Social Media ..What are Corporations asking? My response...

Social Media is a wonderful tool both for businesses, friends, families, learning, and connecting on a global scale. The one thing to understand is it is a new source of media. The ROI is unlike any other. You can expect link building, but beyond that your return on interest is knowing how to keep your clients SATISFIED. It is the best kind of ROI it helps you start conversations (your choice if it is a good or bad conversation), helps you know what you consumers  want from you, helps you know when they are mad at you, and really gives your company a personality. More later on this topic. What do you think? Is this really what you want to know about social media? Is this really how you want to leverage it, when this medium can be used for so much be careful that you don't underestimate it or cut short its potential by not thinking out side the box enough or by simplifying your efforts too much. Both are deadly to your campaign.

1. Desaraev June 6th, 2008 12:16 pm

   Interesting good thoughts… Will post a reply on my blog soon.

2. Desaraev June 6th, 2008 12:21 pm

   Uhm, no all the experimenting is NOT done. Not by a long shot. Are you going to honestly tell me you know everything there is about your consumer ethnography, how to leverage the different styles of sites, and that you keep up on the thousands of new ones appearing daily? I'm on hundreds of sites and struggle to keep up, build profiles, adjust, learn how they work and understand their user base and how to leverage the conversation.

The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media

June 06th, 2008 | Category: Web Theory, Web Strategy

I just visited a client who had several groups in their company doing quite a bit around social media (they are trying to answer the 4th and 5th question). They were what I call "walking" and were on the verge of "running". Often, when I meet companies for the first time, I try to find out which of the following questions that they are answering, as it determines their level of sophistication.

As one might expect, brands in tech, media, and some consumer goods are more advanced, and finance, insurance, and sometimes government are trying to answer the first questions.

Five questions companies ask about social media:

What is Social Media?
For many folks, corporations, the question to answer was "What is a BloB". Blogging was the primary tool that we saw in the marketplace, for some, it wasn't taken seriously, for the savvy, they quickly adopted. We saw scare tactics from the threatened mainstream media, such as "Attack of the Blogs" and light of amateurisms, angry customers and crazies were painted. For many, we wanted to know what are these tools, how to they work, and what's the impact. Early on, this impacted corporate communications, PR, and mainstream media.

Why does it matter?
As we've evolved, many were realizing the impact of exploding batteries, brand hijacking, and blog evangelism. Savvy companies were starting to adopt these tools, a few provided integrated communities that were scrapped together or built from existing platforms. For the majority, trying to understand why these tools matter to a business. In addition to corporate communications, PR, we started to see other marketing and business units being impacted by these tools, as well as adoption.

What does it mean to my business?
We're here now. This is the year of ROI, measurement, and experimentation. Many corporations have deployed resources, headcounts and budgets. Corporations are afraid to make mistakes, so plans are created, and measurement is critical to help manage and prove the worth of new programs. ROI was proven, new social media measurement attributes were defined, and many new tools were deployed, I did what I could to further this industry (see all posts). In addition to Corporate Communications and PR, business units are starting to experiment with these tools, often out of the PR budget. A new role started to appear more frequently, the digital marketing manager, the community manager, the social media strategist.

How do I do it right?
Now that experimentation is done, and business units are starting to apply these tools, like advertising, PR, field marketing, and customer references, companies will want to do it right. Frameworks will be developed, consultants will offer packages, and a loosely developed process will be used. For companies that don't have enough internal resources to listen, manage, and deploy, consultants will be a very sought after service. Nearly every brand will start to have an ongoing budget for social media, the new role to manage these tools will appear. IT departments will start to deploy enterprise 2.0 tools.

How do I integrate across the Enterprise
Normalization is happening, A checkbox for 'social media' on every announcement, product launch, product development and support will be using these tools. Social media tools to listen, converse, collect knowledge, and build new products will integrate across the customer cycle. It's not just external, intranets will start to deploy suites for collaboration, such as blog accounts issued to many internal and external employees. Product Teams, IT departments, HR, Finance, Executives, and of course Marketing will be using these tools.

This post, for the most part is a rehash of what I've posted nearly a year ago, but I think it holds merit to discuss again

What question is your company, or your clients trying to answer, this is often a good post to send to your internal teams and try to trigger a discussion.