How to Deal with “Pollination” on Social Networks

Forrester Research analyst and all-around social media expert Jeremiah Owyang published a great blog post earlier this month on brands’ increasing “pollination” of the social web. Here, pollination more or less refers to the process by which brands both create and promote conversations about themeselves using Facebook, Twitter, email, and other tools and communities.

Jeremiah clearly lays out the risks in following and privileging a pollination marketing strategy. For one, there are the eternal issues of message dilution and message control. People might celebrate your brand on a discussion board, let’s say, but they also might convey opinions and attitudes that don’t fit well against your marketing positioning — e.g., your fans might endorse your product while egregiously insulting your competitors.

Such issues notwithstanding, pollination can’t be avoided in most cases anyway. Chances are your brand is already being talked about on Facebook, Twitter, and other places, so you might as well try to track and benefit from these conversations as much as possible.

Jeremiah discusses the need for social aggregation: he suggests that corporate websites can become a kind of clearinghouse for presenting the best of the best in Twitter mentions, external reviews on Facebook, accolades on Get Satisfaction, etc.

This makes complete sense to us. As for executing this consolidation/aggregation, here are our questions for Jeremiah and anyone interested in using social networks for attracting and generating brand enthusiasm:

What’s the best way to pollinate in order to produce brand engagement? In other words, what’s the best way to catalyze brand enthusiasm? One of the biggest assumptions that we still see at play in social marketing is this: “If you build it, they will come.” Companies will create a customer support forum, a Facebook Page, a YouTube Channel, etc., only to let these languish into practical obscurity. Of course, we understand that this sometimes happens for want of time and resources: busy marketers don’t have all the time in the world to constantly refresh and add to their social campaigns. Incidentally, this constraint is one reason why we built our complete marketing suite for Facebook Pages. We wanted to provide marketers an easy, “set-it-and-forget-it” way to syndicate their best content within Facebook.

How do you keep the conversation going on a corporate site? If you were to feature some of your social network conversations on a dot-com webpage, you’d do well to offer your readers clear ways to continue the conversations across various mediums.

Our recent work for the Golden State Warriors — we built them a Facebook Connect-powered chat client for their NBA.com site — suggests one way forward: Facebook Connect, Twitter’s API, and other tools allow user-generated content that is produced on corporate sites to be automatically republished on social networks (via status updates, Facebook Page Walls, profile stories, etc.).

Any which way, pollination as a marketing and customer phenomenon is here to stay. Returning to our earlier point about message control, it seems that the big winners will be those who can commit to both 1) a promotional mindset and 2) communicative openness. You should definitely highlight what your most enthusiastic fans have to say about you, but keep the door open: instead of censoring, focus on providing your audiences with solid content and fresh offers. More often than not, this is all that you have to worry about.

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