Social Media & your Brand - getting started

Who am I:
Ted Rubin Chief Marketing Officer e.l.f. Cosmetics EyesLipsFace.com… we consider ourselves a Social Commerce site. “We allow women to spoil themselves without going broke”
Our products sell for $1, $3 & $5 and we compete directly with the prestige brands.

Challenge:
Finding enough hours in the day to take advantages of the opportunities to grow our business in the current economic environment. Where to we put our resources where they benefit us most taking market share from the prestige brands.

Myth vs. Reality:
Myth… Nobody had figured out how to monitize Social Media

Reality… it is the Social Media sites who are having a hard time monetizing their eyeballs and traffic. Brands, such as e.l.f., are monetizing Social Media every day. We started in what I call social media 1.0 by building our brand through our blog, content, and email. 2.0 brought us into the realm of reaching out through more and more mediums and watching our customer/members on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc, and now in what I believe is the 3.0 stage we are building engagement using these assets and others and building/showcasing our own within our own platform.

Metrics:
The mistakes I see being made is trying to measure Social engagement with the same tools we measure every other digital touch point. In my view email, search, even banner ads, have spoiled marketers into thinking everything can be and must be measured with the metrics used to gauge success in other mediums. I am not sue of what the next stage will be but right now as we are building our Social Media audience, and testing, I have three stages with which I measure… #1 is Audience growth, #2 is Reactivity… getting them to take an action, and #3 Stickiness… keeping them coming back, engaged and interacting. After we achieve all these I feel measurement will easily follow.