{"id":3009,"date":"2011-07-01T11:44:12","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T10:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uk.cision.com\/?p=3009"},"modified":"2011-07-01T11:44:12","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T11:44:12","slug":"the-evolving-social-media-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/the-evolving-social-media-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"The evolving social media strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The latest Harvard Business Review describes a new study from researchers at Babson College and Bentley University that attempts to put <a href=\"http:\/\/hbr.org\/2011\/07\/whats-your-social-media-strategy\/ar\/1\" target=\"_self\">social media strategies into four distinct buckets<\/a>, from ultra-measurable, small-scale experimentation to org-wide transformation.<\/p>\n<p>What the article failed to do was resolve the dilemma set out in its opening paragraph, that of one global bank executive facing &#8220;a challenge for our times&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">It turns out that a customer who would normally qualify for the lowest level of service has an impressive 100,000 followers on Twitter. The bank isn&#8217;t doing much yet with social media and has no formula for adapting it to particular customers, but the executive still wondered whether the customer&#8217;s &#8220;influence&#8221; might merit special treatment.<\/p>\n<p>One possible response could be heard at Wednesday&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nma.co.uk\/\" target=\"_self\">New Media Age<\/a> panel discussion at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marketingweeklive.co.uk\/\" target=\"_self\">Marketing Week Live!<\/a> event, when Edelman&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/marshallmanson\" target=\"_self\">Marshall Manson<\/a> stated that &#8220;it&#8217;s not so much the number of followers, as who those followers are&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Well, quite, but close examination of 100,000 individuals is rarely achievable. Shortcut 101 for assessing the &#8220;influence&#8221; of armies of followers would be&#8230; the number of followers those followers have, and then the number of followers&#8217; followers&#8217; followers, and so on; a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/PageRank\" target=\"_self\">PageRank<\/a> for Twitter (but not <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tweetrank.net\/\" target=\"_self\">TweetRank<\/a>). Add to that all the other channels through which individuals can potentially exert &#8220;influence&#8221;, and by necessity the analysis becomes less human, and more mathematical. As we&#8217;ve written here before, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/2011\/04\/influence-network-effects-and-utility\/\" target=\"_self\">proof of such an approach is very much in the pudding<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Wednesday&#8217;s panel made it clear just how far we&#8217;ve come. Five years ago, panellists would have been engaged in a &#8220;thou shalt blog becuase it&#8217;s easy and it&#8217;s cheap&#8221; mantra. This week, it was &#8220;no Facebook groups unless they&#8217;re capable of delivering clearly defined business objectives&#8221;, and even (Manson again) &#8220;social media isn&#8217;t always the answer. If you&#8217;ve 25 key stakeholders you might be better taking them out for dinner&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Note that the &#8220;dinner&#8221; strategy doesn&#8217;t naturally fall into any of the Babson-Bentley buckets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest Harvard Business Review describes a new study from researchers at Babson College and Bentley University that attempts to put social media strategies into four distinct buckets, from ultra-measurable, small-scale experimentation to org-wide transformation. &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3643],"tags":[2968,3220,77,97,463,894],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}