when you have a new baby.

I felt overloaded by the amount of advertising being pushed at me, and as someone who was contributing to it - I worked for advertising agency GSD&M in Austin, TX - I thought there must be a better way.

In 2005, following the convergence of several projects I was involved in - non-interruptive forms of promotion, the impact of the actual product experience on the marketing process, and disclosure of paid advertising - I saw social media as an emergent discipline that promised a way forward.

You'll find the complete story at my blog, ReadThis.com:

Corte Swearingen: What exactly is social media and why should a business owner care?

Dave Evans: I worry less about what social media is than why a business owner should care about it. Think of social media as a social - meaning connected - form of a conversation that is taking place as discrete pieces of content - digital media like product reviews, blog posts and shared photos.

Once you've got this concept in your head, as a business owner the issue clear: Your customers are talking about you in a medium (the Social Web) that you can't control. That should get your attention, regardless of how you define it.

Corte Swearingen: What needs to be in place first before a company decides to spend time and resources engaging social media?

Dave Evans: First is listening - what Rohit Bhargava calls "active listening" - and establishing a solid basis of what is being said about you. Here's why: When Pepsi or Coke launched Facebook business pages (in Coke's case, created initially by its own fans), they proved successful. When Walmart tried the same thing, it was overrun by detractors.

Compared with Pepsi's 200,000 fans and Coke's 400,000 the current Walmart presence on Facebook has less than 15,000. For a global brand into whose US stores alone 11,000,000 people will walk tomorrow, that is a low number.

Corte Swearingen: I've heard some well-known marketers say that social media doesn't monetize well - that it's not a good sales channel. Your opinion?

Dave Evans: They are doing it wrong. The marketers making this argument are by and large looking at social media as channel. It isn't. It's part of an ecosystem. Too often they are trying to push messages into a medium that doesn't offer the opportunity for controlled interruptions. The result is that they are talking into the ether, and then blaming the (lack of) results on "social media." The Social Web is arguably the most powerful medium for marketing we've seen yet.

Corte Swearingen: How does the approach to social media differ between BtoB and BtoC companies?

Dave Evans: Other than nuance and tool selection, it doesn't. Effective marketing through social media is based on actual experiences and individual reputations. These two factors are immediately obvious in any form of effective consumer-oriented social media marketing.

Now think about what drives a business-to-business transaction: The reputations of the people involved, supported by the experiences and reputations of those making the referral that led to the transaction. It's the same basic mechanism, and the same proof points apply.

Corte Swearingen: For someone that has a solid content marketing strategy and is ready to engage social media, where should they start? Where would they get the most results for their time?

Dave Evans: There are two answers here: The "immediate, long term" answer is "Listening and the incorporation of what is learned into product/service and business design."

By understanding the conversation and what is driving it, and building your business (internally) in a way that quickly and nimbly responds to what is gleaned, a business sets itself up for long term success. This is the core of Fred Reichheld's The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth - a book that details the Net Promoter Score and the work he did at Bain.

The second answer - call it the "immediate/now" answer, is to "pick the low hanging fruit." There are 300 million people collectively speaking 46 languages on Facebook. Surely, some part of your audience is there, and if so a basic presence - some caveats apply - would be a great first step.

Selling things online? Consider Bazaarvoice and its SaaS ratings and reviews platform. It's been shown to boost conversions, and can be implemented very quickly. Looking to build a following? How about Twitter, with 100 million profiles (and don't believe everything you've read about attrition - "Google" the study and check the methodology). You can set up Twitter and put a basic, smart strategy in place in an hour.

One last point: Implement an internal social media policy. Your employees need to know about conduct, disclosure, protection of confidential information, and more. Start with IBM's Policy on Social Computing.

Corte Swearingen: Let's say your boss is 70 years old, owns a push-reel mower and still has a rotary phone and a manual typewriter. How do you prove the value of social media to higher-ups that are...um...old school?

Dave Evans: Show them the money. Look, business is about results. If your idea of presenting a social media marketing plan begins with MySpace or Facebook or Twitter, forget it. It doesn't matter who you are presenting to: You are not going to be successful. If on the other hand you start out with business objectives and explain the audience' specific use of social media and how you'll measure the results…that "old timer" will see it. This is the focus of Chapters 13 and 14 of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.

I was presenting the basis of a plan to the Board of Directors for a credit union: The most senior member of the board, easily 70 and packed with twice the energy and real-world experience of people half his age jumped up as I was speaking and said "Exactly!" and then went on to explain why this mattered to everyone else. That plan got implemented, and it worked.

Corte Swearingen: As you build up your social media engagement, how do you keep track of all the social channels and determine which ones are working best?

Dave Evans: Paper and pen? Seriously, this isn't rocket science (editor's note: Interesting statement coming from someone that worked at NASA!). Yes, if you are a Fortune 50 global CMO you'll want the same tools that you'd use for anything else.

The complexity isn't the media itself: We've been managing integrated (multi-channel, audience-specific) campaigns for years. What are a few additional degrees of complexity? The same concepts - planning, measurement, review, optimization - still apply.

Corte Swearingen: You've been involved in a lot of social media campaigns. Tell us your favorite and why it worked so well to engage people.

Dave Evans: I don't have a favorite: I love all my clients. I talked a bit about the credit union; what I loved about this one was that the marketing and C-level team literally did this themselves, with the assistance of a skilled implementation partner (not me - I just crafted the strategy). They worked one step at a time, and as each proved itself they added the next. It took about a year, and their members (customers) rewarded them for it.

Another involved a large publishing firm (20 plus leading magazine properties). They had implemented a solid community platform, but had done so without a clear strategy. It was failing. I worked with that team to understand the business and put a strategy in place. When layoffs were announced a few years ago, one of the few teams that continued hiring was the online community group: They had proven the case, had built their own skill level up, and shown the rest of the organization a business win.

Working with a communications company, I created the strategy for a developer's community: In the first year, the primary milestone of independent-developer generated monetized applications was realized. The community features that linked these developers to in-house experts - making it easier to build successful applications - were key to this success.

Finally, a firm focused on helping Mom put dinner on the table wanted a strategy to guide its social media program. What I love about this campaign was the internal result: The marketing director, initially unsure of just how to do all this, became an advocate for the strategy and is now confidently carrying the program forward. One of the best results that a consultant can hope for is seeing the transfer of skill to others. This is precisely what happened.

Corte Swearingen: There are so many social media platforms these days? Can they all survive? Do you envision a time of consolidation similar to the search engines where there are only a few main players?

Dave Evans: Sure, we're seeing it already. Look at EyeSpot and Jumpcut, or the dozens of networking platforms or location-based tools like Dodgeball. There is always consolidation. But look at the way Friendster gave way to MySpace which gave way to Facebook which gave way to…Twitter? Who knows. Who cares, outside a handful of VCs.

The point is that there is always evolution: The Social Web is catching up with and just now actually driving new forms of social (human) interactions. Dunbars' number - roughly 150 - is the theoretical upper limit to the number of relationships a human can manage. So, what's it mean to have 5000 friends in some network? Clearly, it's a very different concept. We're all being pushed forward.

Corte Swearingen: Tell us about the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Dave Evans: The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is an organization that I helped organize, so take that as disclosure for my comments here!

WOMMA is a fundamentally important organization. Look at email: SPAM has trashed it. Sure, email remains effective for some things, but everyone will agree that SPAM is a problem, whether measured in economic or personal (loss of productivity) cost or any of a dozen other measures. WOMMA set out to tackle disclosure, to set prohibitions around fake blogs, stuffed ballots, all of the things we detest as consumers.

WOMMA sits on one of the most important fronts in social media marketing: Transparency and disclosure.

Corte Swearingen: Any plans on a follow-up project to Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day? What are you currently working on?

Dave Evans: Yes, I am heavily involved now in Social Business Strategy - moving the Social Web further back into the organization - and Social CRM, the application of listening and influencer cataloging as applied to business.

This will likely be the central theme of my next book. Based on the reception given my first book this one too will be hands-on, step-by-step. There are some great theory and industry books out there - I've learned a lot from them. At the same time, a "down-to-earth, here's what to do" approach is really useful, something that I've learned from listening and tracking conversations about my book.

See? I eat my own dog food. ;-)