Guest blog from Demand Media, silver sponsor of SMWF Europe and in the comScore Top 30 Global Network of Premium Online Brands .

Thank you for attending the Social Media World Forum and for joining our discussion panel “Examining the Social Shopper” where you met our VP of European Sales & Business Development, Stephanie Himoff. We really enjoyed meeting with you and learning about your business! In the discussion, our VP shared real-life examples of leading brands that increased conversions with basic social media tools.

Optimizing the Social Mix
One of the things we love about the Demand Media Social Solutions group is the opportunity to work with thought leaders at brands and agencies. Via a variety of meetings, conversations and exchanges recently, it’s become clear that marketers are evolving their perspectives on social media.

While Facebook and Twitter, along with owned & operated websites, continue to dominate spend and emphasis, leading organizations are starting to think broadly and holistically.

Like marketers traditional work on their Media Mix, we believe that 2011 is the year to strategically consider your Social Mix. We’ll define the Social Mix as the investment in community activities across digital channels.

Key elements of the Social Mix to ponder include:

• Mobile: how are you incorporating customer interaction into your mobile apps and mobile-optimized web experiences?
• Web: in what ways can customers and prospects communicate with one another, and with you, on your owned media assets, including campaign, corporate, product and other properties?
• Facebook: are your social experiences invigorating and authentic across your pages or are you merely seeing fly-by Likes?
• Twitter: how do you post, listen and respond?
• YouTube: is the conversation around your video content in-line with the expectations of your brand voice?

And for each channel, it’s important to consider your interaction, identification and response approaches:

• What can customers do? Are they able to comment, post, rate, review, submit, or respond?
• How do they present themselves? With a channel-specific persona, a Facebook name, other some other identity?
• How do you seed, guide, moderate, listen and respond to them?

2011 is particularly invigorating as, for the first time, customers’ comfort with Facebook-powered authentication in third party services allows brands to truly think of one customer across touch points. And with an increased understanding of each customer, coupled with a multi-pronged Social Mix, marketers can strive for the digital holy rail: one community, regardless of how and where customers encounter your digital presence.

Each channel can have access to appropriate social content along with tuned and presented read/write experiences from a single set of infrastructure. And it can all be moderated, managed and analyzed from a single service and set of people.

Demand Media would love to help. Through our Professional Services team, we can assist with identification and prioritization of approaches for targeted channels. Through our Pluck and CoveritLive products, we can power asynchronous and real-time engagement, across channels, asset types (text, photo, audio, video) and communication frameworks (rate, recommend, respond, comment, review, post, answer, submit, bet, friend, follow, etc.).  And through our Community Services, we can Manage and Moderate your initiatives, enabling your in-house staff to focus on strategic social media decisions and efforts.

It’s been incredible to see customers like the Dallas Cowboys go from less than two thousand discussion posts on Facebook, to offering a seamless cross-web and Facebook forums experience, powered by Pluck, with hundreds of thousands of vibrant posts.

Microsoft has experienced the power of Demand Media Community Services across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the web during their high-powered Windows Phone 7 launch.  And clients like Conde Nast, the NFL, McGraw-Hill and others use Pluck to power their rich mobile experiences, in conjunction with their core websites.

Please visit our Customer Profile section to learn more or give us a shout. We’d like to explore your thoughts on the Social Mix, provide insights based on client best practices, and ideally help you increase return on your integrated community initiatives.

For more information, please visit www.demandmedia.com/pluck.

Demand Media provides media, content and social solutions to global leading brands. With Web properties like LIVESTRONG.com, Cracked.com, eHow.com, a breakthrough content studio, and the Pluck and CoveritLive community platforms, Demand Media helps marketers deliver meaningful engagement, insight and conversion results.

Pluck, our integrated community platform, supports dynamic experiences on your brand site(s), on social media services like Facebook, and on all of the major mobile platforms, delivering a single view of your customer across all channels. For more information on Demand Media, our Social Platforms, or any of our whitepapers, please email: Natalie.Cheung@demandmedia.com