THINKing

Posted: 29 Apr 2009 10:17 AM PDT

A friend asked me recently to come talk with him about social media. He has an international client that still focuses on the traditional methods of reaching influencers, the channel and consumers. He wants to think through whether social media is viable for this brand. So, that got me thinking about the nature of social media. This is the first in a series of posts about social media planning.

During my more than 30 years in communications there is one thing that has become clear to me: strategy should come first. So, it’s no surprise that I believe that you should outline your social media strategy first and then the tactics will typically fall into place. Lee Odden has a good post outlining the possible outcomes a social media program might include:

Gain insight into a community of interest -You can run all the customer surveys you want, but some of the most interesting and progressive market research can be found within the social communities where your customers interact, share information and make recommendations. Tapping into the streams of dialog is a great start to engagement and social participation with your brand.

Build brand visibility and authority - You’ve heard it before, “Conversations are happening online about your brand, with or without you.” You might as well participate and do so in a way that pays close attention to the interests and needs of your customers - providing them with information and interactions that further support your brand.

Influence and promotion of products/services - Providing information to educate customers about your products in the formats and media types they prefer can go a long way towards building the kind of buzz that results in new business. By promotion, I mean advertising on social media sites.

Link building for traffic and SEO - Creating linkbait and promoting it to social media news and bookmarking sites can attract a slew of links from bloggers that read them. However, sustaining high levels of promotion to the same site or with the same user accounts will quickly be outed as social media spam. Creating value for the community is not the only rule, creating value and behaving according to formal and unwritten rules is what sustains social media sourced link building.

Drive traffic for ad revenue models - Becoming a power user of several social communities involves consistently contributing quality content, rewarding those who vote positively on that content as well as growing a large base followers. That base of like-minded connections can serve as an effective distribution channel for unique and interesting content which drives traffic to ad supported blogs that host the content. The linkbait suggestion above not only attracts links, but also attracts traffic. However, many ad supported sites report that traffic from social media sites is notorious for not clicking on ads. It’s the bloggers that write about linkbait content first viewed on social media sites that drive the kind of traffic which results in ad clickthroughs.

Now, not everyone of these outcomes is right for every brand. To determine which ones are right you have to ask some questions. We’ll delve into that next time.

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