Social Media
Whatever you call it, social media is here to stay, and companies and brands need to embrace it. Depending on your industry and type of business (B2B vs. B2C, product vs. service company) Facebook or LinkedIn may be more appropriate, or both, or something else. Microblogging such as Twitter is also immensely popular across many fields, and besides building community is used a lot for real time searches.
Why is social media important?
- It is a unique opportunity to create an interactive dialogue with your market, in a personal way that builds your brand, which is almost impossible (and very expensive) to do with traditional one-way advertising for instance.
- You need to know what people are saying about your company, products, services and brands, and you can no longer control what is being said and script the public message. If you participate in an open way, and always address and answer or at least comment what is being said, you build trust in the community. Even bad publicity is an opportunity to position your company as someone that listens and cares. Resist control, embrace openness to build a living and responsive brand.
- Today's barriers of entry is more community than patents. If you think of it, a smart idea can be copied in one way or another, or replaced by another smart idea. But it doesnt build a market like a large community can do. If someone in your market segment has several thousands of relevant followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook or LinkedIn networks, you will have difficulties climbing the positioning ladder. If on the other hand that someone is your organisation, others will have to fight hard to position themselves against you.
First think why, then where, then how
Besides the benefits mentioned above, why should your particular company embrace social media? What do you hope to accomplish? Too many companies create a presence on the social networks without knowing why they want to be there, the hype factor is not enough, ask yourself why. Integrating social media into the sales funnel? Great. Building your brand and establishing your organization as a thought leader. Good goal, just takes some participation and thought through content to get there. Involve your community into support and and future product development. Excellent.
Whatever your reason, knowing why your particular organization wants to get into social media will provide clarity and focus, and it shows you are not just doing it "because everyone else it doing it". Then think where, as defined by the characteristic and market segment of the social media platform, so that you will know also what potential future new communities to be involved in. If your market segment is bankers and finance professionals, then LinkedIn is likely more appropriate than Facebook. If you want to create a community for support and ideas, then GetSatisfaction.com may be the answer. And what about all those other communities and services? Every company has an ideal set of services where they should focus their attention depending on why they start with social media to begin with. Facebook pages and groups, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Ning, LinkedIn company pages and networks, ZoomInfo, Xing, Technorati, Google Blogs, Google News, Google Alerts, Sharing sites such as Digg, SlideShare for presentations, ... Where to be and what service(s) to use is not obvious and should be part of your strategy.
Having established that you want social media, why you want it, and where - what communities to join - then think how to do it - how it should look like and how you should engage and grow your community. Implementation and interaction is where the rubber meets the road.
How can we help?
Ztrive can help you get started or grow existing social media initiatives:
- Strategy. We help you define the what,where and how of social media based on your goals and market segment.
- Implementation. For all the communities and services deemed as relevant, we help to design and program those sites according to your branding, naming conventions and interactivity requirements, e.g. using Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for Facebook fan pages. We will also help integrate and synch different social media, blogs and news from your corporate website, so that your updates on one site propagates to others.
- Interaction. Depending on your resources, you may choose to do the interactions yourself, or let us update and monitor for you, or a combination. Besides checking the communities you are part of directly, there are a couple of smart services you can configure to keep track of almost everything that happens on the internet involving your company, services, products and brands, such as Google Alerts, Blogs, Technorati, Twitter search, among others. Knowing what people say - good and bad - and always responding is crucial in growing your brand.