4 Ingredients to a Successful Social Web Strategy

By Adam Mertz (@adammertz) Jul 27, 2011

For many marketers, cross-channel marketing on the social web has been a dizzying, ad hoc and all-too-often unmeasured experiment. What many don’t understand is that the social web offers the greatest marketing opportunities we have ever seen, so it’s time to get serious.

But instead, marketers are defaulting to a Facebook-only strategy — carving out a few dollars to create a fan page, getting a college intern to manage it and telling the CEO that they’ve got social covered.

The real recipe for success isn’t as complicated as some may think, and it works equally well in the B2C space as it does in B2B business models. I’ve personally seen it have a dramatic and immediate impact across all of Marketing’s critical initiatives — driving brand awareness and advocacy, website engagement, leads, sales, increasing loyalty and most importantly measurability to these efforts.

Ingredients to a Successful Social Web Strategy

1. One Part Facebook

With 750 million users, whether you sell to consumers or businesses, engaging on Facebook and creating a fan page or pages is a no brainer. However, just creating your fan page isn’t enough, because with hundreds of thousands of Facebook groups and fan pages already existing, there are likely many other areas on Facebook that you need to be monitoring and engaging in conversations.

Having a process and tools in place for multiple people (not just one or two) to easily monitor all these Facebook conversations and engage consistently are what your customers, prospective customers and partners are now coming to expect. In a moment I’ll describe why it’s also critical to mix this well with ingredient number three.

2. One Part Social Web

This is where social strategy can get dizzying. What about Twitter? YouTube? The blogosphere? Forums? Discussions occurring on relevant publication websites? And now Google+? Did you know that Google+ accumulated 10 million users in just a couple weeks into their closed/invite only beta!?! Ultimately, all of these conversations can be huge areas of both opportunity and risk. Ignoring these channels is equivalent to ignoring the Web itself back in the late 90’s. It’s simply a fundamental shift that demands marketing attention and strategy.

However, for most, if anything has been done in this area, the keys to the castle have been placed in the hands of a very few “specialists” — typically the brand police. Their only thought is to manage risk. Don’t be foolish. Do you let every marketing team member do Google searches? Enabling social web monitoring should be equally ubiquitous. The only reason it isn’t is because virtually every social media-monitoring vendor today makes it cost prohibitive and too complicated for everyone on the team to be monitoring and engaging across the social web. If marketing managers are running cross-channel campaigns, tracking the effectiveness, word of mouth and staying engaged with influencers is essential. In fact, they can leverage the social web to extend the reach of campaigns, get ideas for future campaigns and more quickly make adjustments based on real-time feedback from target audiences and influencers.

3. Three Parts Community

Why is having your own community on your web property more important in your social strategy than Facebook and the social web combined? Simple, you own it. You have 100% control over the look, experience, SEO benefit and most importantly the data behind the interactions. In addition, the broader social web has one other major challenge — it’s virtually all “short form” conversations. Brand advocates need more. People needing support help need more. Partners need more. And you should want to give prospective customers lengthier ways to engage with you and their peers.