Social Media as a Listening Platform

Much has been written about the importance of including social media in your marketing strategy and the types of activities that you can and should begin to explore. Perhaps one aspect of social marketing that might get short shrift is what Dave Evans of ClickZ writes about today in Get Started With Social Media -- leveraging social media as a listening platform.

There may in fact be greater merit right now to setting up your online community with blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook et. al. as more listening and feedback outposts than as platforms for outbound marketing. If you remember from past posts I've written, I'm not sure if outbound marketing/messaging has yet found its' ideal niche in social media marketing (SMM). What social media can do right now is help form the foundation of an inbound marketing strategy, where you make available your intellectual capital, your ideas and solutions for solving business challenges and allow prospects and customers to find your brilliance rather than your going out and hunting them. By becoming a thought leader on specific business problems and best practices you gain much more credibility amongst your intended targets.

Part of that inbound strategy includes using social media as the true interactive medium that it is. And that means listening to all that is written about your company, your brand and your competitors. Social media is an outstanding marketing research tool. Just as important as providing your thinking and ideas online is the response to those ideas that you receive. It provides you with an ongoing dialogue with your constituents, to have a conversation, giving them the ability to express their likes and dislikes, what their needs, opinions, complaints are. How they like to be communicated to. It enables you to share, learn, better engage. Ultimately it gives you a deeper understanding and stronger bond w/your targets and helps guide and inform your own product/solution development.

Foundation of Social Media Marketing

Ran across another article this week that affirms the three (3) primary aspects of a social media marketing strategy (SMM), which I thought I'd review here.

• Content - the information, data, thought leadership, thinking, ideas, solutions that a company communicates out (makes available) through various digital forums (blogs, websites, online media, online videos, ebooks, digital content syndication, webinars, RSS feeds, etc.)
• SEO - by tagging your content with appropriate keywords and by ensuring the development of more inbound links to your valuable content, you are making it possible for your prospects to find your brilliance
• Social Media - lastly, when that content, those links, cross the chasm into social media networks, they take on a new relevance and credibility. As the information is passed along, it takes on a greater value (the personal validation of the person passing along the information), is further amplified and more apt to reach viral status.
  

Robin Niefield talks about the intersection of PPC, SEO and social media in At the Intersection of Search and Social.

Interesting take by Augustine Fou in The ROI for Social Media Is Zero where he suggests that there really is no social media, but social networks that a company can only hope to gain entry to by making their products or services 'awesome' and talked about. What's key is simply providing a place where they can talk. And if you're paying for social media as media, you're probably doing it wrong. Make certain to read through some of the reader feedback/ comments at the end of Augustine's article, some great points made.