Social Media is an important, growing channel in the world of online marketing. Certainly indicated by the number of attendees crammed into this afternoon’s session at SES New York.
The panel for the session included moderation duties handled by Erik Qualman from EF Education and the following speakers: Jennifer Laycock, Liana Evans, Tamera Kremer and William Flaiz.
From the impromptu polling during the session, the majority of people are already leveraging social media as a marketing channel in some way.
There are organizations that are built for this type of marketing. They produce the right kind of content, make it shareable and are willing to test new channels. The Smart Kit puzzles site is a perfect example. (If you are a competitive person, don’t click as you’ll not be able to stop. :))
Others organizations are not inherently built for social media, not because of business models but because of content creation models.
It’s not only difficult to get anything social approved within such organizations, but the conversations on the path to social media can be painful.
For the attendees, both inhouse and agency, in the audience looking for the WHY to social media, Li Evans provided some great ones.
CREATE
1. Opportunities to connect and engage the target audience
2. Buzz around content, products, services, etc
INCREASE
1. Traffic to the website
2. Links to the website
3. Rankings in the SERPs (search engine result pages)
I find one of the biggest push backs on social is companies are afraid of what users are going to say about them.
Most organizations are employing the ‘ignorance is bliss’ way of thinking and ignoring that users are talking about their brand anyway.
It is important to know where your audience is conversing online, what they are saying and get involved.
Cliché as it may sound, companies shouldn’t focus on the bad review, but rather how they respond. Bad reviews are going to happen, it’s part of business. What doesn’t have to happen is companies ignoring conversations in which they can have great impact on the most targeted of target audiences.
Enough of the negative. There are wonderfully positive conversations about brands in the social media space and this is an untapped resource for great content.
We consistently work with clients to take the good and milk it for all its worth, whether media coverage, client testimonial, analyst review, the list goes one.
The positive information should be leverage throughout additional marketing channels to increase credibility with the target audience.
Work with your company/clients to be glass half full kind of people regarding social media because if you are, your glass can be full of results.
