Companies are challenged to grow in uncertain times and to do more with fewer resources. There is a continuous need to explore new systems and methodologies to help your employees work smarter internally and engage external resources who will advocate more often with less incentive. As a result, organizations are turning to the promise of new web based technologies. As our moderator, Adam Cohen puts it:
“Social media is changing the game, providing new touchpoints, technologies and techniques for businesses to build, maintain and encourage relationships with customers. But social media tactics and tools alone will be limited in their business impact. When combining social media with other interactive marketing practices, the results can magnify both. In other words, social media integrated with other forms of marketing is greater than the sum of the parts.”
So what are the parts and how does the sum equal more than the parts themselves?
Social media should not stand alone and “being social” does not change your objectives. Being social merely changes your approach to achieve those goals whether internal or external focused. When used as part of your digital ecosystem, the results can be significantly more valuable. Consider the following areas:
- CRM + Social – although we discuss it quite a bit, the market is still not at a point general adoption. Social CRM provides an opportunity to know more about your customer’s frame of mind at the time and better understand life events that may affect purchase decisions.
- Search Engine Optimization – most companies have paid and organic search strategies. If your site does not optimize for what customers are asking for then your your competitors will enjoy more organic result while you will end up paying dearly for your web search traffic. As social typically creates a wealth of fresh content (of which gets spidered by the engines quickly), you can focus the topics of your content to better effect organic results that your prospects are using at the time.
- Content Management – Ask this wealth of content is developed, you are creating a corporate asset. If you are a global company or run across an enterprise, there is a lot of value to making those assets reusable across campaigns, countries, departments, etc.
- Mobile - find companies where they are, when they are there and in the way they want to be found.
- e-Commerce – Imagine going to Best Buy site, searching for TVs and your friends from Facebook populate the TV screens. You would be more apt to take notice and spend time.
- Website-optimization – Imagine once again that the first set of comments on that TV are that of your friends who have purchased that same TV.
This does not even mention customer service, marketing, advertising and running campaigns. To cover this topic in more depth is Adam Cohen. Adam is a partner at digital agency Rosetta. He will tackle one of the bigger issues that we have had on this chat and is more than capable of doing so. The topic and questions this week will be:
Topic: Weaving Social Throughout Your Digital Marketing
Q1) How should marketers approach weaving social media tactics into their marketing arsenal?
Q2) Why does blending social media improve the effectiveness of other tactics?
Q3) Which tactics have the most impact when combined with social media? (Think both digital and traditional)
Be sure to follow the conversation this Tuesday 7/20 at noon EST by tracking the #SM69 tag on Twitter or visit our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com.
We hear so much chatter that companies have to be participating in social media. The chatter then leads into who should do it….and Viola! a single person is assigned to it. That person is usually born of the marketing or public relations (PR) team and the goal is rather simple: 1. Listen and 2. chat it up in an effort to create customer relationships. Customer Relationships! are you kidding me?!?! Who in marketing or PR has ever had to directly sell or service a customer (let me help you – not many)? So why don’t we ever hear about social media from the people who are responsible for managing direct customer experiences on a daily basis? That’s right, the customer service teams, talk about resources! Customer support, service, tech support usually have dozens if not thousands of company representatives waiting for you to call. Ahh, therein lies the issue. Customer service is typically reactive and most likely engineered to react via the telephone. 
engaging, etc. Let’s say we dial it in and our community efforts are going great and growing quickly. I say, SO WHAT! If you’re not converting these prospects and customers to do something then who cares. All this social stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t sell more stuff or keep existing customers on board longer by providing better service. Another way to look at it is turning regular customers into advocates and detractors into believers. This happens when you engage the customer quickly, meet expectations, deliver quality and consistency over time in an open and transparent way. Companies manage these interactions today using internal tracking systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM). But wait, customers are not using old ways to communicate, they are using new ways to engage and interact with social tools. this leaves companies scrambling to figure out how to engage and interact from their internal legacy systems. Along comes Social CRM.
This topic is sure to be of interest if you are in business. The world of marketing has created this bubble around people that shields off the thousands of “pitches” that people get everyday. How do we as marketers and business owners break through the bubble and begin to effectively market and message in a way that adds value to prospects in a way that triggers action. 
