Holly Grande: Short and Sweet

Ms. Liz Strauss over at Successful Blog has offered her readers a fun challenge.

You’re a social media consultant. You’ve just established a working relationship with an event planning bureau. [...] Google has announced intentions to establish an international meeting place for event planners and sponsors to do business. . . . not much more. Some industry leaders offer speculation on Google’s strategy. No date for launch or further information is given.

How do you advice your client to respond to the announcement?

I loved working on prompts like this in college. Brainstorming solutions is one of my strengths, I think, and I always enjoyed presenting my ideas. Here is my response to this particular problem.

The first thing I would do is call Google's PR department and see if I could learn more about this project.

I would work with my client to evaluate our current strategies. Who within the industry are we targeting? Are we secure in these areas?

As others have mentioned, Google does a fantastic job connecting users with and bringing attention to various companies, but it does not ensure a relationship history. I would remind my client once more that they have the benefit of working histories with their clients, and that they can promise quality over quantity.

At the same time, I would advise my client to keep an eye on the project and learn from Google's more successful strategies. In fact, I may use this as an opportunity to suggest creating a client-only, web-based networking tool if our company does not already have one in place. We can initiate a pre-launch to our "VIP" clients, followed by a press announcement several weeks later. (However, I would strongly advise my clients to have the tool in at least a beta version with concrete release dates available before making an announcement to the press.)

Head over to Ms. Strauss' blog to read the full prompt and add your own suggestions.

Posted by Holly at 10:17 AM  

Labels: communication, social networking