Proactive Reputation Management in Social Media Marketing
Marketing in social media, or Web 2.0, has changed the ways businesses have to compete.
While to many the concept of reputation management may seem like a reactive process to negative publicity, it can also be used to proactively generate a positive profile for your company. A great resource for this is the social media circuit.
Of course, social media outlets can be used to simply promote your business. This is a fairly common practice, especially with newer businesses. MySpace quickly became full of local artists and businesses promoting themselves. The benefits of this practice are numerous, but the most important feature is that you place yourself in a position to more directly interact with your customer base. This is actually where all the subjects in this article start.
The usefulness of social media for this kind of reputation management is multifaceted. First of all, investigation into social blogs and forums can give you ideas of what customers want or need. Let’s say that your business is a cable television service.
Let’s say also that you see an overreaching pattern in the social media circuit of people saying that they want a la carte packages for their cable TV service. That is, they would like a list of channels they can get, and they can pick and choose which ones they want, rather than the typically designed packages. You have just discovered a largely untapped market niche.
Now, let’s say that your cable TV company has access to the technology they would need to provide this service. You file your report on your findings by way of the social media outlets. Your company agrees, and designs a price scale for a la carte channel selection.
Now, as well as the typical methods of advertising, you can also use the social media circuit to advertise this product. It can all start with a blog or forum post announcing this service. This can spread virally, and the next thing you know, you have more and more people signing on for this service.
The social media can also be used to engineer special deals and saving incentives for your company; a technique commonly called “reverse coupon engineering.” By the same means of investigation as before, you discover a consumer asking whether they should use your service or your competitor’s.
Naturally, you will want to outstrip your competition in the social media market. You then look at their offers, and can develop a better package deal. Again, using the cable TV example, you see that your competitor offers HBO free for six months. You can then develop a package that involves free HBO for six months, plus a 10% discount on monthly service for a year.
This is the same principle behind Lending Tree’s claim that “When banks compete, you win,” applied to social media markets. It’s not happening much on the large scale, but it’s becoming more of a feature in Internet Marketing as businesses find their places on Facebook, Twitter and the like.
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