Customers as Spokespeople

After six months of social media experiments, we've gained some real wins with companies like wine.com and Cisco in addition to groups like SourceForge and the Linux Foundation.

My ultimate goal remains elusive. Although we've managed to produce content and distribute the content through new channels such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, we've had limited success in getting our clients' customers to produce content and distribute it for us.

We've had clear success with creating and promoting YouTube videos and growing a following on Twitter. We've also really shined in measurement and getting people to take some action such as downloading a product, voting, or registering into a community.

Since the traditional role of PR has been to provide information to people with existing distribution networks like a newspaper or magazine, it is quite a change to develop content for our clients. Although we're improving the services we can offer, I feel that we need to go further.

About six months ago, I designed the Social Media Magic Quadrant for our internal company presentation.

The two main variables are:

1. Where the content comes from;
2. What the audience does with the content.

In my view, pure social media occurs when the audience creates content and distributes it. Without audience participation, I don't view it as social media. I believe that getting the audience to create and distribute content is a valuable technique that we'll have to master.

Much of our early learning was on the use of new tools like Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook. Our next hurdle was to create appropriate content and promote the content. Our future challenge over the next year will be to develop new techniques that encourage the audience to produce content.