Businesses and organisations are facing increasing pressures when it comes to managing social content. With more and more of their competitors “going social”, there is a growing need for companies to engage simply in order to keep up, and to do so effectively in a way that promotes and raises awareness about their brand.

Social media can provide companies with a unique opportunity to become more than just a faceless entity, and to genuinely engage with customers and clients on a personal level; building relationships of mutual benefit, and increasing brand loyalty. It’s also a great way to keep an eye on what’s new within your particular industry sector, find out what people are talking about, and monitor how your own organisation is seen outside of its own little bubble; all of which are hugely valuable in terms of both marketing strategy and moving forward.

However, with all these huge advantages come enormous problems, particularly based around the sheer amount of content you’ll be putting out and bringing back in on social networking sites, businesses need to think about social content on three levels: strategic, marketing and technical; if you don’t think strategically about how you manage your social content, then you can be storing up some big problems for the future:

• Risk of brand damage if social chat is not controlled
• Risk of ‘social silos’ of communication due to lack of central coordination
• Can lead to big increase in staff using very manual processes
• No storage/history of your social content (internal content or external comments/feedback) or any ability to search through and utilise that content
• Potential ‘silos of information’ as your social content gets lost or split up from the rest of your internal content
• Lack of measurement of marketing spend on social media

The traditional form of marketing has been very much built around a ‘push’ strategy, where the company itself controls what, where, and how it communicates with stakeholders and customers. The advent of social media, however, and its widespread adoption at both a personal and a business level, has turned everything on its head; companies may increasingly find that they need to work with more of a ‘pull’ strategy, relinquishing control and allowing the customers/ stakeholders to call the shots. This means that companies need to be ready to respond to complaints and queries almost instantaneously, sending out a reply as quickly as possible once the relevant tweet or comment has come in.

A lot of businesses who are already involved in social media, whether it be maintaining a company blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube account etc, will already be investigating more efficient ways of managing it. The current method of choice usually used – i.e., one or more individuals updating each website manually - is extremely disjointed; a laborious process of monitoring various forums and updating them separately. This has several clear downsides: it’s time-consuming, it creates unintegrated islands of information, and there’s no real workflow system in place to monitor what content goes out under the company’s name. Many CEOs have already learnt this the hard way, with employees posting out inadvisable content with damaging or even legally problematic effects – two which spring immediately to my mind are Nestle’s Facebook fail and problems arising for The National Theatre due to an errant tweet.

Many companies already use Content Management Systems, such as Alfresco, to help store and manage their unstructured data and content. Social media is ushering in a second wave of unstructured data; one over which it’s perhaps even harder to keep control. This issue will be a familiar one to any companies already dealing with large amounts of unstructured data, in the guise of emails, images, word documents etc; social media can compound this problem, as well as rapidly escalating it due to the volume of content and information released. So, how to keep a handle on your data once it’s been released into the wild?

One solution is to aggregate all of your social content into one central repository, which removes information silos and gives you the ability to access and manage everything from one place. Integrating social media into your current content management system – such as Alfresco – gives the bonus option of being able to access and socialise all existing content, allowing you to cross-post content to your website, blog and social media accounts. Having all your content in one place has a number of benefits:

• Ability to perform semantic searches with ease, and locate and pull relevant information/ content from any platform
• Content can be accessed by anyone within the company, whenever it’s needed
• Avoids legal issues arising from information being unlocatable in the event of a compliance audit or lawsuit
• Makes it much easier to monitor and analyse information and feedback

From an IT point of view, this avoids the problem of information silos occurring, meaning that data is integrated into one place and is easier to access. Without a central repository for social content, content is only accessible via the websites themselves, and this isn’t always easy to do manually – you end up with endless reams of tweets or Facebook comments out there, lost and drifting in cyberspace. This content needs to be brought back into your organisation to be stored, managed, monitored and analysed. With the ability to access and analyse social content and feedback with ease, as well as searching all of their existing content, companies will be able to find any relevant information when its needed. And having a method to effectively analyse and respond to social feedback across the board is a powerful tool when it comes to designing and monitoring your digital marketing strategy.

Utilising Alfresco Share, Ixxus have created a Social Content Platform which provides a powerful and effective central repository for all social content, allowing companies to easily publish content on a one-to-many basis, as well as integrating all internal and social content together with external social feedback. The Ixxus Social Content Platform also incorporates powerful analytical tools, to allow you to prioritise your digital marketing strategy to your best advantage. To find out more, click through to the Ixxus Social Content Platform press release.