One of the many challenges of corporate social media is that it never stops evolving. New tools, applications, features, and strategies emerge just about every day. It can be tough keep up. That’s why constantly learning has to be part of the strategy as a whole.
WebProNews spoke with José Chacón, Lexmark’s Director of Marketing in North America, at BlogWorld & New Media Expo a couple weeks ago. While he and the company were at the conference to launch a new product (a pretty cool printer/scanner with social media apps), he said they were also at the event to learn. A lot of the time at the event, he said, was just spent talking to people and learning.
"We’re still learning. The organization has been fully open and is embracing it [social media], and I think that’s why we’re here," he told us.
"Being such a large organization, you need to get a lot of people comfortable," said Chacón. "It’s something that’s taken us a while, but I think now, they recognize the opportunity – the value. They see what we can do with it and primarily, it’s to serve our customers better."
Do you have partnerships? Even just other businesses your friendly with? What’s to stop you from teaming up to help each other out in the social media space? It could be good for all parties involved (including the customers).
"A lot of the things that we’ve done, and we started very…like a lot of other companies, with you know, using social media more from a corporate standpoint…using Facebook, posting videos on YouTube…probably in the last 18 months is when we started really doing a lot more with our retail partners, with some of the other brands that we’ve worked with that are part of the value propositions…they’re also involved in social media, so we’ve been working together," he said. "So they’ve been helping us, we’ve been helping them. We want to make sure that if they are helping us, that we give back as well. So I think it’s been a pretty neat experience."
Such teamwork could be particularly helpful for businesses with fewer resources to dedicate to social media, and if you want a complete strategy (that is to maximize effectiveness), it’s going to take a lot of time and/or resources.
At this point, you’ve really got to have some kind of social presence if you want to find success in online marketing. "As big companies, big brands…if you want to maintain viability in the marketplace, you need to participate," said Chacón.
If you’re not a big brand, you’re going to need to participate even more.