Planning for Social Marketing in a Challenging Market

Social marketing, social networking, or social media optimization, however you choose to term it, is a potentially powerful marketing channel that burst on the scene in the last few years. Social marketing is not without its pitfalls, however, as successful campaigns can be tricky to plan, and sometimes trickier still to effectively deploy - as Johnson & Johnson discovered. In today’s challenging market, it is more important than ever to plan carefully your social networking efforts, in order to ensure the best chances of success.

Many organizations, when generating a social marketing strategy, are not quite sure how to begin. In the excitement and rush to gain visibility in the online social scene, many organizations reach out to more networks than can be effectively managed. For example, an organization may have a presence on facebook, flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, YouTube, as well as others. How can a single organization possibly keep up with all of these different audiences without a dedicated outreach team? When the real people in these audiences reach out to the organization, who will be there to answer them in a timely and helpful way?

This is one reason that it is vital for organizations to have a well thought-out strategy when embarking on social marketing efforts. Not everyone has the resources of Dell to make a million dollars through Twitter, or President Obama to get elected.

At minimum, organizations considering social marketing should consider the following:

• WHO are you trying to reach?
• WHAT are you trying to achieve?
• WHEN will you reach out to them?
• WHERE is this audience to be found - what networks are they using?
• WHY is this a good channel for this organization?
• HOW much time is available for this campaign? Are there adequate resources?
• ARE there constraints on how the organization can communicate?

To be effective, a social marketing campaign should at minimum address these questions, and build the answers into the overall strategy before a single account is created for the organization.

Consolidation Coming Soon to Web2.0

Another factor to be consider when creating a social marketing strategy, is the long-term success of the campaign. Are the networks you will be using going to be around in a couple of years? The last thing you want is to spend a significant amount of time building a presence on a network that suddenly disappears one day without a trace. And in this challenging market, it’s more important than ever to choose carefully.

Expect to see ongoing consolidation of the social web in the next year or so as the dreams of web 2.0 entrepreneurs bump into the harsh reality of turning a profit.

This consolidation or outright vanishing of networks began in 2008. Consider the demise of Discovery Communications environmental Digg clone hugg.com. This popular website allowed people to vote on stories and, much like Digg, the most popular pages hit the front page. While it never had near the traffic of a larger property such as digg, it did have a laser focus on its niche market. In November 2008, Hugg stopped accepting new stories, and has since disappeared.

If a highly targeted social network backed by the media outlet that brings us the Discovery Channel can’t stay live, then it is clear that we can expect to see other such stories in the next couple of quarters. Consider the recent closure, freezing or sale of Google Video, Jaiku and Yahoo’s LAUNCHcast.

When developing a social marketing strategy, it is important to have an understanding of the business aspects of the networks your organization will be leveraging, as well as a thorough understanding of how your organization will approach each audience. This information can go a long way to increasing the odds of your long-term success.

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to speak about supporting enterprise social computing efforts with SharePoint and Silverlight at the Toronto-based SharePoint Code Camp. It was a really nice event organized by the local SharePoint community. We had good attendance despite the chilly day (-30 degrees Celsius). The complete slides from my presentation are available here.

Highlights from Toronto SharePoint Camp 2009

non~linear creations’ SharePoint Group Team Lead, Andy Nogueira, was featured this weekend at the Microsoft-sponsored Toronto SharePoint Camp. It was a great event, attracting over 250 people. Andy has blogged about his experiences and shared insights in this post.

See more presentations from Toronto SharePoint Camp

This is the third post in a series discussing security considerations and approaches for websites driven by the Sitecore CMS. The topic of discussion today is the findability of private information.

Accidental exposure of sensitive information online is most common when an organization’s CMS drives both the Intranet and the public-facing website.  Obviously, it’s ideal to separate the two systems entirely; however, that often makes sharing content between the two very difficult—if not impossible.  One of the nice additions to Sitecore 6 is the product’s security domains.  By creating separate security domains for the public and private sites, you will greatly reduce the chance of accidental exposure.  Setting up new domains is most easily done using the Domain Manager.  In the screenshot below, you can see the default extranet domain used for a public website as well as a new domain intranet that was created for an Intranet.

Once this is done, content can now be securely accessed in both locations.  If you want to ensure that content authors specifically provide security for both the extranet and intranet domain, you have a number of options. Most commonly, our clients choose to set up custom validation rules or intercept publication of any content that has no specified security settings.  The choice you make will depend on your own processes.

To make the security process as easy as possible for users, we do suggest you create security pre-sets for common security configurations.  Pre-sets are configured at /sitecore/system/settings/security/presets.  You can see two simple pre-sets in the following screenshot.

In the next post, I’ll be discussing security issues relating to external attacks.

Time again for a roundup of news from the world of Sitecore.

Note: If you’re looking to get started in Sitecore and want a more complete guide to navigating this CMS product, our recently released Best Practices for Sitecore whitepaper can help guide you through a successful implementation.

Now, onto the news. . .

Sitecore Web CMS Product and Tool Information

December 29, 2008 saw the release of Sitecore CMS 6.0.0 rev 081222 (or Update-8).  Most noticeable fix is the maximum depth of folders in the Media Library being corrected.

The Presentation Usage Reporter from Alenka Caserman is a great tool to help with large sites and managing the presentation objects in them.

Support tidbits

1. The Scrapbook section of SDN added a few great hints, but probably of greatest help to all is addressing the need to play Flash content.
2. Kim Hornung describes how to move the Page Editor Ribbon.

This is the last post in our short series  discussing things you may want to consider in determining which content to migrate into your new content management solution and which to leave behind or restructure.

FYI - Our whitepaper, Planning for Success: Best Practices in CMS Governance, discusses migration and other non-technical considerations critical to CMS deployment success in more detail.

In previous posts we’ve discussed:

• The demands of the new information architecture
  
• The popularity of the content today
• The importance of content to your organization’s objectives
  
• Whether content is considered “mandatory” for other reasons

This post closes our discussion by outlining two additional considerations.

Consideration Five: Ease of Content Migration

Structured content, — content that is already in a content management solution or is hosted by a database — can often be migrated automatically.  Unstructured content must usually be migrated by hand, but manual migration is time-consuming and costly.  Automated migration usually brings across all content in the structured system, regardless of whether it meets the other criteria we’ve discussed.  Therefore, the cost of migrating specific content clusters should be considered in determining when, how and if to migrate this content to your new site.

Consideration Six: Is the Content a Self-Contained Micro-Site?

Many organizations have a central website surrounded by a constellation of micro-sites. These may have been created for good reasons, or they may have arisen more spontaneously because marketing was frustrated with the time it took IT to launch a site.  Regardless of the motivation for their creation, you’ll need to carefully examine the purpose of each before the migration process begins.  Often, organizations decide to reduce their reliance on micro-sites as they deploy a content management solution. This is because the CMS should allow for faster publication on the marketing side and micro-sites allow authors to avoid the specified workflow as well as other governance considerations enforced by the CMS.

It might not make sense to repatriate  these micro-sites during the deployment of your flagship site in the new CMS.  For the initial relaunch, consider delaying or grandfathering existing micro-sites and focus on core content.