Crowd marketing, SMM, reputation management. What is the difference?

I often hear about the identification of crowd marketing, smm and reputation management from customers, colleagues, commentators under various publications and in person.

And it is quite understandable, since The toolkit used is very similar:

• social networks;
• communication with the audience;
• Internet space monitoring services.

But the goals of these actions are different.
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Let's try to define each of them.

Crowd marketing is interaction with the target audience on third-party platforms on behalf of the company, or a regular user in order to attract attention to the required brand.

SMM - is building relationships between the brand and its followers on the official pages in order to increase their loyalty and create new fans of the brand.

Reputation management is the interaction with clients or other people who mentioned your brand in any documents of the web space in order to neutralize the negative and return the client.

Comparison criteria	Crowd marketing	SMM	Reputation Management
Lecture hall	New people. Potential clients	Brand followers	Customers; experts
Who interacts	On behalf of the company, more often on behalf of the average user	On behalf of the brand	On behalf of the brand
Communication platforms	Any clusters of target audiences. Predominantly forums, discussion in the comments, groups / public in social networks	Official representations	Any documents mentioning the brand
Instruments	Search engines, social networks, software for web space monitoring and work automation	Social networks, software to automate the placement of publications, creative	Brand Query Monitoring Software
purpose	Lead generation, brand awareness increase, seo effect.	Increase the loyalty of existing followers of the brand, attracting the attention of a new audience	Neutralizing negative reactions from customers, returning customers, turning brand detectors into promoters

Table 1. Comparison of crowd marketing, smm, reputation management

Compare by each criterion three areas of activity

Audience and interaction with it

The first and significant difference is the people and their mood with whom to communicate.

Crowd marketing

involves communicating with new audiences of people who have not previously heard about your product. The most important thing - do not try to immediately make a "sale in the forehead." Do not try to immediately get the target action from the person. Help him in the right question, show your expertise and he will come to you.

The second option is to help the person on behalf of the same ordinary user, without showing that you are a company representative. The specificity of a person is such that even if he reads a recommendation and a positive comment about a product from an unknown person, he will still take it into account.

Important! You can not deceive a person. Even if for the first time you can sell him a poor-quality product, it will cause him indignation and he will tell about it on the same platform where they began to communicate with him.

SMM and reputation management are aimed at interacting with people who have already had a touch with your brand.

In SMM,

if users follow the brand, then most likely they are positive towards it. It is necessary to involve them, make it clear that they are needed, offer additional value, which they can share with their friends. Excellent contests, games, promotions.

I recommend to watch the case of the company Intertop presented on iforum2015 promotion of niche brands.

In reputation management,

if a person mentions a brand at a certain site, in most cases he does it because he is not happy.

The most important thing is to quickly find this note and try to change the situation. The worst thing that can be done is to respond with prepared phrase phrases, this will further aggravate the situation. Try to solve a specific problem and do not forget to write about it. After all, other users, seeing that you have resolved the issue, will receive confidence that if they fall into a similar situation, they can also count on support.

Communication platforms

SMM

For smm communication channels are:

• official Facebook page of the company;
• official VKontakte page;
• page in classmates;
• Twitter account;
• video channel on YouTube;
• pages on other specialized sites.

Crowd marketing and reputation management

Use an unlimited set of sites and channels.

For crowd marketing, it is important to find all the habitats of the desired new audience.

For reputational management, it is important to track brand references on any platform in time and respond to it.

Instruments

Crowd marketing and reputation management

The main tool is a software for monitoring web space to record the appearance of the necessary key requests.

For crowd marketing, these are keywords related to products or goods, for example, “buy a vacuum cleaner”, “which monitor to buy”, “where to go for the weekend”.

For reputation management, these are:

1. brand name;
2. its variations in different languages;
3. brand typos;
4. names of key employees;
5. name of individual products of the company;
6. addresses of shops;
7. trademark.

To do this, we recommend using a special software that allows you to automate the work:

• talkwalker;
• Google Alerts;
• mention.com;
• youscan;
• Cribrum;
• and so on.

Using this software, you can not only quickly find the necessary reactions of users, but also answer them directly through these services (for example, mention.com), and also through them you can facilitate registration at new sites (for example, buzzbundle).

SMM

Does not need such a toolkit. However, it is very convenient to use services that make it easier to conduct a single advertising campaign, but on different platforms, and also conduct several at once.

The most successful application for this, in my opinion, is hootsuite.com. It has a wide functionality, allowing to solve most of the tasks:

• scheduled posting;
• simultaneous work with a large number of accounts;
• teamwork;
• additional analytics.

Goals

Crowd marketing goal

• Attracting a new audience.
• Getting attention to the product.
• Getting feedback from the target audience.
• Plus for external seo.

Smm target

• Forming a loyal audience of the brand.
• Retention of the audience.
• Attracting new fans of the brand.

Purpose of Reputation Management

• Neutralization of the negative reaction.
• Getting feedback.
• Return customers.

These areas have some functional intersections, but in general, they have completely different goals and methods to achieve them. By applying them, you will be able to solve many problems in promoting your company.

Which of these methods do you use?