Image Credit: Startonomics
Corporate brands are embracing social media marketing in a big way. Many are called but few have a good handle on what to do, evidenced by the millions of me too Tweets.
Great social media is like a rock and roll song – if you knew what a great song was you wouldn’t have to work for the rest of your life. Those “benjamins” would be flowing into your back account faster than a Dave McClure investment in your startup. Listen up corporate brandoligists:
1) Lose the lawyers and organizational layers – be creative and set your brand free. Great social media marketing is not echoing PR missives, it’s about creating compelling content and engaging with the social community.
2) Create brand loyalists for your company and listen to what they say. High impact social media marketing is much more than broadcasting. It’s listening to your customers and then amplifying their messages and building layered engagements with them as you move your brand forward.
3) Give your brand loyalists a moment in the digital sun – let them jump into your social stream via a Guest Post on your Blog. Give em a contest on YouTube and feature the top videos across your social stream: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Corp site.
4) Think of social media monitoring as an early brand warning system. Get ahead of the curve and respond back to those comments, questions, brickbats, kudos with rapid response marketing. Great Tools for Social Media Monitoring include:
5) If your CEO is a brand like Richard Branson get her into the social stream via Twitter. If she isn’t then make her a star. Creativity trumps everything in social media – your CEO can talk about anything/everything that relates to your brand, or anything that resonates with your market that suits her fancy.
6) Motivate and enable your social media marketing team or community managers to become customer advocates internally within the company. Don’t harness them with rules and regulations, give them power and flexibility to cut through corporate rules and regulations so they can fix a problem or right a wrong. “I see you paid $30. over our discount price and I’ve just sent you a coupon for $50. off any purchase…….”
7) Repetition is at times essential to success with social media marketing. To stay with our music theme, there’s a reason why a great song has a repetitious chorus. Now is not the time to comment on the short term memories of consumers across the social web. Suffice to say, your message is interspersed with thousand/tens of thousands of others and you have to follow the repeat, rinse, repeat cycle to be successful.
8) Foster a positive culture within your own company. Look at the wonderful brands Whole Foods or Patagonia have built by empowering their internal staff. Neither company is perfect; but, each has pi0neered empowering their employees to believe in the corporate brand being built and to make contributions to it in creative ways.
9) Go long and go deep with social media marketing. It’s not going to happen overnight unless your Steve Jobs introducing one killer product after another or a member of Twitter’s exec staff. Build it right and they will eventually embrace your brand.
10) Think mobile. We are seeing a huge shift in consumer usage of social media via smartphones. Building your own unique IPhone or Android App is not a bad idea either, if you are lucky enough to find a developer!
11) Integrate a social cause into your branding/marketing mix. Pick a cause and support it as part of your branding initiatives and social media marketing. Check out the Pepsi Refresh Social Media Marketing Campaign. This campaign has helped to revive Pepsi’s “rusty” brand and humanize it at the same time. We Support “What’s In The Heart” a wonderful film about the plight of our Native American People here in the US.
Discography Courtesy of Pandora: Dina Krall, Ray Charles, Dusty Springfield, The Who, U2, Ella Fitzgerald, Coldplay, Stan Getz.
There’s always something cool coming out of Y Combinator, but even so 
