Social Marketing. How do one make sense of this new frontier?
Everything starts by planning and having a strategy. Having a Facebook and Twitter page is not a social marketing strategy. Social marketing strategy should drive overall direction and approach to how social marketing fits into the greater marketing strategy. How does social fits into your CRM, websites, search etc. activities? Especially if we have more than one type of social media platforms. How do we ensure consistent management of these platform? How do we efficiently manage social marketing campaigns, have central view of results, conversations, insights from various social media platforms? How integrated are your campaigns and web properties? Are they able to meet your users/customer's needs and expectation?
There are many tools and players out there that tries to make sense of these problems. Here are some that we have worked with to manage various social channels, from Buddy Media, Wildfire, Tiger Pistol, Hootsuite, to Adobe. The list is endless with new players entering the ring. Most are focused on selective aspect of social marketing and none are emerging as the clear overall leader in this space. Finding a platform that works with China based social platforms is a struggle as well but many vendors have highlighted that they are looking into this deficiency.
Social listening is also an important part of your social marketing arsenal. Being able to gather and listen in to what your customers are saying about you on social media gives you good insights and allows you to get a pulse on what's happening around your brand, product and offerings.
Your users/customers expect your web properties to be integrated and social. They want your web properties to be an extension of their social experience; to know what their friends like on your site, be able to easily share content etc. With the recent Google "Penguin release" (see my opinion here), being able to easily like, share and comment your content would have SEO benefits which you should not ignore.
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