Social Media ‘Experts’ Don’t Get It
It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.
Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn’t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you’re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.
Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.
What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn’t normally have access to. If you aren’t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you’re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.
It’s laughable to see corporate Twitter accounts being followed by 50,000 people – but that corporate account is only following one person. What is that? There is no interaction, there is no socializing, and it’s not social media. It’s almost more laughable when a corporate account follows 50,000 people and still acts the same way the corporate account following one person does. If you don’t occasionally respond to the people that follow you and ask questions it isn’t social media.
Social Media also isn’t another place to jam your brand down consumer’s throats. I follow about 180 people and I probably actively pay attention to are the people who post funny things or post interesting topics. The people who just post a bunch of links to new products – well I don’t follow very many of those. I’ve also started to trim down the people who I don’t find interesting or hold conversations with.
I recently saw a ’social media expert’ tweet about how they thought it was funny that people with less followers than them would make posts about how to gain twitter followers, and then followed the tweet with a profane hash tag. That person followed some 3,000+ people, what do you think the percentage of people she actually communicated with out of those 3,000 people was. I’m guessing less than .01%. It’s pretty easy to get 3,000 people following you if you follow 3,000 people. The real expert will be the person following 3 people but its followed by 3,000.
Another way people misuse Social Media is they don’t have a plan. ‘We’ll do it because the kids are into it’ isn’t a plan – well it is a plan, but not a plan for success. If that’s your attitude, it’s time to wake up because the internet isn’t going anywhere. You as marketers have the ability connect and get more data about your consumer than you have ever had. Find out what consumers like and dislike about the product. Somebody somewhere hates your product – get over it.
Social Media isn’t Facebook, isn’t Twitter, isn’t MySpace. Don’t get the idea that being on the most platforms means you’re social media forward. You can get more results just using Twitter than all the others combined if you know how to leverage it. Social Media is conversation and dialog with the consumer. If you allow the consumer to leave feedback on your site and actively us the information it supplies that’s more social media forward, and useful than creating a thousand Twitter accounts to have some phantom Twit post to. Social Media is trendy – today it’s Facebook and Twitter, tomorrow who knows?
Do you think the only place people are going to talk negative about your product is on your Facebook page? Why not take the opportunity to defend your product head on, or realize you have serious problems and actually fix the damn thing. It isn’t the 1930’s anymore – word gets around fast when something’s wrong. Because you don’t let people see bad comments on you blog doesn’t mean nobody will see them.
As Dave Culbertson of Lightbulb Interactive points out even most large corporations don’t get Social Media. A big example of this is Ford, which shouts ‘We use social media, we’re hip and cool’ but it fails to be nothing more than the same old tactics of marketing days of old. He calls companies that do this ‘social media chickenhawks.’ See Ford has social media initiatives – but they don’t use them. Dave explains that Ford started off with a neat idea but dropped the ball by only offering up one vehicle model, one that isn’t even sold in the US yet to and then didn’t even bother to interact with the consumers they lent the car to. This point is clearly lost on Ford as their ‘Social Media Guru’ – Scott Monty, who responded to Dave and just didn’t get the point Dave was trying to hit home. Ford should be letting people review their cars on their site – much like most electronics site allow users review products.
It’s about the conversation. Engage the consumer or take the ‘Guru’ off the resume. Because if you’re just doing the same thing you’ve always done, you don’t need a new title, unless that title is Social Media Chickenhawk.
I’d argue that it’s not about the conversation at all. It’s about real relationships. And most companies will never have real relationships via Twitter, Facebook, whatever. In fact, most situations on the Internet will never build a real relationship unless you do something about it.
I think this will become more apparent 5 years from now (when it’s too late!) when companies realize that the ROI in having a Twitter account is ridiculously low.
I’d argue that most people on your Twitter feed would not go “out of their way” to help you as Seth Godin brilliantly puts it. Time to start build relationships the real way: by knowing people.
I guess your blog won’t let me embed a movie, so here’s what I was talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0h0LlCu8Ks