Almost every other day I read another article talking about the importance of doing social media.
Typically, but perhaps not surprisingly, these tend to be witten by professionals in traditional ad agencies where the model of Us Doing Things To A Passive Target Market appears to be very much alive.
Here’s the truth: If your brand, your products, or your services are of importance to enough people then they will be discussed, talked about and reviewed, whether you’re choosing to actively take part in that conversation or not. Meaning if you’re a brand of any consequence at all, you’re most likely already involved in social media.
“A brand is what they think, not what you think” has always been true. And today, when their power to communicate can easily negate whatever ad dollars you choose to spend, the traditional communication models just don’t work anymore.
Which explains why so many marketers are facing such huge problems. They know and understand that social media is here to stay, but admitting that it is pretty much an untamable beast goes against everything they’ve ever known to be true. Controlling your message? Forget it. Legal sign-off? Don’t make me laugh. Having a guaranteed audience? Pull the other one.
If you’re coming from a worldview that is built around the idea of having control, that relies on Them and Us having different degrees of communication power then the realities of marketing in 2010 are frightening indeed and the temptation to try and compartmentalize social media initiatives as yet another media choice, to do social media, has to be huge. Give in to that temptation and you’re almost guaranteed to fail.
Social media is extremely good at highlighting both the best and the worst aspects of your brand. Last year a United Airlines baggage handler broke the guitar of Halifax based musician Dave Carrol. Rather than making good on the damage, United decided to hide behind the corporate firewall. In days gone by the musician would have complained to his friends and maybe him and a dozen others would have boycotted the airline for a couple of months.
In 2009 he wrote a song about the experience and put it on YouTube. There it amassed 6,000,000 views in a couple of weeks and forced UA into an expensive and embarrassing apology.
The lesson here is not to get yourself a twitter account or to start a Facebook group, the lesson is to first get your brand values and expressions right. Find out what your customers care about and then see where you can either publicly align yourself with their values, wants and needs or where you can make your own values known in a way that encourages previously latent groups to crystalize around them.
That way you don’t have to do social media. It will happen all by itself and it will happen in your favour.