On August 29th, there was an interesting article published on Huvudstadsbladet, Helsinki’s 2nd biggest daily newspaper, with the title Companies Are Committing to Social Media (registration required), which painted a fairly accurate picture of the difference between making plain social media investments, and on the other hand, making social media investments that actually work.
From Whitevector’s point of view, there were two arguments that seemed especially relevant regarding the level of social media knowledge expected from B2C companies, when making these investments.
1) Companies that want to be in social media, might already be there
There is a distinct difference between having to pay for social media presence, and already having a high level of visibility in online discussions. Certain companies might have a relatively strong presence in online discussion due to a strong brand, special events that appear on the news and are worth discussing, or just because certain brand names are an easier way to refer to certain services or types of product (e.g. Coke can refer to basically any cola-beverage).
Brands that are not lucky enough to already possess this level of social media presence can however approach their target audiences more efficiently than ever, by participating in discussions through customer service, finding the most influential sites to target or optimising their search engine referrals with social media buzzwords.
However, as it was discussed in the HBL article, being visible online (even if it is for free) is not the end of the road, but companies should indeed be a part of that discussion as well. This way, the customer and the company are able to meet under the umbrella of social media, and consumers can get more response when dealing with their preferred brands, for example in the form of more flexible customer service through a Facebook fan page.
2) Being in the right places is not enough
Once companies do bring their brands closer to their audience within the most relevant forums, blogs and social networking sites, it should be kept in mind that once the audience’s attention has been grabbed, it actually takes some effort to hold on to it.
Short contest-type campaigns within Facebook groups can indeed gather tens of thousands of potential customers to the same place, but if nothing is done after the winners have been raffled, the value of such campaigns might be significantly less as they would be, if such audience groups would be cultivated and cared for through recurring and relevant company-generated content.
One way of seeing how such social media campaigns have impacted each brand’s online visibility, is through analyzing how the overall tone of discussion has changed over time (through sentiment reports) or seeing whether discussions have spread farther than before, or if the general discussion volume per brand has improved notably – especially compared to the overall volume of each relevant product/service category.
