Social media
While in some ways social media has made communication easier, it’s made many digital lives — and digital marketing — infinitely more complex with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube, Quora and myriad other platforms and tools competing for time, attention and dollars. But 2011 is the year it gets a little simpler.
Brands that boost their Facebook fan base by offering freebies and discounts to people who sign up could face a backlash in the not-too-distant future, warns Augie Ray. Social search engines are likely to find ways to weed out “fake” fans, just as conventional search engines learned to screen out “black hat” marketers who sought to manipulate their algorithms. “Brands hoping to help their social search engine relevance by amassing fans should take heed — the easy way may work for a while, but the authentic and hard way always wins in the end,” Ray writes.
About 70% of brand coverage by bloggers around the world is disconnected from the core messages being promoted by digital marketers, according to a study by PR firm Burson-Marsteller.
Distortion of Company Messages by Blogs by Region, May 2010, (c) eMarketer
Some degree of message distortion is inevitable, but experts say that companies can reduce the noise by creating powerful content of their own – if bloggers can link directly to high-quality content, the theory goes, they’re less likely to put their own spin on things.
Nearly three-quarters of blog posts don’t reflect corporate messaging
Marketers and other corporate communications professionals may sometimes feel they have a thankless task: carefully craft messages about their company’s thought leadership, social responsibility efforts and new product or service launches, only to find those messages distorted as they’re disseminated through the media.