360DigitalInfluence

You might wonder what types of conversational and social media to engage in online. The answer is probably more than just one type. In traditional media, it’s been shown that marketing messages delivered across multiple overlapping media (for example, television and print) are often more effective than those delivered through one channel - even if the reach and frequency in that one  channel is optimized.

Consider  extending this offline marketing campaign notion to the online space by  creating “distributed branding”.

The idea behind this strategy is to ensure your brand/positioning messaging is visible wherever target consumers live on the web. This strategy effectively maintains brand awareness over time at a cost that can be carefully  optimized.

In actually implementing a distributed branding strategy, you’ll be pulling together all the usual basic knowledge about  your online audience:    what your target users are doing online, where they’re spending their time  and  what are the behaviors of influencers  (i.e. friends, children and colleagues and others who will probably have a significant impact on the decisions of your core audience).

While you’ll probably want (or already have) more detailed use data for your target audience, below is helpful data from Forrester Research / Businessweek (see a longer article) that summarizes online activity by age segment. In a nutshell, for people age 18-40:

• 30-70% use social networking sites
• 40-60% read blogs, watch videos, listen to podcasts
• 25-35% comment/rate/read/write reviews
• 15-20% subscribe to RSS feeds, tag web pages

Even the best home sites typically engage consumers for only a limited time, often in connection with a specific activity. A distributed and pervasive presence can engage consumers through:

• widgets
• desktop apps
• screensavers or wallpaper
• podcasts
• blogs
• video
• games
• rss
• microblogging
• social networks (white label)
• social networks
• and more

Keeping your brand top-of-mind is a key objective, and the full variety of tools available online should be considered - if not used - in achieving this goal.