Blogging, Microblogging, Podcasts, Tagging, RSS feeds and Wiki’s are all tools available in the tool belt of businesses wanting to attract social butterflies. Which one to use is really depend upon the strategic marketing plan a business has. Remember the primary functions of social media are the 4 C’s,
- Communication
- Cooperation
- Collaboration
- Connection
If connecting and communicating to your customers is your goal, blogging or microblogging are the tools of choice. A blog’s main purpose is to allow a business or author to write about topics they are passionate about. Blog tools allow feedback in the form of comments. Comments can be favourable or not, either way this stimulates strong conversation and discussion on blogged content. Several different platforms are available for blogging probably the most popular is Blogger.com and WordPress.com. Blogging has the advantage of forming groups of people with common interests called followers and everyone knows two heads are better than one. Like minded people are more likely to comment and give answers to questions asked within a blogs content.
Microblogging is also aimed at a target audience or followers but is limited to 140 text characters. This limit is due to their delivery mechanism being a simple message service (SMS) gateway as used by mobile phones. The world has many microblogging sites, to name a couple Plurk and probably the most popular Twitter. Products such as Facebook and MySpace also provide a form of microblogging through their status updates.
Communication by blog may be a weekly or monthly posting as information is gather and processed by the author where as a microblog is instant and can be banged out with provocation or without. Several famous actors and singers have sent out Twitter messages (called tweets) without thinking about what they were really meaning to say. The consequence from their fan base has been instant.
For an example the Latin post states “Justin Bieber just tweets, ‘Yeah, Beliebers, go hard’ when they’re attacking somebody,…” Whats up with this dude? This is young man so drunk with fame he forgets his shirt every time a photo is taken and recently was caught with drugs in his home. I suspect his fan respect is being lost in his drug haze. Justin Bieber is a business brand so how did you think this tweet effected his reputation to the parents of his fans? The media love this stuff and are quick to reblog as news. The power of a social network is clear in a case like this.
Business can use microblogging and blogging to communicate new services, products to their fan base. The trick is gaining that fan base in the first place, people who engage in conversation via social networking sites are very aware of their social profiles. The social butterfly is able to be your friend one day and the next not. Justin Bieber who?
Have a question or something to say leave a comment below.
KimN Social Butterfly 