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Chris Morace joined Jive Software in October 2007 to lead its Social Business Software product strategy and oversees engineering, product management, and product marketing.

He brings with him a 15 year track record for building high-growth, high-value businesses in the technology sector. Prior to joining Jive Software, Chris held executive positions at Sindhara, an innovator in next generation digital media; Awaken, a startup focused on enabling the consumer transition to digital audio; Mercury, the global leader in business technology optimization (acquired by Hewlett-Packard); and Kintana, an IT governance software company (acquired by Mercury Interactive).

He began his career architecting supply chain solutions and facilitating enterprise change management with Price Waterhouse for companies such as Cisco, Western Digital, and Xerox.

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Harnessing the Power of a Social Media Tsunami

Written on
Sep 24, 2009 
Author
Chris Morace  |
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Harnessing the Power of a Social Media Tsunami

socialmedia5_small.jpgADOTAS — For marketers today, social media is both a blessing and a curse. We all wonder what will trigger our brand’s next public ”disconnect” and but we also wonder how we can harness social conversations to influence a positive flow of communication.

We need to ask ourselves how ready are we to deal with the conversations happening about our brands outside our four walls? There are really three possibilities here:

The I-Don’t-Know-Where-to-Begin stage: If you are doing nothing to monitor what is being said in the social web about your brand, don’t worry — you’re not alone. The vast majority of brands have yet to adopt even the most basic of free alert systems to keep track of conversations pertaining to them.

The I-Think-I’m-Doing-Everything-I-Can stage: This could mean anything from having various people within your organization using free alerts to hiring a social media expert to buying the best buzz monitoring tool on the market. While it’s a huge step forward, it’s still largely a manual process. Sure you may have automated the listening portion, but you still have to rely on email to share important observations on the social Web and pray that you’ve included the right people on the “To:” line.

The Ready-for-Primetime Stage: This is when buzz monitoring tools become just a part of a much larger social strategy that ties to the marketing plan for your brand. If you’ve arrived at this stage, it means you have the right people alerted at the moment of pain or opportunity; you have a single “war room”-like space to collaborate instantly; and you can tie all interactions with your customers back to your brand’s community online.

Where do you see yourself in the three stages referenced above? The good news is, you can get to the final stage in three manageable steps: people, timing and strategy (the big payoff).

1. People. At the end of the day, it always comes back to people. For some companies, the sheer number of people inside the organization monitoring what’s being said about the brand can get quickly out of control.

Because it’s so easy to respond to and listen in on random comments online, it can make Jane Developer more aware of her company’s brand reputation than the CMO. A comment or two later, that Junior Developer becomes, in effect, your PR agency.

At the heart of this problem is the need to identify the right people to respond at the right time. If you haven’t already, the first step is to define a social media expert (or small team) and hire the needed resources as soon as possible. This person, while very closely tied to PR, should come from Web Marketing since ultimately their work will lead back to your company’s web site.

For some companies, there are several social media experts already in the organization – someone in Support, someone in Corporate Communications who tackles reputation issues, etc. What’s most important is that there is a focal point tying all of this together.

Once you’ve identified that person, you can begin playing the “What If?” game. What happens if your product needs to be recalled? Or if you’re United Airlines, what happens if someone posts a YouTube video blaming your baggage handlers for breaking their guitar?

Who needs to be a part of the conversation to determine if a response is required and what it should be? Or, on the flip side, if your social media expert notices a trend in conversations around a certain product, and ideas for future features, who gets brought into that conversation?

Lastly, do you have a place for these people to really collaborate, hash through responses, options and ideas in a timely fashion? Because “Reply All” is not a collaboration tool.

2. Timing. Going back to the United Airlines example, it took United a full four days to respond on the social web with an explanation, having chosen to target the initial response to traditional broadcast media. The outrage was online, yet United didn’t even tweet a response.

This is not only emblematic of a bad response plan, it’s symptomatic of a problem most brands face –- how do you get the right people involved in crafting and delivering the right messages when the window of opportunity is now measured in hours, not days?

This is where technology steps in. By having a solid collaboration space, your “War Room” maintains the context for the team, enables you to respond, and monitor the reaction. Participation is social, which means all of the right people are in the loop immediately and the information finds them.

3. Strategy Why would I talk about strategy last? Because once these pieces are in place, the strategy becomes powerful. If you need to fund the hiring of a social media expert or get the right technology in place, you’ll need to prove the business value.

In the case of our customer National Instruments, its strategy focuses on building community and driving conversations occurring across the social web back to its community. The brand-owned community can help influence conversations and meet customer needs with accurate information. And if there’s an opportunity to cross-sell, up-sell or gather ideas for the next product innovation, it’s going to be on your community site –- not on the wild web.

Social media truly can be a blessing to brands — your fans become extensions of your sales team and the best innovation partners your development teams could have. It’s all a matter of having the right strategy, technology and attitude.





Reader Comments.

Steve Jobs said it all – there is no reason to advertise to a million people, from which only 10 are interested in your product. Better choose your limited, narrow market and reach 100/100 people.

Posted by Covert Hypnosis | 11:51 am on October 2, 2009.

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