It's been 473 days of working non-stop, learning how to deep-diving and politicize at the office. I'm going to try and squeeze/share with you what I've gathered so far. Here goes.
1) Social Media - some people misconstrue the idea of building a community as a increasing the current one (x number) into something more massive (x² + 100,000 or so). It looks impressive on paper or powerpoint, but what you really want is a group of followers/fans that you know. That you look forward to everyday to converse with. I used to do social media inbound and I still remember some notable customers (those who were kind vs. those who have cussed me out of exasperation with the company's service). It's a balance when it comes to (social) customer care - there are praise-worthy days, and there are nights when you just want to drain the negatively-charged cerebrospinal fluid (I think I still have a vial of this at home) from your brain into your cacti garden. On building the community via a paid LIKE campaign - I think some commercial groups will benefit from this tactic at the onset. A healthy number of fans can differentiate and legitimize the professional, official group from a fan-sourced, fallacy-filled one. Jumpstarting the group, if you will. After that, it's up to the community manager to offer the genuineness of two-way human communication.
2) Pay-Per-Click Campaigns - I'm an SEO/SEM student of both Jhon Mariano and Mannix Pabalan. I'm thinking of getting SEO certification this long (Holy Week in Christian countries) vacation weekend and going through the Google resources and the Microsoft SEO toolkit. Admin access on Facebook and Google Partners allow companies to be ad publishers in-house, not dependent on third parties or ad agencies for creation, publication or monitoring of ads. I'm hopeful that corporations will take advantage of this to save on time as efficiency reports are seen in real-time and money since the promo ideation and creative process can be done internally. Processes can be made faster as well.
3) Web - In relation to campaigns, the SEO strategy of a corporate site should be planned carefully and not done ex post facto. Keyword research (not GUESSING) should be conducted with the research group, product teams, customer care (for verbatims), agency (as long as they have proper digital capabilities, in this case, it should be an expert SEM group), IT and the digital marketing team. It helps that the team has technical knowledge of web language, design language (color theory, design limitations), the CMS, hardware knowledge (redundancy, security) and user experience (USER?).
4) Management and mentorSHIP - the captain needs to be a thought leader and a voracious reader/researcher/resource person, aggressive in tracking campaigns and listening to social media pulse / leads. It's a new and fast neighborhood and keeping up won't hack it. It's an attack & evolve or face extinction.
5) Teamwork - I've always liked the Haro bike analogy from BMX Plus back in the 90s. A selection of the best components in the world won't guarantee the creation of the best bike (in parallel, a combination of mediocre parts won't create a good either), but complementing and using the strengths of each one to the whole's advantage is the success recipe that should be served.
