Page 353 - Social Media Marketing

Why This Matters in Business 331

Social applications like YouTube, Slideshare, and Scribd offer simple ways to extend ■ ╇ S ocial A pplications D rive E ngagement
the reach of your existing content, and they provide a ready-for-sharing platform for
your ideas, presentations, whitepapers, and similar content. YouTube, Slideshare, and
Scribd support embedding—meaning others can place your presentation into their
online site, with full credit automatically extended to you—and as such are excellent
vehicles for a component of a thought leadership or similar program in addition to sim-
ply getting the word out about your brand, product, or service.

As you set out to plan and implement social applications, make note of the ways
in which content publishing sites like YouTube can be used. You don’t have to reinvent
content uploading, video storage, and streaming, nor do you have to build your own
community to distribute thought-leadership materials. Take advantage of existing
social applications like YouTube, Scribd, and Slideshare. Save your money (and time)
for creating the very specific social applications—such as Aircel’s Facebook-based
voicemail application or Penn State’s “Outreach” employee collaboration and knowl-
edge-sharing platform. And if you haven’t already done so, develop and implement
your social computing policies. Instead of reinventing what already exists, build off of
it and use your resources to fill in the gaps or bring unique value to your customers and
stakeholders.

Curation and Reputation Management

So far, the social applications and tools covered have centered on extending the func-
tionality of social networks, facilitating member connections within them, and using
these platforms to publish and share content. In a simplified view, these applications
have involved or enabled (further) content consumption, setting up the content-sharing
process that leads to collaboration. The next sections cover the applications that you
can use, build, or subscribe to in order to move site participants to these higher levels
of engagement, to contribute their own thoughts and ideas, and to facilitate collabora-
tion between participants themselves and with your business.

The previously mentioned Facebook Like button is a simple implementation of
a more sophisticated class of social applications that support curation, the basic act of
voting something (or someone) up or down, of rating, reviewing, etc. For nearly any
type of content, in nearly any application, one of the “new realities” of the Social Web
is that people generally expect to able to rate it, to review it, or to otherwise share it
and indicate their own relative assessment of its worth in the process. This is a subtle
but very important insight: Where not too many years ago a web page or online adver-
tisement was largely assumed to be a one-way message, the expectation now exists for
the option to participate. Posting an article without providing an easy way to rate it or
comment on it effectively screams to your audience, “We’ll talk, you’ll listen.”