The Four Spheres Of Social Media Strategy | Social Media Explorer
- Brand Intelligence
- Consumer Insights
- Community Behavior
- Tools & Platforms
Brand intelligence refers to knowledge and understanding of the brand, product or service, competitive set, industry and business factors that effect how the product or service in question is positioned in the market place. A brand manager or chief marketing officer would likely be the most qualified and informed person here. For many advertising and public relations account managers, this is the easy part. You live and breathe the brand everyday. This part, you’ve got down.
Consumer insights is the combination of audience research, profiling and various graphics (demo, psycho and techno) the brand or market research teams compile to direct the marketing efforts. Admittedly, this area is often either overlooked or underfunded by most brands. Good research isn’t cheap.
Community behavior is the understanding of how people interact, share and communicate both broadly on social media sites and narrowly within individual communities. This is having a working knowledge of the differences in sharing information on Twitter versus Digg or Facebook and how brands and companies can do so without appearing to be spammers, which varies from community to community.
Finally, tools and platforms refers to having an understanding of what social tools and platforms are out there you can recommend to a brand. This doesn’t mean you have to know everything there is to know about every tool out there.
(...)It would be remiss of me to not say I feel strongly that the Consumer Insight is the driver behind most good social media strategies. Social media done well is consumer centric, so fulfilling a social need for the consumer is the starting point for a brand’s participation in social media marketing. Each area has a level of importance, however, and good strategy cannot be had without a deference to each.
Can't agree more on these post - especially on the first two spheres and the points in the last paragraph. Social need often = relevance. Therefore you need to know your Consumer ('s Insights) and your product.
