• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, February 6, 2008

Social media can be a powerful marketing force, but a new study from OneUpWeb finds that companies can easily make mistakes that alienate potential customers, or worse, simply fail to follow through with new content.

In its study, OneUpWeb first focused on a group of 12 products and Web sites it thought would be hot for the holiday and tracked social media efforts and resulting Web traffic, first in September and then throughout the holiday period.

While the 12 included such cutting-edge marketers as Apple, Nintendo and Starbucks, the report finds that while some companies cleverly leveraged existing social-media users into a powerful marketing force, others more or less abandoned them as time went by, says Tim Kauffold,

OneUpWeb's director of business development.

Based on such social marketing strategies as blogs, podcasts, forums, interactive video tours, social networks and virtual worlds, it says Nintendo Wii, Coach, and Sephora are among the big winners. And those that missed a few steps? Webkinz, Starbucks and Target.

Overall, the study finds that social media marketing did play an increasingly important role in holiday sales, and it expects that to increase in the months ahead. What seems to work best, Kauffold says, are marketers tweaking and evolving plans while still staying within the brand's personality.

Nintendo, for instance, took its social media off the Web site and put it all on the Wii gaming system. Owners are offered a "Wii Channel" and even a "Mii Channel," allowing users to create their own avatar as a playing persona. That channel allows users to share, review, exchange and comment with others; "Everybody Votes" pages encourage even greater community involvement.

"Sephora's In-Girl campaign invited existing Sephora customers to solicit online nominations for a seat on the In Girl panel," OneUpWeb reports. Because Sephora learned more about both the nominator and the nominee, "the program should render long-term benefits by helping them understand and build their consumer base."

A puzzler was Taryn Rose, a division of Nike's Cole Haan. Initially, because of its online relationship-building efforts through the founder's personal blog page, MySpace profile and use of video, OneUpWeb expected it to continue to build its social content through the holiday period. Instead, the company appears to have abandoned it: "We found these social media marketing efforts went generally unmanaged and quickly fell into disuse." Holiday traffic at the company's Web site was flat, the study finds.

Target's strategy misfired, the report says, when the retailer told its Rounders, a group of influential college students picked to promote the retailer, to conceal to Facebook groups that they, in effect, worked for the company. "The social community took it as a deceptive practice, and Target's online reputation suffered," Kauffold says.

"What surprised us most in the study is that we thought [that] since some of these marketers were using social media so well, that they'd keep it up," Kauffold adds, speculating that marketing departments may have underestimated the expense and time required to keep social media efforts fresh and active. "Some just let it die off. They had a huge opportunity, and then it just went away."