OWN THE TOPIC, NOT THE BRAND

This is a couple of slides from one of our presentations about how to increase your revenues and traffic with Social Media and, in this case, XCAP. My point here is that today companies spends quite allot of money (on advertising) driving traffic to their domain while it might be much more efficient (and cheaper) to let the users in and create content that fits your agenda.

If this is going to work you have to create a subject related to your core business - since it's not likely they will be interested in writing positive and interested things about your brand.

Example: You have a e-commerce business that sells home electronics

1. Create a topic site (think magazine) about home electronics. You shouldn't hide that you as a brand is responsible for the site, but most likely you can come up with a cooler name than your company name. Now, the important thing here is to allow anyone to write blog posts (of course well moderated), post comments, rate stuff, upload images or write reviews etc. and mix it with your own content. When you write blog posts, and you should, make sure it's you as a person and brand that writes that information. Also, make sure that you in some way link that content to offers in your store. After all it's business we are after.

2. Make sure articles are share-able to some of the major social media networks. Now, here's the trick. If a user writes a blog post on your website, uploads an image or comments on something it's MUCH more likely that this will be shared to her friends. After all, SHE was the one that wrote the content. If this is an article about a new receiver from Yamaha, make sure you link those to a relevant offer in your store. We use a searchable RSS fetcher for this.

3. Create top-list for the most read author and give the winners give-aways. This is to increase the will to share content even more. Now, if a user gets an Ipod for delivering readers to her article, she will share, email and twitter to all her friends about her latest post (to get higher in the ranking).

4. Create support forums. Let your users help other users and move your existing support to this area as well. Both forums and blogs are also great SEO magnets if correctly built. Again, if a post is about "how to install an Airport extreme" make sure you relate this to relevant offers in your store.

Having a separate "topic" site gives you many advantages. You have more freedom, your content (or rather the users content) will get much higher ranking in SEO and you will provide a service that most users will appreciate.

Don't believe me? We actually done this with SAS already. You can look at www.goeurope.se and see how we did it.  It's a travel-site about Europe with mixed content from SAS and users. All categories are based on relevant routes to Europe.