50 Ways To Utilize Social Media By Objective

Here is a great article that summarizes by objective how we can utilize Social Media to Listen, Energize, Talk, and Support our Customers. Supporting Strategies are listed as follows:

Supporting: Getting your customers to self-support each other

• Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.


• Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.


• Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).


• Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.


• Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.


• Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.


• Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.