Summary

The purpose of this article is to analyze the recent social media marketing trend and more specifically, how this trend applies to RIA and future development with the Adobe Flash Platform.

Introduction

There’s no denying the fact that one of the hottest topics and latest buzzwords in the online arena is “Social Media Marketing”. This is not an article intended to define social media marketing, and it assumes you already know what it is. Therefore, if you are not familiar with ths term, I suggest spending a brief moment reading the short Wikipedia entry for Social Media Marketing. Regardless of how familiar you are with it, I  suggest downloading and reading the 2009 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

Streamlining Social Media Marketing with the Flash Platform

The ability to rapidly aggregate data from a variety of sources and organize it all into something meaningful in near “real time”, is one of the most prolific uses of the Adobe Flash Platform. I might also note that my favorite tool for this is Adobe AIR by a long shot. This is because AIR has direct access to system resources and is not forced to work within the limitations imposed on it by the web browser. As a result, social media mash-ups run faster. Tweetdeck is a good example of this.

Tweetdeck has been in beta for quite a while now, and has limited functionality. I have been hoping to see some more AIR apps developed with the intended purpose of merging all social network accounts and API’s into a single interface in the effort of streamlining Social Media Marketing.  Unfortunately, it seems as though innovation in this area has been somewhat lacking.

I recently discovered Flock, a web browser that is built on the MoZilla engine, which does a decent job of tying everything together.  It’s pretty clunky compared to a well-designed AIR interface though. Furthermore, with the powerful built-in browser capabilities of AIR, the functionality of Flock could easily be accomplished with AIR, and it could not only do it a lot more gracefully, an astonishing amount of additional functionality could be tied in to merge your favorite features of each separate social networking platform.

Part of the problem is that not everyone has an open API. It amazes me that LinkedIn has still not caught on considering the fact that Facebook was able to drive their valuation into the stratosphere by opening up their API.

Flex Data Tools for Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing

According to the 2009 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, one of the greatest burning questions among marketers is “how do I track my social media marketing efforts?”. Right now this is not an easy task, and requires a multitude of tools and utilities that only perform a single function. Therefore, attempting to track the influence of a new branding strategy by a large enterprise is essentially the full time job of 5 or more people. This is ridiculous. Why haven’t we automated this entire process? It only takes one marketing director to monitor and take snap shots of the social media space from an all-in-one data visualization dashboard after a major news release.

The Data Visualization Toolkits that are available for the Flash Platform are absolutely staggering. There is a market opportunity out there right now for any software house that wants to take advantage of it: develop a quality dashboard using graphing components that displays near real-time information using something like the ILOG Elixir component library for Flex and AIR. Ideally, this application would include a set-up wizard where the initial information for the tracking would be entered. For example, using the Twitter API, one could enter a number of keywords to follow (such as the company name), as well as links (such as links to press releases and the company web site). Using this dashboard, a marketing department could essentially get a near real-time visual depiction of their “buzz” that they are creating in the social media atmosphere after a news or product release.

Of course, that is only one of the many potential functions that a “Social Media Penetration Dashboard” could include for the purpose of tracking market penetration. Consider how sophisticated such an application could be. Geo-targeting reports, for example, could display the level of interest for a product by location using the google maps API or Yahoo maps, identifying where the biggest “buzz” seems to be happening. That data could then be applied to other marketing campaign efforts, providing the data needed for a company, say Bed, Bath, and Beyond for example,  to do a mass mailer of coupons in a particular geographical area based on the amount of buzz that was generated in the social media space after the news of a major product release.

SEO vs. Social Media Marketing

Many compare Social Media Marketing to Search Engine Optimization. These are two different beasts and require completely different knowledge and skill sets to master. They are not one in the same and should not be treated that way. Measuring the effectiveness of SEO is different from measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing; completely different as a matter of fact.

Whether or not SMM will be exploited by black-hat trickery the way that SEO was a few years back remains to be seen, and my guess is that the answer will be that yes, someone will find a way to exploit it, and then so will others. Don’t look at that as a bad thing though. It was thanks to the black hat SEO thugs that Google is able to disseminate quality content and recognize when an attempt is being made to “trick” the robots in an effort to get higher rankings.

It will likely be a little while though before we start seeing “black hat trickery” in the world of social media marketing though. It took at least a year before it started in the world of SEO, and social media marketing has arguably been mainstream for only a few months now. This is emphasized in one of the statistics pointed out in the aforementioned industry report, which states the following:

“When asked to rate their experience using social media marketing for their businesses, a significant 72% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months.”

Conclusion

In the software development arena, specifically Rich Internet Application development with the Adobe Flash Platform, a world of opportunity exists to leverage the rapidly growing popularity of Social Media Marketing.  What it really comes down to is – who will be the first to recognize and execute on this blatently obvious opportunity?

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Posted by Dan Orlando on May 23rd, 2009 :: Filed under Social Media
Tags :: Adobe Flash Platform, RIA, Social Media Marketing
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