As businesses and companies caught in today’s cut-throat competition – both online or offline – look to aggressively market their product and services, social media is taking center stage for its reach, effectiveness and cost-efficiency. Marketers are resorting to dynamic Facebook fan pages, informative blog posts, timely Twitter updates and regular industry updates, to reach out to more and more people on the Web.
Intricate maze of cross-media communications
In the process, the companies are moving away from the earlier days when a core corporate message could be controlled by a few key people in a communications office.
The intricate maze of cross-media communications often leaves small businesses confused. Unfortunately, many of them still grapple with social media marketing, more because of lack of expertise than will, thus failing to tap new opportunities in customer engagement.
Logic and logistics of retaining social media interactions
Archiving relevant Web content is becoming a vital aspect of relentless social media interactions involving prospective customers and companies. Agencies like DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, are already in the process of presenting important clients with new, innovative technologies for a holistic social media management plan.
Underlining the need for such an exercise, Chief executive & president of Tribal DDB Worldwide (the agency’s digital division), Paul Gunning points out: “What if three years from now somebody suddenly comes and demands for every Facebook post and every tweet about a brand?”
Archiving a brand’s communications
In this context, what they intend to do is basically crawl the Web and thoroughly archive a brand’s communications – sent from marketing teams to customers and vice versa – to gauge the pattern of such interactions over a period of time.
Mr. Gunning feels that agencies and advertisers would be required to keep elaborate records of the huge amount of two-way social media communications that they release every day. “When I look at it, well, it makes me shiver!” he exclaims, referring to the awesome quantities of posts that companies put out day in and day out apart from other text generated online.
Data management acquires significance
The agency is set to team up with Nextpoint that makes use of cloud-based tools for archiving relevant Web content. This is for the purpose of presenting to its clients a product termed ‘Cloud Preservation’.
What the product does is to crawl the Web and then archive websites, blog posts as well as social media interactions by employing Amazon Web services. Many such partnerships are in the offing among top media and technology companies largely owing to the explosion of content on the Internet.
The information can be stored, compartmentalized, tagged, searched and exported. The cost of the data management service is in the range of $15 onwards a month (for rendering basic service) to something like $2 million to $3 million annually for a full-scale, end-to-end operating service. The cost that companies are willing to pay underlines the importance of managing social media communications.
