iBank.com - Applying Social Marketing to Your Company

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Social Media has been called the wave of the future. People are relating the use of social media at work to the adoption of personal computers onto all of our desks. The interesting thing about social media however is that there are some companies and industries where it can be applied to huge success. Take nike's social networking site for socer fans joga.com or the Myspace and Facebook pages that most any popular product has these days. Unfortunately the small businesses often don't have any idea how to utilize these new mediums.


Since I was brought on to the iBank.com team I decided to take it upon myself to figure out how social media could become an integral part of the company's marketing. Little did I know that there would be huge other reasons to use social media on top of that. A Forrester report breaks down the application of Social Media into five different categories: research, marketing, sales, support, and development and suggests different social technologies for each.


What research I found I put into a presentation that I gave at a friday meeting. Where we are going from here is to try and apply some of the research I've found to our marketing strategies and see if the industry that iBank.com is in is ready for social media.


When I am done I will post the results but for now here is our gameplan:

1. Introduce the heads of the departments to the technology (LinkedIn Q&A, and Twitter)

2. See if our industry is already using LinkedIn Q&A or Twitter

3. If there seems to be a large enough user base on these technologies that we want to connect to then I will educate each department head on how to do so and educate the appointed person in each department on how these technologies work as well.


Thats it. It is fairly simple and if we have to stop at step 2 because there are no individuals in our industry using these technologies so far, then at the very least we have educated our company to these technologies and concepts so when there is industry adoption we will be poised to be a leader in meeting the individuals in our industry where they are.

Robert Moore,
iBank Comm/Tech Team
(714) 549-4226 ex: 135
rmoore@ibank.com
3151 Airway, Building G-3
Costa Mesa, CA 92626