Brands are still in the very early stages of figuring out how to use social networks to sell product. Much has been made of brands dipping their toes into Facebook and MySpace. There is a clear distinction to be made here, are we talking about advertising or Customer Relationship Management (CRM). I don’t think most brands have yet figured out how to use social networking for marketing. Most brands are trying to wrap 'traditional’ tactics (digital banners)  into the new mediums and it’s not successful. No big surprise there. Marketers have yet to think of social media as a CRM program, which is exactly how we are thinking about it in Windows.

Yes we collect friends and fans on our Windows Facebook and YouTube pages but for us that’s just the beginning, for many brands that the end. Think about adding friends as the same thing as developing a database in CRM terms. You spend a certain amount of time and resources to create these databases of customer information. But creating the database is only the first step. If you never do anything to reach out to that database and inform your customers what is the value of that database? $0. CRM  programs are focused on reaching out to the customers on a regular basis, offering valuable information, moving customers through the product life cycle and hopefully reselling them and keeping the cycle going. We have someone on our team who is responsible for customer engagement on those pages. If you don’t have resources to manage and maintain your communities on these social networks, don’t build them. Would you build a database of customer information and then have no plans to actually use it? No. If you build a brand page you are doing the same thing. If you build it they may very well come. But when they get there who’s playing the game? Is it worth watching? It matters.  And is it interesting enough for them to stay?

I spoke at a panel dinner last night at the Seattle Direct Marketing Associations Social Media networking dinner and had a good time. The panel was 3 agency people and me – the brand. One of the questions that got discussed was where does social media fit into an org chart. Who’s responsibility is it? PR, marketing, customer support? I thought I’d pass along my answer because it seemed to resonate. The short answer is it depends…. on what? On what your goal is. Each of these departments focus on different business objectives and solve for different use cases. PR is about exposure, how many publications picked up the story and what was the reach of those publications. It’s about exposure through influential's. PR is interested in a 1:few scenario where the outreach is targeted to key influential's that will then trickle down their message to the masses. If this is your teams strategy then it makes sense to put social media engagement in your PR plan. Xbox and Zune drive their social media activities from their PR teams.

Customer support is about solving customer problems. The metrics are based on solve rate, lowering support costs and customer satisfaction. If your business needs are driving by customer sat numbers and decreased support costs then build a social media engagement program in your customer service department. Dell and Comcast do this.

The third option is the marketing team. This is where I sit. When I started the community/social media plan it was driven by a few precise business goals, increase brand favorability and likelihood to refer and lower customer churn for Windows Live. I knew if I exposed Hotmail users to what can be done on Messenger I had a better shot at increasing customer attach rate to our services, thereby lowering customer churn. My business objectives are rooted in marketing performance indicators so it makes sense I’m running this program from the marketing team.

It goes back to being articulate and concise about what the goals are for your company’s social media program. Your objectives will tell you where it should live.

I came across this and it gave me a chuckle.

I don’t talk much in my blog posts about the power of search and I probably should reflect on it more. When I explain to people the power of the social media efforts we are building I always use Search as a way of grounding the conversation. It makes complete sense to everyone these days that the #1 way people find ‘stuff’ on the web is through Search. It’s logical for a marketer to want to push their messages through that channel and in most cases marketers use key word buys to get the best position possible in Search results. While this tactic certainly proves to be successful it can be very expensive. Social media outreach allows marketers to push syndicated content through the web making it more likely to be discovered virally through Search.

Here’s how it works. Joe writes a post on a forum posing a question about your product X. Your outreach efforts pick up Joe’s post because your company is investing in listening devices to monitor for mentions about Product X. Your engagement team replies to Joe’s post with the answer to his question. But your engagement wasn’t just with Joe. Not only have you solved Joe’s problem, which is traditional help and support, you’ve posted the solution out there for other people to discover. Data shows social media channels (blogs, forums, wikis) are more likely to appear in viral search results. Search crawlers like them more :) So don’t forget Search when you are pitching your social media efforts. Banner ads and home page takeovers do nothing to drive Search results or long term engagement.