Practically anything a marketing department does these days generates corresponding activity in social spaces as, at the very least, a brand’s power users interact with the most recent campaign or piece of news. These social activities range from very modest investments in the brand (i.e., clicking a ‘Like’ button) to quite highly invested acts (i.e., a YouTube video response). Every one of these actions is an echo of the original campaign that reflects back into the users’ social graph and wrings additional value from the initial investment. These echoes are a source of value that, to date, brands are not maximizing. The thing to realize is that there can be ongoing value generated for the brand on the back end of any given marketing campaign lifecycle.
Social echos let you squeeze more value out of campaigns
From a practical perspective, realizing this value is a manageable (though complex) problem – it starts with establishing a listening strategy, then on to archiving, retrieval, aggregation and display systems. Once the practicalities are out of the way, then the more difficult questions start staring you in the face – “We know how to do this, but what do we do?” The goal is to put social echoes to work for your brand and there are countless ways to to do so, but here are a few high level categories (and examples) to help spark your thinking:
- Amplifying echoes – If you are already aggregating social echoes in some fashion, then it’s not much of a leap to curate and rebroadcast those in digital spaces that you control. This might mean something as simple as an e-mail newsletter or as complex as a homepage takeover. You see a basic flavor of this on social aggregation pages at companies like Pizza Hut or more adventurous implementations like Skittles’ home page or the Special K Victory Chain.
- Engaging the engaged – Outreach to individuals who are echoing your messaging is an interesting opportunity in both real-time and asynchronous use cases. Real-time outreach enables marketing experiences like the Old Spice Guy campaign as well as servicing scenarios like @ComcastCares or @AskCiti – though social servicing done correctly is no small feat. Asynchronous outreach lends itself to Social CRM scenarios where companies can use their marketing to kick off a series of social echoes and then partner with their IT department to embed the ensuing cascade of information into the day-to-day operation of the business.
- Proving value – Every other kind of marketing has a reel – why doesn’t your social campaign? It’s the accepted currency of marketing land. This is fairly straight forward, but helps prove that the campaign was worth the effort. Here is Gatorade’s attempt at making monitoring and data capture cool.
- Campaign life extension – Give your campaign new life after you stop buying paid media against it by archiving and hosting your social echoes in an interesting way. Once you’ve got an archive you can use your owned and leased social channels to republish an echo and spark ongoing engagement. This is also valuable because it abstracts your owned social channels from the specific campaign giving you more flexibility to start up and break down new initiatives.
Next time you launch a campaign think about the entire lifecycle of social – not just how you will spark the social echoes with amazing creative and great social extensions, but also how you are going to turn those echoes into assets.
*Image courtesy of f1uffster (Jeanie) on Flickr
