Before entering in social media (specifically start-ups business), companies need to ensure some business fundamentals: sustainability and innovation plan, core business and markets, brand building strategies, good website design and quality service assurance (we don't want to be "attacked" by our customers if we know we have a lousy service) .
Social Networks are means to interact with customers, consumers, suppliers and anybody interested in your business, so each company emerged in the social networks have to design very careful the online community strategy: Goals (are we looking for brand news, customers comments, corporate news...?), resources as social media can become an important channel of communication (Staff, designers, PR, Legal, etc), channel (is the company willing to create a facebook profile, twitter, blogs..? what kind of segment and market do we want to reach?). As Twitter, Facebook and Likedin are the most important in terms of users, these social network sites are recommended for a company to be in a online community
According to Melonie Gallegos, Social Media Specialist at Geary Interactive, Resources is one of the seven things Brands need to focus when building a community or social network...you can see here the complete interview
Few companies are starting to talk about the importance of Community Managers as the leaders of a Company's Social Network or community. Companies who embrace the community challenge, need resources to deliver excellent results, we are talking about programmers, designers and all other staff people that keep the community's flow attractive and interesting...Don't be shy about your online growth forecast...!! you could be surprised...!!
Federico
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I agree with Federico about the endless possibilities of marketing in social networks, but again it is only a tool organizations have to use, and this has to be used wisely. For example, one of the biggest mistakes organizations do is to join everybody as it quantity counted more than quality: BIG MISTAKE!!!. You need to focus the people that really might be interested in the goods you are marketing in order the offer don't get lost as the several offers sent by retailers to the customer's "inboxes" that usually go straight to the "trash" folder.
ReplyDeleteAnother obstacle to overcome: the mandatory need to have fresh and updated contents and by content I'm not talking only by offers, but news, other material as ring tones, etc, etc, etc.
Everything has to be measured to know for real if it is useful. And this is the final goal: to measure the efficiency (by sales in $) of marketing in social networks.
When federico said online growth forecast and then Ricardo mentioned more metrics (by sales in $), It hit me that companies not involved in the online community scene will indeed join the masses but may take the wrong direction in goals and presumably metrics to measure these goals.
ReplyDeleteMany companies out there promote themselves as having the tools to measure your community goals. One such company is community metrics .
I would insist on a company hiring a community manager or online media director which can control and rely a companies message via threads and blogs and sites, instead of having sales managers and executive team members worry about the kinks to roll out an effective marketing campaign via communities.
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