Time for a Strategy: Beware Social Media Tokenism - Social Media | P2P

Keynote: ‘Time for a Strategy: Beware Social Media Tokenism’

Speaker: John Bell
Heads up the 360° Digital Influence team
Twitter: @jbell99

@growwithorganic on ‘Time for a Strategy: Beware Social Media Tokenism’

“Is the act of simply using social media enough for business and marketers?”

This is what John Bell seems to imply in the title of his keynote, and it is a topic his blog touches on again and again. As Social Media strategist at Ogilivyand a professional marketer at the top of his game, John knows as well as anyone that social media presents business with a new set of challenges that a traditional advertising and marketing lexicology cannot comprehend.

And what John feels is needed is a Social Media strategy. I think I would agree.

For business, having a strategy or plan in any area – let alone social media - is not just important, it is vital if you are to succeed.

PEOPLE NEVER PLAN TO FAIL, ONLY FAIL TO PLAN!

If experience has taught me anything, it is that if you dabble in anything in your business you are unlikely to make it work! Social Media is just the same; lead your organisation blindly into the social media universe and chances are you are setting your self up for failure. Within a business, you have to be able to justify a business case, identify the goal and understand how it relates to the bottom line, and if you undertake social media activity without trying to maximize return and measure it, then it will not work for you. Essentially, if you are going to spend your company’s time and money, you had better justify it!

TIME FOR A STRATEGY!

So you need a strategy.

No problem! Marketing and advertising people are used to having a strategy. This is nothing new. But do you have the right strategy? As John says in his blog, social media is so new and different that the old rules don’t necessarily apply.

‘Social media is not just another channel, it is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior’

NOT JUST ANOTHER CHANNEL

John thinks that the main reason a social media strategy fails is that social media and traditional marketing or advertising are not the same thing. If you task advertising people to deliver a social media strategy, you get an advertising strategy for your social media. Advertising strategy is usually about generating awareness of the brand, product or message, not about genuine social engagement.

The point is that advertising is a different discipline. If you use an advertising approach to social media you go against the grain of the media. You miss the point of social media and the experiment fails.

A COMMON PROBLEM IN DIGITAL

I have found this to be a common problem in digital. The web design industry is a place where this happens all the time. For much of the 2000s, all that most people wanted for their business was a web presence. Normally this took the form of what was to all intent and purposes a ‘brochure website’. This was a website that looked and behaved like their offline advertising: literally a static, promotional online advert that looked and acted like their brochure. It looked, behaved and acted like an advert or brochure. In fact, many people still look for this today, and there is a huge industry built simply to satisfy this need. The reason for this is that the concept of a brochure style website is something everybody can understand.

However if you work with the grain of the web medium, your website can and should be so much more than this!

• It can be a proactive communication tool.
• It can be an experience
• It can be a customer conversion or retention tool
• It can cross sell or Up-sell.
• It can provide a service to your customers.
• It can turn customers into advocates
• And so on.

Likewise, my experience in digital marketing for the recruitment industry has shown me that many HR Managers and Directors find it difficult to even begin to comprehend how social media should change the way they recruit and communicate internally. (you can get a white paper on the subject here.) However, this isn’t surprising because, as John alludes, marketers and advertisers often don’t appear to get social media either.

So, as I think John will seek to point out, social media is quite different to traditional advertising. Indeed, in my opinion social media is in fact so much more than a traditional marketing or advertising channel. I don’t know whether John would agree with that, but I think he would agree that in order to succeed in social media you need a strategy that runs with the grain of the medium, not against it.

Okay, so what makes a social media strategy?

One fundamental difference between social media and traditional media and marketing channels is that social media is a mass franchise media. It is a democratised environment. Everyone and anyone can have a voice through social media. As a result it turns the traditional one way, top down model of business marketing and communication on its head.

In social media, the conversation is already happening, and you don’t control it. A social media strategy is about engaging in that conversation in a positive way. You can see this happening right here on this site. If you look at this site, you will see the Likeminds hashtag conversation going on right now, in real time.

Another important thing to understand when defining social media strategy is that you can’t identify a one size fits all solution, and any solution you come up with will change because the medium is so fluid. Context is all-important. A social media strategy can include lots of different disciplines and media from video to micro-blogging to PR to viral and gaming - and a good strategy will include many of these, and new ones as they come online – so understanding context is everything. As someone said to me just the other day: (rather prematurely I think!)

‘Remember MySpace?!’

The third component of a social media strategy that I think is all important is that social media isn’t an end in itself. The worst thing you can do is establish a social media department, come up with social media policies and start undertaking social media activities in an attempt to be a social media organisation. Social media isn’t the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s the rainbow itself.

FOLLOW THE SOCIAL MEDIA ROAD (and expect road works)

What I am trying to say is that a social media strategy can be applied to any area of your business, and dont get hung up on how you are doing it today, because you will probably have to throw it out and start again at some point. Just like any motorway in the UK, it is going to be under a state of constant repair.

All departments in your business can use social media strategy and apply it to their activity. Social media is about engaging on a person to person level and applying this thinking to your business allows you to do things in a way that we are predisposed to do them in. We are after all, ‘social’ beings who have for millennia lived in ‘societies’.

What then, could be more natural for ‘social’ beings in a ‘society’ than ‘social’ media?

So what are the key components of a social media strategy?

So John’s Keynote will seek to explain in his words why you need a strategy for social media, and then the panel will seek to identify some key components of a strategy.

In the meantime what do you think? Please let us know what ideas you have! Here are few to get you started, but my list is by no means exhaustive!

Identify your goal: In order to be successful in social media, you need to know what you are trying to achieve. If you don’t know what this is, then look at your business plan or your organisations raison d’etre. Anything you do in social media should seek to advance you in some way towards your goals. Just remember that social media is better for achieving some goals than others. If you do not have a goal, then there is nothing to strive for or measure against.
Think in terms of people centric engagement. Communications and interactions in social media happen on a one to one (person to person) basis: You need to understand that if you want people to engage then it is going to be about individual engagements that are probably reciprocal in nature, not one way, one message, one size fits all solutions.
Empower your own people: If social media is people centric, then you need to provide your people with the skills to engage in social media activity. This is a radical step for many organisations and possibly one of the hardest to achieve in a culture where the message is traditionally very tightly controlled. However, it is a necessary step because in the world of new media, you no longer control the message.
Social media is a set of tools: get to know your tools. The tools change, some are better than others and they all do different jobs. You need to know your tools.
Social media is a streaming media: Social media happens in real time, it is a conversation. You need to approach social media as a stream of information and act in real time with a long term commitment.
Have an opinion, or at least be prepared to say something: Engage with people. They are already talking! If you are clever you will make it relevant to your product or service.
Listen as well as speak: Understand need – your organisation's need, your users needs
Build digital real estate: People don’t come to you, they are out there in the social media universe and you need to find where they are having conversations that you need to take part in.
Measure: Digital comms are easy to measure so make sure you do it.
Be Dynamic. Dont fear change: The media is going to change a lot and quickly. Be prepared to throw it all out and start again.
Don’t operate in a social media vacuum: Social media is an integral part of your wider digital strategy, your website and search marketing, and a way of approaching every aspect of your business from HR to Finance. Don’t put social media in a box!