Part 2 of 3.  The KickApps
seminar I attended last month yielded a wealth of information, from
both advisors and corporate marketing people, about what to do with
social media if you're a company.  For the next three posts, I'm
sharing what I took away from the afternoon.  [To become a member of
KickApps own social network, click here.  You'll be able to watch the videos of the seminar presentations.]

These brief points are compiled from the excellent presentations made by Alex Blum of KickApps, Dylan Boyd of eROI, James Mastan of Blue Rain Marketing, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester, and Sandy Carter of IBM.

Make your website more open to viral discovery

• Customize it — not just the design but its searchability and usability
  

• Focus on content that is yours — differentiate
  

• Enable syndication via widgets

Integrate your website planning into your overall marketing strategy

• Use tools that enable you to graph your user data

• Let your branding approach give your website its context

• Make it easy for visitors to interact with you and your brand —
  build a community or better yet, give users the ability to grow one
  organically

• Make sure your strategy accommodates the fact that your
  communities will define your products — so don't try to control the
  communities, just be part of them and help to seed the networks within
  them

• Craft  your website in such a way that it helps your community
  experience not just your products but the Web itself more vibrantly

• Remember that community members trust each other more than they trust marketers

Consider three important social tools for the website

• A wiki — a great way for customers to contribute their ideas

• BOTs — to increase clickthrough — but use them sparingly because that's their power

• An independent social network around your product