Monitor and Listen to understand customer needs. First, hire a brand monitoring company that can understand the needs of your customers in the real time social web. Radian 6, Altierian, Scout Labs, Visible Technologies frequently come up in conversation, and there’s a larger group of incumbents such as Dow Jones Factiva, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and TNS Cymfony. For those that want to create an online focus group –contact vendors like Passenger and Communispace who focus on what I’ve dubbed “insight communities”.

Start with by using sharing tools. These enable customers to share corporate created content such as videos, blog posts, images, and contests. Vendors such as Share This, Add This or other similar technologies can easily get a brand up and running. Why is this a good first start? It simple extends the corporate approved and created content to the social realm.

Create “On-Brand” Contests. Develop programs that maintain the sanctity of the premium experience by developing a program that encourages members to share the preferred experience with others. Example: Develop a Facebook app that asks a quiz “which one of your friends is most likely to buy our beauty product” and then encourage them to share it.

Highlight consumer created content from “preferred” segment. If celebrities are using your products and talk about them, echo it back and highlight from your own efforts. Example: highlight users of your products in your blog, from Twitter, or other social technology “See how Ashton sports our latest suits”, allow users to share and spread it to their own websites using simple tools like sharethis.

Develop or sponsor lifestyle communities. Branded communities, social networks, or bloggers can all be reached using traditional media relations tactics. Not unlike traditional sponsorship and spokesperson product trial programs, you can develop brand affinity in the social space through formal programs. The trick however is to become a platform to uplift their voice –not just insert your own.

Quelle: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/09/03/five-ways-luxury-brands-can-overcome-the-conundrum-of-social-marketing - via http://twitter.com/vascellari/status/3751657801