Social Media - Topic Management

In social media, there are various ways where advertiser or manufactures try to harness this media to drive conversation, influence perceptions, drive purchase intent, etc.

In the area of topic management (ie getting into forums, discussion groups to drive conversation), there are various approaches:

Tone Approach

a) Guerilla tactic

Engage social media agencies to get their team to go into forums to start topic/ reply existing discussion. This approach usually uses fake identity or the team pretends to be part of the community to influence certain conversations.

b) Corporate talk

Company can go in as company PR lead to reply to messages, etc. Very often the tone of language can be corporate sounding which may not go down well with the community.

c) Common Langugage talk

Company can engage agencies to go in on behalf of the company's PR lead and response with the same tone / language as the community

Engagement approach

a) indepth 2-way discussion

This approach requires the agency/user to be equipped with good knowledge of the product/services to be able to reply and engage in a 2 ways communication to deliver the message across to the receiver.

b) short reply with links to more information

This approach is safer and less effort intensive as this requires the agency to just 'touch the surface' and lead the reader to other sites with more information/tools/message to do the convincing.

c) standard response library

The client has to create a response library to address the common questions asked in the forum. However depending on how strict the agency should follow the library, the conversation may not flow nicely or it mean appear too corporate-like answers which may back fire (community may deem this as advertiser trying to drive their agenda in the community)

Response Framework

Client has to established some rules surrounding responses and bullet points of various possible reasons for agencies to use. The response rules are necessary to help agencies operate within a boundary that is aligned back the client's objective and intent.

Here are some rule of thumb approach to decide if a response is needed.

a) no reply needed if user is emotionally charged (when they use words like "hate, never buy again, etc.."

b) multiple competitor brands are being mentioned (again depending on the extend of conversation and the depth to carry through, some feel this is a terriotory that typical conversative company will avoid.

c) user's positive response (that is already in aligned with company's direction)

d) user sitting on the fence or already sold in one of the options - if the user is sitting on the fence, it is much easier to drive a conversation to swing his opinion.

Different responses should also be prepared for

a) installed base user - already owned a product

b) prospect - user seeking advice to buy

c) researcher - user doing a product review and comparison

Advice or responses should also be specially tailored to conversation about alternatives / counterfeit products.

Any thoughts to frame this more comprehensively?