The CMO Council recently reported that seventy-nine percent of marketers are expected to implement some form of social media technology platform this year —from community building (30 percent), social monitoring and data mining (30 percent), and social media tracking and analytics (19 percent) to automation platforms that will help take the next leap in optimizing social engagements and relationships.

Social media marketing has certainly become a key strategic communication channel for most organizations in the world today. Many companies within the financial services, insurance and healthcare industries are currently not embracing the social media marketing channel to the same extent as others due primarily to compliance and regulatory concerns. Should these organizations be able to overcome these compliance concerns they could well be poised to leverage the social media channel greater than anyone else. Organizations that leverage a distributed marketing and local sales model often times support hundreds if not thousands of field sales, local agents and marketing partners and most, if not all, already have social media accounts. If the organization could somehow harness the power of those networks to broadcast and socialize content while minimizing compliance concerns then these distributed marketing organizations could quickly move from social media laggers to social media leaders.

Consider the following numbers as an example:

5,000 employees, agents, franchisees, etc.
x 130 avg. connections*
———————————————-
650,000 possible impressions per post

The numbers speak for themselves but how can compliance driven distributed marketing organizations take advantage of this opportunity? Tim Storer, CEO of Distribion, a leading provider of multi-channel distributed marketing automation software may have the answer.

“There are typically four obstacles that prohibit organizations from taking full advantage of their social media assets: The first is the time commitment necessary to effectively utilize and monitor the social media channel. The second is adequately training your employees and agents regarding how to build and engage an audience. Third is the inability for users to find or produce relevant content worth socializing about. Fourth are compliance and regulatory concerns.” Storer also notes, “these challenges are amplified considerably for organizations that leverage quasi-independent agents, brokers, franchisees or partners because often times the organization doesn’t have direct control over those individuals.”

In order to help organizations overcome these challenges and fully realize the potential of their social network, Distribion introduced a new concept called “Distributed Social Media Marketing“.

Using the Distribion Distributed Marketing Platform, corporate marketers can now publish pre-approved social media campaigns that consist of numerous content posts with links out to rich media and other supporting collateral.

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. Since all posts are pre-approved by corporate there are no compliance concerns. In addition, should someone wish to add or customize content the software can quickly route the content through a designated approval process.

When asked what led Distribion to come up with the notion of distributed social media marketing, Storer commented: “Our Distributed Marketing Platform has always helped organizations realize the full potential of their sales and marketing networks. Extending our platforms capabilities into the social realm really wasn’t a big leap for us at all.”

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