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.