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Social media integration - its not just about technology - its also about community.

The biggest buzzword on the web right now and in advertising and marketing is social media integration. I am having more and more meetings each week with clients asking how they do this.

We have a lot of technology that we can throw at this to make it easy to work - and the tech stuff is pretty easy. Most of the major players are now providing "open" or at least partially open access to data.

But none of it is any use if you are not able to make the community part work. Integrating your brand marketing and awareness with social media is not like traditional advertising, where you threw stuff out at people and barely listened to feedback it at all. At most my experience with big brand advertising has been that the feedback loop was filtered through ad campaign managers, 3rd party survey random sample providers and the odd bit of internal email dealing with the one or two very angry customers!

If your business takes this approach to social media then you will be laughed at, ignored and the impact could be huge. You can no longer hide behind a glittery TV campaign and the brand spin doctors. Witness the current David Jones fiasco with sexual harassment cases.

Now social media is immediate engagement, instant feedback, and has to above all be open and honest and bi-directional. Internet users are now savvy consumers, able to speak their minds, and they do, about their responses to organisations customer service, product quality and after sales service. Having a twitter account or a Facebook page is not enough - you have to use tem like a real person would.

Two brands I have seen lately doing this very well are Lorna Jane and Bras and Things. both of these companies are using the Facebook pages to unashamedly advertise their products, but they are also encouraging two way communication, providing specials and other opportunities and can be viewed as very good Social Media integration examples.

Laurel Papworth writes in this space as an expert and if you want to do social media integration you should definitely be reading her blog. Her article on Movember and online community rituals talks through some practical ways to engage with your customer community.

Darren Rowse has written a very good article recently called 4 ways to use Twitter to Support your Blog. He teaches you to provide genuine interaction in the micro focused twitter community.

Some of the tech stuff we use includes JanRain, Drupal, Facebook, Windows Live, Twitter, Google and some new stuff we are still evaluating to help the conversations be managed better.

One of our customers we are doing a lot of work with in this space is Emsflightcrew. There are others we are working on but not ready to talk about yet. However contact me if you want to know more about how to make this work for your company or blog.