From my side of the table, I’m seeing clients needing to understand these three areas to effectively map a social strategy that works for their brand: social, distributed, and integrated.
Social
This is the circle most people think of first when considering social media: people talking with brands and other people in social networks. Think Twitter or Facebook groups, forums. Places where you need to be fairly active in listening and participating to do any kind of work facilitating or leading a segment of that community.
Social is also the most deceptive. Brands are eager to jump in because it feels easy. It’s just about telling someone to open an account and do some tweets, right? But if that person or people can’t carry the brand strategy through the lenses of casual, persistent social interaction and maintain ambient awareness while they do the rest of their work — all while being empowered to keep people happy and route requests to the right people, the dollars and brand equity start sinking fast.
That’s why it is so important to spend the the time upfront creating a brand / participation framework and choosing the right people to operate it.
Distributed
Content distribution and curation is where the action seems to be right now for brands testing out the space, and it’s a great way to start wrapping top-down corporate hierarchies around the notion of the mobile Web. Rapid publishing platforms (you know them best as blogs), and distributing content to what I would call semi-social sites like YouTube, delicious or slideshare.
These are great places to start as any truly social effort will fail without a combination of good people and good content that is easily sharable. Brands need to budget for both, and start understanding not only what it takes to make the jump from marketer to publisher, but what platforms and what content their audience is most interested in. It’s a context economy, and smart brands are already realizing it.
Note: Please do not engage in any social or distributed platform before having a solid strategic foundation for interaction design and search. There’s no point in having a Twitter strategy for a possible pool of 20-some million registered users when just about everyone in the world starts some decision-making process at a Google search box. You’ll also find that most tools for social media right now are extensions of SEO tools / methods, so having a keyword-based framework is a good start.
Integrated
Integration between the enterprise, the audience, and social networks is where every brand needs to be directing the rudder. In agencies right now it’s as much about demystifying working with APIs as it is developing models that bring social networks back through traditional brand properties using social experience design.
In brands, integration needs to start with communication tools that work with social networks to bring back worthwhile intelligence, flatten the hierarchical communications structure and deliver answers from the back of the house to the audience as needed.
What do you think? You should add a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis.
Filed under: Social Media
