Archive for September 26th, 2009

5AM in Paris, and here I am back writing.  Talk about dedication.  But at least there is a French Roast and petite dejeuner at the end of this. 

Installment three of our series on social media channel architecture. To catch us up: in Part 1 we discussed the strategy and theory of social media channel architecture. In Part 2, we conceived a new product called Greensoap which has three unique advantages: it sends fewer harmful chemicals into the water supply, it doesn’t get mushy when stored, and it is 50% cheaper than other leading brands.  This product appeals to three unique market segments we have identified on an attitudinal and behavioral basis: The Green Consumer, The Vacation Traveler, and The Thrifty Shopper. We mapped these consumer segments to their preferred media (video, graphics, audio, text), their most used technology platforms, and the likely sites/online social networks they participate in.

My blog posts tend to be long as a rule, and I don’t want to make them any longer than necessary to make my point. So for the purposes of this and the next few installments, I am only going to focus on the example of The Green Consumer and provide general outlines of how to create an online social media campaign to engage them.

The first step is – duh – to research sites and other programs that companies have done to engage these consumers. If there is any truth about Internet marketing it is that there is always someone out there who has done something similar to what you would like to do and the easiest way to generate new marketing programs is to explore what has been done and use that as a jumping-off point for your conceptualization/brainstorming.

The first question I have is what green-specific social media networks are already in existence that I could leverage and where I might find a very focused target customer based for my products. Realize that these networks are probably small relative to a general-purpose social media network, but they will provide a good place to test engagement with the audience and an excellent seed location for any programs we may conceive. So I search on "green social media networks" and get the following results:

 

 

What I find most interesting is how much activity there already is in this space – let’s just do a quick breakdown:

Green Social Media Networks:  CarbonCopy.com, Climateculture.com, Greenlinkz.com, Greenedia.com, Gaia.com

Blogs: earth2tech, lohas.com/blog

Campaigns: ClimateCulture: America’s Greenest Campus, Carbonrally: Seventeen Campaign

Downside issues: GreenMyApple from Greenpeace 

Time to get out and about.  We will continue the implications of our research tomorrow.