Social Media Optimization

Another interesting week in social media. We started the week with an interview with blogging expert and author John Cass. John spoke about the five steps that every company should take before launching a blog. They are:

• A company should understand their marketing goals?
• Conduct an audit of their blogging community.
• Understand the resources and capabilities of their company to determine if there is value in blogging.
• If a company starts blogging, conduct training within the company on how to operate within social media communities and set expectations about what will happen and what will not.
• Have a strategy for content on the blog and in other blogs.

We continued with a article about how BrandWeek is struggling with the concept of social media. A priceless quote was:

If you’re to have any hope of maintaining your brand equity in the Web 2.0 world, you must begin by assuming that while your happy customers will remain silent, your critics will be all too happy to denounce you online. So you might as well provide the place for discussion and retain some control of how the dialogue develops. An invitation to the public to air its views need not, however, be a free-for-all. You should take a hard-line on obscenity, vulgarity, hate speech and intolerance. You may even want to curb anonymity to raise the overall civility of the discourse.

We followed that with a great article on why Golf ball manufacturer Titleist failed to find the fairway with SMO campaign to promote its NXT series of golf balls. Our conclusion on the campaign in part is:

However, you have to think most SMOers would want a better campaign than the NXTube.com to serve as a flagbearer of sorts for the SMO industry. The site is riddled with a wide range of amateurish and rookie mistakes that culminate in an overall lack of engagement with users and a shank of a marketing campaign.

Last, but not least, we covered Wal-Mart’s third attempt at social media marketing. Our thoughts on Wal-Mart’s latest efforts are:

Based on there past behavior I expect that Wal-Mart will quietly scuttle this latest social media marketing campaign before the end of the year when negative reviews start to show up across their site.

Next week we have a two-part interview with Lee Odden of TopRank. Lee talkes how TopRank uses social media tactics to distinguish itself in the market. In the second part, Lee talks about how TopRank’s clients are using social media to grow their business online.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 6:08 am and is filed under Brand Marketing, Interviews, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.