Social Media, Transmedia, Cross-media...

Social networks, social media, blogging, micro-blogging, transmedia, cross-media, web 2.0, social web….new ways of using the web to share, communicate, and build community. Where integrated marketing campaigns brought a consistent message across multiple delivery channels, the communication was largely in one direction. The next step is to take these channels and make them bidirectional, bringing direct feedback and interaction with your customers.

But the technology is only part of the story. It is the critical foundation, but what you build on it is up to you. Effective deployment requires a commitment and a solid understanding of what vehicles are appropriate to solve your individual challenges..

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Myspace... customers today get information in new ways, relying on the community to provide both access to product information and solutions and to access peer recommendations and experiences. Instead of simply marketing to customers, social media allows you to establish a conversation with the customer base and engage them in an interactive dialogue.

The customer is presented with a rich experience linking both company-provided solutions and customer-provided experiences. Each vehicle reinforces your message and adds content appropriate to that particular channel. In addition to basic promotional opportunities, product ideas and techniques can be "crowd sourced", letting your customer base become an extension of your customer support and requirements gathering processes.

Center Marketing has helped clients plug into the new social media world and establish a presence that reaches both new customers as well as existing customers in new ways. We can help you set up and take advantage of new media opportunities to engage in direct dialogue with your customers and establish a community that will dramatically expand your brand awareness and customer experience.

Transmedia

Where the classic use of social media vehicles involves a consistent message that is reinforced across multiple vehicles, transmedia leverages these popular sites to create a story that spans the whole user space and requires the user to track down information at multiple sites to assemble the complete story. A social media campaign seeks to provide the same information in multiple vehicles, and transmedia takes a single story and distributes pieces of it across multiple vehicles. This provides an extremely rich customer experience for the delivery of promotional narratives, stories, puzzles, and games. Many alternate reality games, based on transmedia delivery, have been used to successfully promote product launches and provide the user with a rich brand experience.

Center Marketing brings a depth of experience  in transmedia productions including expertise in utilizing existing social media sites as well as creating custom sites with blogs, forums, and interactive video. Our last large transmedia project utilized Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reverb Nation, MySpace and Flickr. Cloud compute resources were utilized to implement multiple custom web sites, custom Wordpress blog installations and custom phpBB forum installations. Direct interaction with the audience was through email, phone calls, text messages  and physical mail. All coordinated, all connected. That’s not just brand marketing, that’s brand immersion!