Page 144 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

» Technical skills: Examine the breadth of technical skills you have in-house.
Who will do the technical work involved? Some of the platforms are plug-and-
play, but more often than not, integrating them into your own sites can
present problems. For example, if your website uses proprietary software,
you might need to have technical staff write new code to connect the two
applications without causing problems. This might be a quick fix or a long,
involved project. You’ll want to know that before you move forward.

» Design skills: Understand the design skills needed to create visuals, charts,
and so on. The quality of graphics and multimedia online continues to
increase. You either need a designer on hand or you have to hire someone
to create the graphics to match your own branding on one or several of the
SMM platforms.
» Computing power: Look at whether you’re prepared to handle more traffic
and sales. You’ve heard the warning, “Be careful what you wish for.” What if
you get more leads than you can presently handle — or if your site can’t
handle the traffic surge? It sounds like a great problem to have, and it is,
unless you wind up disappointing potential customers who can’t reach your
site or get support.

For example, during the 2013 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola found itself in a spot of
trouble when its Super Bowl microsite crashed after its advertisement aired
on television. Coca-Cola had asked consumers to vote online for which ending
to the ad was the best, and the voting made the site first slow down signifi-
cantly and then crash completely. Coca-Cola had underestimated the amount
of traffic the promotion on the Super Bowl would generate. See Figure 7-3 for
the sign posted on Coca-Cola when the website crashed.

FIGURE 7-3:
Coca-Cola
website
crash sign.

128 PART 3 Reaching Your Audience via Mainstream Social Platforms