Mashable.com posted an article by Chris Allison, today called the “4 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media as a Catalyst“. His article speaks about 4 ways to which you can begin to look at the big picture and begin to put together some thoughts and ideas about how you are going to use social media, in the context of your brand and marketing goals, to maximize results.

Like I said ya gotta have a plan! This article should help you gain some perspective as to where you might want to get started.

Best Nicole

As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.

Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?

Social Media as a Catalyst

When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities. Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.

1. Cause Marketing

The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation – pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation process.

However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter() account.

One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional benefits to the cause marketing table:

1. Access to increased publicity
2. The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining conversations
3. The ability to bring customers into the support process

Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where Pepsi will donate their funds as well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook() Fan Page, and a blog.

By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice). Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).

Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.

Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s() NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.

2. The Offline World

Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects, locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.

Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.

Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer support representatives that can help customers on location.

On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.

3. Media Coverage

Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful (Iran’s() election crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.

When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.

Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited from traditional coverage:

Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among ‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of old media carry
significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of the credibility their names lend.

I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is often read over days, weeks, or even months.

The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.

4. Technology

At SoCon10, a social media conference in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.

But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus, perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the strategy.

One of the great reasons for women focussed marketing in 2010—a target market who weilds 80% of both the decision making as well as buying power—is that women are online and using social networks. The nature of engagement is a good fit to how women connect naturally offline and have been engaging for centuries. Check out these stats on the female economy (stats from 2009 book, Why She Buys, by Bridget Brennan).

• Apparel – 65% of purchases are made by women
• Automotive - 52% of all new vehicle purchases, including trucks, made by women (80% of purchases influenced by women)
• Consumer Electronics -45% percent of purchases made by women (61% of purchases influenced by women)
• Health Care- 80% if family health care decisons are made by women
• Travel - 70% of the decisions are made by women
• Insurance, Investments,and Retirement Accounts - 90% of women participate in the decisions that affect their houshold’s retirement & investment accounts
• Homes – 20% of purchases are made by single women; 91% of all purchases are influenced by women
• Wine – 55% of all purchases are made by women
• Gaming – 40% of players are women

Some convincing reasons to start reaching out to women today, if you haven’t already. Being aware and dedicated to finding ways to target and engage women via social media is sure to be a winning return on your investment for years to come!

Best Nicole

Go New Orleans Saints!

Watch this video for what three visionary CEOs have to say about Social Networking:

• John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco: “Social Networking is transforming companies. Is is the future of Business Productivity, Health Care, Education and Entertainment.”
• Indra Nooyi, CEO, Pepsico: “Global company with global brands and reputation can use it as a force for good.”
• Jeffrey Joerres, President and CEO, Manpower: “When it comes to Social Networking, it is a major trend towards what will be a very standard everyday stuff.”

This very clearly highlights the fact that Social Media and Social Networking are not a fad, but for real, are here to stay and will become mainstream in near future. Social Business is not just another way of doing business, it is THE way business will be conducted.

I strongly recommend that all senior executives (and especially the CMOs) start taking Social Media initiatives seriously, and lead from the front when it comes to use of Social Media, as survival and growth of their business rests on how effectively they leverage emerging tech tools.

Social Networking has far reaching implications for the marketing department and I recommend that CMOs setup a Social Media Task force that will advise them on how to quickly adapt and integrate their marketing operations into emerging Social Networking tools and applications. Sooner marketing department(s) adopt and start using Social Networking for engaging their customers better for their brand(s), else performance of their business will suffer.

Marketing Profs writes a daily blog called Get to The Point! One of today’s posts beautifully describes how understanding the ways in which your customer wants to connect with you and you with them, will help provide the pathway to the social media relationship that builds brand evangelism.

Enjoy their post. Best Nicole

Pepsi’s Scheme Fails Taste Test

By now, you’ve probably heard about a recent Pepsi outreach that delivered three packages, over the course of an hour, to 25 influential bloggers; the first two contained cans with logos from throughout the cola-maker’s history, while the last featured those with the latest design.
A note explained: “You’re part of a handful of digital and social influencers we’re reaching out to regarding a multiyear, companywide transformation.”

The delivery gimmick, which some found intriguing, didn’t pack its intended drama for a few recipients. Mack Collier, who lives in a rural area, was bemused by the silliness of having a courier sit in his driveway while waiting out the prescribed 20-minute interval between each delivery. Rohit Bhargava, meanwhile, missed it altogether—he was out of the country when the packages arrived.

Collier applauds Pepsi’s ambition, but takes issue with the initial stage of the campaign’s execution for these reasons:

“Sending bloggers stuff to get us to blog about it is soooo 2006,” he writes. “Sure it can lead to a ton of initial buzz, but if there’s no follow-up and if the buzz doesn’t lead to the start of creating connections with your customers, then it’s still money wasted.”

Companies should target online evangelists before they go after social media influencers.

In the world of social media, you’re sure to see a better ROI on time than on money.

Your Marketing Inspiration: Focus on the relationships that social media tools facilitate, not the tools themselves. “You want to use social media as a channel to better connect with your customers, as a way for you to better understand them, and for them to better understand you.”