There’s three ways to look at adopting new digital media and social media channels for your marketing and communications efforts.
A) Bleeding Edge: Get in before the service becomes super hot to build presence and traction (i.e. getting into Twitter in 2007.) The upside can be getting to shape the tone and manner and building a strong brand presence. The downside is knowing it will be a winner and that it won’t shut down for lack of service. If you picked Plurk as microblog platform, well, sorry about that.
B) Leading Edge: This is when, it would seem, mainstream media first starts to report on a service. A good example would be blogging. You can better pick which service is likely to be around in a few years (even through acquisitions or mergers) and you can still play a role in shaping the channel and building a strong presence.
C) Laggard: Shareholders of pharmacy chain Walgreen’s kept pushing senior management to build an online presence fast and start an eCommerce site. Management resisted and waiting until 2000, watching and learning from others who failed. Smart move on Walgreen’s part. Sometimes this can be a safe bet, but you’ll expend more human resource time and money in social media channels the later you enter.
In large part, when you choose to use a social media service depends mostly on senior management’s comfort with that level of engagement, expenditure and how it can relate to ROI for the business. Other factors include time, brand values, market size etc. As always with social media, do some listening first. A service may not always live up to the hype or may not even be right for your organization.
Some companies have a culture of being “bleeding edge” and want to be at the visionary stage of product adoption (i.e. Moores Law of technology adoption)
Newsgroups, forums and bulletin boards. They go back rather a long way in the ancient history of the Web…some as far back as the late 70’s and early 80’s, like the WELL (born out of the Whole Earth Catalog days.) And they remain a key place of conversation and opportunity for engagement.
Yet marketers often overlook them. Likely because those using them have guarded them well as a place for people, not companies. Although some companies have done well. For fans of Anne of Green Gables, production company Sullivan Entertainment has done very well providing forums for Anne fans. Mostly because they clearly understand the value of the newsgroups. While they may monitor them, they stay away from always trying to upsell – but rather wrap the forums access with merchandise. They built a brand following, long before blogs, Social Networks and Twitter popped onto the scene.
Forums, newsgroups and bulletin boards can be excellent sources of information. Sources that 98% of “reputation monitoring” services don’t cover. Gaining access in an automated fashion (i.e. through an API) is not always easy either.
But these social media channels are very active to this day and perhaps the least untouched and least touchable, by marketers. If you’re a marketer looking to push your product, tread gently. Protocols are strong in newsgroups and aggressively enforced.
As we do research into Social Media use, we spend a fair bit of time in these channels. There’s three key things I’ve taken away from spending many an hour validating our search results in them;
1. They are a channel that marketers have had little true success in. They are a place to truly have a conversation with your potential or current prospects. To do otherwise will end up in tears.
2. They are a very rich source of insights for public relations practitioners, product managers, researchers, sociologists an marketers. Perhaps a much undervalued one.
3. Not all online spaces are susceptible to marketing and public relations activities. When people just want to socialize, they can and will, make a place of their own.
A fairly decent free monitoring tool is BoardTracker; although not comprehensive, it does a pretty good job of digging into these channels. No reputation management tool has yet been able to conduct an automatic crawl however, and due to the technology, it may be a while yet. Our mediasphere360 is about as good, but manual validation and review remains vital.
So next time you’re planning for Social Media engagement, having a look around newsgroups and forums; you may be quite surprised at what you uncover. Good and bad.
(Author: G. Crouch)
Best Practices, Thunking•
on November 2nd, 2009•
One word: Attention.
Basic economic theory states that when you create a wealth of one thing, it creates scarcity of another. In the case of modern day media it’s a wealth of channels and a scarcity of attention. For the most part today, we “snack” on media. We consume when we’ve set aside our attention to watch a movie or a whole TV show or listen to a full broadcast of a radio show.
On the Web we mostly snack. The most effective bloggers have posts no more than 300 words.
Public Relations practitioners have always fought for our attention. But today that’s harder than ever. So many channels. And consumption changes by channel. Twitter is “grazing” while Blogs are a quick bag of crisps and Facebook is a cup of coffee and a cookie.
If the “story” starts as a press release and media advisory, backed by the press kit or background kit, then it will need to break into many little pieces as it goes out into all of the various media channels. Each snippet hopefully getting the right readers attention.
It might follow then that the second biggest hurdle is then getting your audience to act on the information they’ve received.
Best Practices•
on August 13th, 2008•
You know your organization needs to move into Social Media; but where? There are over 300 blogging services, over 200 news feed services and mutiple Social Networking services like Bebo and Facebook. Should you be everywhere? While it might be ideal, trying to be everywhere could cause more harm than damage over the long term.
Microblogging is just one example (the main channels are Twitter, Plurk and Identi.ca) where you can only place 144 characters. As Jeremiah Owyang points out, many brands fail on services like Twitter. In part because the concept of Microblogging doesn’t suit the brand and because of the ability to understand how Microblogs work and sustain a presence there. Microblogs come down to a “who” not a “concept” like a brand and thus require an “individual” to represent the brand. For a company, a Microblog might be more useful for crisis responses and good quick stories.
Success in Social Media comes from selecting the right channel and building, then sustaining, the right message(s) over time. Building a presence in Social Media also means investing some time and understanding the ROI is not immediate like banner ads and Landing Pages. Social Media is a Sustainable Marketing activity that is like marketing itself – a managed investment. Properly managed, an investment in Social Media will result in increased customer loyalty, lead generation, brand strengthening and product innovations.
So when looking at engaging in Social Media it’s all about finding the right channel and the right target market. You may not need to engage with Microblogging and perhaps just a blog is a good start and then develop your strategy from there. Segmenting in Social Media channels is as important a segmenting in Web marketing and marketing planning as a whole.
