Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 7. Step Three: Evaluate Online Conduit Strategies (And Don’t Forget Search)

Who do you want to reach? What do you want to say to them? Those are the key questions to think about as you plan your conduit strategies—your plan for using the social web to reach your target audiences. The big four conduit strategies are reputation aggregators, blogs, e-communities, and social networks.

And don’t forget search, for the simple reason that you want people to find you. Search comes in two flavors: unpaid—or organic—and paid, which can offer a nice return. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts calculates that for every $1 it spends on search advertising, the firm generates $14 in revenue. Small wonder that Wyndham has increased its spending on search advertising by 500 percent since 2001. Roughly two-thirds of its online ad budget—and close to 15 percent of its total marketing budget—goes to search ads keyed to phrases like “Bahamas hotel” and “Phoenix golf.” Kevin Rupert, Wyndham’s vice president of marketing and strategy, says: “Search marketing is a basic foundation—you have to have it.”^[1] I couldn’t agree more.

This Way to the Conduit

Before I explain the big four in more detail, I want to emphasize that the lines of demarcation between reputation aggregators, blogs, e-communities, and social networks are somewhat permeable. The line between e-community and social network can blur, meaning it’s hard to say where an e-community ends and a social network begins. The line between blog and reputation ...