Josh Dreller, VP of Media Technology and Analytics, Fuor Digital, LLC, wrote an article for iMedia Connection discussing social media strategy beyond owned and learned, citing Lotame as a solution in social targeting.
See below for an excerpt, or read the full article here.
Undoubtedly, as future digital marketers look back on the history of the web, the years where the internetwasn’t socially enabled will be a tiny blip on the front end of a thriving social-enabled industry. Frankly, human beings are by nature social creatures, so this social media revolution was certain inevitable, if not predictable.
For marketers trying to take advantage of this emerging opportunity, the main focus has been on the owned and earned opportunities such as Facebook tabs, Twitter feeds, etc. Joseph Jaffe’s Join the Conversation has framed the discussion perfectly as companies hire social practitioners to help them find ways to get closer with their customers, listen to what they say, and try to engage them in a dialogue.
Ultimately, the goal is to leverage owned content to build loyalists and then activate them to generate earned influencers through “likes,” positive reviews, and shares of your message. This plan seems to be working out well, especially for bigger brands like Starbucks and Coca-Cola, which now get more visits to their Facebook pages than their websites.
But there’s more to social media strategy than just owned and earned. There are plenty of paid opportunities as well. Unlike its cousins, paid social media has the huge advantage of being very scalable on demand. For smaller brands or even larger B2B brands that don’t organically have a large social presence, paid social media can be a great avenue to achieve high reach and frequency goals against their target audiences in the social sphere. As well, what paid opportunities lack in perceived credibility is balanced by providing marketers total control over the placement and message. Anyone who’s dabbled in social media knows that it can sometimes spin out of control — as it did for Skittles.
