Guest Post: Five questions for social computing strategy

  Can Paixano 
  Originally uploaded by Pete Kim.

[Cross posting from Being Peter Kim]

First off, thanks to Rohit for inviting me to guest post.  I’ve enjoyed following this blog and meeting in person. Rohit provides a feed that’s in my "must-read" folder and hopefully I’ll provide you with some information that of a similar quality.

I’m currently in Barcelona and had "dinner" at Can Paixano last night – talk about being social!  You can’t help but be networked with the crowd, whether you like it or not.  Never ending friending, indeed.

I spent most of the day prior at Forrester’s Consumer Marketing Forum EMEA.  During the day, there was a lot of talk about social computing initiatives and we tweeted quite a bit of it.  As I hear about different brands, industries, and technologies, some questions keep coming to mind:

1. Does it integrate with our existing marketing strategy?
2. Does it build our brand?
3. Does it drive profitable business results?
4. Can we measure it?
5. Will it scale?

There are probably more questions; these are the highest-level ones that keep coming to mind when I hear people speaking about what they’re doing or recommending to clients.

Good case study examples should answer all of those questions – we’re past social computing 101.  Brands still need 101-type information and there’s still a lot of learning left out there.  What it means is that people who are put on stage these days as experts should be delivering the goods, better.  If you’re not a regular reader of this blog, I suggest you subscribe now because Rohit’s a great resource on getting to 102.