This article is part of a road show presentation series I did in Toronto for Intertainment Media, owners of Itibiti Systems.
Social media is far from prescriptive, that’s why I sought out stories of people who succeeded in creating their own industry voice using social media. The result of my research is this article, “14 Successful Techniques for Building Your Industry Voice with Social Media.”
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Check out the summary below, read the article, and/or watch an audio slidecast of the live presentation I did in Toronto.
Summary
Get inspired to capitalize on social media for your business with these successful tales of building industry voice.
- Ride current hot news and cultural memes: Mobile gaming company capitalizes on the Bernie Madoff scandal by launching a “create your own Ponzi scheme” game.
- Build your own memes: An unexpected Internet entrepreneur starts a new celebrity tracking trend.
- Connect an existing brand or talent to your brand: From complete nobodies to big product brands, more and more companies are using celebrities and entertainment to connect audiences to their brands.
- Focus on content, not social media: An unbridled focus on content and not gaming social media technologies is what made Alec Saunders a thought leader in Voice 2.0 communications.
- Use your own product to tell your story: Alec Saunders demonstrated Calliflower, his company’s free conference calling application, by hosting a daily roundtable podcast in which anyone could participate.
- Manage your industry’s community: An SEO entrepreneur launches his city’s professional networking community. With no revenue model, the connections and recognition have built invaluable goodwill with potential and existing customers.
- The community is the best help desk: Intuit is helping customers find answers quickly by building social networking capabilities right into its applications.
- Take care of your best resource, super users: Like Tom Sawyer did with painting the white picket fence, Boxee turned the arduous task into manning a booth at CES into something customers competed to do.
- Convert potential buyers into a word-of-mouth advertising network: Unknown book author becomes a New York Times best-selling author by podcasting his book for free.
- Feed everybody’s needs all along the sales cycle: In order to sell a new product, Microsoft engages with decision makers, and tries not to fall short of satisfying everyone.
- Own a word: With laser-like intensity and determination, The RFP Database focuses its energies on owning one word and succeeds.
- Customer’s perception of what they get must be greater than what they give: General Mills’ Yoplait Kids asks customers if they’re willing to trade personal information for a coupon.
- Own more real estate: NBC extends its reach to every screen, but also uses itiBiti to get prime placement on the user’s desktop.
- Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing: If everyone follows the same advice, social media becomes very crowded. Sometimes, as Harry McCracken of Technologizer discovered, it’s best to do the opposite.
What’s wrong with your current solution or why haven’t you chosen one yet: Most companies haven’t made the leap into social media because they’re either still trying to uncover social media’s ROI or they lack the necessary structural change in company communications.
To get your copy of this free article, register to download the PDF – It’s FREE.
cc photo credit to Fabio Trifoni.
