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.
I’ve been struggling recently over a webinar discussion led by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. They seemed to both imply that early adopters of Twitter will profit and that when “everyone is doing it” the newest adopters will be too late to the party. It reminded me of network marketing (ala Amway) and that idea really saddens me. I have avoided the auto-follow options to build a follow base. I want to have real conversations and build real relationships through this media. But I have wondered if that makes me a fool who is wasting time while she could be first “building clout.”
My initial attraction to Twitter began after reading a NYT article about an itinerant food cart owner who had 5000 followers all waiting to learn his featured flavors and on which corner he would be located for that day. To me this was beautiful. It used Twitter as a convenient, instantaneous communication tool capable of delivering the message literally into the hands of potential customers.
If I ever sense that all the real value and profit in social media will funnel to those with the largest number of followers then I will tune out, turn off and unfriend as fast as I run away from every other traditional network marketing “opportunity.”
But I don’t believe that is the real value. The real value of Twitter to me is in how fast I can learn of the availability of something of interest to me specifically. If you don’t have something I want to hear about, then don’t bother me with a Tweet. On the other hand, if you’ve taken the time to get a sense of my wants and you have something that meets those…well, in that case you’re practicing the ancient slow art of customer service, but with unnecessary service delivery delays eliminated. I don’t believe that customer service could much improve upon such a formula.
Very interesting ideas, and thanks for posting. Like the blog a lot, will check back!
@Bobbie: I truly believe that early adopter talk is rubbish, quality cuts through clutter with ease. It is rather easy to stand atop that pedestal and proclaim that no one will reach their ‘guru’ stature, because they took a lot of time and hard work to cultivate their influence and followers.
Alternatively though, anyone can amass thousands of followers in the attempt to shout at their followers to join them on the Trump network etc, but all that is doing is bastardizing a worthwhile communications tool.
You are obviously getting something of value from using Twitter so don’t let the tall talk and egoism of arrival at “social media expert” get to you.
Also, isn’t it best to always show up fashionably late to parties?
I think this is what the Dominos commercial is doing, tackling the buzz head on and letting the consumer know the negative feedback has been heard and they have changed their strategy to reflect that.
It’s like their own YoTube video, but they payed a few hundred thousand more dollars for it, someone should tell them about YouTube…