Come on in, the Water’s Fine! Diving in to Social Media Marketing
I went to a forum a couple of weeks ago to discuss social media marketing . The format was to discuss a series of questions in rotating small groups. The discussion that stuck with me was over whether companies should add social media to their marketing mix right away or wait and see how the tools and usage evolve. To my surprise, many people were very hesitant about social media marketing. They were worried about liability for their companies and about doing the wrong thing.
My own approach was to just dive right in to social media marketing. Last summer I started this blog (albeit in a much different format), set up profiles on Facebook and Linkedin, and subscribed to an ever growing set of RSS feed from blogs and news sources. It tool a little while longer to warm up to Twitter, but now I use it everyday – at least for following the news. You can check out my social graph here – http://sherilarsen.com/about/.
Initially, my goal was just to understand this new set of tools and communities. I soon found them irreplaceable both personally and professionally. I have found a couple of great communities that have made a real impact in my personal health and happiness. But the real benefit has been to my professional life. Twitter and Bloglines are indispensable for keeping on top of industry news, competitors, general marketing and management topics, and for tracking mentions of Northern Light and its products in the press and blogosphere. Delicious is great for saving and sharing the best news and for finding “that story” later when I need it. Linkedin is a great tool for researching prospective clients and partners. Over the last few months I’ve built a network of fellow marketers and prospective customers that I can reach out to for feedback on new products and features and who act as passive references for anyone researching me or my company online. These tools have made me better informed and more productive.
My next project is to integrate social networking features into our search portals. We have already launched an editorially seeded public Market Intelligence Wiki (http://wiki.northernlight.com) and can host integrated research wikis in our custom SinglePoint research portals. We also have company internal wikis for collaborating and sharing information. We have a nascent corporate blog (http://blogs.northernlight.com). Our search alerting system has been upgraded to allow alerts through RSS as well as email. We have launched a new industry authority blog search (which you can see in our free business new portal at http://www.nlsearch.com). We have several “widgets” in our SinglePoint portals that leverage user generated content for tag clouds of top search terms, lists of most searched for or downloaded documents, and lists of other portal users that have searched on my topics or viewed documents I have viewed. The response has been great and users are clamoring for more!
I don’t mean this to be a sales pitch for Northern Light, but unless I, in my role as head of product marketing, had just started using social media services we would have been far behind the requests of our customers. I have seen that it’s very difficult to understand the value of social media unless you actually use the tools – and for more than a just few days or weeks. So, my experience is that it is imperative for companies to make a start, at least by becoming users of social media services, and then by determining how the tools could be leveraged to better serve their customers (and shareholders).
Splash!
