Social Media is Not One-Size-Fits-All - Blog Master…NOT
Last week, we hosted a B2B Marketing Roundtable in Austin on Social Media. It was great to see what other marketers are doing with social media. Some were very advanced with huge customer communities while other were still trying to figure out how best to integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy. It seems, overall, executives are aware of social media but do not completely understand it. If you are feeling pressure from your bosses to start a blog or user community because it is the hot thing right now, you should really sit back and analyze what tactic would be best.
One attendee said she was supposed to be starting a user community but they only have 70 customers. For most companies a user community is a lot of time, effort and money for only 70 customers especially when you consider that only a fraction of customers will actually be active in the community. Knowing your customer is also something to consider when deciding to start a blog. Some companies believe that blogs today are what websites were 5 years ago, you just have to have one. The truth is they are a lot of effort. If your customers and prospects are not active online, starting a blog is probably not a good idea. The point? Research and know your customers’ behavior before launching any social media program.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I agree that a company shouldn’t dive deep into social media “just because,” but I think SEO is an equally important factor to weigh in on whether or not to start using social media?
Even if a customer demographic isn’t “plugged in” to social media, posting one good, interesting, blog post per month packed with relevant keywords, and having a few other facets of a social media presence (i.e. myspace, twitter, etc) don’t have to be terribly time consuming, but can do wonders for your search rank. Don’t you think?