The Social Media Impact On Marketing

In my last post, I talked a bit about how social media impacts you personally.  There is so much information out there, and it does take some time to get your head wrapped around it.  Once people get comfortable with using social tools for personal use, the next logical step is to take it to the office.  How can we use these tools and ideas to make us more money? To increase our brand presence?  To interact with our customers?

This is the second impact area of social media.  It is using social media tools and techniques to better market your business.  There are thousands of examples and studies out there defining how this has worked for companies.

10-15 years ago, you put up a website.  It was a “brochure” website.  “Check out our website – it will tell you all about us, and it never changes”.

Today companies are coming up with creative ways to use social media to promote their brands to consumers.  There are great examples of companies using social media techniques to market their brands.  Evian using YouTube, this video has almost 12,000,000 views and was recognized by Guinness records as the most watched online advertisement ever.  Ford, creating the fiesta movement, giving social addicts a ford fiesta and having them blog, video, and tweet about their experiences with the new car, creating a huge online presence and reaching out to an audience that may never have considered driving one.  Dell attributing $6 Million in sales to twitter.  Frank Eliason (@ComcastCares) has been credited with turning around Comcast’s customer service department using twitter; and countless other companies creatively marketing to consumers using social media, coming up with the next viral idea to capture attention.

Sure, these are all big companies, what about the small ones?  What about organizations?  What about a student group at a University?  The same logic applies.  It is about increasing your online presence, to attract a bigger audience.  The really cool part about this is that any organization, big or small, can create an online following for a few dollars and a great idea.  Having a web presence is essentially free.  Having the idea that attracts people’s attention is what is important, and getting people’s attention these days is not easy.  (Having an established social network can help you with that).

And of course, let’s not forget about Google.  The more web presence you have the more Google will like you.  Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Customer Forums, etc. are easy ways to get Google’s attention.  There are specific use cases for each tool, and there are specific things you can do (referred to as SEO – search engine optimization) to optimize your results.

There are a lot of people approaching social media from this perspective.  Marketing firms are adding social media consulting to their offerings, specialized consultants are setting up shop, there are lots of resources out there.  Search social media marketing in Google and read up on it, subscribe to some blogs and learn about it, as there is way more info you need to know that I can’t capture in a single blog post.  And if you still don’t have a personal social media presence – get one, learn about the tools and then you will start coming up with ideas on how to use them.

The third area is Social KM, using social tools to engage employees and share knowledge.  This is an area I am passionate in, and I think my blog posts here will start to reflect that.  I will talk about that more in my next post.

In the meantime, what is your great idea to help market your organization?