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Recently one of our clients mentioned a recommendation by an online marketing agency on how they can hire 4-5 people who will start blogs and comment among one another to strike up a positive conversation in the blogosphere (different than having a ghost writer to write for you).

The idea is tempting and you might just even get sold on it, if you are a newbie on social media marketing. You control the message. The bloggers are yours. Yet to the outside world, the effort is going to be seen as passionate fans of your brands/ organisation writing positive about your brand or organisation.

We have talked about using Twitter to enhance your media relations practice in the past. We talked about how many journalists are using Twitter today and some of us are now directly pitching to them using the 140 characters miracle. Our media friends love it too – it’s fast, crisp, and devoid of any fat adjectives.

What would an effective social media marketing campaign entail? According to me, there are 4 key quadrants that we especially need to take care of.

1. Monitoring mechanism: Have a listening capability and understanding what the various stakeholders are talking about our brands and organizations is critical. Without this, we would be just another me too and shooting in the dark. How do we build an effective monitoring mechanism in place. We can use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search to monitor the blogosphere, subscription on email and RSS on influential blogs around your industry/ subject, setting news alerts, and monitoring social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. There are host of tools to monitor micro blogging platforms, read Twitter. For blog comments and monitoring the social media space in real time, we have free tools like Social Mention. What about the citizen journalism sites and consumer review sites. Lastly but not the least, not forgetting to monitor the search engines.

In the past it was always the cola war between Pepsi and Coke. I never understood who finally won the battle and whose sales or saliency went up in the consumers mind. The trend continued in the cola space for quite some time but I have not off late noticed that kind of campaigns being released. May be both of them realized that it is sheer waste of money. Is there not a learning for other categories from this? But recently I happen to see Nestle trying a spoof on CDM, which is splashed across all channels in the electronic medium. Post the campaign, we saw more write ups on various portals on who is right and who is wrong and who is getting benefited.

One can quote many examples as to why companies go for a makeover. But having said that most corporate and companies want to tell the world through PR that we have changed our identity and share the vision and its new values of the company. Well it definitely sounds interesting but will it create ripples in the consumers mind? To me the answer is no. So what will work? The entire communication strategy has to be well orchestrated 360 degree effort to instill the change in name or the logo in the desired audience’s mind. PR in isolation may not create the desired impact but PR with strong mass media campaign and internal communication will work wonders for the brand. The most refreshing example which still stands tall in my mind is the launch of Axis Bank. Today we don’t see much of their campaign but Axis bank has become a familiar bank name both with their current clientele and the future prospects.