Social Technology

Your website and social technology are two pieces of the digital marketing strategy that need to bolt together.

The way to think of this connection is that the website is the "destination" and social tools provide the "conversation" or your organizational voice. The website provides an authority or authenticity while social tools provide it with an informal method of reaching out and gives your website a human and personal face. Your company now has the ability to express a personality and opinion.

Social Technology can be viewed as an umbrella term encompassing three main categories or social tools used to leverage seperate business strategies:

• Social Relevance - 0nline Credibility, or reputation value of your company
  
• Social Media - Lead Generation
  
• Social Networking - Client Communications

Organizations can use social tools and conversation to drive people to the website destination. Therefore, it is important to review the nuts and bolts of connecting your website with the world of social technology. Both the website architecture and social strategy require an understanding of the visitor categories you intend to engage including where they are likely to reside online.

When building your website it should be designed by identifying your three to five most important visitor categories, then creating specific paths through the website for each - these paths should be driving the visitors towards specific actions. For this reason one must be organized when developing what social conversations and connections we want to create with them so that we are building relationships, and earning the right to provide links that will drive them to the website destination. This will ultimately enable these visitors to drop into the action funnels created upon their arrival.

The ultimate goal in digital marketing strategies is where you can target a group with a campaign effort, and the results grow dynamically because of possible social viral effects. An example might be you are connected to 1,000 individuals through your social tools, and when you send a marketing communication it ends up being seen by 10,000 through eWord of mouth. In this case you might have a 300% response rate over the original targets set based on the amount of people you initially were communicating with.