What news about Technology Infrastructure

 

What news about Technology Infrastructure

The good news is, you probably don’t have to buy any servers.

Hardware

Social media and Web 2.0 technologies go hand in hand, so virtually everything

you need to support your social media program from a technology and database

perspective will live in the cloud.

That’s a good thing for speed to market, low investment, and robustness.

Establishing a presence on the major social networks is free, for the most part.

It’s stunning to think how quickly and inexpensively you can be amassing an

audience of hundreds of thousands, communicating with them, and publishing

and promoting to them.

Software 

You will probably make technology investments in cloud software tools to help

you do the following:

Monitor your brand reputation, industry, and rivals

Efficiently publish to several social networks

Perform customer relationship management

Launch sweepstakes, games, group deals, and other specialized campaigns

Track and report analytics

You’ll also task developers with enabling social features on your own website.

Adding widgets and social plug-ins from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn,

and other platforms requires little to no developer resources. Custom integration

with the social networks requires programming, HTML, JavaScript, API, and

other skills.

but for now, it’s

important just to know that the social media program will have to budget for in-

house or outsourced developers.

Tip What kind of developers do you need? (1) To integrate your website with

Facebook, you need a developer who is proficient on your website platform and

can work with XFBML, JavaScript SDK, and APIs. (2) To integrate your mobile

app or mobile website with Facebook, you need an iOS, Android, or web

developer. (3) To develop apps for Facebook, you can use any language that

supports web programming, such as PHP, Python, Java, or C#.

The downside of public networks and cloud computing is that an unprecedented

amount of your brand equity has migrated to platforms you don’t control, with

member databases you don’t own. Yes, you could try to construct a “walled

garden”—and I’ll talk about proprietary social networks next in Chapter 10—but

my preference is to engage with the big public networks in a way that seeks to

bring much of the relationship, intellectual property, and SEO benefit back to the

proprietary site.

Monitoring Tools

As I mentioned on best practices, it’s vital to approach the social

media landscape first as a listening post, not as a speaking platform. Social

media represent the new public square, and they are an ideal place to hear the

conversations of your target consumers as they talk about your brand. 

marketplace (what they like, what they hate, what they need), and your

competitors. Listening is not just the first step in developing a strategy for how

you’ll approach social media. It’s also an ongoing, everyday responsibility—a

modern-day discipline your company needs to practice, to ensure that you are

able to:

Resolve consumer problems and complaints wherever they emerge on the

web

Detect cultural trends, memes, fads—and potential scandals—early

Monitor the volume and sentiment of mentions of your brand (and your

competitors’ brands)

To be a good listener, you’ll need social media brand-monitoring tools. There

are decent free utilities out there to alert you when your brand is mentioned in

the press, for instance. But to reliably track, report, and act on brand mentions

throughout the various social media platforms, you’ll need to invest in one of the

leading software packages, such as HootSuite, Sprout Social, or Radian6.

The best social media software combines all three of the key requirements:

Brand monitoring

Publishing management

Social analytics and reporting

Publishing and Management Tools

Shoutlet, Vocus, HootSuite, and TweetDeck are just a few of the leading

applications for publishing posts and managing conversations across multiple

social media network. 

Ad-Management Tools

Most businesses will not require custom software to manage their advertising on

social media platforms. But for organizations running large and complex ad buys

across several social networks, or testing a huge variety of different ad versions

or microtargeting audiences by location or other criteria, there are management

tools worth considering.

For instance, BuyBuddy from Buddy Media allows you to manage your social

media ad buys from one central console and lets you measure performance

against an impressive array of performance goals (see Figure 7-3):

People talking about this

Page “likes”

Post “likes”

Comments

Shares

Twitter @ mentions

Check-ins

Photo tags

Offers shared

Offers claimed

App installs

App uses

Credit spending in an app

RSVPs

now part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, lets you track

the results of your social media ad campaigns and optimize their performance.

Courtesy salesforce.com.

Because social media advertising targets actions that are so different from the

paid search-and-display ad model, social ads deserve their own management

software. I advise you, though, to first manage your social media ads directly, in

each ad platform’s administrative interface. Until you’re personally familiar with

the different platforms, and some of the inefficiencies.