Infopros and social media 2: subverting the medium
Jinfo Blog

4th December 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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It all started innocently enough; utilise social media to engage with your customers. But when it got to exploiting bloggers to improve your brand’s search engine results, that’s when you wonder whether some of the marketers who presented at Online Information 2010 (http://www.online-information.co.uk) actually gave away more about themselves than they realised. If you take content created by your marketing executives and seed it out to Twitter or Facebook, don’t just rely on direct Tweeting, suggested Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising (http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk). When you push out content you need a mechanism for drawing people back in, so all direct Tweets should include a call for action – then when it comes to Retweets, recipients don’t even need to click on the link to be aware of the brand. In a session on maximising return on investment in social media, Joel Davis of what claims to be the UK’s first social media agency, Agency2 (http://www.agency2.co.uk) highlighted the relative value of priced vs earned vs brand-owned media. But, as a founder member of the Direct Marketing Association’s Social Media Council, he also introduced a cautionary note: there were legal issues surrounding social media’s use now (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28138 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29552 for more on this). Asked about available monitoring tools, he acknowledged that there weren’t many and they weren’t brilliant yet. Take sentiment analysis; tools weren’t always helpful at identifying positive or negative reaction because they couldn’t recognise irony or sarcasm. You could repurpose positive comment from social media for use on your website, importing it via your content management system, suggested Jonathan Beardsley of self-styled ‘content experts’ OpenText (http://www.opentext.com). Married up to your web content, user generated input could keep customers engaged and encourage interaction and networking. So did this mean freezing comment and censoring it? Moderate it first but don’t restrict it was his advice; people were going to comment anyway, so best to have it under your control. But the most salutary lessons for information managers probably came from Cedric Chambaz, also of Microsoft Advertising (http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk). You can’t produce all the content that a search engine returns on your brand – but you can help the process along. Tell bloggers something of value about your brand (he cited a sneak preview of a premium beer in a new bottle) and they’ll provide you with lots of unpaid coverage. Search engines are integrating social media more and more, he said; brand owners needed to ‘dominate the real estate’ on the search page by exploiting this trend. Great stuff for marketers, but it may have told experienced information professionals a different story. Subverted by social media marketing, could Bing, Google at al rapidly lose any residual value they may have as serious business research tools?

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