Social, website effectiveness go hand-in-hand

The integration of content and social media has never been more important to marketers. If social media is an increasingly dynamic and favored marketing engine, content is the fuel that makes it go.

But neither content nor social media works to its fullest capacity without an outstanding Web experience—whether it's the company's main dot-com, its blog pages, its YouTube channel or an assortment of minisites. Here, appropriate content can best be served to visitors and social sharing can be optimized to the fullest, according to Nick Panayi, director-global brand and digital marketing at multinational IT services company Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC)

Over the past year, CSC has undergone a thorough marketing transformation: deploying a new global database, installing a marketing automation platform, establishing new social analytics engines and creating a robust content-marketing program to feed its social marketing initiatives.

But first, CSC transformed its website.

“Our website went through a pretty significant redesign,” Panayi said. “Over two and a half months, we dramatically remade it, reducing it from 22,000 pages down to 13,000.”

Not only did CSC's website become more efficient, with a focus on high-performing pages, but the site now serves as a central serving station for CSC's growing amount of socially enabled content with an in-house staff of 170 editors around the world.

Panayi said CSC is working to get all 98,000 employees socially engaged. Among the company's initial efforts, CSC's “Ingenious Minds” initiative features CSC employees who have solved important IT problems, with each featured on a personal minisite. Other social-content initiatives that feed the company's new social efforts include “The Success Story Briefing Center,” with case studies, and “Infographic Central,” featuring a growing amount of graphics-oriented research.

Social activity exists to spread awareness of, and engagement with, this content, Panayi said.

“Social should be weaved into everything we do, and we are rapidly moving to that state,” Panayi said.

The primacy of the website experience is underscored by a new study by BtoB, with marketers saying that branding and website traffic are the two marketing goals that social media is most effective in realizing.

According to “Social Media Marketing: A Surge in Adoption,” marketers report that 12% of all website traffic originates from social media sites—often in response to an offer of some form of content, a link, a recommendation or a shared mention. The report was based on an online survey in March that drew 622 respondents.

A powerful website presence has also been key to the social content efforts of JDS Uniphase Corp. (JDSU). The optical components manufacturer is relying on the social-sharing power of video to highlight new products. It kicked off that effort in 2009 with its “JDSU From a Different View” series.

And the company's blog, JDSU Perspectives, incorporates informative videos and “man-on-the-street” interviews from trade shows.

“This gives our audience—including the media and the investment community, employees and customers—a much better appreciation of our message,” said Jim Monroe, VP-corporate marketing and communications at JDSU.

JDSU's video series is promoted via its website through banners, and “even on product pages if the video relates,” Monroe said.

“We'll promote the videos through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all the social channels people are using. And we leverage our video content on our YouTube channel,” he said.