We are into the second quarter of 2009 and witnessing some of the highest adoption of social media tools ever. For companies, it is time to start looking if social media is panning out like expected and should we be in it. This could be a blog post on metrics and results, but I’m thinking that it may be time to look at how easy it is to manage social media across the vast number of tools and properties. After all, isn’t it a part of marketing effectiveness and efficiency?
There are a variety of tools and properties which can be utilized to connect with you: blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog communities, and a variety of analytic tools to track progress. Isnt it a lot of work to manage all these tools. No single venue provides everything and each offers a different twist on reaching and connecting with others. The best way for me to manage everything is a big toolbar folder on my browser where we all keep bookmarks for all the social media tools and communities we participate in. Then we have other ways to manage content and connections within each community. It seems so much inefficient.
CRM was the buzzword not too long ago (proabbaly about 3-5 years back). Today CRM is an obvious thing evry business hsoudl have. It isnt a diferentiaiton facotr but a necessity. It is ironic that a solution that is all about managing customer relationships is now almost obsolete in terms of differentiaiton. CRM allowed marketers to share program and campaign assets, communications and results with each other. The biggest frustration is that after standardizing on CRM, it is of little use for traditional marketing which is becoming less and less.
We need to aggregate our social media marketing efforts. Where it created efficiency in process, cataloguing, and communication, it can do the same to streamline our social media activities. Salesforce has already integrated Twitter into its customer service platform. Having the same ability to push blogs, microblogs, and participate in community discussions and forums would be a great next step. Having the ability to also post interactive content like presentations and podcasts from a single point would also be better than having to go to YouTube, iTunes, and Slideshare as well as posting to my own website and corporate social network.
