Enterprises, corporations, businesses, brands… no matter how you name them, they need to address a string of challenges when it comes to social beyond simply adopting a social strategy. OverBlog is a little known social-meets-curation-meets-knowledge-management solution that’s worth exploring as it provides seamless solutions to a number of the issues at hand. Here are the top 4 reasons why OverBlog is a tool for enterprises:
- Winning the budget war: empowering the social employee
- Collaborative brand building: internal and external brand ambassadors
- Real content, fresh content, SEO love and corporate knowledge
- Social media crisis management
In a nutshell, OverBlog does this: it brings together in one Destination Page the best of a brand’s posts/updates across the various platforms, including its own blog posts. The key word? Best–OverBlog is about curation, not plain aggregation (who wants to see spam on a flagship page?). As a result, the tool pulls in the best blog posts, Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagrams, Tumblr posts, Foursquare check-ins, Flickr photos — you name it. Once this is done, one of the tool’s really great features comes into play: collaboration.
Winning the Budget War: Empowering the Social Employee
Let’s face it, the tug of war is always the money and the budget.
The most common behavior today is to hire external companies or consultants to fan your ‘social fire,’ for budgets that can exceed tens of thousands of dollars per campaign. Instead, OverBlog will help you bring such costs to acceptable levels. How? By helping you empower your social employees.
The thinking behind this: among your employees, find the top 3 who you think use each social network best (3 for Twitter, 3 for Facebook, 3 for Instagram, and so on…) and appoint them as your brand ambassadors. Note: it doesn’t have to always be the same employees; if you have more than 3 in the company, you can rotate them. And by best, I mean, for example, those who you see regularly tweet content that’s relevant to the brand; such content is usually lost to the company.
Also, blogging becomes an enterprise-wide activity: OverBlog allows you to appoint an infinite number of contributors. If your head screams «safety!» – don’t fret: only admins can validate and publish contributors’ pieces so you have an extra layer of security, just in case.
When using OverBlog, a company’s primary investment will be to allow a mindset shift in how they approach social, as well as training social employees to use the platform (which OverBlog provides – don’t stress!). Thanks to the filtering system on OverBlog, the social employees will be able to keep posting as much and as diversely as they wish on all platforms, and only the content that they will tag with the company’s specific hashtag will go onto the OverBlog. Easy as pie.
Collaborative Brand Building: Internal and External Brand Ambassadors
How do companies get better at social? Again, by empowering employees. Now it’s beyond budget, although it is intimately interlinked. Employees who ‘own’ the brand they work for are more likely to instill a dynamic group culture inside a corporation. Social is not only about the virtual networks, it’s about the results in real life. Social is about character, conversation and added value.
Inside the enterprise, those employees become internal ambassadors who can help educate their peers and drive changes from within.
Outside the enterprise, allowing those employees to lend their voices to the brand via their social posts furthers the brand itself. After all, who better to speak on behalf of your brand and tell your company’s story than the employees who are so closely tied to the business? With employees rising up to the challenge, the brand naturally gets a human face: that of a solid team of responsible people who know what they’re doing and what they’re talking about, bringing added value to the conversations in which they take part.
Seeing a time management red flag? That’s where allowing 3 per network comes in handy–not everything relies on one person’s shoulders; instead, it’s a team endeavor. Plus, with simple and sleek mobile apps, OverBlog allows your teams to keep a close eye on and maintain the brand’s Destination Page on the go. The iPhone/iPod/iPad and Android apps are here to bring [safe] serendipity to enterprise blogging.
Currency: Real Content, Fresh Content, SEO Love and Corporate Knowledge
This is where the power of social and curated blogging for the enterprise takes root when you start using OverBlog. Each post or social update is treated as a full article, resulting in two major implications: first, when an employee tweets, for instance, the tweet becomes a fully-fledged piece of content that is presented as such and will provide freshness to your blog (or Destination Page, it’s up to you to decide how you would rather call it). Second, whereas Twitter or Facebook only index items for their own search engines, OverBlog goes one step further and indexes them for the search engines like Google and Bing. Your SEO is boosted and you content becomes searchable.
Finally, let’s say you’re looking for a tweet that you remember was posted by your team a few weeks back, a tweet with an URL that would REALLY help you make the difference as you discuss a specific topic with clients or the board. You can search Twitter and take a sweet amount of time finding it. Instead, OverBlog will become your place of reference: type in your keywords and you will quickly find what you’re looking for, no matter what original platform the content was distributed on. Turns out that tweet was, in fact, a Facebook update and you’re lucky to have found it so easily in your corporate repository of social content. As a result, OverBlog becomes a seamless knowledge management (‘KM’ for the specialists) system for the enterprise.
Social Media Crisis Management
So what happens when a crisis arises? As it stands, for most brands today, third parties, i.e. external agencies and consultants, are leading (in the best case) your troops. A lot of them have their crisis plan in mind and some have it in place.
OverBlog can be a helpful addition to your crisis management strategy. It’s a strong support tool for two reasons: a) owning the brand will minimize the likelihood for crises because the empowered employee takes pride from his/her ambassador posture in-house and towards the outside world (read: consumers and clients). And secondly, OverBlog will allow teams to mobilize highly reliable and trained resources in no time: the empowered employee is already there and part of the conversation. OverBlog can be used as the social media crisis solution: name a captain (the administrator of the OverBlog?) and s/he can direct the participating employees as the crisis strategy unfolds. And by maintaining one central content destination, the team leader can invite consumers/users/clients to that page to see the full brand experience, rather than catching snippets spread across a variety of networks. Additionally? Using OverBlog helps brands stay consistent in their approach, an important consideration especially when you’re dealing with a sensitive situation.
If you’re curious, here’s a little background about OverBlog that might interest you. OverBlog is an 8-year old platform that was first created in Europe (Paris, France, to be precise) as a content destination and a blogging platform. Two years ago, the co-founders decided to put it on steroids to include all the social incoming streams, with a mind to maintain quality – hence the curation vs aggregation approach. A year ago, the reloaded platform was launched in the U.S. and encountered such success that the co-founders decided to move here and make it a local New York tech company. Interested in taking OverBlog for a test drive?
Liva Judic runs Merrybubbles Communications, a marketing and public relations agency dedicated to tech startups with an ambition to grow outside their home markets and mostly into the U.S. A contributor to tech publications in the U.S. (VentureBeat, Search Engine Watch) and Europe (Wired.it), she advises a number of startups and is also on the advisory council of The Greatest Pitch, which helps startups connect with seed funding. OverBlog is one of the startups Merrybubbles is introducing in the U.S.
Image via OverBlog
