Content & Conversation Transcend Place

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Erin Korogodsky is Lithium's social media quarterback.  Obsessed with social media, Erin has worked with clients like Newell Rubbermaid, Wieden Kennedy and Vista Print to monitor their brands and brainstorm engagement strategy.  She is a frequent blogger on the Lithosphere (as ErinKoro) and you can follow her on twitter at @erinkoro and @LithiumTech 

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Enter Socl, the social network Microsoft is working on.  All around the world, marketers are thinking, "awesome, another page to update, another round of etiquette, another wish for Hootsuite to integrate another platform."  

In fact, Kyle Flaherty wrote a great piece on his blog, echoing the sentiment with,   "Spread Too Thin: Why Marketers Are Failing At Their Jobs".   Among other great points, Kyle outlines the vast amount of activity that goes into just one message from a marketing team.  No one is crying a river for marketers, I assure you of that.  But it does point out something important – marketers are overloaded and it’s their customers that ultimately pay the price.

One of the tricks of social media for brands is finding a way to take all of these online conversations, happening in so varied places, and harness it into something useful. By useful I mean:

• Customers gets what they need faster 
  Customer service, project advice, buying the right products that they need, better understanding of a loyalty program, even just being able to enjoy the brand more

• Brands can zero in on key trends and absorb this into the enterprise
  What ideas were generated?  How can we route the right issue to the right person in the enterprise?  Can we give customers more of the things they love?

It’s one thing to monitor keywords and engage in various channels.  It’s another thing entirely different to spot trends.  And to make those trends actionable.  Take the Sephora community, for example.  It's called Beauty Talk and it runs on the Lithium platform.   

Their community is pulling in conversations from Twitter and Facebook.  If people in Facebook/Twitter respond, community members see the info and their "superfans" respond when inspired.  

What is great for marketers is that the whole conversation happens simultaneously in Twitter or Facebook and on the community.

The people choose their platform but the info is shared in all places.  

Holy ubiquity!  Not only are "superfans"  (or Beauty Mavens in the case of Sephora) helping reply to posts or tweets with brand mentions, they're also more trustworthy to other consumers.  Sephora, by the way, sees all the activity - the who, the what, the when and what drives purchases.  That’s the big win here. 

Today its SocL and tomorrow is Mocial (I just made that up).  My point is that there's always going to be another platform.  They'll come and go.  (insert obligatory myspace slam HERE).  

As marketers, we have to stay ahead of technology.  Which isn't easy since it’s moving so increadibly fast.  So brands need to create content and conversation that transcends place.

Don’t think it can be done?

Sephora, Home Depot, HP, Best Buy, Lenovo, myFICO and many more tell us otherwise.