Questions to ask before starting a Social Media Campaign 1: Why do you want to use social media? While, I think that many companies should exploit the numerous benefits that social media marketing (dubbed relations) affords them, there are equally as many companies who should stay clear from the medium. Determine what the underlying goal is and why social media should be used to achieve same before you continue. 2. Which department will social media become a vertical to? Often it’s the technical department that gets the thumbs up. But think carefully. The Marketing and PR departments are generally the creative, content-driven folk who hold the key to any company’s target market. This is at the soul of any social media strategy! Also, well executed social media is a result of an integrated approach. 3: Is the company ready for social media engagement? Often, so much blue tape exists within corporate society that we forget that it’s not conducive to the pace-of-lightning speed that social media is. Determine beforehand what processes need to be in place for your engagement to be real and timely. 4: Similar to point 3, is your company ready for the brutally honest feedback that exists on the Internet about your company or brand and if so, is the business ready to make positive changes to the business? This includes having access to senior management - even Exco level - so that they’re aware of what’s happening in the space. 5: What part of the bottom line are you hoping to improve on with social media? This is a biggie. You see, I’m all for brand positioning. It’s important. But it generally costs a lot of money and on its own does very little to a business’ profit margins. Social media, like any other online marketing channel, needs to be used for the purpose of generating leads. Sure, the approach may be different but there needs to be a financial target. It’s that simple. Anything less is fluff. 6: Have you got access to target social media communities that you can rely on to launch a blogger or social networker seed campaign? Being able to reach out to influential online networkers with a large following is important to accelerating the campaign and its message into the social media community. 7: Speaking of bloggers, are you aware that social media goes beyond bloggers and blogging? Often a company will jump on the blog bandwagon not realising that other social media channels do exist that could offer far more value to both your business and customers. Do the research. Call someone in. Make informed decisions. 8. Have you experimented and ideally succeeded with a SEO campaign? Because Search is the lifeblood of online traffic, it is important to understand the fundamentals of Search and Optimisation to reap the benefits across online marketing disciplines. Similarly, it’s important to be able to make sense of quantitative and qualitative metrics. There’s probably many more things that I can add to this list. What do you think is missing? See you in May. It’s going to be a very exciting month on so many levels...
Questions to ask before starting a Social Media Campaign
Yahoo! to Rewire for Social Graph and Data Portability
Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed today. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. Here's a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.
Installable Apps
It's all about the platforms and conference organizer Brady Forrest was kind enough to referenceour post yesterday on what comes next after APIs and platforms are ubiquitous in his introduction of the Yahoo! CTO. Sure enough, Yahoo! has its own vision for what comes next and it's a pretty good looking plan.
Yahoo! will soon allow developers to write apps that work easily across every property in the company. Hosting will be offered or the apps can live off-site. When a user ads an application, they'll be asked which of the Yahoo! sites they want that app to be installed on. This will include the front page of Yahoo! - which will soon host 3rd party apps. Look out Facebook.
Those apps will include an event stream (ala FriendFeed/Facebook Newsfeed/MySpace friend activity feed) that's prioritized by topic area and social graph. The activities of your sports friends will appear on the Yahoo Sports page, your closest email buds will be surfaced on Yahoo! Mail.
You might not feel like you have a well developed social graph across Yahoo! but think about Flickr, Upcoming.org and Del.icio.us. Let's see Yahoo! acquire Twitter or FriendFeed and then we'll really be talking.
The Social
Social graph data, or prioritized friends lists, will serve as the relevance filter for the apps that operate across Yahoo. Back in November we discussed this strategy in a post about the Inbox 2.0 strategy titled Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook.
While Facebook stagnates, struggles with app spam and looks more like MySpace every day though - FriendFeed has taken center stage in experimenting with friend activity data, friend of a friend conversations, friend recommendation and prevention of information overload.
Yahoo will do that type of work, but will also leverage its work with in the Identity and Data Portability communities. Users will be given extensive control over where they share their data, something Facebook for example says it is focusing on before it can make Data Portability real.
Yahoo! users will have a single unified identity across all Yahoo! properties. I was sitting next to Kaliya Hamlin, known as Identity Woman, when this was announced and asked her how that sounded. She said that if a unified identity was a requirement, that would be bad, if they were an option that would be ideal, and if they were "toggleable" (like multiple personas) that would be ideal. I agree.
There's a whole lot of potential here and Yahoo! has really been engaged in the Identity world in particular. If they can make a few radical steps and perhaps a few key acquisitions - then social graph + 3rd party apps + semantified search indexing could make the user experience at Yahoo! very, very compelling. Coincidentally, or not, these moves were very close to what our own super-prescient Josh Catone called on Yahoo! to do almost a year ago.
It is a really tall order to fill, but with the infusion of so many smart people into Yahoo! after years of acquisitions like Flickr - a company wide rewiring seems relatively plausible.