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What I mean by that is that social media is maturing and starting to develop definable disciplines. As once Online grew into email, search, display, etc. specialties so too is social today. Many of the pundits have picked up this theme and have started to lay claims around the emerging areas, most notably with the good folks over at Altimeter and their 18 practical uses of social media.
While there is clearly value and great insight in this broader thinking, as a marketer I really only care about what’s going to directly impact me on a daily basis. Reflecting on our experience using social for our own marketing at Alterian I think there is a slightly different bucketing that more closely aligns with the way marketers work and is thus more actionable.
Content Syndication: The cost of distribution is approaching zero. Thank you Mr. Anderson “Long Tail” / “Free”. Previously we had to pay to have our messages distributed. Now we can do it for free. Advertising is moving from the periphery of the page to the center. Except we no longer call it advertising, we now call it content. The etiquette of this advertising is clearly different and what we used to pay for the placement is now being spent on content creation.
While this may be a “social” approach it hails from the same roots as traditional marketing. Get out there and plant the seeds. Hit your reach and frequency and drive someone into deeper, more engaged interactions. This is a bandwagon you’ve got to get on. Looking to the near term future, this is going to become the number one channel for awareness and acquisition.
Community Engagement: “Engagement” as a concept can rapidly become a rabbit hole in social media marketing concept. Without getting into a life skills conversation about building relationships or an academic one about viral network patterns there are some fairly pragmatic approaches that can be applied.
Identify relevant, active communities for your brand and begin to make yourself visible. Comment, contribute content, and anything else you can do to be a productive member of the community. Don’t be shy about intentions, but use good manners relative to the form of communication.
Social Intelligence: As a whole most marketers need to figure out how to become more data driven. Social media amplifies this need. The amount of data now available in our digital begot social world can be overwhelming. The key is to develop the skills and approach needed to convert this data into knowledge.
Zach Hofer Shall over at Forrester has done some good work in this area and has coined the term social intelligence. As a starting point you need to be using social media monitoring for improved targeting. This is the low hanging fruit and the core to successful content syndication and community engagement strategies. Next is the incorporation social campaign promotional history into media performance models. When you start to bump all the interaction data up against one another you can generate new customer insights, but also begin to find new ways to optimize your media mix.
To make social media actionable and relevant you need to break it down into manageable chunks. The intent of content syndication, community engagement, and social intelligence is to present marketers with those chunks in a form that resembles many current day activities. A social media strategy doesn’t begin with one giant leap, but rather a number of small, orderly steps.
