Category Archives: Technology

We don’t like to toot our own horn here at Backbone, but its always nice to be able to pat our coworkers on the back for their good work. Social media has been a major focus for us and with our clients over the past few years and it is great to have those efforts recognized. Check out the article below from the DailyTech blog. Thanks Michael for including us in this piece.

PR Companies See Great Opportunity in Web 2.0 World

Michael Barkoviak- DAILYTECH – June 17, 2010 6:22 AM

It’s a difficult issue, but some companies have been able to thrive

If you’re a customer looking for new ways to reach out to a company, take a look at their social networking options. Even if the company uses a PR firm — similar to how Backbone works with several companies — it’s still possible to communicate and share your opinion.

Check out some of the work we are doing with New Belgium Brewery on Facebook.

Last week Google announced the beta version launch of the latest feature to Google Search, called Google Social Search. In short, the new technology finds content from your social media networks and displays it at the bottom of a traditional search results page. Based on what social networking sites you link to in your Google profile, the Social Search results will update you with relevant content from friends and followers. For example, I typed in ‘climbing shoe’ to a normal Google search and found results from followers on Twitter and blog posts from my RSS feeds.

Some may argue that this will change the way users interact with search results and may limit the effectiveness of traditional seo. I think it has more importance to how brands and companies communicate their message(s) on the social web.

Social Search makes monitoring, engaging and providing relevant content on the social web even more important for brands that are active in this space. Here is a checklist for brands to keep in mind with Social Search;

– Expand the social media monitoring fishnet to include all products and categories for their business – check out SM2 by Techrigy (we use them).
– Dedicate some man-power to engage with users on the social web and deal with negative social mentions timely.
– Encourage customers to create and share content for products and categories. It appears that most types of social content is searchable, including blog posts, tweets, videos, pictures, etc..

Google Search seems to have fallen perfectly in the time-line of new products from Google – and is likely to be a key component to Google Wave and the centralization of content. For now, brands have just one more reason to keep tabs of their reputation online.

Before businesses make the leap into the social web, it would benefit their reputation to take a step back and consider the consequences of a poorly organized engagement strategy using social media. Simply put – social media engagement is how your business manages and interacts with conversations regarding the brand throughout the social web – be it on a company blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc . . .

The first step, and arguably most important, is to listen and monitor the conversations on the social web. Creating and implementing a custom  social media dashboard is becoming best practice to help monitor brand mentions and help detect growing trends for your brand. Once you have established a system to monitor your brand, you’ll then be able to answer these questions;

What are the main channels of communication for your brand? Too often, businesses will take a blind leap into the social web by attempting to have a presence in as many social networks as they can. This is not the most effective strategy, as you could be focused on building community around your brand where it may not exist. Instead, monitor your brand’s dashboard and identify where your audience is established – be it on microblogs, such as Twitter, social networks, such as Facebook, Blogs, Forums, etc..

Who are the players in your space? By monitoring your brand and the people who talking about it, you can begin to identify who the influencers in the community are, along with who your brand evangelists are. It pays to interact with the influencers regarding your brand because they typically have established a large following within the community.

How do the conversations start? All conversations on the social web have a starting point, no matter if they are one-to-one on Twitter, or found in a forum thread with many users conversing together. Taking some time to identify how the conversation was kicked off can be huge insight for a brands market research team. Positive or negative – each conversation is a type of mini focus group.

When to engage your brand in the conversation? I feel that this is the most important question to answer before engaging your brand in any social marketing relationship. At what point do you feel that your social media profile needs to act as a customer service rep or give expert advice on a product or service? Once you have engaged your brand in the conversation, it is very difficult to find an exit strategy without sacrificing your brand’s online reputation.

Something to think about as you help your brand a create solid engagement strategy for the social web. Enjoy your Wednesday!