Social Media has become a topic at many marketing meetings.  As an individual, you may be actively interacting with others online through blogs, discussion boards, or social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook.  But should your organization be actively participating in social media too?  

There are many types of social media:
•    Multimedia Social Media - Sharing photos and video on Flickr or YouTube
•    Collaboration and Opinion Social Media - Adding content to Wikipedia or sharing your opinion on Yelp
•    Communication Social Media – Blogs, Twitter (a.k.a. micro-blogging), and social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook

Organizations are most often utilizing Communication Social Media.

Determining if your target audiences are actively using any of these forms of social media is the first step. For example, an audience made up of business professionals is likely be using professional connection sites like LinkedIn or Plaxo rather than a more personal site like MySpace.  Wherever you decide to focus, build connections and relationships first, and then use the features of the site (such as LinkedIn and FaceBook groups) to expand the value of each site. Start small; don’t try to cover too many sites at once.

Using social media to market your organization can create a positive buzz and help build awareness of your organization, but it does open your organization to negative messages as well.  You risk losing control of the messages being posted about your organization, since anyone can add a positive or negative message, anonymously in some cases, to many social media sites.  If you are concerned about the messages being posted, a blog is a good way to get started.  

If you do decide to make social media part of your marketing efforts, make sure once you start to keep the effort going. While one of the benefits of this activity is attracting individuals to your organization, keeping their attention depends on the generation of new and up-to-date information. As the Harvard Business Review reported recently, most Twitter users send messages (or tweets) very rarely. The top 10 percent of those using the service represent 90 percent of the messages sent – so if you add Twitter to your social media plan, you want to be sure you are in the 10 percent that attracts followers.  Looking across all your social media initiatives, it is important to create a schedule to ensure you keep posting information. You will lose opportunities to interact with potential visitors if you invest in a blog but post very rarely.   

Another decision to be made is whether to advertise on a social media site.  These sites generally have low click-through rates when compared to advertising on a search engine such as Google.  You will have a better return on your resources by building awareness virally through social media, and investing in advertising via search engines and other proven channels.

By determining your social media goals, and focusing your effort and available resources, you can use these viral channels to increase your organization’s brand awareness and your ability to build new connections within target markets.  

Frequently refreshing your website content gets visitors interested in returning, and makes a positive impression on potential and existing customers.  The effort may seem daunting. But with a content management system and dynamic content your website can do a lot of the work of staying up to date.

Content Management Systems (CMS) have been around for quite a while now, at least in web time.  They enable you to edit your content through a WYSIWYG (what you see, is what you get) editor with varying degrees of user friendliness. A majority of websites are now managed this way. With the right planning and weekly attention content can stay fresh–provided the organization has the resources to stay on top of it.

But if you can’t keep up with the weekly updates, consider adding additional features to help you. Many content management systems have add-on features or modules that can be used to make content appear on a schedule. Modules like a calendar of events or a newsroom/articles manager often allow you to define start and end dates for content. Calendar entries could be for events you are attending, or events of interest to the industry, so the information may not have a long shelf life.  Beware of sunsetting content without enough to replace it though–you don’t want to be displaying a blank page.

Then there are modules like an Ad Manager. The primary purpose of such a module may be to handle ads on behalf of other organizations, but why can’t those banners be yours?  Using them for content rather than promotion is another way to change information on your website throughout the week, or even throughout the day.

The destinations and enrichment areas of the cunard.co.uk and cunard.com websites are excellent examples of dynamic content at work.  Speakers, programs and tours that will be offered on individual voyages can be accessed from multiple locations throughout the site and managed simply through one administrative interface.  When content managers enter an item to appear, they also select the associated voyage or the start and end dates for the content.  The website has been programmed to display only the content that is valid for the current date and the selected voyage.  Passengers return to the site often to get the latest updates on the tours and speakers for their voyages.

If you are looking to keep your website constantly fresh, be sure to use a CMS with options that help you to add and manage dynamic content.

Betsy Balgooyen is Project Manager for Quicksilver’s Internet team and has been keeping the world abreast of the events and activities of Cunard’s QM2 and QE2 for more than five years.