Dec 10
Social Media Marketing and Sustainability
Yesterday during lunch I sat in on a webcast from Jive and Deirdre Walsh, who is community/social media manager for National Instruments. She talked about the success they've had in building a strong community around NI and Labview. I was pretty impressed by the numbers - over 125,000 people are part of the community, and it seems like Deirdre's staying at the forefront when it comes to innovation and success in social media marketing.
Deirdre had some good advice about integrating social media as an ingredient in the other marketing/pr efforts. I think that's a great way to build legitimacy and increase the effectiveness of those efforts. Actually, I just read an article today that lists the same idea as the next big thing.
Anyway, the thing that struck me most about what she talked about was the fact that the NI.com/community site was the centerpiece of their strategy. She mentioned the fact that they didn't want to be chasing and spending energy developing on top of one platform after another, and, although they want to be where their customers are and to help them there, they subscribe to a "2-minute rule," where if they can't handle an interaction/solve a customer's problem in 2 minutes or less then they send them through the appropriate channels.
I think that what NI is doing is actually innovative in that it's a proper blend of traditional and new media, and that it is a thoughtful, sustainable strategy. Of course there's a problem here when it comes to emulating their strategy in the hope of having the same success, and that is that you have to first have built up your home community. That's no easy task. Actually, it's the hardest part - one that (even though NI already had active user forums) required them to dedicate an internal project to with real engineers doing real work providing real source code and resources to the community in order to kick start. It's not just money and resources, either - it takes time to build your own community.
And there's the problem when it comes to social media strategy these days. No one has the time, the money, or the resources to foster real community building in their own domain, especially considering the economic conditions. As a result, marketers put themselves out on the "easy" social media islands, where one person can represent a brand, spreading themselves thin and hunting and pecking for interactions and opportunities. I think that strategy can have some short-term success and that it can build awareness at the wide end of the marketing funnel, but ultimately I think there has to be a clear bridge with resources and interaction every step of the way for companies to convert this awareness into sales. Without that, I think you end up with an off-balance strategy that's not sustainable.
This bridge runs both ways. In Jim Cahill's recent InTech article he talks about bringing experts and employees to the surface of your organization. There are big barriers between the inner workings at a company and sharing your expertise on twitter or facebook. I think by building a strong core community internally and bridging between internal and external communities and then again between external communities and the various social media islands then you are providing a mechanism for the distribution of people, ideas, and expertise. This is a virtuous cycle because as ideas flow out, they contribute to the social media "surface area" you're covering, and they bring innovators and enthusiasts back to your domain, where they can collaborate and contribute with each other and with your experts.
