Questions to ask before starting a Social Media Campaign

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:09:54 GMT

A while back I published a social media primer highlighting some questions to ask before starting a social media campaign. I thought I'd share these questions with you (feel free to add to the list by adding your comments below):

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.

As with most things online, educating yourself on the potential of social media is key. Understanding the differences between social media and traditional media – the obvious being control and influence – and how they can, and should, support business objectives will prepare you for future participation.

How Social Media Helped Barack Obama's Campaign

Gino Cosme — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:21:02 GMT

As a web and social media consultant, I am always on the lookout for pioneering communications strategies that share valuable lessons on how to effectively use social media to feed ongoing conversations with consumers and ultimately deliver results. And this is where my interest - and respect - for Barack Obama and his campaign sits. Not only did he passionately campaign offline, penetrating the hearts and minds of the American community, but he brought these interactions, opportunities and messages online, in turn harnessing the very nature that is social media - conversation and community.

Barack Obama launched an integrated online campaign that communicated his values, message of change and commitment to the US public through the execution of an interactive, engaging and highly personal online marketing strategy that ultimately affected his supporters’ conversations on the Internet; a conversation that grew like a virus and ultimately affected the US public’s voting decisions.

One of the most striking activities that Obama facilitated was proactively sharing information and insight about his campaign’s movements, thoughts and actions, in turn building community interaction and handing over ownership of his campaign to the community. He did this by focusing on reaching a wide an audience on the web as possible using numerous pre-existing social networks and tools including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. However, he didn’t stop there and opened up his online campaign to penetrate smaller, more targeted communities such as BlackPlanet, Faithbase, AsianAve, Eons and Migente. And he did this through a genuine efforts to engage with people on a one-on-one basis.

Over and above this, Barack Obama took arguably one of the most proactive and aggressive approaches to online reputation management, dealing with the rumours spreading about him across the Internet. The most popular of these include that he is secretly a Muslim and that he was born in Kenya. How did he manage to handle this so well? With the launch of fightthesmears.com, and by enlisting millions of his supporters to help put an end to what he called the lies.

Barack Obama’s campaign offers an important lesson in how social media and networking strategies can empower people and their online networks to help execute a campaign that resonates on both a personal, targeted level and across a wide variety of demographics, interests and beliefs. And this is where the genius sits that marketers and communicators
should take note of: by empowering communities with information, you allow them to become your brand (or campaign) ambassadors. As Obama understood, it’s about letting go of control, believing in a product (or message), and letting the power of word of mouth reign.

Obama recognised this and is subsequently succeeding.