**by David Roth**
What's our Social Media Strategy?
Has anyone in your company asked you this lately, or at all? Chances
are if you haven't heard this question from a VP yet, you will soon.
It's what everyone is trying to figure out - not if we should be using
social media, but how we should be using it. In this column, I'm going
to look at a few ways that Yahoo!, and others, are using social media
and how it's evolving from a big-brand perspective.
But first, a bit of perspective
Why is it that SEOs typically end up being the ones in their
respective companies who are responsible for social media? On the
surface, the two activities have little in common. SEO can be very
technical in nature, both in strategy and in practice, while social
media looks a lot more a like a public relations campaign.
But just to reset, when sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, even
Digg started to become popular, SEOs could readily see the potential
for promoting their own sites. Social media in the beginning was a
double-whammy: not only could SEOs get bloggers and other authorities
to link to their sites, providing link relevance, but they also got
the incremental traffic coming from users following those links. The
link-building aspect has since been downplayed with the advent of
nofollow tags, but the traffic source is very real and very powerful
if you can get links put in the right places.
So now that social media is becoming much more mainstream (as has
SEO), how does a big brand use social media to its full potential? As
well, who in the organization should own social media marketing? When
I look around at how we and other big brands are using social media,
it's clear that social media's role has yet to be fully defined. Let's
look at a few examples and we'll see.
Survey the landscape
Try this if you haven't already: go to Facebook and search for your
favorite big brand, be it online or offline. Where is the company's
official facebook page? The fan page? Specific product pages? Hard to
tell, isn't it? This is one of the challenges with the social media
landscape. As a brand loyalist, do I really want to sift through all
those entries so I can find the group that speaks to me? Try the same
thing on Twitter - these spaces are already so crowded it's hard to
find the signal through all the noise.
If these networks are going to be viable for commercial use, and one
could argue that they will have to be in order to survive, social
networks will need to find some way to stratify the landscape, to draw
lines between the commercial and the non-commercial, without
alienating the user base. But enough of that, let's look at some of
the ways that big brands are trying to use social media to their
advantage.
Customer support
Some companies are starting to leverage social media as a form of
enhanced customer support. The reason is that it enables brands to
have a dialogue with their customers in a new way. I saw a
presentation recently about how a company was using Twitter to
communicate with its customers in conjunction with their Superbowl ad.
Other companies are using similar platforms to field support
questions, akin to an 800-number or web chat. This works to a degree,
but when you look at the volume of inquiries coming through say,
twitter, with incoming emails and phone calls it hardly looks like a
relevant channel at this point.
Community marketing
Many companies now have their own Facebook group that customers can
join. This method of community marketing shows a great deal of
potential (assuming customers can find the right page - see above).
The additional challenge here is that companies largely have not
figured out how to use this to their advantage.
For example, I joined the Facebook group of one of my favorite
wineries in Sonoma, but in fact, there's very little that happens
there. The winery isn't posting much in the way of notices,
promotional or otherwise, and the customers, although you would think
they would be posting about their favorite wines and discussing such
topics, rarely do anything of the sort. I think the lesson here is
that it's not enough to simply put up a page; as a marketer you need
to first generate a critical mass.
Naturally, if you're a winery in Sonoma, you will need to work much
harder at this than if you're a top Internet site. Once critical mass
is there, brands can offer their social communities first access to
promotions, product previews, exclusive content, anything to allow
this community to deepen engagement with your brand.
Protecting your brand
One of the things that social media does for big brands is to magnify
consumer opinions, both positive and negative. This can be scary for
brand owners who have grown accustomed to controlling their brand
image and messaging. The notion that one dissatisfied customer can
post a bad review on Yelp and dominate the image of the brand online
has some marketers and business owners in a cold sweat late at night.
Relax. Fight fire with fire. The best thing a brand owner can do is to
leverage his own community and ask them to write their own reviews
using the same channels. The above mentioned winery did a great job of
this, posting a link on their Facebook page, inviting members to go to
Yelp and write reviews.
Let's be careful out there
One thing businesses should be aware of is that social media can be a
double-edged sword. I was talking to a friend on the train today who
revealed how he used Twitter as a competitive intelligence and sales
tool. He was monitoring tweets from and about his competitors and
could tell who his competitor was selling to.
From that point, a well-placed sales call is all it takes to get a
meeting with the right party to close a deal. Big brands don't need to
fear this particular tactic so much, but the lesson remains: assume
that whatever you post in social media will be read by everyone, and
use this as a filter when crafting your social media messaging.
What's ahead?
Despite the staggering numbers associated with the rise of social
media, I don't think we quite know what to do with it yet. Sure, we
like it when celebrities tweet, but I think we will all agree that we
don't care if my cousin Vinny just ate a really good steak. We may be
interested in Facebook updates from some of our friends, but the sheer
volume of posts makes it almost impossible to find anything useful or
interesting.
I think the people who are really going to capitalize on the medium
will be the ones who find the niches where this medium really excels
and build products that live in these niches. I have some friends, for
example, who are looking at this space closely, and have figured out a
really slick way to create deep and meaningful dialogue among groups
of people. The beauty is that this happens in an anonymous mobile
environment where people interact freely and in real-time, reducing
the inevitable clutter and noise that come with existing social
networks. I could go on and on about this - you'll just have to follow
my tweets if you want to know more.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
David Roth <http://searchengineland.com/author/david-roth/>
is Director of Search Engine Marketing for Yahoo!, Inc.
<http://www.yahoo.com>
. The Industrial Strength
<http://searchengineland.com/lands/industrial-strength.php>
column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land
<http://searchengineland.com>
.
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