Awareness, Inc’s , “Social Context Triggers” is an additional offering to their on-demand social media marketing software services.

Standard keyword-based filtering functionality available in social media platforms automates the moderation of profanity in posts, discussion forums and comments. Awareness' Social Context Triggers extends on this functionality by allowing organizations to drive sophisticated automation from the use of specific words or phrases, resulting in an increased ROI, improved organic SEO and enhanced participation from community members.

Specific use cases of Social Context Triggers are e.g.:

  • A large online retailer links specific product names to the corresponding page on their ecommerce site. This puts community members’ 1-click away from purchasing the product that is being discussed. This simple tactic has driven over $2M in additional sales since the community was launched in early 2009.
  • A small online publisher struggles with users misspelling their company name. They use context triggers to automatically replace the misspelling of their brand within posts, discussions and comments.
  • A large B2B software company uses context triggers to individually alert sales reps to posts about conversations occurring around specific products or subjects. This allows the salesperson responsible for the product to immediately respond and contribute in the conversation.
  • A large community of medical professionals links specific medical terms to the corresponding definition in their online medical glossary. This puts users a click away from finding definitions to words and terms they don't recognize.
  • A loyalty rewards programs sells advertising units within their community based on the context of conversations within posts, forums, and comments. Every time an advertiser's brand or product is mentioned the system generates a link to the corresponding page. This has allowed them to drive additional advertising revenue based on the context of posts, discussions and comments.

In addition to the specific use cases outlined above, Social Context Filters significantly improve organic search engine optimization. Online communities reflect an echo chamber of your audience's interests, which proliferates key words and phrases that are relevant to your community. Using social context filters to automatically generate links for some of those words and phrases helps to optimize your online presence in the eyes of search engines. Some organizations have been able to significantly reduce PPC spend after launching their online community.

"Social Context Triggers are an extremely robust part of the Awareness Platform and something specifically designed to drive ROI," says David Carter, CTO and Co-Founder of Awareness. "We have made the functionality flexible enough to accomplish multiple marketing objectives and easy enough to be administered by marketing end-users."

Social Context Filters are easily configured and deployed and is available within each Awareness Best Practice Community—pre-packaged, ready-to-deploy online communities designed around specific business objectives.

 “We have all the “ingredients” for any type of social media implementation. Our history in the industry has also allowed us to capture a number of best practices and we have recently offered those as “Best Practice Communities” to get clients up and running quickly with social media “recipes” that we know work,” continues Carter.

Best Practice Communities allow organizations to dip their toe into the social media marketing waters and provide the flexibility to dive in once they have realized the tremendous business potential. Awareness Best Practice Communities (BPCs) can be rapidly configured and launched in days,  says the company, thereby allowing marketers to quickly and confidently leverage the power of social media marketing to engage with their customers, build their brand, increase revenues, and build trust and loyalty.

Carter acknowledges that compared to other industries, social media is still not mature.  He notes for example that the notion of “friends” as filters is just barely being exploited. “Imagine all sites having a “friends” view that tells us what friends have rated products, bookmarked pages etc.  Today, these features are not used in a unified way. We are just now offering more ROI focused metrics, but “acting” on those metrics is not baked into most social media platforms. Social media needs to be woven into the fabric of companies instead of being a separate initiative. Today, many companies have their community, and their web site. Moving forward the distinction will be blurred,” he says.

This is why it is so important, he observes, to focus customers on “Return on investment” and not just the sizzle of social media. “Clients come to us with a shopping list of features that are simply the combination of LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Digg.com.  We have to ask what their business goals are and who are their audience? After all, no one is building Facebook now, this has already been done. The important thing is to add value to your customers.  For example, you may leverage FaceBook to extend your reach. Above all, remember that the data that makes up your community is a valuable asset. What people have shared in their profiles, the content they write, what moves them to participate and so on. All this is data traditional marketers have spent millions to figure out via focus groups and research.  If done properly, your community will be creating it real-time.”

It’s no wonder then that the social media scene seems to be growing bigger every second which is in turn why it is grabbing the attention of more and more platform providers, technology vendors and consultants that try to tap this promising looking industry. Here, Awareness is making its mark in the industry as a leading provider of on-demand social media marketing software. The company began as a pure “content management” application delivered as a SaaS based offering in 1999, known then as iUpload and decided after a few years in the business that the more valuable role was to help customers gather, organize and distribute “User Generated Content”, which led to the launch of their Social Media Marketing platform in February 2004.

The company’s success in this space, is simple, says Carter: “Our value proposition revolves around the strength of our technology, and we provide an array of consulting and services to create a complete solution spanning community strategy, design, implementation, and management,” he shares.

By Daniela La Marca

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