It's probably a safe bet that many of you make your living (at least in part) by helping your clients -- or in the case of the client-side marketers among you, your companies -- engage consumers more effectively through social media channels.
Should your CEO blog? What should your brand managers know about MySpace and Facebook? Do you need feeds, widgets, a podcast or some kind of virtual world presence? How about mobile social software or presence applications? And then, of course, how do all of these things fit together and integrate properly with your mass media and traditional PR efforts to actually help you meet your business objectives -- because we all know that tactics without strategy won't get you to where you need to go.
These questions -- and others like them -- seem to be on the minds of just about every marketer, PR practitioner and client-side social media evangelist. And while these questions warrant answers, it strikes me that, if these are the first questions we're asking (even the strategy question), we are starting in the wrong place.
If you ask me, starting with social media marketing can often amount to nothing more than putting lipstick on the pig (and yep, the pig in this case is your old school "anti-social" company.) I can't tell you how often marketers ask me for advice on how to use social media to reach new customers and sell more stuff, yet have never even considered how they can use the very same (or similar) tools to work better, smarter and cheaper themselves. Worse still are those companies that seem hell-bent on marketing through social media yet can't even access social media sites from within their firewalls.
The most far-reaching impact of social computing is not that it changes the way we market; it is that it changes the way we can and should do business. Marketing is just the external manifestation of this change, but the change needs to come from within the organization and must impact everything from how we attract talent to how we share information with our co-workers to how we define 'workplace.'
So rather than simply asking how your company (or clients) can market better (or at least different) through social media, why not get straight to the heart of the matter with questions like these instead:
1) How can we use social computing tools and platforms to allow the people who work at my company to share, collaborate, network and work more efficiently?
2) How can mobile social software and presence applications help my company's remote workers (from telecommuters to a widely distributed sales force) be productive no matter where they happen to be, stay connected with each other, and participate in a digitally-enabled corporate culture.
3) How might a private online community enable me to collaborate more seamlessly with my clients, investors and outside business partners?
4) How can I take advantage of social computing technologies to offer my existing customers more convenient, flexible ways to open a direct line of communications with a company representative (or with each other) when they are in need of help or support?
5) How can platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Second Life, pretty much any instant messenger, and even YouTube or Ustream be seen (and used) as corporate productivity tools, rather than as the time wasters many managers and IT professionals still perceive them to be?
6) How do I tap into social networks to find and attract the best new talent? And how can I empower new workers with a set of tools that will allow them to be productive when, where and how they actually want to work today?
7) How can listening to online conversation about my company, brands, products and competitors provide not just an entry point for my marketing team to 'join the conversation,' but also valuable insights help me improve the way we operate, what we sell and how we produce it?
These are just the seven I thought of while writing this post. No doubt, there are dozens of others. What other questions would you add to the list?
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