I had the fortune of attending the Online Marketing Summit this past week in San Diego and the “buzzword” was social media. What is it? How does it impact your business? How do you make it work without compromising your brand? All loaded questions. The most important takeaway was the need to commit the time and the resources to making it successful. In the ever-changing marketing landscape, we often neglect planning and instead focus on acting. Both are needed to create a cohesive social network that delivers relevancy and collaboration. Add in multi-channel tactics promoting your network and you have created a cohesive strategy.
Mike Angiletta, from Illumina, offered these words of advice during his presentation How to Build a Social Network Strategy and Plan. If you are going to have a social network, make certain you have the following components:
- Budget – Don’t expect to fly by with a shoestring budget. Be committed to setting aside a budget specific to your social network.
- Resources – Determine your need for a dedicated designer, developer, information architect, copywriter, community catalyst and more.
- Platform – What platform will you use? Will you build it in-house or use an open-source platform?
- IT Support – Allocate time with IT to ensure that when there are needs to expand, fix, or upgrade your social networking tools someone is available.
In addition, it’s mission critical to identify your users objectives. They can include collaboration, education, or even networking. Being in tune with your users needs enables you to create content that is both timely and applicable. There are multiple strategies for accomplishing this so try one or many. Personalizing the user experience can include organization, data collection, recommendations, tagging, rating, linking or user interaction. Decide which is best for your organization.
Here are the best practices that Mike also outlined:
- Make your community available to non-users.
- Engage your audience quickly before you lose them.
- Keep a consistent look and feel for recognition purposes.
- Enable self-expression.
- Make it a dynamic living site.
- Integrate with other communications.
- Build communities and sub-communities.
- Provide solutions for your user’s everyday pain points.
So how does email tie into this? It’s simple. Use email to keep your users engaged. Whether through alerts, invitations, rewards, or personalization, you can create an engaging campaign that keeps your social network top of mind.
Sally Lowery
Online Marketing Manager at Bronto
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