Community Management: The New Frontier
As marketers, we spend so much time and energy trying to guess who our customers are. We take surveys, we hold focus groups, we read the research and we paint a picture of the people who want to buy our product. While traditional research methods are excellent tools for getting a read on our customers, social media is quickly reinventing our ability to listen, learn and act. Through proven methods of what we call Community Management, brands now have the ability to collect relevant conversations, identify their key influencers, define their target demographic and create systems to enable two-way communication and measure the results.
Listen & Learn
A common misconception of marketing in social media is that it can be purchased in the same manner as traditional media. The problem with this approach is that Community Management is a process, not a flight. This process of developing relationships begins with listening to existing conversations about your product, brand category and competitors, and applying these findings to quantitative benchmarks. The net result of creating this snapshot is a defined set of actionable insights and key performance indicators for your campaign. Too many marketers miss this step and end up questioning the ROI of social media campaigns without defining what they were trying to achieve in the first place. This is a crucial misstep in the process of creating a social media presence and can waste significant time, effort and money.
Act
Creating a platform is defining where you’d like to build and how you’d like to interact. There are a number of social media channels to consider; and some of these work better for certain brands than others. Again, this step is built from listening to the space and deciding how you’d like to create impact. For example, if you decide to create a Facebook page, you need to decide what you’re going to do to keep it active and interesting. Generally, profiles aren’t Web sites. Making a page and putting up product shots will not foster community; you need to be engaging and you need to facilitate conversation. If you’re reaching out to a network of bloggers, you need to give them something. Whether it’s great content, a product to review, or a way to cross-promote their space, bloggers are interested in creating and maintaining relationships; they are not interested in being free advertising space. All of your tactics in social media need to be centered around creating and strengthening relationships with your customer base.
Measure
Lastly, defining ROI on your campaigns is vital to effective marketing. With clearly defined performance indicators and a benchmark of your presence, measuring ROI becomes a much simpler process. The problem marketers are having is figuring out which measurement unit to use. I contend that you can measure social tactics with any metric you want, so long as you decide how to measure it before you begin. All success is measured on change: what is the change in comments, conversations, inbound links, clicks to site, friends, impressions, conversions, sales, etc. Unless you are starting with a baseline, you’ll never get to the finish line.
Are you listening?