Communication strategies are a hallmark of  of corporate marketing’s and public relation’s overall strategies.  It used to be that one message could carry a television, radio, print and micro-site campaign.  Once marketers became digitally enabled, that changed to be more targeted from a message of WE to a message of ME.  Now with social, the rules for segmentation have changed all together.  While customers still have the expectation of receiving personalized messages, the corporate approach to targeting has changed.  Only a couple of years ago it was OK to ask customers / prospects what they were most interested in.  The idea is they fill in a radio button to identify what they would like to receive and how they would like to receive it.  Violla, self-targeting.

What we have learned though is that people will tell you one thing and ACT very differently.  That is in direct contrast to how companies have set up their systems and tactics for communicating effectively.  Now segmentation involves grouping plus behavior.  For instance, a customer says they are interested in learning about a vehicle, however their behavior says they have been on 7 auto sites over the last 2 days.  That would infer they were actively in the market to purchase.  Understanding this, would you respond to a tweet with a link to a general website or a link with a specific vehicle along with purchase options that are available for a week.  That is custom, on-the-fly content that is not pre-packaged nor is it easy to syndicate at scale.

 It is no longer OK to ask a customer / prospect what they want, you must infer it.  This inference can only happen by having the systems in place to engineer the proper analytics (not just report it) and tracking mechanisms to support behavioral modeling in conjunction with segmentation modelling.  Combined, I refer to it as developing personas (segmentation + behavior).

Let’s say you are able to identify the proper personas, how can you implement it.  Think about the difference of developing 3 versions of a targeted campaign (1 for each segment).  That seems like a lot of work.  Now think about every customer as a defined segment.  I don’t know of one marketing communications department that could handle that type of load.  Digital has provided a definitive shift in the expectations of what customers expect and how they want to be communicated with.  Marketers are struggling to keep up.  It’s one thing to customize content for a single digital channel (like Facebook) but there are typically dozens of Facebook pages, dozens or more blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc.  The possibilities are endless.

This week’s discussion will attempt to cover this topic and more.  To moderate we are bringing back a true friend of www.hashtagsocialmedia.com, Beth Harte who is now hosting her 3rd chat on on the anniversary week of our 3rd year hosting this discussion.  Beth is a long-time industry thought leader specifically around communications strategies and the evolving Marketing Communications and Public Relations departments.  The topic and questions this week include:

Topic: Communicating Specifically To The Masses: Social Content Management

 Q1:  Is individual communications (socially) the same as micro-segmentation in social?

Q2:  Is communicating socially to micro-segments too daunting or just what companies need to stay competitive?

Q3: How do you scale personalized communications whether social or targeted?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, March 15th at noon ET.  Follow #sm102 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.