Social Media is a marketing tool that provide companies with an opportunity for not only band extension, but also is unique in its ability to form a 2-way dialogue with prospects and customers. Companies are presented with the opportunity to achieve the following marketing goals:
1) Positioning your company as an expert within your space of vertical markets
2) Extend your brand personality or traits
3) Build end-user and prospect communities around products or solutions
4) Overall, it's a conduit to drive interest in your brand on a one-to-one basis
Social media can be broken down into two major "types" or categories:
1) Corporate or "Owned" - This includes corporate blogs, user groups, and other two-way communication channels on the web. Your company's social media activities provide you with th ability to offer thought leadership (blog articles - which is a LOT like PR, but should be shorter with the goal of driving a discussion), encourage customers to comment on solutions, and even drive product innovation. There is no room for trying to jump up on a pedestal. Your goal here is to provide valuable insight and information to the target audience, or even ask questions of the target audience to build peer-to-peer knowledge (i.e. shared knowledge). Try to image the topics (and depth of topic) you might share at a industry cocktail party or meeting. What would you discuss? What do your prospects and customers find interesting or challenging?
2) "Third Party" Social Media Outlets - community sites where users can comment on a subject, discuss what's on their mind, complain, contribute and provide accolades and recommendations around certain products or subject matters. Your company needs to track the various sites, see how people communicate, what they are saying, how they are saying it, and once you have a solid grasp of a given community you can start contributing and responding to topics or discussions. 'Third Party" social media sites (like LinkedIn's Groups Tool (business-facing), my3cents.com (consumer-facing), and others) is much different than any other media conduit we've ever seen as marketers. Companies need to know where their customers are visiting, what they are saying, and join the conversation WITHOUT selling. Be sure to offer value and also that you are extending a documented brand personality (i.e. brand traits) in every communication.
The "Owned" Category can be much like PR -although your postings cannot simply be press releases. Blogs and the like provides you with the ability to publish articles, ideas, and even take controversial stances in order to spur conversation.
On the flip side, "owned" customer or user groups provide a forum for and access to customers' thoughts, ideas, issues and (if done right) product and customer support innovation. Corporations are just need to be "thick-skinned" enough to listen to honest feedback, as well as have a plan for responding to both positive and negative discussions or comments. I recommend that customer social media groups be for customers only (not the general public) to there is some accountability and so that you can respond to any crises that may and will arise.
Crisis Management:
We've all seen the bad side of social media. Because customers can post anything they want whenever they want, you need to have a crisis plan in place should should negativity around your brand spiral out of control. Here are a couple examples of the dangerous side of social media:
1) Dominos Pizza - employees placed a YouTube video showing them breaking about 100 health violations to the food they served to clients. In response, the president of Dominos posted his own video illustrating what they were doing to rectify the problem.
2) United Airlines - a customer's guitar was damaged (badly) by the baggage handlers. After a year of trying to get the $1200+ back from the company to fix the $3,500 guitar, the singer/song writer and FORMER customer has kept to his promise to customer service. He's written a song and published a video on YouTube called "United Airlines Breaks Guitars." http://tinyurl.com/l8vznc
A warning... much like many people in 1995 who thought the Internet was going to replace their sales staff (a slight exaggeration), social media needs to be right-sized, balanced and planned for as one of the many communications tools marketers have at their disposal. It's very different from anything else we've seen, but nothing is better for creating a dialog with prospects and especially customers and/or customer groups in order to allow people to see what you do, and especially to show your corporate personality (i.e. a direct line to your corporate culture and brand personality). Using the dating analogy, social media provides an opportunity to show "what your like as a person" along with providing a opportunity to show how you think/feel about issues - much like a blog.
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