Innocent’s Social Media Network

The fast emergence of social media network sites like Facebook and YouTube, and the rise of blogs, wikis, virtual 3D worlds and podcasting, present fresh communications challenges, and opportunities.

Call it ‘Web 2.0’, or the new Web, the fact is we are all participating in the rise of a vast global platform for computation and collaboration that is re-shaping many aspects of business communications, (both internal and external).

While many brands sit around twiddling their thumbs, Innocent is moving ahead with its social media strategy, and has launched itself on Twitter.

Innocent is using Twitter to report on its AGM and is opening itself up, which is a key characteristic of social media. This follows its blog, YouTube channel, Facebook presence and Flickr presence. Although this might create a lot of additional work for their communications teams, it is clever how they are starting to cover the visits of journalists (bloggers) to their offices in videos.

Take a look at: http://twitter.com/innocentAGM2008

A useful method to follow when thinking about social media strategies is called the POST method. It is pretty simple:

P stands for people (assess the social activities of your customers first)
O stands for objectives, and what you want to accomplish
S is strategy and planning for the kinds of relationships you want to have with your customers (supportive, collaborative, engaging etc.)
T is for the technology you wish to use.

It is important that we spend time getting up to speed with social media. Firstly we have to understand the social media culture in order to be able to plan strategies, and secondly, social media is not just about technology solutions. The characteristics of social media (sharing content for niche groups, co-creating etc.) can be applied offline as well.