A recent survey shows that over 65% of marketers are planning to integrate social media into their marketing campaigns.  Consider the aggressive growth in social media users, and it’s easy to understand why such a large percentage of marketers are adjusting their strategies to include social media into their campaign mix.  By the numbers:

• There are more than 900 million Facebook users
• 93% of U.S. Internet users are on Facebook
• Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 new users per day
• Google Plus is adding 625,000 new users per day
• There are more than 135 million professionals in LinkedIn

Given these types of numbers, it’s hard to imagine why any marketing department would not aggressively engage in social media.  There are a large number of organizations, however, that are late to the social media party, in large part, because of four primary factors: (1) time commitment, (2) training, (3) inability to find or produce relevant content and (4) company policies limiting activities due to compliance concerns.

Properly addressing these challenges for a large organization with thousands of employees that now represent potential social media users, can take a significant amount of time, energy and effort.  Take this same challenge and apply it to organizations that leverage a distributed marketing and sales model made up of quasi-independent agents, brokers, franchisees or partners that the organization doesn’t have direct control over, and the challenge is amplified.

To overcome these challenges, organizations are beginning to leverage a new concept – Distributed Social Marketing – where corporate marketers utilize specialized online software to manage the entire social media publishing process throughout the organization and its partners.

Distributed Social Marketing software works like this:

1. Corporate marketing publishes pre-approved social media campaigns that consist of numerous content posts with links to rich media and other supporting collateral. In addition, corporate marketers have the ability to set designated time intervals between posts, select social networks to publish to as well as establish campaign access and customization permissions.
   
2. Once published, employees and marketing partners simply opt-in to a campaign and the specialized software posts the content to the selected sites at the designated time intervals on their behalf, thus automating the entire social media process.  Although campaign posts can be entirely locked down, corporate marketers also can set permissions where posts can be customized, and if necessary, routed through a corporate approval process prior to being published.

Sophisticated Multi-Channel Distributed Marketing Platforms, such as the one offered by Distribion, take this concept a step further by allowing the corporate marketing department to publish a multi-channel “bundled” campaign that consist of integrated e-mail, direct mail and social media campaigns that run simultaneously.  Distribion also recently announced a partnership with Hearsay Social that will provide advanced users with additional reporting, listening and auditing capabilities.

Common Distributed Social Marketing benefits include:

• Ability to maintain corporate compliance and brand standards by controlling social media content throughout the entire organization.
  
• Publishing pre-approved content and leveraging automated approval routing for customized content saves time for the corporate marketer; employees and partners also save a considerable amount of time by not having to search or create relevant content to post to their social networks.
  
• Ability for employees and partners to leverage social media marketing best practices established by the corporate marketing department, thus reducing training and increasing social media adoption.
  
• Ability for the corporate marketing department to centralize social media data and reporting throughout the entire organization to gain better insight and identify trends that influence future marketing efforts.
  
• Dramatically improved campaign response rates through the use of “bundled” multi-channel distributed marketing campaigns that include social media, e-mail and direct mail messages.
  

Sources:
1.) Facebook (900M users), 2.) Blogher (93% of US Internet users on FB), 3.) Jeff Bullas (Twitter new users), 4.) PC World (Google Plus new users), 5.) LinkedIn (Registered users), 6.)  Booz & Company/Buddy Media (65% of marketers planning to include social media)