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Success Through Strategy!
Strategy Matters brings you news, tips and strategies for effective communications from Strategic Communications, LLC. We're committed to bringing you success through strategy whether you're communicating with employees, customers, consumers or the media.
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Using Social Media for non-Marketing Activities
When we think of social media, we tend to think of its use as a marketing tool whether we're talking Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc., etc., etc. And, of course, using social media as part of your marketing efforts often makes sense (depending, of course, on your objectives and your audience). But social media can provide benefits beyond marketing.
For example:
- Recruitment. Social media, particularly LinkedIn, is proving to be a great resource for hiring professionals in a variety of fields.
- Monitoring the competition. Social media makes it very easy to monitor what others are doing, including the competition. Of course, keep in mind that if you're monitoring them there's a good chance that they're monitoring you as well.
- Monitoring industry trends. There are a wide range of online sources of information that can be easily monitored to track trends by geography, industry, issue (e.g. legal, regulatory, etc.) to keep you up-to-date on what's happening and, importantly, what others think about what's happening.
- Building an online repository of visual information for your audience that can be used for education, training or product/service support. YouTube is the obvious tool for this type of activity and, like other social media tools, it's free!
- Tracking comments about your own organization and products/services. This can be done by monitoring certain key words/phrases with tools like Hootsuite , or by using tools like Google Alerts that will send emails when online items with certain key words that you've requested show up.
- Crisis management. In the event of a crisis where your own internal communication tools may be inoperable or inaccessible to staff, customers and other key constituents, social media may present an option to communicate with these audiences.
The bottom line: don't limit yourself to the use of social media just for marketing communication efforts. Think creatively about ways the array of social media tools might help your organization in other ways.
In what ways have you successfully used social media for non-marketing activities? We'd love to hear from you!
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Does GM Know Something We Don't?
As Facebook prepared to launch its much-anticipated public offering, GM announced it was discontinuing its use of Facebook ads. Now, I'm guessing GM is a pretty savvy organization with a lot of pretty savvy people monitoring its advertising spends. At reportedly $10 million a year for Facebook ads alone (which apparently may be a big # for me, but not so much for Facebook in the big scheme of things...), if marketing staff aren't able to demonstrate value it seems logical to pull back. Facebook doesn't seem worried; maybe they should be.
GM is not the only company to question the value of its online advertising efforts. NPR also recently ran a story about a much smaller company - Pizza Delicious - and its experience. It provides a good contrast, I think. After all, I can understand why Facebook might not be such a great place for an automobile company to generate measurable results, particularly over a short period of time. A pizza restaurant, though, seems like it should be well poised to generate interest and action through locally targeted Facebook ads.
What do you think? Have you been able to generate measurable results through paid social media advertising?
(To read more, visit our blog.)
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Practical Applications of QR Codes
Ever since I heard of them, I've been enthralled with QR codes. Not so much the traditional (and rather "boring") applications where they simply take users to a web site, but more creative and practical uses that really leverage this technology to convey information and, in some cases, accomplish tasks. Recently, when coming back from a trip, I spotted another airline passenger scanning something with his cell phone in the screening area. A QR code which served as his boarding pass. Cool!
It made me wonder about other practical applications for the use of QR codes. After all, the history of these codes stems from an operational, not marketing, application--they were initially used by Toyota, in Japan, to track parts by vehicle manufacturers.
I've thought of a few possible applications which you can see here. Can you think of others? If you're doing something creative with QR codes, let us know. |
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Volume: 4 - Issue: 6
June, 2012 |
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