Jeremiah Owyang on Social Media Strategies

Jeremiah Owyang

Yesterday I attended Jeremiah Owyang's web seminar "Social Media Playtime Is Over: How Brands Must Focus In A Recession." Jeremiah has been covering social media and on-line communities for Forrester for the last year and he offers a unique perspective on the state of the art best practices. In his position as a researcher he gets a first hand view of both corporate practices and vendor product strategies.

Here are some important insights from the seminar.

• The opportunity to use social media despite the recession is NOW. While the media maybe over hyping services like Twitter (Oprah and CNN vs Ashton Kutcher) with 3/4 of the US based on-line adults using social technologies this is a trend not a fad. We can expect adoption to increase during the recession as more people are between jobs and tapping into free social networking services to create and enhance personal brand.
  
• The companies surveyed are increasing their spending on social media programs but as a percentage of their overall marketing spend it remains small as most programs are not strategic.
• Most corporate use of social media is experimental with no clearly defined best practices and with many efforts underfunded and sporadic. Over 60% of the companies surveyed have budgets under $50,000 that are not dedicated but come from previously allocated marketing and advertising budgets.
  
• Jeremiah then offered 7 tactics that can fuel experimentation. These included:
  
  1. Socialize content - Make your existing connect available to be republished
     
  2. Word of mouth with Twitter - Establish Twitter accounts as communication channels
     
  3. Aggregate existing content - Provide a unified view on syndicated content relevant to your audience
     
  4. Crowdsource your support - Empower your users to provide answers and content for your community
     
  5. Sponsor bloggers - Give your customers a forum to talk about your brand and products
     
  6. Sponsor events - Not only provide venue and cover expense but actively participate
     
  7. Let go with APIs - Provide APIs into your service to allow others to build Internet properties using it in unique ways.
     

Bottom line is that we must treat social media as a long term strategy with the appropriate metrics and measurable returns and staff it with resources dedicated to its success that include a constant improvement feedback loop as best practices evolve.

Welcome To Corker Club

Welcome to Corker Club. CorkerClub is dedicated to helping Wineries effectively use social media to strengthen their brand and engage their members in meaningful conversation through an on-line community. CorkerClub advises wineries and wine regions in the formulation of their social media strategies and offers marketing services ranging from social media training to building and managing custom on-line communities.

Over the last year social networking has grown considerably and the availability of, and participation in, on-line communities is expected. CorkerClub specializes in the effective use of on-line communities and social media for wineries and their regional organizations. CorkerClub’s full range of marketing services helps wineries get the most out of their social media strategies.

In this blog I will be posting about social media trends and how they effect the wine industry.

You can also follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CorkerClub