Thankfully, there is a strategy that digital professionals can use to wrangle all the madness: Unification.

With more than one audience to contend with it’s imperative that you go where your fans, followers and users are. There’s the corporate website, company blog (or blogs), Facbook and Linkedin pages, Twitter account, YouTube channel, Foursquare presence, the list goes on. The hazard is that it can also dilute your brand and overextend your resources. This is where unification comes in.

Associate Editor Jennifer Van Grove, from Mashable, has a great article on managing company brands on the Web and touches on unification as one of her five main tips. She points out a great use case, Director of Interactive Marketing for the Chicago Bulls, Jeremy Thum. Jeremy and the Chicago Bulls Interactive Marketing Department is redesigning Bulls.com and focusing on pulling all of its online initiatives together with BullsConnect to provide a consistent brand experience across all fronts.

BullsConnect creates

a singular login and commenting experience across their online properties. In the future, they’ll be incentivizing fan activity with a Chicago Bulls points-based loyalty system to draw attention to this unification initiative. Moving forward the team will also work to bring a “Lite” version of BullsTV to their Facebook Page, as well as use it to spruce up their “dormant YouTube channel.

Thum explains that they have and will continue to re-build or build digital marketing components that are unified while still allowing unique opportunities to engage fans on the Web.

David Churbuck, the VP of Global Marketing at Lenovo also has interesting thoughts on this topic, though he refers to it as “recentralization” and focuses on digital marketing.

He describes how, in 2005 and subsequent years, IDG merged customer databases with the creation of IDG Connect. This database and lead generation consolidation assisted with providing a unified customer experience.

I had the opportunity to work on part of the IDGConnect project through the redevelopment and launch of CXO Media’s (part of the IDG family) e-newsletter program. Two of the challenges we had to overcome were sharing and combining CXO’s subscriber database with the other business units and implementing an email service provider (ESP) solution that allowed subscribers from all IDG properties to have one account management experience. My team led the way by choosing and testing a powerful ESP (Lyris) that was customizable and easy enough to distribute and teach to the other units.

Churbuck also touches on the challenges of managing far-flung social networking assets. He aptly points out:

Brands are falling over themselves to establish a presence on the highest populated social networks and sharing services. First: you can’t be everywhere, second, this is where the real chaos is occurring.

This has presented a real challenge for content and marketing teams worldwide. Global brands especially face a tough road. As Churbuck shares, “digital brands don’t have national boundaries.”

Why try to unify? You can’t control what others do and where they do it, but you can at least work toward ensuring a consistent message and experience.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.

Viralheat

Viralheat seems to be a few months old, judging by the history of their “In the press” section. It is a social measurement software as a service platform that provides social marketers and social networking types with an in-depth way to slice and dice information from Facebook, Twitter, “the realtime web,” and viral video. (And I suspect they’ll be adding more sites in the future.) One can then track, react and optimize social campaigns and audience engagement.

Poking around the site reveals a clean and easy-to-use user interface, as well as offering important geolocation data for global brands and an API to embed key statistical information into applications and internal websites for the movers and shakers at your company.

Notably, Viralheat has been instrumental in the helping to decide the outcome of the geolocation war between the two social-geo giants Foursquare and Gowalla after the recent South by Southwest conference.

For marketers grappling with analyzing the right social data, this primer post about ‘Making Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data‘ by Viralheat CEO and founder Raj Kadam on Mashable offers a great starting point.

Performable

Performable is a new product that’s in a closed beta mode. It offers analytics that help to optimize important online marketing tools such as landing pages, lead acquisition forms, newsletter sign up pages, targeted videos and contact forms.

At this point, the information at Performable.com is rather sparse. However, the potential is huge. I’ve been in countless meetings with UI designers, editorial teams, marketing and sales teams, as well as developers, trying to figure out how best to create a landing page, lead acquisition form or newsletter page. Each stakeholder has a different perspective and level of understanding. I would leave frustrated as these pages were diluted into watery mud puddles that proved to be ineffective in the end.

With Performable, one can: A. Easily create numerous variations based on stakeholder input without having to worry about design and development time and B. Easily gain insight from measurable real-time usage statistics. That’s a double win in my book.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any quick data on results or customer testimonials, but this looks like a good group to keep an eye on.

©2012 Blog de Puree. All Rights Reserved.