For companies of all sizes, the notion of having social media “covered” often means that they’ve got someone charged with daily community management. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that the integration of social media into your integrated marketing strategies is exponentially more complex than simply community management. That’s why I’m excited to have my smart friend Ric Dragon, CEO and founder of DragonSearch and author of Social Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get Customers to Stay Forever as this week’s guest on our videocast, V3 Live: The Internet of Things.
There are five major approaches to social media that organizations who are successfully integrating social media into their integrated marketing strategies use. They are:
- Brand maintenance, including customer care;
- Community work, including developing internal and external brand ambassador programs;
- Influencer programs;
- Reputation and thought leadership;
- The “big splash” creative campaigns (or campaigns they hope will create a big splash, anyway), including viral media.
What many marketers (and sometimes their senior leadership) overlook is that determining the right mix of the foregoing approaches is where the real meat and potatoes is when it comes to your marketing strategy. Each of these modes works differently for different kinds of businesses, and marketers must measure the impact of their effectiveness differently as well.
I already mentioned that Ric is pretty smart. I think that when it comes to online marketing and understanding how social, SEO, and content work together to produce results, there’s nobody better. I’ll bet that by now you’ve figured out why I’m such a fan, since this is pretty much what I talk about ad nauseum (and what we do for our clients). Ric draws on his experience and insights into the history of marketing, combined with process methodologies like LEAN and the Capability Maturity Model, and works with companies to help them develop social media processes that are measurable, repeatable, and improvable.
Equally as important, in the course of his research and client work, Ric has interviewed marketers from various brands, big and small, and really understands the challenges marketers are faced with these days and how complex the world of marketing has become. When it comes to social media and the modes or approaches to social media outlined above, sometimes they hit on one and stick with it – and get some results. But many times, they don’t and/or they don’t realize the kind of results they might see if they knew more.
That’s why I’m excited about this week’s show, because we’ll do a deep dive into this topic and send you away with some new ideas and some things you can put to work in your business right away. Here’s a video of a presentation Ric did at the 2013 BRITE Conference at Columbia University that will give you a preview of what we’re going to be talking about.
We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday and if you have questions or anything you’d like for us to cover in advance, post your questions here on the blog or tweet them to us using the #v3live hashtag and we’ll be sure to tackle them during the show. Here’s a link to the landing page for more information.
If you’re looking for an advanced book on the social media marketing process, buy Social Marketology, it’s one of my go-to resources and I’m pretty sure it will be yours, too. And while, I hope to see you on Wednesday, know that you can also catch the show on demand later if you can’t make it during the broadcast.
The article was republished from LinkedIn.
And by the way, if we’re not yet connected on LinkedIn but you’re reading this blog, let’s fix that. STAT.
photo credit: krossbow via photopin cc
How to Get More Out of Social Media Using the Whole Systems View is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency
