Social Media Strategy: which department is responsible?

According to a May 2010 study by Digital Brand Expressions, 52% of social marketers are operating without a Social Marketing strategy or plan. Respondents were equally concerned with the ongoing monitoring of brand reputation, at 71%, but only 52% had a plan for such activities.

And yet social media have spread throughout many organisations and companies. So who should be included in a corporate social strategy? Should it be limited to marketing or PR departments, or include human resources, customer service or even sales or IT?
As the graph below demonstrates, most agree that responsibility for creating social strategies belongs with marketing departments:

Further reading:

• What Makes Up a Social Marketing Strategy? @ eMarketer.com

Twitter as a customer service and marketing channel

From A new Twitter marketing maturity model by social marketing app builder Offerpop:

Twitter can be a very effective alert and listening channel, and with the right offer, creative and positioning, can be a great viral and word-of-mouth channel as well. [...] Offerpop's Twitter marketing Maturity model [...] could be a useful tool for looking at the stages of social marketing on Twitter, [...] and also calling out specific activities and metrics (and apps) needed to best leverage this channel.

The interesting part is that this model makes the connection between Twitter and Coupons. But what do you think of the model? And how do you see "viral coupons"?

Further reading:

• A new Twitter marketing maturity model @ blog.offerpop.com
• Twitter als volwassen marketingkanaal @ incredibleadventure.com

Combining the forces of social media with e-mail marketing

Savvy marketing professionals are experimenting with ways to have the two channels, social media and e-mail, complement each other instead of compete.

A round-up of recent studies and articles:

• A survey of small businesses by e-mail marketing company AWeber found the most common tactics implemented last year were tweeting e-mail newsletters and sending out blog entries to e-mail lists.
• According to a study by e-mail marketing company GetResponse, including a social sharing option in an e-mail increased their clients’ click-through rates from an average of 7.2% to 8.7%, and including as many as three different sharing options boosted the rate to 11.2%
• A study by ExactTarget might give some comfort to the email proponents - it found that 58% of respondents in a recent survey say they check their e-mail first, while 20% go first to a search engine or portal site and 11% start with Facebook.

Further reading:

• The Future of Social/E-Mail Integration @ eMarketer.com
• Social Media Strengthens Its Stance against Email @ mediabuyerplanner.com
• Social Media Integration Drives Major Clicks for E-mail Marketers [STUDY] @ mashable.com
• Social Sharing Adds 30% to Email CTRs @ marketingvox.com

5 elements of social media marketing

IT services company Infosys has just launched iEngage, a platform which uses uses some of the currently popular social media applications and makes them available as enterprise application.

According to this platform, Social Media Marketing consists of these 5 elements:

1. Social Analytics: listening and responding to consumer conversations
2. Dialogue (blogging): engaging in two-way communcation with consumers
3. Community: enabling consumers to connect and interact
4. Content aggregation: bringing together relevant and useful enterprise content
5. Content Distribution: pushing and pulling content across the social

An interesting mix of content, community and social media marketing tactics, but I wonder

• how they handle the overlaps
• where and when they measure conversion

Further reading:

• Infosys Ventures Into Social Media Marketing – Launches iEngage @ watblog.com