My background prior to joining the sales team is somewhat unique.  I started at Pluck three years ago as a Senior Engagement Manager, working with clients in a post-sales capacity overseeing the strategy and integration of our product into our clients’ sites.  About a year ago I joined our Business Development team to work with some of the world’s leading agencies in order to align our tools with the digital strategy they’ve laid out for their clients; creating lasting partnerships that continue to hold strong and add ongoing business value on both sides.  Now I’m on the front lines as a Sales Director, evangelizing Pluck’s industry leading platform and helping prospects make educated decisions through their evaluation of Social Media platforms.  Through this journey I’ve had the unique opportunity to participate in all aspects of Social Media Marketing adoption from defining a strategy to technology evaluation to implementation and, of course, the increasingly important measurement of these initiatives.  In what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts to our company blog, I plan to share with you some of these experiences.  Let’s start with what I’ve learned about how Pluck helps create Social Media Marketing value.

One of things I enjoy most about my role in sales is that I get to share my experiences with prospects that are not only evaluating Pluck 4, but evaluating social media as a strategic part of their marketing initiatives.  Since we are a technology company, these discussions often center on matching their marketing goals with the multitude of participation opportunities that our platform provides.  So I put together some suggestions on how some of the most common marketing goals align with our tools:

Engagement: Foster peer to peer discussions around product-relevant topical areas; solicit product reactions in the form of comments, ratings and reviews in order to create engagement with the brand and products; create groups that result in micro-communities around passionate subject matter for like-minded consumers.

Advocacy: Provide a platform for your consumers to share product usage and lifestyle stories using video uploads and blogs.  Enable Social Bridging so that these stories get broadcast to the broader social web such as Facebook and Twitter.  Social Bridging builds brand advocacy through digital word of mouth.

Loyalty: Pluck4 Rewards leverages both Pluck-powered and non Pluck-powered actions, allowing users to build a holistic social reputation based on their interaction with the site and business as a whole, not just the social media elements.  Use Pluck’s reputation system to issue Badges and Leader board positions as incentives to drive participation, and to reward users with virtual currency that can be redeemed for broader site access or perhaps promotional material such as t-shirts and other product paraphernalia.

Affinity: Create a community that adds value to your audience by fostering discussions on topics that your consumers are passionate about and are relevant to your products.  Pluck’s Moderation and Community Management Services help program your community around these topics and guide the conversations down relevant paths in order to build stronger consumer to brand relationships and trust. 

Measurement: Use Pluck’s analytics tools to gain a new level of visibility into your community and identify top contributions and site areas that are most social, measure performance and inform the business. Solicit community feedback using low barrier techniques such as Pluck4 Reactions in order to gauge and promote community sentiment towards specific brand topics.

I hope you find these suggestions, at the very least, interesting and I welcome your comments.