Conversation + Business = Create Loyalty, Awareness, and Increase sales
David Armano is turning the conversation about social media into a more interesting one, putting the conversation asset into the business frame. What the point in speaking about conversation, how to turn it into an asset. He makes the distinction between internal and external properties for companies. But instead of focusing on the company use of social networks and collaboration, I’d prefer focus on the objectives: loyalty, awareness, PR, expertise, sales increase, and innovation process speed up.
Orchestration of the social media efforts isn’t easy to manage since there are so many platforms and web services that appear every days and we don’t always know where to go first. But the first move is to understand what’s the objective in going social. Setting objectives and targets are the the starting point. Once that done you would definitly know where to go to achieve these objectives and find the right targets. Objectives may be becoming the thought leader, a resource center, inviting people to discover more the company and its values, gathering the more information and insights about your business area, and others. Targets in the social media field aren’t socio-demo related but points of interest related: if you’re working in the music area, don’t target 15-60 years old people, but target returning visitors of a specific website, loving to speak and share about a specific kind of music, and speak with them when they’re looking for it (don’t spend money advertising on a general portal for teenagers for example, be more accurate since its the value added of the internet).
Then generate content, feed people with every thing you have, scan your company to find employee who are already experts or frequent users of the platforms and web services you want to leverage and request them to explain what’s interesting, how it works, and whether it’s relevant for your business. Share and engage users of the platforms you’re working on with your content, while providing more complete information and value on your own platform. Social Media platforms and web services have to be understood as traffic drivers where you have to push appealing content to make them join your “group”. And when people are on your own platform you’re a click-away from increasing sales, generating loyalty, awareness, and PR. The rest is your job, turning visitors into your customers.
More:
David Armano post on orchestring social media efforts (have a look at the diagram).
Photo Credit: Virtva
