SMILE, it’s social media marketing

If you start with thinking of using social media to connect with your customers, please first think of the goals you would like to accomplish. At first it seems like that goals are numerous, however there are really only five goals that can be accomplished with the support of social media.

Social media marketing is using social media for activities such as public relations, customer service, marketing, sales and crowdsourcing. Or as I put it into the diagram below:

• Supporting
• Meshing
• Interacting
• Listening
• Evangelizing

If you start using social media for the first time, you probably won’t go for all five of the goals. You might just want to listen at first to get to know what people are telling about your products and brands. If you want customers to evangelize your products, you probably first have to listen to them, support them and interact with them before you have reached the phase that they want / will be able to evangelize your product.

So keep in mind that most goals aren’t single objectives. Sometimes you have to set up some other goals first, before you can accomplish your final goal.

SMILE model

This image is also available as a powerpoint slide. Please email me at rick.mans@capgemini.com if you would like the powerpoint version.