Social Marketing Framework (Part 2 of 5)

1. Reach out to an existing community

My last blog post outlined four major categories for a social media marketing plan.   Despite the many different social approaches to social media marketing, we argued that there are only four real categories:

1.    Reach out to an existing community
2.    Create your own community
3.    Accelerate your message through sharing tools
4.    Perform market research

My next set of posts will look at each category individually, examining a specific company and the tactics they utilize.   We will also review customer behavior.  If tactics are working, it is because they are inline with behavior.

Case Study – Boxtone
Category – Reaching out to an existing community

Boxtone is a dynamic software leader in the management of enterprise blackberry deployments.  Yes, all those mobile devices that companies are carrying around have big implications and risks to the enterprise; Boxtone is the leader in this area.

When deploying their overall marketing communications strategy, Boxtone CMO Brian Reed noticed his potential customers were extremely active in online communities.  As there is a learning cycle associated with making this type of software decision, much of the learning was taking place peer to peer in a number of vibrant online communities.  We are not talking about a few comments on a blog post but forums with over 100,000 entries.  Boxtone also saw very quickly that certain opinion leaders had risen up in these communities and people were listening.  These opinion leaders had become experts in the field and potential Boxtone customers were going to them for ideas and insight.

Using part one of our social marketing framework, Boxtone began a strategy of reaching out to these communities and opinion leaders.  The key point here is this:  they did not try to sell their product to these groups.  Instead, they spent time listening and discussing what was needed in the marketplace.  They engaged the opinion leaders and asked them to evaluate the product and suggest improvements.  They invited people to industry events and built long term relationships.  Yes, in the end, Boxtone’s goal is customer acquisition, but one lesson here is to be patient when reaching out to existing communities.

Another lesson deals with customer behavior.  In the case of Boxtone, the learning cycle behavior prevalent in the target customer base birthed a number of online communities.  Boxtone’s success in reaching them can be attributed to the fact that this behavior existed in the first place.  When working on part one of our framework, the first thing to do is focus on customer behavior and see if community trends are forming.   If not, part 1 may not work for you.