Scaling Social Media Initiatives

Many companies, hopefully yours, have begun to migrate away from the one-way megaphone approach to marketing and towards the two-way conversational marketing approach (let's call that the telephone approach). Where you are on the megaphone-telephone spectrum can be a factor of many things:

• Your industry type - Conservative, stodgy industries can be laggards in adopting new approaches to marketing
• Your company culture - We run into many firms whose CEO's are aghast at the thought of customers actually being able to talk back to them, or to each other ("They might say something negative!").
• Your marketing team's age - Let's be honest, younger marketers see the potential and explosion of social media, and are hungrier to enter into the conversation.
• Your resources - Many firms don't feel they have the person-power to manage two-way conversations.

But can social media efforts really scale to the point of replacing the megaphone? After all, marketers are in the business of selling as much as they can. The more qualified prospects they can get in front of, with the right value proposition, at the right time, with the right offer, the higher the return on marketing investment. Right?

Here are a few things to consider when deciding how to balance your megaphone (one-way)-to-telephone (two-way) communication migration path:

• Start with the influencers- Do you need to be the one talking to the entire base of customers, or do you really need to start with influential customers who will then represent you to the wider community? More often than not, you need to start the conversation with a smaller core group of advocates and influencers, and they can scale the conversation for you.

• Set expectations accurately-  Sprint recently got into some trouble with customers when they invited them to email their CEO with their feedback. In return, they received an automated thank you email. Seems realistic, after all, a large corporate CEO can't personally reply to thousands of individual emails. But the campaign that initiated the emails made it seem like he would, and instead of a positive, the campaign created hard feelings. It's critical to let customers know what level of human response they will receive if you invite them to share.

• Automate - There are hundreds of useful Web 2.0-tools available in the form of widgets for your web site that can build in interactive, two-way conversational elements. Take surveys or polls, for example. People love to rate things or provide feedback, and then see instantly how their feedback stacks up to others. Technology can create the two-way response for you (again, make sure expectations are set properly).

• Outsource to volunteers or vendors- Companies are finding that motivated, advocate-oriented customers are willing to invest a lot of time volunteering in support of their favorite brands. Partly it's an ego thing; people love to be an "expert" and find fulfillment in helping others. At other times, you may need to hire a third-party firm who is an expert on customer response and who can serve this role less expensively than hiring more full-time employees.

It will be a while longer before completely personalized, interactive, social networking can replace the megaphone entirely. Until that time, be smart and use the tactics above to build a culture of conversation in your company and begin to influence the influencers to carry on conversations on your behalf.