Step 1: Advertise on social networks
Your first step is to allocate a portion of your online media budget to the social networks. You'll want to run a good mix of your display media, and keep in mind that these need to do more than just drive consumers to your home page -- they should drive traffic to your brand's social network pages, as well as to any branded social networks you may have developed. This helps unite your community. You should also consider other avenues to drive traffic like promotions, syndication and seeding your story throughout the relevant blogosphere.
Step 2: Embed your brand into social networks
The second step is to embed your brand into social networks. The more widgets, videos and promotions you can tie into your page, the better. This is where the consumers will control a majority of the communication. You'll have less control -- which not all brands are comfortable with -- but you'll give consumers an invaluable opportunity to talk directly with the company. This is your window for looking at, listening to and learning from what people are saying about your brand, so be prepared to open up a dialog with them. You won't be able to mine this data as easily as you will with your own branded social network, but you'll still learn a lot.
Champion Sports Apparel's Facebook presence is a great example. Champion has tapped into one of the biggest social discussion topics around college rivalry, targeting the college demographic with promotions, intramural sports, requests for T-shirt design suggestions, photos of fans and discussions on the best teams -- all while providing a place to go buy Champion products. Their next step should be to move these fans to their own branded site.
Step 3: Build your own social networking site
The third and probably the most important step is also the step most often overlooked by marketers: building your own branded social networking site. Having your own site gives you a little more control than you get when you embed your brand in traditional social networks. Building your own site is more involved, of course, but here's where you can really cash in: You gain all the advantages of social networking along with the ability to weave in your product merchandising to drive real sales. You can also capture invaluable data about your core consumers -- data that you can't obtain through media buys or social networks. Remember, consumers will evaluate your own branded site more than your embedded site before joining, so you'll definitely need to have a good user interface tailored to your consumer and brand persona.
- Reebok recently launched Run Easy, letting users create profiles, communicate on message boards, share workout music, upload their favorite run in their cities, play videos and other activities that create a community of users who love to run. By providing a site that helps runners connect and share stories, Reebok has already amassed over 18,097 members, 200 runs and 50 discussion boards. Reebok will be able to mine this data to help structure local marketing programs and understand what runners care about.
- Jeep has launched a great combination of the 3 + 3 with the Jeep Experience site. The site incorporates Flickr photos of users and their Jeeps, videos, MySpace and Facebook groups -- all while weaving the adventure persona of the brand in with an action sports section and live experience events that users can participate in. Jeep also has developed promotions, swag, games and a geo-caching contest with a chance to win a new Jeep. Jeep has amassed more than 25,000 members that, when it is time to buy their next car, it will probably at least consider buying a Jeep. And at $30,000 for an average car that comes out to 750 million dollars. Not a bad ROI…..
If your current social marketing strategy is classified as a wallflower, you need to become a social butterfly in order to survive. We compete in an attention-based economy, using fragmented, portal media to reach a mobile consumer. You can't disregard the momentum effect that social marketing will have on your business.
So go out and socialize.
Mark Drosos is VP, account management and executive creative director at Powered Inc. Read full bio.