Social Media
“How can I transform my social activities in 1 integrated interaction ? ”
Since the arrival and adoption of the smartphone in the early 2000’s, social networks have evolved and grown at a tremendous speed. Communities in various shapes and forms arose alongside the tendency of users to increasingly share any type of content they felt worth while exposing their lives to the world. With an explosion of real-time and contextual content as a result.
As any meaningful channel that is actively used by people, monetization and commercialization efforts from businesses in these spaces grown substantially as well, with many good but also a huge number of bad examples and executions. As exposure barely offers any type of control, businesses better prepare properly before entering these spaces. High hights are just as close as deep depths with the risk of serious damage to your companies brand or reputation. Preparing properly and adhering to a phased closely monitored listing, to react and ultimately interacting mode is the safest way of exploring the value of social for your company
Carefully plan your social exposure and visability
Starting with kicking in a huge open door… make sure you start from what you already are doing for a while in your (brand)marketing, PR and media relations. Apply the rules and regulations you’ve formulated and just extend those rules to what the social channels could offer you. This means being choose full in the channels you open up, ensure you have the right recognizable channels at your disposal, content that works best for these selected channels and a solid organized team that can handle the moderation and possible escalations that may occur. Obviously closely aligned or maybe even part of your existing communication, PR or media-relations team.
Once you have answers to all of the above mentioned points of attention, you can start the actual listening activity. Start to learn how the channel behaves and what communication and interaction is common. Once you’ve got a proper understanding of that dynamic, you should be ready to start some proactive posts and responses to reactions. Learning about your perceived authority and value within the channels or the channel you offer. This automatically will result in a need to further plan your comms on these channels which opens-up the possibility to truly interact with your audiences.
Depending on the succes (means number of channel subscribers or active participants/likes or comments) automating this process becomes important in order to keep a certain response and act quality level. Close connection to your backend systems then can help to further professionalize this channel, which also is a signal to further insource these channel activities and move away or change the role of the service providers that you may have hired for this job.
How to protect your brand value and reputation online?
As speed in social is extremely high and challenges of sincere mis-interpretation or maybe even worse deliberately are nearby, a closely monitored activity to monitor brand value and your company or brands reputation is crucial. In order to organize this monitoring properly its important to make sure you have most of the keywords your organization, brand or activities can be searched for online within eyesight. These keywords need to be scaled and applied to your monitoring values which allow you to properly act upon them. This may differ per channel that they are being used and responded to, and so is the usage of automated publications in other domains via potential RSS feeds you may offer. With this information and qualification sorted out you should be equipped to get started. Goes without saying that not everything is predictable and one certainty is that you will always get surprised, flexibility and quick, quality response can be a great prevention of huge escalations.
This obviously is not something you solely can manage from your organization alone. Many of the people within your organization personally are also active on these social channels on their own. Making sure that you carefully manage and explain the organisations position on social with your employees and providing them with a behavior-guideline in these channels can help you to further encourage and grow people to communicate with your via this channels. A true signal of the ambition to be truly customer centric as a company!