With the explosion in and variations of social media participation (eg Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) you can forgive marketers for occasionally feeling just a little bewildered. It can seem like drinking from a firehose! Yet getting involved yourself (open a Twitter account, start a blog, start a group on Facebook or LinkedIn) is critical for any marketer just to understand this new medium... And that is only half the challenge, what about your day-gig? What is the brand going to get out of this?
Forrester, I believe, continue to do a good job of mapping out the social media landscape for brands and a recent paper "Turning Your B2B Web site Into A Community Hub" (sorry, this article costs) provides some clarity and supports our experience in managing online communities for brands.
Forrester "recommends a community hub approach: a social media strategy that focuses on maximizing leverage from the corporate Web site and integrates with public community Web sites like Facebook, LinkedIn an Twitter for greater reach, impact and efficiency." That is, you need to be hosting your own conversation and inviting folks over to your place when you get the opportunity.
For all the hype around public social media sites, consider the following observations (some from Forrester, some from our own experience):
- Public sites change. Hot new community sites come along with with increasing regularity - evidence the passing parade: Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter... As Forrester observe: "chasing the latest social media trend is a losing battle"; are you prepared to create an ever-growing portfolio of community sites, all of which take time and effort to learn, master, manage and maintain?
- You cannot control public sites. As a marketer, you have a fundamental lack of control on these public social sites. Facebook allows marketers to keep only limited information about users, while the vast majority of information must be deleted within 24 hours. There are no service-level agreements and there is nothing stopping providers like Facebook or YouTube changing their terms of service on a whim. Indeed their are examples - like Sportsgirl here in Australia - where an apparently successful Facebook application was all but made impossible to find following a unilateral Facebook interface decision; the ability to control the user experience and calibrate conversations is important for the brand...
- You cannot control or facilitate conversations on a public site. It is important that brands have the option of pre-moderating user generated content if they are wanting to nurture constructive conversations. This capability should not be used to censor negative commentary or to strangle spontaneity - this will only harm the brand in the end - but the brand will occasionally have legal or commercial reasons to respond in a manner of its own choosing.
- You cannot identify customers on a public site. Excuse me, but this is a big one.The most significant value in communities usually comes from knowing who your customers are (insight should not be anonymous) and being able to build up a picture of individual customers and of customer segments using transactional (behavioural) data from other enterprise systems. Being able to confirm identity (eg using loyalty card numbers) is critical to realising this value.
- You still have a corporate website! The corporate website is not dead (yet). And for established brands, particularly the larger consumer brands that we deal with, customers still value information about your products and services on your web site. Why force customers to go elsewhere for that visibility and community - losing opportunities and dropping leads unnecessarily...
- Public sites do not provide brand context. It is difficult to create meaningful brand context on public sites where "anything goes" and a brand-related conversation can be lost in the noise.
Forrester's recommendation is not to turn our backs on public sites of course. Their observation and indeed, our experience, is that mature community marketing efforts are emerging that unite both corporate domain and public social networks. These community initiatives:
- Bring community features and functions to the corporate web site. Community features and functions are enabling a more engaging corporate website experience - re-invigorating that brochureware on your current site and providing for the social reflex that customers have grow to expect elsewhere on the web.
- Expose those features prominently and consistently. Whilst it might serve your initial risk concerns to tuck your community features away in a remote part of your website it ultimately pays to integrate and expose these features across your website - demonstrating an open conversation to others.
- Create hooks to external sites for greater exposure. This all about creating a seamless or consistent customer experience from your website to public community sites. This means exposing existing content from your website to public community sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Some community platforms (like the one that we use) have pre-built integration to prominent public social sites
This approach achieves significant benefit through focus. As Forrester state: "instead of chasing customers throughout the web and fixating on the the public community du jour, firms that adopt a community hub approach will focus on building a valuable, relevant and consistent user experience".
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