Is Social Media All Sizzle and No Substance?

THE SKINNY
Everywhere you look, people are banging the social media drum. “You need to be on Twitter. How many Facebook Fans do you have? Do you have a blog yet?” Is it all sizzle without substance, or can it be leveraged as a practical way to market your brand to customers?

THE SCORE
Shawn Jones from Edelman says that to be successful in social media marketing there are 10 principles you should consider:

1. Establish Measurable Goals: Track key performance indicators: Awareness, impressions, sales and advocacy

2. Community is King: Engage with and take the community seriously in a two-way dialogue. Invite participation and user-generated content, not just push out your own content.

3. Make Everything Shareable: Make things that are of interest sharable with your target audience. Don’t make it difficult for them to find the content they need. Popularity = quality content in the mind of Google.

4. Embrace Your Blog: Don’t take your blog for granted. This is an important source of content. Make postings frequent, fresh, and relevant to your audience. Establish trust and authority. Use multimedia when possible.

5. Foster Relationships: Speak to people directly and interact with them. Respond to comments, postings, and reTweets. You want to cultivate brand ambassadors.

6. Engage Your Audience Offline Too: Don’t put all your eggs in the social media basket. Use a blended approach that includes traditional marketing and live events.

7. Optimize Your Content: Your content needs to be findable online. Use keywords that your target audience cares about and Google will find through search.

8. Have a Social Embassy Strategy: Use each online tool strategically rather than duplicating content across all social media channels. Use it for what it does best.

9. Leverage Partnerships: Think about who you and your audience know and care about. What partnerships are a natural match for co-branding, promotion, and storytelling.

10. Prepare for the Worst: Think through how you will respond to crisis communication if and when it happens. And respond quickly when a crisis does occur.

Joe Strupek, State Farm Insurance says that often in the mind of corporate executives, social media is a bright, shiny object that attracts people’s attention because it’s what’s new. If you think about it, prior to the Internet, other early forms of social media included things like CB radios, Ham radios, party telephone lines. In each of these technologies, people shared information on more than a one-to-one basis. To be successful in social media, Strupek suggests the following:

1. Engage your customers in a conversation: listen and respond. Don’t just try to push content out to create buzz. It’s about the conversation as much as the content.

2. It’s not about your online content, but your customer’s online conversation. You have to be prepared to respond to your audience in both long-form blogs and press releases and 140 characters on Twitter on their terms.

3. The online influence of customers: The average person has 300 Facebook friends and 150 Twitter followers. This gives their voice influence for or against your brand.

4. Listen often enough on social networks to know who to engage or not engage with online.

5. “We’re all public figures now,” says Tom Friedman at the New York Times.

6. Social media has turned everyone with a mobile device into potential reporter about your brand (for better or for worse.)

7. “You are who your follows say you are,” says Steve McKee. Find out what people are saying about you and your brand.

8. Net/Net: Listen, Educate, and Help your customers online.

Matt Gibbs shared his insights about social media from his experience managing Playboy’s Smoking Jacket Web Site. His challenge And adult brand that is not safe for the workplace. Moving the Playboy brand from “I read it for the articles” vs. “I read it for the tweets.” They’ve adopted the CERT model: Celebrity, Engagement, Revenue, Traffic.

1. Celebrity: Providing a platform for maximum exposure and development. They had to deal with the reality that the fame of monthly celebrities fades over time. To adapt, they trained the celebrities Playmates on how to post on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

2. Engagement: Constantly connecting fans with the brand. If you didn’t work for your brand, would you follow it on social media? Post content frequently and on schedule. Don’t rely on advertising. Make your social media outlets a destination rather than leaving it up to chance. Treat fans like VIPs and give them exclusive content. Ask their input on what content you post.

3. Revenue: The key is to monetize without weakening the brand.

4. Traffic: If you follow the first three steps of the model you will generate traffic that you can analyze and monitor to learn more about your customer’s needs and preferences while building a relationship.

THE SCORE

Social Media can be a bright shiny object, but it loses is luster if it isn’t leveraged effectively. Social Media needs to be an integrated component of a marketing campaign. Once implemented as part of an overall strategy designed to connect with you most important audiences, you will start to reap the benefits of attracting fans and creating engaged customers. Like all marketing strategies, through social media customers are looking for compelling content, and a relationship with a brand they can trust.

Source: Chicago AMA Meeting on Zen and the Art of Social Media, October 6, 2011.