Intelligent Social Media

Social Media is powerful, and it’s here to stay. Here’s a handy resource from SCT’s Creative Director Brad Smith to its relevance for businesses and brands.

By Brad

What is social media?

Social media is a concentrated network of resources, people and information using the web, and web-based technologies (blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook etc.) to create social dialogue across many channels.

Social media transforms ‘people from content consumers into content producers‘.

Unique to Social Media, and in striking contrast to conventional media channels such as newspapers or television - is its capability of allowing a single voice with relatively no resources to publish information with significant volume and sentiment.

What used to be “word of mouth” is now “world of mouth” - Eric Qualman (Socialnomics)
Watch the Social Media Revolution (YouTube)

The key to Social Media is ‘genuine dialogue’
When considering social media strategies or campaigns, provide your audience a genuine reason to participate.

• Ensure your idea has resonance
• Provide a genuine incentive to participate
• Ensure the message has relevance (to your intended audience)
• Establish a meaningful exchange for you, and your audience
• Ensure your message is fresh
• Establish trust and ensure you maintain it

Tip: Ensure your approach is sustainable with your available resources.

Ramblings, references and recommendations…

• Historically, brands and business are used to having their conventional armory of communication lined up in a row ready to push information out and hope it works. Now brands need to participate.
• Ironically, human connection is the primary reason people venture onto social media sites - though contribution to content eg. blogs and product consumption is frequent (Razorfish)
• Social media, is an opportunity for brands and consumers to equally benefit from relationships.
• People influence others online = Social Influence Marketing. Ironically, human connection is the primary reason people venture onto social media sites - though contribution to content (eg Blogs) and product consumption is frequent (Razorfish)
• Acknowledge, accept and employ social media as a powerful and viable channel to marketing
• There are many indexes and methods for measuring success of social marketing. For easy understanding, Social Media measurement is a metric of volume and sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) around user-generated content.

Tools for enabling social marketing
Enable social media into your website to encourage social interaction, community support and make content more shareable.
There’s many ways and means, here’s a few handy tools as reference.

TweetMeme: The TweetMeme re-tweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on Twitter.
AddThis: Boost traffic back to your websites by making it easier for visitors to share your content.
Delicious Collaboratively manage bookmarks for handy online resources tailored to customer segments
SlideShare: Upload and share presentations, Word documents and PDFs. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar.
Survey Monkey: Survey your community at the start, middle or end of a campaign.

References:
There’s literally thousands of websites, blogs, business and evangelists out there, here’s a good start to learning more…
Social Nomics
Disruptology
WoorkUp
Mashable
Going Social Now by Shiv Singh
MediaPost
Social Media Examiner

Big kids at play: Pepsi V Coca-Cola
If you’re not yet convinced social media is here to stay, Pepsi have dropped their established NFL Superbowl ad placement for a social media campaign; Pepsi Refresh Project valued at US$20M. It’s no small gamble, though if successful they stand to gain a full year of audience sentiment, rather than a fleeting 30 seconds. Coke stayed with their Superbowl placement, though not to be out-done, countered Pepsi with a socially minded response through Facebook called Live Positively.  Read More.

In those famous words of Coke’s early 2000 campaign… “Enjoy!”