Social Media’s Change Challenge

by Dan Bailey

I’ve had the pleasure in recent months of co-founding a series of workshops for the greater good; non-profits and social causes, taught hands-on digital marketing strategies for growth! The Change Challenge (TheChangeChallenge.org) is this great Fall monthly series at GSU, and (thanks to my co-founders Sherry Heyl, @SherryHeyl, and Terry Coniglio, @LYFTterry) we’ve poured a lot into it to really help the non-profits and volunteers on board. It gets back to the cause-driven origins of social media (remember such sites as sixdegrees.org, change.org and ScoreCard?). In fact the first workshop is tomorrow morning and I’m currently having fun planning my lecture (just as I did creating the branding, website, etc.).

Our first workshop is focused on something sorely lacking in social media marketing today – objectives and strategic content alignment. So – here’s a sneak peek – two social media strategic structures shown below (click on images for detail).

The first strategy map shows how social media is often used today with a traditional advertising broadcast promotional model. In the digital world, hub-and-spoke models are constructed, with the goal of driving social and other channel traffic to a website or landing page (or increasingly a Facebook page). As evidenced here, messages promoting the hub are pushed out to channels.

While the above can produce measurable results, a real strength of social media lies in finding existing target audience communities and engaging in conversation with them there. People buy from those they know and those who help them with advice, info, etc. Just as it works in live, physical communities, it works in digital communities as well. By finding and collaborating in these groups, marketers can pull users to the marketing objectives, as in the below.