Hi everyoneWe've all been involved in so many social media campaigns with clients lately, that it's good for all of us to step back for a moment and consider what we've learned.
Social media is not something brands or companies own. Yes it is media. But it was created by people, for people. That is the paradox many brands face.
An important point re-enforced here. " Social Media is not an advertising platform that was created by a brand or publisher. It's somewhat humorous to realize that by all aspects, Social Media was forced on to brands. Brands never wanted transparency.
Brands never wanted consumers publishing their perspectives about them to the world. Brands wanted to control the messaging and conversation from the top down and back up again."
There are some really important fundamentals here for all of us, because applying broadcast thinking to a social media conversation is not a recipe for success. In our experience of doing these campaigns with clients across Asia in the last 12 months, the main obstacles when thinking about social media planning are:
1. It's All About You: It isn't. It's about engaging with people with something interesting for the to engage with. Developing a social media campaign just to focus on your product and benefits alone - like make me a video on what is your favorite flavor - isn't really that engaging. But then create your own ad on YouTube about what you think our next flavor should be, is fun. There's a big difference.
2. Having a Fan Page is a Strategy: Read this. Many companies still want to build all their strategies just around just including Facebook or Twitter into the mix. Like linking with these platforms is enough to drive interest or engagement. Fact is you may not need a Facebook page or Twitter account to do social media, maybe it's another channel. Or it may be just the beginning, but you need to understand how will it engage with users, how you will maintain and drive traffic. And how it fits in with all your other marketing. Just saying we link with FB, Twitter, whatever, ain't cool any more. If it ever was.
3. All Social Media channels are pretty much the same: Think about this, Facebook is a community of friends. Twitter is a community of now. Foursquare is a community of place. Flickr is a community of images. I could go on...but you get the idea. Every social media channel has it's place, here's a starting point..
4. It's still all about reach & frequency: I still have clients request that we deliver only on reach and frequency even though we are using social media for other purposes. Look I understand, we are trying to reach as many as possible, but we need to get beyond just traditional mass media measures, and it gets back to campaign objectives. These campaigns provide an opportunity to listen, engage, and participate - yes hopefully widely. No one yet has all the answers on measurement, but looking beyond broadcast measures, like these, is a good place to start.
5. Social Media can stand alone: Digital can stand alone, many industries like banking and automotive are moving towards this. But generally, for social media campaigns, we need help letting people know where we are and what we're doing. Actually much of the success in campaigns we've had has not just been from other digital channels, but from ATL driving people to social media. Don't build and expect people to come, spend plenty of time thinking how to drive traffic.
As this recent article notes, "Social media -- what is it good for? Relationships, customer service, brand and image building, lead development, demonstrations of expertise and amplification of other channels. What is it not good for? Standing alone."
Cheers, Rob
