Page 87 - Social Media Marketing

employees, the conversations themselves are very likely to be powerful expressions that 65
carry the business or organization forward.
■ ╇ W hat I s S ocial B usiness ?
This kind of end result—an expressed passion around a brand, product, or
service—is associated with the higher stages of engagement. Beyond consumption of
content, engagement in the form of curation of community interaction, creation of
content and collaboration between participants are the activities leading to advocacy.
Consider the role that collaboration plays in contributing to the sense of ownership as a
result of the combined efforts of employees and customers, participating together in the
creation of a shared outcome. This sense of joint ownership, however subtly it may be
expressed, is in fact a reasonable and even required customer sentiment that once and
for all “cuts through the clutter.”

Brand Outposts

As a result of the growth in social activities on the Web, there is a natural expectation
on the part of consumers to find the brands they love in the social sites they frequent. As
a matter of course, customers expect this kind of presence and participation. In addition
to the branded community efforts described prior, an alternative (or complementary)
approach to connecting a brand or organization with an existing community also exists:
The creation of brand presence—known as a brand outpost—within an established
social network or online community—a Facebook Business Page, a Twitter presence or
a YouTube channel to list just a few. In creating a brand outpost—in comparison to a
self-standing community—there need not be any reason other than the expectation for
the brand to be present and a tie back to business objectives that are served by such a
presence. There does, of course, need to be a relevant contribution by the brand, prod-
uct, or service to the community it wishes to join. Simply posting TV commercials to
YouTube, for example, is in most cases not going to produce engagement beyond the
firm’s own employees and perhaps their families watching these commercials. New con-
tent created for YouTube—Freescale’s allowance of employee videos—is the kind of con-
tent that is both welcomed and appreciated, since it is created specifically for this venue.

In particular, Facebook members expect to find their favorite brands on Facebook.
So Aircel, an Indian Telecom provider, created a Facebook application that embeds Aircel
voicemail services within Facebook, providing both a link to customers in an important
new media channel and a point of competitive differentiation. Aircel Customers pres-
ent on Facebook, who as a group tend to be younger and savvier when it comes to their
use of the social web use this application to stay up with voicemail without ever leaving
Facebook. The Aircel voicemail application is shown in Figure€3.6.

Citing its own business objectives around customer service, Australia’s Telstra
created its Twitter presence (@telstra) partly out of recognition that Twitter is a bur-
geoning customer service portal and that—as is the case with Facebook, Orkut, and
other leading social networks—its own customers expect it to be there.