In this post, I’m going to walk you through a social media strategy concept known as the homeland-embassy approach.
It’s an idea shared first by Steve Rubel, though I’m not sure he meant to take it as far and as literal as I’m going to here, but the basic gist is that your website is your homeland and your social networking accounts are your embassies.
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty of the homeland-embassy strategy idea and what it suggests strategically about how you execute, let’s take a minute to acknowledge the importance of proximity or where the online social engagement transpires.
Is it okay for a company or brand to engage on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin but be antisocial on their own website? Or do they need to socialize their homeland as well?
Michael Dell spoke about the issue of proximity in an article in Forbes back in 2006:
The first step was to add blogs and message boards in the hope that irate customers will talk to the company rather than gripe to the whole Internet. “If we don’t do that at Dell.com, it’s going to be on CNET or somewhere,” Michael Dell says. “I’d rather have that conversation in my living room than in somebody else’s.”