Social Media from the Island of the Gods

What do you envision when you think of Bali? Surf? Sun? Rice fields? Now you can add to that list Social Media Marketing. Bali firms water&stone and ClearWhiteSpace have joined forces to launch Bali’s first social media marketing service.

The rapid growth and rise in effectiveness of content channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and the like creates exciting new opportunities for companies to reach out to their target markets. These new media present not only fresh channels to distribute information but more importantly they also provide a forum for engaging the world in a two-way dialogue.

Traditional marketing and PR don’t provide the immediacy, specific target marketing, or detailed reporting that is achieved by online channels. The nature of social media provides marketers and PR personnel with a much richer way to interact with people. Because the media is simultaneously one-to-one and one-to-many, companies can extend their reach while still maintaining a personal and persuasive voice.

For those new to the social media arena, tracking, responding and engaging users can be a daunting task that includes not only technical challenges, but also a new type of strategic execution. The combined services of ClearWhiteSpace and water&stone solve both of these problems with a turnkey social media marketing service. Ric Shreves of water&stone adds: "By combining cutting edge technology tools with a deep and experienced understanding of the marketing mix, we provide our clients with access to this new way of reaching out to the world. By putting it all together in a turnkey package, our clients will gain a competitive advantage over those slower to react and engage social media users."

Complimenting each other in their areas of expertise, water&stone brings their technical experience to the table and ClearWhiteSpace their client communication and PR skills. ClearWhiteSpace and water&stone work by first tailoring a social media strategy to a client’s needs and then by providing the execution skills to get the job done. They offer strategic planning, monitoring, engagement and escalation services, and also include the creation and maintenance of online profiles to raise brand awareness and product recognition. Jo McFarlane of CWS states: "Our traditional sales and marketing experience allows us to understand client strategy, to educate ourselves quickly about brands and to communicate on their behalf in a language that compliments the brand, the product and the specific channel audience."

Near real time monitoring and accurate tracking means that clients gain the ability to test their target market and evaluate results almost immediately. The team’s monitoring systems give tremendous reach and enable them to receive all online postings relevant to the client and track the dialogue that results. Postings are measured by both their influence and their sentiment, thereby enabling clients to identify and track the most influential voices and to follow trends in market sentiment. Jo adds, "With social media tracking you can find out who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. You can also identify areas of concern and spot issues before they evolve into problems. It’s the new PR and so much more.

The question isn’t can you afford to do it, but rather, can you afford to ignore it!"

One on One with Ric Shreves of Water & Stone

Ric Shreves is an author and one of the founding partners of Water & Stone, a web development company that specializes in open source content management systems. Shreves has been building CMS websites for over 10 years for global brands such as BASF, Colgate-Palmolive, Tesco Lotus, FPDSavills and many others. He has also published several books on open source and open source content management systems. He is presently working on two titles for Wiley & Co., the Joomla! Bible and the Drupal Bible, which are scheduled for publication later this year. We asked him about using open source content management tools.

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