As a business, what’s your strategy for online engagement?
Do you spend the majority of your time responding to brand mentions and comments as they come in? Or are you constantly searching for new Influencers, commenting on industry blogs, and engaging with a broader audience?
Boiling it down – does your business take a reactive or proactive approach to social media?
It seems to us at Spot Influence that the second strategy is bound to yield better results than the first. To put it in a strategic metaphor, “The best defense is a good offense.” (That’s not us, it’s Napoleon. Who, aside from being a dictator, was a pretty successful strategist.)
So, why do so few companies adopt a proactive strategy?
From what we’ve found, this is largely due to the fact that they lack the necessary data. Or, more precisely, they have LOADS of data, but it’s not refined enough to provide pivotal insights. Unfortunately, a lot of the current metrics available (Klout or PeerIndex scores, friends/follower counts on various networks, etc.) only give you a basic sense of how popular an individual is, how often they engage, and some of the things they talk about. Some of this data can absolutely be useful for reacting to unique mentions and comments as they come down the social pipeline…
“@kimkardashian mentioned us. Let’s freak out!”
“@scobleizer talked about a ‘boarding pass’ – let’s pitch him about our travel backpack.”
… but responding to lightning strikes and keyword filters aren’t really long-term proactive strategies.
In order to truly be effective when engaging online, you need to lead the conversations and provide benefit beyond what flies across your social dashboard. You need to engage with individuals in the outlets and channels they’re already using. Why? Because we believe the Cluetrain Manifesto came true: networked markets exist for everything. Of course you have to engage in those conversations. But there’s also a bigger opportunity here.
There are people online who have a terrific understanding of your market and – more importantly – who already have the attention of the people you’re trying to reach: the potential customers for your products. Shouldn’t you be asking these contextual Influencers what they want in your next product? Wouldn’t it make sense to get their input on messaging before you launch that $2M ad campaign?
Until now, it’s been very difficult to be proactive online. Social media is fragmented across the web, the content is largely unstructured, and there hasn’t been an effective solution for discovering the influencers around any search – and definitely not at Google-speed. That’s what we’re aiming to solve at Spot Influence. Through data mining, lots of Big Data tech, and our own fancy algorithms and analytics, we’re able to discover what everybody cares about, where they’re posting content, and who they listen to on specific topics.
At the end of the day, we want to help people be strategic with how they approach social media. Our data makes it possible for every company to do just that. The future of online engagement is being proactive.
