Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to work with a leading entertainment & sports company to help them navigate the often complex waters of social media. Like many companies in their space, our client realized the importance of engaging with their consumer base through social media and knew they needed to develop a plan soon, but just needed help with the right strategy. Before our client began to pursue a more aggressive social media program involving actual online conversation management and participation, they first needed to conduct some good old fashioned market research.

Strategically partnering with the wide array of social media monitoring platforms now available allowed us to complete this vital first step and help our client conduct comprehensive market research. After a period of in-depth social media monitoring and analysis, we were able to produce some meaningful data for our client complete with actionable recommendations on how best to engage their customer base online. Among our interesting findings, we determined the most common media type used in online conversations surrounding our client’s brand was message boards and identified the top domains where conversations were occurring, as well as specific keywords used – all of which provided our client with guidance on targeted messaging to the most appropriate audiences online, as well as invaluable keyword research applicable to both SEO and PPC campaigns.

We were also able to drill down into recurring conversation themes around our targeted keywords. For example, some analysis of these themes revealed that specific mobile devices were being discussed in conjunction with our client’s brand, which led us to make specific product development and targeted advertising recommendations.

Once a comprehensive social media monitoring and analysis was completed, we began to make high level recommendations on how to begin engaging with their customer base via social media. These included activity in each social media type:

• Blogosphere – To help gain awareness and recognition as an industry thought leader and activist, follow and comment on other industry bloggers
• Video-sharing – Begin to think about creating and promoting videos on online video-sharing sites and existing social media properties (e.g. Facebook)
• Social networking – Continue to engage Facebook fan base by posting interesting content, employing interactive apps, quizzes, etc.
• Micro-blogging (Twitter) – Identify company/brand advocates to “tweet” daily on various industry-related topics, link to company news and industry bloggers and Twitter users
• Social Media Newsroom – Building a page that links all your social media properties together allows a company to:
  • View all media coverage
  • Read all past and present press releases
  • Look up all of your past and upcoming events, tradeshows and conferences
  • Download multimedia material like high resolution photos, company logos, podcasts and videos
  • Subscribe through RSS feeds to any portion of information on the site
  • Share any content of the site with their friends or colleagues, via email or by posting to social bookmarking indexes like del.icio.us or Digg with one click
  • Link directly to your latest blog posts
  • Link to other blogs or Web sites that are relevant to your message
  • Comment directly on your media coverage, press releases, and events
  • Instant message indicators for key media contacts using AIM, Yahoo Messaging, MSN, Skype, etc

We are excited to see the progress of our client as they continue to navigate their way through social media, and will always be there to help. Managing conversations and directly engaging potential customers through social media conversations is still in its infancy, and we look forward to growing both our client’s expertise as well as our own as the technology evolves.