360i's Social Marketing Playbook Quiz

Active listening will help identify issues early on, but sizing up the audience and each commenter’s sphere of influence is even more important to qualify the potential ramifications and either amplify or quash discussions from there.

Community management, or “community nurturing,” is an umbrella term defining a broad range of initiatives that engage your customers once they’ve arrived at a social space. It’s not enough to just drive people to your programs – you have to continually provide value to them once they’ve arrived to keep the conversations flowing and nurture deeper relationships that provide benefit to both you and your customers.

Listening, being prepared ahead of time and speaking the language of your audience while still retaining brand identity are all necessary components of a comprehensive crisis management plan. A poorly handled fumble can lead to disaster, but a thoughtful response to issues that arise can actually lead to greater customer appreciation and loyalty.

Before launching a specific program or coming up with a grand idea, marketers can ready themselves for success by gathering the information needed to reach an intimate understanding of their audience. How do your customers engage across the social landscape and what are they saving about your brand? How is your competition utilizing social marketing? Marketers can gain these insights by actively listening, watching, gathering and learning from the online landscape before diving in.

It is never appropriate for a brand to shirk transparency. The most successful Digital Word of Mouth programs start with transparent, authentic and personalized communication between brand representatives and bloggers. Exclusive content, access to talent or new product lines, sampling opportunities and interviews are the best ways to make a lasting impact with online infuencers.

Although Twitter gives its users 140-character limit, you can make yourself more “retweetable” by keeping your tweets to 120 characters. This gives enough breathing room for your followers to preface your message with @yourname.

Oftentimes marketers fall into the trap of using online advertising to support online experiences, while using traditional advertising to support offline campaigns. While there are certainly organizational challenges when asking your traditional ad agency to incorporate social marketing components, the efficiency gained by leveraging your investments, as well as the promotional benefits of providing a call to action that encourages consumers to engage more deeply, can offset the internal complexities. Co-opting marketing efforts are both efficient for the marketer and useful to consumers because they don’t have to search for your online presence or wait to stumble upon it – you’ve already let them know where they can interact with you online.

Before launching a social program, consider first if the opportunity meets your brands objectives, leverages your brand’s existing arsenal of assets (online content, celebrity endorsements, Brand Advocates, etc.), follows the best practices of the platform and provides value to your customers. Not every opportunity on every platform will be right for your brand.

Social marketing measurement boils down to gauging success against marketing objectives and developing easy-to-understand proxies for those metrics to evaluate the contribution of individual marketing components to the overall success of the program. It’s not about any one lever – it’s about making the levers work in tandem to produce metrics that gauge effectiveness against pre-determined objectives.