Marketing Voices - Weekly Perspectives on Social Media Marketing

Liveworld is a social media agency which has implemented programs for companies like HBO, EBAY and Intuit. Peter Friedman, the CEO gives me great perspective on what he feels is important to building brands today with social media. The three steps Peter discusses for a social media program are: 1) Define culture 2) Integrate the community voice into the culture 3) Participate in the community development. Defining the culture of the company through its community is instrumental to making social media work. Listening to what the community is saying then integrating what it says makes the brand voice come alive. Participating in the brand through blogs, podcasts, wiki is the final step. To me, he offers a social media program roadmap very similar to what we follow at PodTech. The cost of doing these steps with LIVEWORLD is not inexpensive. It costs $10,000-100,000 to get it going then $150,000-300,000 to maintain it.So a company has to be committed. But startups have to do it today too and yet they don’t have those kinds of budgets many times. But the program elements are still the same: define culture; intergrate the voice of the community and participate in the community.