Social media strategies, fishing where the fishes are
This article is in continuation of “Corporate Web Strategies” Series… read other installments here, here.
In the beginning, the web was developed as a stateless platform and ever since it has evolved to something meaningful and social. With the advent of programming languages that helped maintain states on the web so as to have a meaningful experience, the web now mimics the normal social life.
Social media is a stage the web has evolved to; bringing the way we live life everyday to the web. As you may have known, we are a social being and in every aspect of our lives we demonstrate our “social-ness” which now brings us to the age of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the likes. All these are tools that help customers spread your message faster whether good or bad.
Social media strategy should be part of your web strategies as it has come to be a part of the web experience. You may want to know what social media is all about; Social media is the use of Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.
Key point that will help you formulate a better social media strategies
- Listening: implement at least a rudimentary listening platform. By listen, you know what is been discussed by your organization, what are they saying to their friends/network about you? What are their frustrations or love?Web Strategy Matrix: The Eight Stages Of Listening
| Stage | Description | Resources Needed | Impacts |
| 1) No objective at all | Organization has a listening program but has no goals, nor uses the information for anything resourceful | Simple alerting tools, like Google Alerts and feedreaders will suffice. | At the basic level, simple self-awareness. Yet without any action from the data, this is useless. |
| 2) Tracking of brand mentions | Like traditional “clip reports” of media relations, companies now track mentions in the social space. Despite tracking there is no guidance on what to do next. | Listening platform with report capability based on brand or product keywords. Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Techrigy/Alterian, Buzzmetrics and Cymfony, Dow Jones are providers. | Improved self-awareness to track volume of information, yet unable to track depth, and tonality of conversations. As a result, not a full understanding of opportunities. |
| 3) Identifying market risks and opportunities | This proactive process involves seeking out discussions online that may result in identifying flare-ups, or possible prospect opportunities. | In addition to a listening platform staff must actively seek out discussions and signal to internal teams. Alerting tools, and listening platforms are required. | Organization can reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitors customers. |
| 4) Improving campaign efficiency | Rather than just measure a marketing effort after it’s occurred, using tools to gauge during in-flight behavior yields real-time marketing efficiency. | Dedicated resource to manage reactions, activity, and sentiment to a marketing effort, and the resources to make course corrections nearly real-time. Traditional web analytics tools like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics are common. | Campaigns can be more effective, as hot spots are bolstered, and dead spots are diminished. |
| 5) Measuring customer satisfaction | In addition to customer satisfaction scores, orginizizations can measure real-time sentiment as customers interact. Sysmos and Backtype have focus areas into this space. | Customer experience professionals will have to extend their scope to the social web, using a listening platform and sentiment analysis. Insight platforms like Communispace and Passenger offer online focus groups solutions. | Brands can now measure impacts of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction. Then identify areas of improvement during customer lifecycle |
| 6) Responding to customer inquiry | This proactive response finds customers where they are (fish where fish are) in order to answer questions. Example: Comcastcares account on Twitter asks customers if they need help –then may respond. | An active customer advocacy team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses nearly around the clock. | Customers will fill a greater sense of satisfaction, yet this teaches customers to ‘yell in public’ to get a response. |
| 7) Better understand customers | Evolving the classic market research function, brands can improve their customer profiles and personas by adding social information to them. | Social CRM systems are quickly emerging that tie together a customer record and their online behavior, locations, and preferences. Salesforce, SAP, both have partnerships with Twitter to synch data | The opportunity to not only serve customers in their natural mediums, but to offer them a richer experience regardless of their customer touchpoints. |
| 8. Being proactive and anticipating customers | Minority Report: This most sophisticated form actually anticipates what customers will say or do before they’ve done it. By looking at previous patterns of historical data, companies can put in place the right resources to guide prospects and customers. | An advanced customer database, with a predictive application put in place, as well as a proactive team to reach out to customers before an incident has happened. Haven’t seen any such application yet. | Identifying prospects and engaging them before competitors can yield a larger marketing funnel, or reducing customer frustration as problems are fixed before they happen. |
This table was developed by Jeremiah Owyang
- Communications: build a starting place to hold your conversations. And by this, I mean a blogging platform.
- Methods: determine the mix of content you intend to create, and build workflow around it.
- Community: most social media strategies have to address community and how you will embrace the people you seek to gather around your business.
- Neighbors: develop a plan to reach out to others in your community, comment, and share. For corporation this will include media outfits and industry thought leaders.
- Outposts: develop social network outposts where you can communicate with other communities, and also share the way back to your own platform. This is very important as some fears that they lose traffic to the social media sites. To guide against this, create a funnel that allows your customers (or prospective) to come to your site where the action takes place. This could include getting their contact or having them to buy your product or service.
- Marketplace: if your strategy involves making money, build a marketplace external to your community. Keep these separate.
- Attention: learn how to build awareness and encourage relationships with the media you’re making.
Above all you need to know if your work force is web/social enabled (we will talk more on this later. This involves education your staff or selecting the ones that already use social media to leader your campaign. If your culture has not matured (for social media), I advise that you work critically on making your firm to develop culture of a social web.
Remember that social media helps to broadcast your company performance whether good or bad.
Great article. Thanks.