Developing a social strategy is a lot like having a balanced diet. While the employees can learn from each other, additional external supplements must be introduced into the diet for a balanced meal.
Unlike other tried and true mediums that are used to connect with customers, social strategies come with implications and risk. While brands will ultimately drive and implement their own social strategy entrée they’ll still need supplments to ensure they’re getting a balanced and healthy diet for this marathon. The below is a list of methods that brands are getting their daily dose of supplements for their social programs.
[Developing a social strategy is a lot like having a balanced diet. While employees can learn from each other, additional external supplements must be introduced into the diet for a balanced meal]
How Brands Balance Their Diet With Social Media Supplements
Brands ultimately drive their own strategy, but must have additional resources outside of their firewall to understand the rapidly changing social space. For each supplement, I”ll define what it is, give an example, then suggest how to best use, these supplements include:
Workshops and Webinars:
- What it is: Brands often bring in third party experts that have formalized workshop agendas, content, and workshop content to help them succeed.
- Examples: I know many of the community platform vendors like LiveWorld have such an offering, as well as most social media conferences. Education hubs like Marketing profs have ongoing webinar series, as does Forrester’s teleconfernces.
- How to use: Use these once internal stakeholders have buyin, and there’s momentum from groups that want to learn best practices. Don’t apply too early –nor too late.
Ongoing Training/Internal Labs:
- What it is: Brands are offering marketers ongoing training classes for social, that include a variety of external speakers, but coordinated by an internal resource or central team.
- Examples: Proctor and Gamble has the P&G social media labs which has provided a multitude of internal brands with resources, including a safe place to experiment. See their recent “Tides of Hope” experimental campaign, which was a success in learning. Secondly, PepsiCo, is leaning on Edelman Digital Strategy team (Rubel) for internal training, strategy, and recommendations.
- How to use: Large conglomerates or CPG brands will benefit first by having this ongoing educational program and curriculum. Great to deploy when multiple teams need education –and need to benefit from synching from each other.
Social Media Advisory Boards:
- What it is: Brands have a dedicated relationship with external thought leaders and practitioners, build relationships with them and seek their perspective.
- Examples: Intel has a social media advisory board, dubbed the “Insiders” that has a broad collection of industry practitioners and commenters –I’ve noticed some of them get Intel sponsorships. In some regards, Wal-Mart’s 11 moms program, which is non-paid sponsored conversations will result in similar benefits.
- How to use: Brands that want to develop long term relationships for programs, campaigns, should set these programs up, these are great stepping stones for influencer relations, esp in markets that take heavy criticism.
Councils and Clubs
- What it is: Brands join ongoing clubs and councils created by third parties. Some have member fees, and some are free, depending on sophitication. In some cases, memberships are wide open for the public, and others have private membership
- Examples: There’s a great number of councils and clubs from the: Social Media Club, Social Media Breakfast, BlogCouncil, Internet Strategy Forum, Forum One, Womma, EConsultancy among others. IBM hosted a Tweetup in their NYC office to meet and greet the social media community, although a one-off, a tweetup is an ongoing meeting across the world of passionate social users. At Forrester, we offer premiere clients the opportunity to join the Forrester Leadership Board for Interactive Marketers.
- How to use: Encourage practitioners to attend these clubs to learn from peers on an ongoing basis. Host or sponsor these meetings at your own company to learn from folks.
Research Firms:
- What it is: Research firms provide brands with data, best practices, and recommendations that help them to make successful decisions.
- Examples: eMarketer, Comscore, Nielsen Online, Pew Research, and Compete offer strong analytics. Brands seeking strategy and advice could approach Society of New Communciations Research, Gartner or Forrester, my employer. Leave a comment below if I’ve missed someone.
- How to use: Research is needed before crafting a strategy, as brands must find out who their customers are, how they use technology, and use for vendor and service vetting.
Ongoing Social News
- What it is: News about the social media space is well, noisy. Finding the right areas to find signal are key for every brand, as spending time scouring blogs can easily consume one’s day –and night.
- Examples: You’ll find consistent summaries and digests from SmartBrief’s Social Media daily wrapups, RWW’s weekly wrapups, or, my weekly digest of the social space.
- How to use: Be selective in your choices, you don’t have a lot of time during the day, once you find your credible news sources, be sure to encourage your colleagues to subscribe.
Other Forms
Of course, this dietary supplement is an ongoing process, and not just limited to social, brands, leaders, and everyone need to constantly learn to stay fresh. Additionally, brands should have internal training areas that employees can share their best practices and learn from their wins and losses. Take for example Vignette’s Dirk Shaw, a recently appointed social media strategist who has an internal blog dedicated to helping their marketing and product teams and beyond learn social. I purposely left out the extensive list of books on the topic, and this large list of marketing related conferences.
Upcoming Research on this Topic
I’m working on a Forrester report to uncover “How companies organize for social media” and if you’re a large brand that wants to talk to me, I’d love to interview you for this Q2 report, contact me at jowyang @ forrester.com.
I hope this list helps you maintain a balanced and regular social diet, leave a comment with additional suggestions, I’ll add them in as appropriate and credit you.
Wow!!! Thank you… all of the resources and explanations… wonderful! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, I’ve been slowly working on this post for a few weeks, research can be fun.
As I’ve said elsewhere, a balanced SM diet is like conventional nutrition. For every gram of LinkedIn you should have 10 grams of Facebook and 100 grams of Twitter. You can add some FriendFeed for fast-food conveninece, unless you’re on a low-Scoble diet, in which case you should probably have some TechCrunch for roughage.
–Ax
Alan, great analogy. Hopefully no one gets indigestion.
This is the most brilliant checklist on how to facilitate adoption of new areas of practice like Social Media. I hope to use this format to develop ongoing programs for my other areas in the iterative marketing comms field.
Thanks a bunch, Jeremiah.
hwooter @twitter.com
how about gartner as a research organization? i know it’s a competitor to forrester but still…
the gartner hype cycle is one of the most useful tools to marketers in the online space. what’s hot now and where its trajectory is taking it is of vital importance if you’re looking to decide what technologies to use in your marketing mix.
i humbly suggest my own take on the matter:
http://bloggingmebloggingyou.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/the-gartner-hype-cycle-what-consultants-and-agencies-need-to-know/
ed
Ed
I added Gartner. Initially when I did this list, (as you can tell) the majority of focus was on the marketing angle. Included them for good measure.
Not to sound too self serving but a lot of marketers also depend on their agencies as a supplement. Here at Razorfish we’ve found ourselves giving dozens and dozens of knowledge sharing sessions and hosting forums on social media. These are sometimes in our client offices but in many cases at our own too. I’m quite certain that other agencies are doing the same as well.
Shiv
That’s fair, glad to have you here. I consider that agencies could deliver a few of those examples, I listed out Edelman, and we know that agencies help with teleconfernces and webinars.
I would add another category which may be implicit but should be explicit.
Exercise: All of the brand managers and marketers should be active in Facebook and Twitter at a personal level. Sharing photos via flickr, creating a family blog, and downloading widgets. Understanding these technologies as a user will help marketers unearth their potential in creative applications.
Andres (former colleague) it’s so great to hear from you, Good advice, learning by doing is key.
Great list, Jeremiah – very helpful. I might suggest a small tweak, though: Rather than just research firms, which you suggest are especially useful in strategy development, and then general ongoing social media news, I’d suggest an internal “research and reporting” function focused on competitive and partner tracking. Monitoring firms can do this, and/or you can do a lot of it yourself with various alert and tracking tools, but the point is to maintain a regular review of what your key competitors and partners are doing with social media. I include “reporting” in this because the raw data can be overwhelming. Having someone summarize and synthesize important initiatives and interesting nuggets for everyone else in the company can be a very useful, entertaining, and inspiring service.
Hello Jeremiah,
Here is the tweet you asked me to post:
Our brief interaction did lead me to want to write about it, I did so here: Weblogs and Wikis – one of the differences
Best, Mark
Jeremiah,
I like to think of social media as organic food with less or no ‘marketing pesticides,’ and there is no question this healthier diet is leading to more lively, happy and consumer-friendly brands. All of the resources you listed are certainly contributing to this new lifestyle!
Mike Spataro
Visible Technologies
Rob
Agreed, there are multiple vendors, partners, and agencies that can deliver any of the above supplements.
You might be interested in this recently published book
Social Media Marketing is the start of a conversation about marketing communications using social media forms  including internet spaces and platforms and mobile telecommunication sources. The book addresses the importance of data and analytics both in helping to monetise these media, and in improving the way that the owners of these media market themselves. Marketers wishing to communicate with customers, or potential customers via social media need to adopt a new set of skills and techniques to be effective. The need for dialogue and involvement, for engagement, is paramount. This book helps the advance understanding and use of social media.
This book can help you to Â
* Understand the world of Social media from the perspective of the Web (social media), mobile/telecoms and traditional media
* Understand the significance of data within social networks
* Work with social media metrics like Alpha users, cost-per-relevant-audience and others
* Learn from case studies from enterprises who have successfully used the social media marketing approach
* Learn how to deploy social media marketing campaigns
* Recognise the growing significance of Privacy in Social media marketing
This book would appeal to anyone in the social media, mobile/telecoms and traditional media worlds, as well as to businesses wishing to become involved in Social Media Marketing.
Kind regards
Alan Moore
Hi Owyang,you have done a great job by expressing your views in this site.It has helped me to know about the role of social supplements in our diet and also to gain knowledge about the programs available for the dieting process.
After some years of marketing, I began to realize that what you say is true…at least in my personal experience: that the right balance is somewhat more important having excellence in just one component, especially in social media.
Thanks for this post!
The book is well written and quite profound in its analysis of the diet's own principles and those of other, competing diets. The meals and recipes included in the book are excellent, and the diet as a whole seems much more sustainable than Atkins, South Beach, Rosedale, etc.
I'm not finished read this yet, but it's so fabulous 'n I'll back again when I was finished my job 😀
Well Thinking. Great work done.
For more jobs visit http://www.staffingpower.com
I'm not finished read this yet, but it's so fabulous 'n I'll back again when I was finished my job 😀
I'm thankful to social media because it brought me a lot of viable product suggestions in life, including the handy natural weight loss supplement that I'm using. 2 months since I bumped into it, I already lost almost 40 lbs. 🙂
Interesting???
Bookmarked http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/05/03/how-brands-balance-their-diet-with-social-media-supplements. Thank you for sharing your info on SEO. Definitely worth the time away from my homework.
zinc supplement can help promote healing in the body, & can be used to fight chilled & flu signs.
Eating a healthy diet is of key importance to your weight-loss success. From healthy diet plans to helpful weight loss tools, here you’ll find the latest diet news and information. Lose Weight and Improve Overall Wellness. We help you lose weight safely and effectively.