Friday, January 27, 2012

Integrating Social Media Inside of Campaign Management

If I send a custom offer in an email, can I also customize the tweet?

The idea of running campaigns inside of social media is a natural.  After all, social technology allows for the leveraging of human interactions to improve engagement with contests and events. Companies like Strutta and Wildfire are offering social media marketing products and suites to execute promotions from within social networks.

But what about integrating social channels into traditional campaign management tools to simultaneously deliver a message to a like, a follower, or a member.   Since the objective is to increase the odds of conversion, how do we surround a consumer with relevant offers across those channels? 

When we send 10,000 customers custom coupons based on their transactional data in email or direct mail, can we leverage social channels in a similar way?

So, the fine folks around the corner from my office took a look at the API's of various social technologies from that perspective.   Here's a brief synopsis of what they found.
  • Twitter: we can certainly send a tweet to individual followers and we can dynamically generate the text and offer.  However, because twitter limits the number of tweets a given account can send per day you can't effectively reach all our followers.   
  • Facebook: it is possible to post status updates to the page the brand owns and it can see the likes. However, posting on the wall of the likes is another matter.  And since the evidence suggests that less than 10% of likes see the posts on the brand page, this is an area worthy of further exploration.  
  • LinkedIn: again, we can create an account, enlist followers and post messages.  The limitations are two-fold: first, what constitutes a marketing message, and a coupon would most certainly qualify as that; second, how deep into the network can a communication go - direct connections vs. 3rd degree. 
Obviously these limitations are in place to reduce spam.  

So, the question remains: when a consumer voluntarily connects within social media with a brand can we send custom offers from outside?

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