Observation & Research

Session 1 Overview:

Clearly, defero is adept in keeping up with best practices in traditional media. You will now need to add to that expertise by getting up to speed with best practices in corporate social media. This poses quite a challenge, because everything under Web 2.0/new media is constantly changing. Here are four important questions you will need to ask yourselves regularly. We will elaborate further on these ideas in Session 1.

1. How will you organize and distribute your observations and research?

Social media offers many opportunities for information organization. And what better way to learn the ins and outs of different platforms than to use them regularly? Here are just a couple of ideas that will help transition defero from traditional to new media.

Bookmark on delicious: You may have noticed that I have links from delicious running down the right-hand column of this site. Using delicious, a social bookmarking application, you and your colleagues can share informative links by tagging them. For example, I have tagged all of the links that appear on this site “projectdefero.” Best of all, you can access these links from any computer. Sign up for delicious, and keep track of your research online. I will be adding to my delicious links for  Project defero regularly.

Twitter lists and favorite tweets: Twitter is a powerful tool for tracking your connections in the corporate world. Once you are on Twitter, you will be able to organize your contacts in the form of lists. This way, you can separate all of the clients, competitors, social media experts you are following into separate categories. If you see a tweet that you find inspiring, you can save it as a favorite so that you may access it later. Twitter will allow you to monitor your market to keep up with its needs.

Build a defero glossary: Here’s an idea that will help your team gain the insight and knowledge they need to discuss new media authoritatively. Start to build a glossary, like this one, of all the new media terminology you come across. Not only will this help build your knowledge, it will also help you in the future to build your clients’ knowledge.

2. Who’s the best in the business? What can you learn from them?

I’m sure you can easily recite a list of your competitor’s names, and I’m certain you know how to keep tabs on your competition. This is certainly something I want to discuss during this session. But I want the questions on this page to be questions you may not have asked yourselves yet. Consider defero’s business goals as a company helping businesses move from traditional to new media. This is not a new type of business, and there are players out there who already do what you want to do exceptionally well. Here are a few to investigate. How do they use social media to build up their reputations and client base? Would it benefit defero to employ similar strategies to any of these companies?

3. Who is your audience?

In defero’s case, I understand your main audience will be your clientele: traditional media experts, like yourselves, who want to branch out into social media. Conveniently, the process we are going through now (with me proposing a social media strategy for defero) will enable you to relate to your audience very well – they will be in the very same boat.

The best way to learn about your audience is to interact with them. Corporate social media has a huge following. Go to conferences, leave thoughtful comments on blogs, and tweet about industry trends. Eventually you may want to develop a social networking service of your own. This could be one of your ultimate goal in providing the best possible service for your audience. Videos from Blogwell, a corporate social media conference, describe such ideas in more detail. These videos form a great series, and you will notice me using them as examples throughout this proposal. I highly recommend the following video from the Chief Marketing Officer of General Mills. He makes many valuable points about how to maintain/grow an audience from a traditional media to social media transition.

4. How will you gather further information regarding your online presence?

Once you are up and running with a website, possible blog, and potentially several different social media applications, you will want to how your audience perceives your online presence. Initiatives to discover this will help you determine what kinds of improvements or changes you may need to make to gather a greater audience. There are several tools and practices that can help you do this. Here are a couple of ideas I suggest you consider.

Usability testing: According to the Usability Professionals’ Association, “Usability is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs.” You should conduct usability testing regularly to ensure your online materials continue to meet the needs of everyone viewing your site. Jakob Nielsen, an authority in usability testing for the web, puts out a great newsletter I suggest you look into. His newsletters are archived on the sign-up page, and they are a great crash course in how to think like a usability tester.

Web surveys: In addition to usability tests, web surveys are also a valuable way to learn about your online audience. Polling users of your site with a couple of questions can help clear up a wide variety of issues. Survey Monkey is one popular web survey tool worth looking into. There are many out there, so be sure you find one that best fits your needs.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a very accurate way to make your online marketing initiatives more precise by analyzing the traffic on your website. Measuring the analysis that Google Analytics provides on your website’s visitors will help you to gear your online marketing strategy to them. Again, there are other tools out there that do this and it’s best to shop around for the one that best suits defero.