The Power of Social Media Management Systems (SMMS)

As has been said before, today the Social Web has changed the way we communicate and we now have at hand, the unprecedented ability to reach out to consumers and hear what is being said.  Wikipedia defines Social Media as ‘the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video.

Social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook,  flickr, Linkedin, have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily workplace. Needless to say, this has opened up a sea of technological opportunities geared towards full-scale social media implementation.

The future provides a myriad of options that tend to boggle the mind.  If your association wants to stay ahead of web trends, we highly recommend a formal, full-scale social media management service. Jeremiah Owyang defines Social Media Management Service as ‘a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage multiple social media channels from one tool.

How it works: Three simple features in the most basic sense, these management tools do the following: 1) connect with social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 2) Allow the manager to quickly publish from one location to each of those channels, some provide ability to customize to each channel 3) Aggregate and Manage social data. The system allows the manager to see an aggregated view of what’s happening (from views to comments) and may offer some form of analytics and conversion metrics.”

Jeremiah delineates a list of social media management systems:

• Awareness Networks, Social Marketing Hub
• Buddy Media
• Context Optional Distributed Engagement Channel by DEC  
• KeenKong.
• MediaFunnel
• Mutual Mind Objective Marketer
• Postling
• SocialTalk
• SpredFast
• Sprinklr
• Strongmail
• Vitrue
• Wildfire

To refrain from being redundant, we have not added his comments on each of the above but suggest you take a look at them. We have added Objective Marketer that might be a good fit in this category also.

Jeremiah suggests using certain tools after you have developed a Social Strategy.  He writes, “Every technology has upsides and downsides, there are always tradeoffs. While these tools may help social strategists manage an unscalable situation — they have downsides.

To me, the hope would be to rise to the challenge of leveraging automation tools and yet still preserve the human touch so needed in social media marketing!