Old marketing for new media?
Category: Thinking pieces
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How do you maximise social media's potential for your brand? It does require new skills and new ways of thinking, but the danger is in throwing away everything else and forgetting marketing principles that are not only relevant but could also help you maximise the effectiveness of social media, particularly those within direct marketing and measurement.
Let's start with best principles for maximising social media:
Make sure the business is set up for social media - Lots of organisations get this wrong and Seth Godin describes this mismatch perfectly in 'Meatball Sundae.' Social media doesn't work in the same way as other channels; you're opening up the organisation and setting up consumer expectations that you are ready to engage in dialogue in all touchpoints, not just social media. Content and social media engagement also has to involve senior players. Habitat's use of a junior member of staff to implement their Twitter strategy was a good example of the consequences of getting it wrong - and this TechCrunch's take on organisations using Facebook or Twitter as sticking plaster back this up.
Make sure your brand is really social media friendly - let's not forget that the appeal of brands is built on their personalities and some brands are the sort of people you'd like to stop have a chat with on the street and some are not, they're more functional. More emotionally engaging brands such as Pot Noodle, Ribena and Starbucks are already welcome in social media - Starbucks has close to 4m Facebook fans. More functional brands have to work much harder, or decide to stay out of that space, because amplifying what they stand for or their creative work just won't do it. Brand owners need to understand where they sit and act accordingly, or they risk a sad and underwhelming presence on Facebook. Blendtec's brand perceptions may have altered drastically because of the phenomenal success of Will it Blend? (http://www.willitblend.com/) but if it had just started a Facebook page before then it would have been a failure.
Build relationships in their space, and play by their rules - You're in their world and you need to remember why they are there and play accordingly. Even if you hold on to the belief that the brand proposition is king, not something to be negotiated with consumers, you still need to forget it in the social media space, or you'll get caught out and exposed like so many before you.
These are good foundations to start with, but many social media strategies lack something more fundamental - clear objectives. Many marketing people would admit that they're in the social media space because their CEO has said 'why aren't we tweeting?' Not a good place to start and woolly objectives always mean woolly measurement, something that much of brands' social media activity is guilty of.
Too many social media approaches and measurement criteria are based on old school brand and PR success criteria - such as the number of consumers engaged (e.g. Facebook brand page membership and YouTube downloads), the amount of positive or negative chatter about the brand, using buzz monitoring tools, or keyword search behaviour. It seems strangely old marketing for new media.
But brands should consider other 'old school' models as well, e.g. bringing more direct marketing approaches and measurement criteria into the mix. Using such a conventional approach as direct marketing and applying to social media is heresy for many, but there's a strong argument for doing this and adapting for social media:
Most social media marketing breaks the first rule of smart direct marketing - Facebook pages for brands and many of the strategies behind them are guilty of investing marketing budgets in brand loyalists, who actually need less investment than those who buy into the brand as well as other brands. Of course, the smarter brands pick out the advocates and invest in them, but not enough brands do this.
Use the value exchange principle to collect additional data, prioritise, segment and migrate to different communications streams - Absolute heresy for many social media experts, because rule number one is not to try to control the relationship, let them decide the terms of relationship and never, ever try to migrate them out of their social media space. These experts are probably the sons of marketing men who said 'why would I want a relationship with a brand?' when relationship marketing was in its infancy. If I am engaged enough with a brand in the social media space (obviously not in those cases prompted by antagonism towards the brand) why couldn't I be persuaded to tell them more about me and sign-up for dialogue outside the social media space? Once you've built these foundations you can start to make smarter considerations about where and who to reward in longer-term one-to-one relationships, even to skim off those with the greatest potential and migrate into more conventional relationship marketing.
Widen the measurement of the success of social media through ROI-based calculations, including life time value and transactional data - Isn't it possible within social media to treat those engaging with your brand in the social media space more as if they are customers who actually spend money on your brand, and setting out to estimate it, or even really measure it. Why not? Why can't you take the next step on from the value exchange principle and use social media as a relationship marketing recruitment tool and measure it accordingly? Sure, stick to all the other measures and engage and tackle brand issues in social media, but isn't it just rude, and bad business, not to move the conversation onto the next level, and measure whether they do put their hands in their pockets because of it?
Many brands are still in their infancy in putting in place their social media strategy, playing catch up with other brands. Rather than investing a lot of time and budget into catching up the smart thing to do could be taking a different approach, and thinking more around different marketing principles and models and measuring accordingly is one smart way to do it.