Global Social Media Marketing: Does Your Brand have a Plan?

Neal Schaffer: 0:00

take take take take enjoyment. Welcome to Social Business unplugged, helping you understand in plain English how to best leverage social media for your business. And now, here's the founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings everybody this is Neal Schaffer. Welcome to another episode of social business unplugged, where I am coming at you, literally, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where it is

5: 0:26

45am part of social business unplugged, and why I enjoy this podcast is because I have the ability to do it from wherever I'm traveling the world. And I'm right here in Kuala Lumpur, presenting at a two day advanced Social Media Marketing workshop. And really, the theme of today's podcast is tied into what I'm talking about here, because social media is a lot more global than you may think. And for people, it's great the ability to really meet and communicate and learn from people around the world. But from businesses, it also has a lot of implications that I think most businesses still have not realized. I have people here that work for international headquarters for Chinese companies, for instance, or people actually fluid from the Philippines. And that work on behalf of American brands trying to market locally in the Philippines, this multinational company that's from China, with international headquarters in Malaysia is trying to figure out how to market globally with social media. And the amazing thing is, I'm an American, many Americans just assume that all these sites are as popular here as they are in the United States. And it obviously didn't used to be this way. And there were countries like Japan where Facebook really wasn't established until fairly late. But just looking at the statistics, we see some amazing stats and whenever I look at websites, there's obviously compete.com or Quantcast, I tend to look at Alexa so just looking at the popularity of social media platforms in terms of website traffic, and since I'm in Asia, I think this is a great stat. You know us obviously Facebook number two YouTube number three site with LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, currently being number 1112 and 14. And what's very interesting to see is the popularity of Facebook in Malaysia, number one, Singapore number three, Indonesia number two, Philippines number one, India number three, Japan number nine, Korea number four, truly, Facebook has obviously become a global platform YouTube very similar. I mentioned US number three Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Japan, these are all YouTube being the fourth most popular website and all these countries and even in Korea number six, LinkedIn very interesting number 11. In the US actually number eight in Singapore number eight in India, Philippines number 12. Malaysia not as popular number 21. Indonesia number 37. Twitter is pretty much between number nine and 14 in all these countries, except for Korea. Pinterest is the one where it's number 14 In the US number 15 in the Philippines. And then here in Malaysia, number 50. Indonesia number 81. So and in Japan, Pinterest actually doesn't even show up in the top 500. So obviously, when you think globally, not every platform is going to be relevant. But Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are three platforms that are relevant. But it's not just about traditional marketers wanted to keep control. And that's been one of the challenges that they have with social media and giving up control and finding value and giving up control of certain things while maintaining control in different ways. You know, from a global perspective, do you want everyone in the US to be in charge of every global channel? And I think that this Chinese multinational company based out of Malaysia presented an interesting challenge. They're just getting started. They have both b2b and b2c line of products and target users. So do they start with a global account? Do they have accounts per continent? Do they have accounts per country? Do they have accounts per language? Who's going to do all this work? And who's going to sort of organize and coordinate not only the creation of the social media strategy, but the implementation? Are they going to create a global center of excellence for all this? One of my students here from the Philippines was mentioning that they have an American corporate Facebook page. And they did a campaign in the Philippines that was wildly successful, just based on they have like different brand names in the Philippines, what have you, but since it was a campaign, they can only literally post to their Facebook page according to their corporate policy, like one month a year so the other 11 months, there's no posting been done. It's really a bizarre situation. And I'm sure every company is different. I'd really want to talk to the people at American corporate in charge of the social media program and understand why they can't have a separate page for the Philippines considering they have 10s of 1000s of fans and really engage from there and this is the many challenges of a global social media strategy and global social media implementation. Most companies up until now are either completely hand off you know let each region do it themselves or they are very much want to keep in control like traditional marketing and I don't have enough experience with enough Global Fortune five hundreds to be able to give you a concise answer. I wish I had the ability to do a survey but I find even if company These are allowing each of the individual regions to do it themselves. There is something to be said for global branding and consistency of your brand and the sharing of best practices between regions. In North America, you may be using radiant six, you may be using system most when in Europe, Brandwatch may be more popular in certain countries. And in countries like Japan, where you have issues display in foreign languages, they may not even work in listening to conversations that are happening in foreign characters. So there's a lot of issues, it may not be important for smaller brands, but obviously smaller brands have the ability to reach out to the entire world. And if they've been limited to business only in their native country, they now have the ability to really create a global awareness for the product. On the flip side, you know, larger brands, I believe, have this challenge that they're not really in, you know, the title of my next book be maximize your social, they're not really maximizing the opportunities that are out there by either not allowing local countries to engage with their local audiences in social media in whatever language that may be. Or there's sort of an ad hoc policy where there's probably a lot more that can be doing on a global scale through coordinating either through the creation of a global social media strategy with local input, or the sharing of best practices with a center of excellence. I think of Intel as an example of a company that has the Center of Excellence team that's obviously been very famous in the world of social media. So these are just some ideas that it was appropriate, being the Howard's in Malaysia and sharing with you and actually finding that the people here in my class were very advanced in their understanding of social media very, very far along into the implementation. So you know, social media marketing is truly now a global phenomenon. And I really hope that your company, no matter what scale you are, will take the best and fullest advantage of it. This is Neal Schaffer signing out. Make it a great day. Bye. Bye. You've been listening to social business unplugged with Neal Schaffer, social media author, consultant, speaker and university professor. If you'd like any specific topics covered on future episodes, or if you'd like to be interviewed for this podcast, please connect with me by email. Neal at windmill networking.com on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer and on Twitter at Neal Schaffer. Please also visit windmill networking.com for daily Social Media for Business updates. Thanks for listening and make it a great day.