Recently, during the consultancy that I gave to major companies about social media and online marketing strategy, I realized that the monitoring and building a structured strategy for online marketing are generally missing or never taking place at all as a long term initiative in marketing plans. A few years ago, when I was working as the marketing manager of a IT vendor company, I encountered a really challenging problem with a customer. After accusing the company for mistake that the actually made on his product resulted an unusable computer, he bought 2 millions of email addresses and sent a text containing very heavy accusations about the company to all those 2 million people. He added inserting of this text to many IT forums although the mistake was totally his fault and he was treated equally and kindly by the service support company of ours. We suddenly noticed that there is a turmoil in the social media about our company and the brand was heavily being ruined. After this problem occurred, we had to handle the problem very proactively by three different teams dealing and fighting with the issue from different angles. I suddenly understood that SEO or social media management or online marketing campaigns are not only the solution for building a proper online branding image and social media appearance. It is more complicated and building a firm that is “online media aware”, is also one of the challenges that you have to take care into.
I have a friend who is working in an electronic appliance industry as marketing manager. He also had a similar case where a person with 100K followers were not treated “adequately”, shared her experience (especially with people who are probable customers of the company) in a twisted and exaggerated way in one hour. The problem became shared by thousands of people in a few hours.
There are only a few things you can do for those inevitable problems. Monitoring, immediate reaction and avoiding the problem from the very beginning by preemptive techniques. Thus reconsidering your online market strategy must be one of your top priorities you should take as an initiative again.
Please do not forget that “IT IS YOUR BRAND TALKING IN THE INTERNET”. You might be being represented by an agency or a group of people in your team. However, If your company or agency is not aware-enough about your brand, soon or later you will strike to a problem.
The first thing you have to ask yourself about your marketing online strategy is whether you have a structured plan. In this very issue of HBR, I read an article about the social media planners’ attitude and strategy about online marketing. The article categorizes the companies into four different groups about their approach to online marketing: “Predictive Practioners”, “Creative Experimenters”, “Social Media Champions” and “Social Media Transformer” companies. The main KPI in putting a company into one category is how they handle the unpredictive risks of social media. If you are a “predictive practioners” than you are a company which takes measurable and controllable ways of online marketing like CRM and online service interaction over specific software and leave the comments to your customers. If you are a “Creative Experimenter” the creative campaigns are first tested inside or a controlled community and fired to real world after that controllable platform. The “Social Media Champions” are the companies which dedicate a significant resource for online marketing and interaction. However your results in your campaigns are still predictable and monitorable. The fourth category residers are real challengers. The online media is owned by whole company and the campaigns and interactions are far from predictable.
You might be thinking about your category right now. However, before putting your company into a line, please rethink how much your brand value and sales might be impacted if you are making campaigns and your brand existence uncontrolled. In order to raise your brand value and sales interactions, you should check how responsive your company is to those inevitable problems occuring during those interactions with your customers. Are your campaigns eligible to be a darkwhole in some case if you are not monitoring the community enough?
In order to avoid those circumstances and raise your online marketing strategy to a more rigid and non-bendable place, you need free advocates in the cloud who can monitor and probe and find your weaknesses in online marketing. Please start with your own crew by teaching and reconsidering your CRM. If you are possesing a sales force on the field they are the frontiers and social observers. “Social media is NOT something” that online lives on the web pages. Those people use facebook, twitter, stumble upon, delicious…. etc. Those sites have their own technical hints and gestures. Ordiniary people do not know those details and voila! they can be your employees as well! Train them and train your workforce on the battle field at first.
Please TEST your team and/or your agency about how responsive they are to ever changing online media and problems that might occur about your products or sales procedures.
Always take (even though it is seldom) a consultancy that will pull you out of your professional blindness. Even this minute new ways of interaction, new campaigns are being produced somewhere and you are becoming distant from them. You or your team are going to be busy with your own routine. Thus take a closer look and take a consultancy for discussing and checking your status on the online era.
Prepare new campaigns in order to create advocates for your brand. Prepare campaigns that create new soldiers for your brand that care, monitor and find your weaknesses in sales procedure. Generally the weaknesses lie in sales procedures or service procedures… If you are a cosmetic or healthcare company, please include training/helping services to your advocates. After creation of an army, include new campaigns that give them incentives, gestures or experiences that will definitely make them feel special and extraordiniary. Wait and train them for feedback and new bright ideas. This army is not enough if you do not employ a monitoring agency of monitoring company. You must be comparing your online existence with your rivals. Your exposure, dimensions of the community you touch, your positive and negative ways of online existence can be monitored and compared. Please ask or create reports for exposure. Compare your level of creativity, compare your outreach/infusion and diversion. Please make reports that monitor the ups/downs of your exposure percentage (in numerical way) comparing your online/offline/social appearance. This will enable you to drive more decisions on making appropriate media planning. And one more final report… Please monitor your ROI on sales after your online marketing campaign. It is extremely important to evaluate how your efforts and what type of efforts are turning in to sales. Even for your branding in online worlds, your product owners are going to be your advocates. Creating campaign to keep in touch with your customers is the second best step to make online strategy.
You must be planning your quarterly or yearly marketing plans according to your needs and product roadmaps or your country agenda. Please include some extra budget to evaluate and monitor yourself. Always keep an extra budget for cases of extraordinary. Making a plan of online/social media marketing is not always consisting of SEO or social media management or web site migration. These are good steps to start. However, advancing your online strategy and converting your company to a more online-known social media winner lies with controlling and monitoring.
You can follow me on twitter @gokalpharman. I would be delighted with your posts.








