Finding the mutual purpose of your social campaigns

The thought of participating in news and content creation can be very attractive for companies trying to connect for marketing or customer relations purposes, but before you dive into the new media and social networking pools, make sure you have what Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, calls a “mutual purpose,” to keep you afloat.

“By a ‘mutual purpose,’ he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it.” I’m sure we all know how to be self-serving, but how do you “serve the audience interacting with your campaign?”

One way to is to follow the advice of Jonah Paransky, vice president of marketing for Stacksafe, and recent speaker at SpeakerBox’s Measuring Buzz event, and create problem-focused content – provide answers to common client questions or information that your prospects want and can use to solve a problem or met a need. By doing so, you not only position yourself as a thought leader or expert in your field, but also provide prospects with ideas or introduce opportunities of which they may not have been aware.

In order to be successful your new media and social networking campaigns needs to be less about your business and bottom-line, and more about your customer. After all, it’s not new media if you simply broadcast information. New media is about networked information, contribution, and communication.

- Lisa Wells

Photo source: Flickr.com