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Social media is a sink hole. Sound familiar?
A company can pour all its available manpower and time, yet still barely make a dent in its brand recognition, brand value and sales.
There is a natural tendency here to make three critical mistakes. Almost every business makes them at one time or another.
By examining them, we'll also see what you can do better and how to avoid the traps...
1. Using Social Media As A Broadcast Platform
Because social media channels aggregate a lot of people in one place, there’s a strong temptation to use them as a traditional one-to-many broadcast platform.
Businesses put up their latest ad, or one slick marketing message after another, and expect the traditional equation of...
number of times shown × total audience number
...to deliver a percentage of conversions that compares to the baseline established in every other traditional mass-media channel. When that doesn’t happen, businesses think that social media “doesn’t work” and they move away, to focus on channels where familiar metrics show results they understand.
2. Treating All Social Media Platforms The Same
The blanket term “social media” creates a total blind spot for companies: They miss the differences of each platform.
This creates a sense of detachment and depersonalization in every message placed there. Clearly, the focus is on sending the message out, rather than reaching a receptive audience.
When that happens, not only is the voice wrong, but there’s also a profound disconnect between brand and audience, each ‘talking’ at cross-purposes to each other.
3. Failing To Actually Have A Conversation
Because most social media campaigns are approached from the direction of established brand engagement metrics, the “social proof” numbers revolve around actions such as +1s, Likes, retweets, etc.
This is sort of engagement has precious little sentiment attached. Because the connection made is fleeting, it always requires brands to engage in the sensational and the exceptional in order to stimulate an audience’s interest.
This creates an even deeper disconnect between a company’s marketing and its market.
The Catch-22 Question
Every time a company falls into these traps it comes out with a variation of, “there’s no established ROI in social.”
This results in social media being done at ever greater arm’s length. It becomes the afterthought into which are dumped parts of ongoing marketing campaigns taking place elsewhere. Sadly, the results fully justify the incorrect assumption and so further strengthen the self-fulfilling prophecy that social media marketing fails to deliver results.
Talk To Me
The thing is, all this can be avoided by asking one simple question: “How can I start a conversation?”
Right there, those six words encapsulate the difficulty and uniqueness of social media marketing. It also presents the key to solving the obstacles to measuring its effectiveness.
For a conversation to really start, you need to have something to say, understand who you’re saying it to, and say it in a way that will eventually lead to a connection. This rules out overt marketing of the “buy my stuff” variety, slick ads, and the kind of content whose sole purpose is to dazzle.
Conversations help create common frameworks that allow the establishment of character, shared values, and common concerns. In short, they help a brand become humanized, they change marketing messages into personal ones, create the opportunity for trust to be formed, and allow that elusive customer loyalty to take place.
Conversations require three important factors. These need not only to be true, but to be seen to be true:
- that a brand respects every single customer, equally, irrespective of the number of customers it has,
- that it be authentic and authoritative,
- that it reflects the values of its customers.
Seven Steps To Brand Authority
Authority in the online world is built through seven steps: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation and communities. Each of these requires that online activities have the same data density and attention to detail as offline ones.
Companies that “get it”—such as the Coca-Cola Company, Ford and Red Bull—find that social media marketing allows them to create passionate evangelists out of their audience. Those evangelists become partners in a journey of shared brand values and vision. The metrics they employ go beyond sharing numbers and include sentiment analysis, brand citations and brand perception values.
The Bottom Line
Unless you treat your online audience with the same depth of understanding and respect that you reserve for your offline one, you’re unlikely to avoid the classic social media traps.
But if you make this small change in attitude, you’ll find social media becomes your most powerful, cost-effective marketing channel to date.
What's your take? Weigh in with a comment below, and connect with David Amerland (Google+) | @DavidAmerland (Twitter).
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