There are so many tools out there, enabling conversation with friends, customers and brands. Even content management is rife with options.
That doesn’t mean companies should adopt those tools without examining them through the eyes of their customer.
Cautious integration will yield stronger results than rapid adoption. A strategy can be formulated. Consequences can be considered. Take these two examples:
Company One (Uno)
Uno created YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook accounts in rapid succession. As they did this, two managers, working with an outside marketing firm, developed a redesign to Uno’s flagship site.
Subsequently, the responsibility to maintain Uno’s social tools fell to one person (Juliet) with limited experience with any of them. While Juliet toiled, the message became—unsurprisingly—muddled.
When Uno’s redesign went live, there was an immediate and drastic drop in their main performance metric. Basic social functionality was left out of the site (for financial reasons) and the other social tools weren’t integrated at all.
Results:
Videos on YouTube needed to be imported to another platform for display on Uno’s site. Juliet maintained a Facebook profile under her name with Uno’s images, videos and content while also managing Uno’s separate Facebook page.
Company Two (Zwei)
Zwei partnered with an outside marketing firm to use their online CMS system for smaller sites and monitor engagement. Simultaneously, Zwei moved its site to a different CMS.
The CMS that runs Zwei’s site was built for a different PC operating system than most of their marketing department was using. The CMS features for the smaller sites were vastly oversold, missing necessary options to create site templates.
The effort needed to migrate the flagship site from its existing location to the CMS and to develop the smaller sites within their CMS exceeded the benefits. Clients have yet to edit their own content within the CMS.
Results:
Working within either CMS created more work and reduced flexibility. Both were proprietary and through partners, meaning extra cost and time with any changes.
Uno should have started using social sites and redesigned their site separately. The design should have established a voice to carry through the social tools, or vice versa. Their site could have integrated YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or blogs to maintain engagement.
Zwei should have weighed the CMS options, finding one that worked across platforms and supported smaller sites. A free tool could have been used to reduce workload, lower costs and increase flexibility.
Both Uno and Zwei had the best intentions. The jumbled message (luckily, Juliet found her voice with practice) and the costly partnerships for inadequate tools could have been avoided with patience.
In both cases, users—those meant to benefit—may not have even noticed a difference.
Tags: digital reputation management, interactive design, social tools