Rise of the social media enterprise

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How the right DAM software can open new possibilities of shares, likes, comments, +1’s and retweets

Rise of the Social Enterprise

By Mark Davey of the DAM Foundation

Copyright ©2015 Widen, Inc.

All rights reserved.

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How the right DAM software can open newpossibilities of share, likes, comments, +1’s and retweets

Copyright © 2015 Widen Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.



We read, write and share with millions. It’s a fact of our always-on world. The Internet is built around people and relationships, not just content. This has been the case for awhile now, but something important has changed in the last couple years. For the first time, social interactions and influence are measurable. This has been a shift of huge magnitude in business communications.

The ability to measure influence is moving the social tools and platforms into the professional communicators’ toolboxes. New tools are being built to capture knowledge with digital assets (images, video, documents, etc.) and people’s direct and indirect involvement in content. Those same tools are also useful in determining effectiveness of content.

Social media is rapidly maturing into sophisticated technologies built on relationships, knowledge and the power of the network effect. We will take a dive into how social media has evolved, who is using the tools and why. We’ll also look at why digital asset management will remain the bedrock for harnessing all the data and measuring successes and failures.

Whether it’s blogs, RSS, social media, news aggregation or video publishing, it seems platforms and networks are becoming increasingly mature. These services are also becoming tools of identity, trust and value.

The rising enterprise of social media has become the hub and driving force in the business and marketing world. Web 2.0, which was centralized around the ability to publish directly into the appropriate networks, is moving towards web 3.0, where mobile devices and responsive design are everything. The original benchmark of network success was about follower count, a metric we now know is neither as useful nor as meaningful as we need.

Social media marketing 2.0

Even the proverbial ostrich, with its head buried deep in the sand, could not fail to have noticed the rise of social media as a mainstream force multiplier for any and everyone with something to say, share or sell.

Because social media is so user-driven, the segmentation of users based on things like knowledge and shared interests happens organically. This quality has its roots in Web 2.0 tools, which made contributions by users not only easier to facilitate, but also easier to mine for information about those users.

Google+ made it easy for anyone to plug previous network connections directly into the newly-launched social platform and had record growth rates. Now it has been surpassed in user numbers by Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; however, Google+ has stayed strong in the top four social media platforms.

The benefits of marketing in social networks stems largely from the very rapid growth and broad reach we’re talking about. These are spaces with little or no barrier to entry (monetary or otherwise) and massive audiences. What’s more, each platform allows for a very personalized kind of interaction with those audiences, whether you’re communicating to everyone at once or addressing questions and comments from a single person.

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Multiple channels and networks

The challenge for content marketing teams is to keep up with the changing dynamics of social media and ensure messages are being placed in the most relevant, appropriate spaces possible. Monitoring the content

and engagement on more and more socially-enabled channels is a skill the marketer needs to develop.

Business on social

LinkedIn has now reached over 364 million business users. That network is growing by more than two new users per second. LinkedIn is now supported in over 200 countries and territories. It is a phenomenon that has never before existed in the business world, and it affords high value to those who wish to share stories, information and insights. More importantly, it offers the most effective, real-time database of people and markets. This is a long-tail relationship-building tool, and businesses have risen to the challenge of creating skilled long-tail networkers.

The way we see and use our business relationships has been changed by LinkedIn. Those connections are easier to refer to and organize than business cards. They’re more actionable and easier to leverage than a Rolodex. Perhaps most importantly, though, the platform makes it possible to find new, meaningful ways to deepen professional relationships that otherwise would have gone stale and become

meaningless.

Who is on social networks and what are they doing there?

The current king of social networks (by sheer numbers) is Facebook. Facebook has drawn users of every demographic. Even if you’re not a fan of Facebook, you can’t miss the outstanding size and variety of people, brands and thoughts that exist on one platform.

The four big social media sites — Facebook (1.44 billion million users), Twitter (302 million users), LinkedIn (364 million users) and Google+ (300 million users) — dominate the numbers game.

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Although it has a vast amount of daily activity, Twitter has nowhere near the engagement levels of Facebook — maybe because it doesn’t offer the same kind of personalization for the nature or visibility of engagement. However, Twitter is, without a doubt, the go-to place for trending information. It has changed the face of viral marketing.

Real-time information flows are here to stay, and as better filtering tools appear, the information exchange is rapidly exceeding traditional media outlets — even television.

What is a “social” network? What makes a site, service, app or anything else “social”?

With over 364 million users and more then two new sign-ups every second, LinkedIn is truly a business phenomenon. LinkedIn is now the common action for any business connection and enables the conversations to continue long after first meetings or introductions. LinkedIn probably represents the purest form of business networking on the web.

LinkedIn is also becoming a recruitment resource. The LinkedIn profile has all but taken the place of the conventional résumé. The site not only enables job seekers to more efficiently leverage their interpersonal connections, but also enables recruiters to dig deeper into prospective employees’ histories and obtain up-to-date job histories.

LinkedIn, however, is much more than a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week networking hub. People use LinkedIn to share knowledge, experiences and the tools they use in their work. What it lacks in terms of publishing tools (many of which might seem out of place in LinkedIn anyway), it more than makes up for in ways to connect and build real relationships.

Social networks have played a vital role in identifying connections and factoring the real identities of real people with everything from important international happenings to the relative triviality of what people had for breakfast.

Make no mistake. We are all publishers.

Social marketing maturity

Now that the marketing technologist has the tools and network footprint (i.e., they have a social media presence on the main platforms), we are starting to see a shift from the sales and marketing routes of previous years. One size does not fit all, and marketers have learned that spreading a single message the same way on different networks and platforms can hurt campaign performance and effectiveness.

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Using the same messaging strategies across social and other platforms is unwise for two main reasons. First, many, if not most, of the members of your audience are active in multiple networks. At the very least, there is overlap where different platforms and services have created integrations with one another (so, for instance, YouTube video ads often show up in Facebook news feeds).

Second, users of these services expect different kinds of messaging on each of the platforms and are encouraged to engage in different ways. Google+ and Facebook allow for lengthier publishing and easy access to other users’ comments on a post, but nobody wants to have to open new windows and dig through retweets to digest your message on Twitter. By the same token, the kind of frequent, short updates that are acceptable on Twitter might be downright unacceptable to your audience on Facebook or Google+.

For those willing to put in the time, though, this maturity and diversity in social networks is making content marketing and storytelling more effective ways of engaging audiences. Lead generation in socially-enabled environments has given rise to new, more effective ways to take the soft-sell, long-tail approach to marketing campaigns.

What are soft-sale, long-tail campaigns?

There’s a paradigm shift that’s been underway in news media for a long time now. It used to be the case that editors played a “gatekeeper” role in how we found and consumed information about the world. But with new technologies putting more control in the hands of consumers (that is, a greater ability to bypass the gatekeepers and cherry-pick information based on our own interests, needs and personal persuasions), the editors are being pushed out of that gatekeeper role.

The same is true in marketing. We need to understand that the platforms and media through which our audiences find us (or are found by us) are increasingly personalized. For this reason, it’s necessary to establish relationships that are based on more than placement and message, and more on exchange and confidence. That is to say, we need to establish a sense of trust with our audience — not just to achieve conversions, but even to convince them to hear our messages.

In much the same way, you need to be familiar with the ways that different platforms can be leveraged to engage different (and frequently overlapping) audiences. What is generally true, however, is that your social media marketing is more PR than advertising...more marathon than sprint.

Trust is a big factor in any social relationship. You know that different gestures, favors, gifts and attitudes help you garner trust with certain individuals in face-to-face interactions. Knowing what buttons to push, what strings to pull and how to navigate those relationships while letting your audience know that you’re genuine about what you’re saying is important.

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It’s as much about placement and timing as it is about the message itself.

The long-tail, soft-sale means we are in the stream of our prospective clients; they are able to see who we are and what has meaning to us. When they are ready and would like to communicate, we have personally branded ourselves and our company to the prospect. Soft-sell, long-tail relationship building is the key to how this new economy is working.

Different platforms have their own unique audiences, and this needs to be factored into campaigns and analyzed, and a feedback loop created of what works, where and how. Socially-oriented marketing campaigns and companies will benefit the most as we reach social media maturity.

Tools that allow for the immediate monitoring of “conversations” (positive and negative) can be used to inform your organization of problems, and allow marketers to react in the correct way, build long-term relationships and measure campaign feedback.

The C suite is still focused on return on investment (ROI). With the rise of analytics and metrics that track human and asset activity, social media ROI is a bit easier to quantify. Part of that ROI comes from the fact that social networks offer unprecedented incentive for users to volunteer information about themselves, including their likes, dislikes, occupations, political leanings, etc. These are the sorts of things that people used to pay through the nose for. With this information, you can be surer than ever that you’re delivering your message to each segment of your audience in the most effective way possible — because your audience has largely segmented itself.

The metrics of social influence

Perhaps the best-known example of social media metrics is Klout, a service that allows users to track their and others’ levels of influence in social media. Klout, along with Kred, PeerIndex (now teamed with Brandwatch) and TrackMaven, is helping marketers gauge social performance and influence. As a marketing professional, these sites can supply you the necessary tools to help find topics and develop better tactics that can boost engagement, monitor your content performance and help you time content releases.

Content marketing

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 86 percent of all brands use content marketing and 70 percent of them are creating more content than they did last year. There is value in putting great content in the right channels at the right time — and it is affecting companies’ bottom lines.

Content marketing is nothing new; it has been around since 1895 with the launch of John Deere’s customer magazine, The Furrow. What’s new is how we spread and construct content.

The Coca-Cola Content 2020 program, for instance, is based largely on the use of content marketing to do good in the world. Through the stories they tell, Coca-Cola sparks conversations that earn the brand trust and credibility in popular culture, thus maintaining brand identity and awareness.



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About Widen

Widen is a marketing technology company that powers the content that builds your brand. Leveraging cloud-based resources, Widen delivers configurable, scalable software services that help marketing and creative teams easily capture, organize, share, and analyze marketing content. Organizations of all sizes use the Widen Media Collective to streamline their workflows and make their content work harder. Widen is trusted across various industries by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide like LG, Roche, Trek, Cornell University, New Orleans Tourism Marketing, The Atlanta Falcons, Red Gold Tomatoes, Electrolux, and Yankee Candle. To learn more about Widen, go to www.widen.com.

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Rise of the social media enterprise