Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media

Hi, Kyle Sheridan here again with some social media update. I spend a lot of my day in a marketing automation platform. We actually use Pardot. But it’s not that different than Eloqua or Marketo or any of those other guys. When you guys power the social landing pages, do you dump data into systems like that that have pretty wide adoption throughout the marketing and sell?

Marketing automation is a great use case. So part of our interest is in making all of this data actionable. So not just in the context of what is that user doing on your site, so the site behavior that you may already have been collecting in marketing automation, but from other social searches. So what’s that user’s birthday, what’s their gender, what’s their age, all of that interest information that’s so rich from social channels?

If we’re pulling all that in to our system, we definitely want to make it actionable in all of the technology stuff that you’re already using. Marketing automation is a great place to be dumping into a number of those systems. Email service providers are another place that makes a lot of sense, and then all of the on-page engagement elements like commenting platforms, ratings and reviews, all of those kind of platforms where users are taking action, fast- forwarding that process.

So theoretically, you could have people log in to your site or subscribe via a social ID, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Google, etc. Then because they have provided their email address or other information to those social identities, you could then use that for downstream email marketing, for example. So somebody comes to socialpros.com and we ask them to authenticate via a social ID. Now we have their email address and we also know that they’re male or female or something else.

So I think probably LinkedIn would make the most sense. So if we can pull in some information about where this person works now or where they have worked in the past, then in terms of email segmentation it becomes really interesting to see, okay, these types of roles, AP level roles, versus social manager roles, versus broader digital roles. How should the content be different in each of those platforms, not only in email, but also on the site?

So if the user comes back to the site the next time, what kind of content should we recommend to that user or what kind of products that are going to be most relevant to them. That’s going to get them to deepen their engagement on the site.

That’s been really effective for us. Obviously we’re active in a lot of other external channels. But since so much of our technology is focused on the site experience itself, which was one of the concrete ways that we could integrate our own technology into our existing marketing staff.