By Angelo Fernando, PublicRadius
Fragmented or integrated? It’s easy to pick the latter, because it sounds like the right thing to do. Depending on what you are trying to achieve it’s not that easy though. Here are two scenarios:
Scenario A: You are launching a new service that is relevant to 30 percent of your audience. You’ve got the usual suspects –um, channels — in place with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, a blog and two Twitter accounts. Do you make spread your content across all of these?
Scenario B: You a teaching a class, and most of the attendees use Facebook rather than email, but you also have a series of video updates. Do you stick with Facebook, or add a blog to the program which will feed Facebook embed YouTube videos?
I don’t want to say I know the best answer. (It may take a bit of digging deeper into the usage patterns of the audience etc.) But I often lean heavily on closing the gap between communication channels. It takes some planning ahead, but you only have to connect the dots once, and thereafter, it’s easy to pick and chose the channels you like to integrate.
I pointed this out toward the end of the webinar I was conducting last Monday. To demonstrate it, while my co-presenter Steve England was speaking, I took a photo of the audience and our dashboard, using the camera on my phone, and emailed it to Twitpic.com. Nothing fancy. But it was much quicker than had I used a regular digital camera, and tried to upload to my blog, which was another option. The tweet showed up in a few seconds, but I also used Twitpic as an easy way to archive the photo, and later copy the URL and place it in a blog post.
For the record, there was some built-in integration we had set up in advance. We used a Skype video feed to ‘see’ the audience, but the webinar dashboard, DimDim, let us see us, and chat with the audience as well.
If you use a service such as Hootsuite, there’s a whole lot of built-in integration. Then there’s PingFM that lets you ‘post to all your favorite services’ such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumbler, Bebo, Ning, Plurk, Jaiku, Posterous, Yammer and more. Is that necessary? Most people would say it’s certainly not because each niche comprises different audiences. (Most people would think you’re nuts –or have dozens of little elves managing these sites – to be that spread out, anyway!)
What is your integration or segmentation strategy? I’d love to hear more.
