There is a lot of debate about how much investment and resource a technology organizations should invest when moving toward a social media strategy.
Often times, technology marketers have all the right intentions, but simply cannot secure the necessary support to fully engage in social media. Like many other marketing efforts, implementing a sound and robust social media strategy can impact your financial and human resources.
Knowing that a fully implemented social media strategy can overwhelm an already over worked and under funded marketing department, there are some basic social media activities that can be pursued without breaking the bank or creating staff deficits.
All social media should have the objective of listening to the marketplace. Your first social media activities can help you track perceptions and conversations about:
- Your technology solutions
- Your corporate standing
- Even you customer services efforts taking place in on-line news, blogs, social discussion groups, video content sites, and even LinkedIn and Twitter.
Members of your marketing team can easily track your technology solutions, company and specific product name(s) as keywords using tools like Google Reader for news, Google Blog Search or Technorati.com for Blogs, and a tool like TweetDeck for Twitter. All of these tools are easily to use and many have features that will allow you to be notified if your keywords shows activity.
A few things to listen for about your technology and company:
- Persons that consistently blogging or tweeting about your technology or corporation. These persons are displaying a passion for your technology solution whether it is positive or negative, get to know them and establish communication. They can be a great learning source for future marketing messages and perhaps become a brand advocate.
- Themes in the conversations. In most cases there will be some common thoughts shared or even strongly written pint of view that can be very beneficial to understanding how your technology or company is perceived in the marketplace. Once again this is a great content starter as yo can Craft marketing messages to address these thoughts.
- Any industry expert, publication, reporters and analysts. Pay careful attention to these points of view as these persons can influence the marketplace.
Monitor your competition
Similar to monitoring your own keywords, you can easily create a set of keywords closely associated with your competition.
- The most obvious is to monitor what your competition is blogging about, or how they are messaging their particular technology in the marketplace. Listen for common themes.
- The same goes for your competition, monitor the people consistently blogging or advocating your competitors technology, you can gain great insight and create marketing messages to address their thoughts.
Understanding the marketplace’s perception about key competitors and your competition’s messaging will also allow you to adjust marketing messages and delivery if needed.
These basic steps can be implemented with little time and money, but the benefits can be quite valuable.
