Part 2 of 3. The KickApps seminar I attended last month yielded a wealth of information, from both advisors and corporate marketing people, about what to do with social media if you're a company. For the next three posts, I'm sharing what I took away from the afternoon. [To become a member of KickApps own social network, click here. You'll be able to watch the videos of the seminar presentations.]
These brief points are compiled from the excellent presentations made by Alex Blum of KickApps, Dylan Boyd of eROI, James Mastan of Blue Rain Marketing, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester, and Sandy Carter of IBM.
Make your website more open to viral discovery
Customize it -- not just the design but its searchability and usability
Focus on content that is yours -- differentiate
Enable syndication via widgets
Integrate your website planning into your overall marketing strategy
Use tools that enable you to graph your user data
Let your branding approach give your website its context
Make it easy for visitors to interact with you and your brand -- build a community or better yet, give users the ability to grow one organically
Make sure your strategy accommodates the fact that your communities will define your products -- so don't try to control the communities, just be part of them and help to seed the networks within them
Craft your website in such a way that it helps your community experience not just your products but the Web itself more vibrantly
Remember that community members trust each other more than they trust marketers
Consider three important social tools for the website
A wiki -- a great way for customers to contribute their ideas
BOTs -- to increase clickthrough -- but use them sparingly because that's their power
An independent social network around your product
Comments