If you work in the web / interactive marketing industry you have no doubt had to sit your clients down and have the social media talk. The whole social media buzzword comes up in just about every conversation these days. Something that I have found myself having to do is to debunk a lot of pre-conceived notions as to what social media can bring to a customers bottom line.
While I agree that there is no better tool for getting the message out there, it still all comes down to the message. If a clients message is not as good as their competitors message, or their product or service description is lacking, it’s going to get pointed out a lot quicker in a user generated content environment than it is anywhere else. Now, this is not to say that all of our clients have bad products or services, let’s just say that they have a great product or service but they don’t do a good job “selling” it in an interactive environment. I will go as far as to say they might have an awesome product but are promoting it with dry white-papers or boring static content and product pages that, frankly, no one wants to read. Adding social media to the mix is just going to irritate the problem instead of making it better…
I think that before pushing existing content onto the social spectrum, a close evaluation should be done to see if the information on hand is in tip-top shape. This blog post comes on the heels of another post I recently launched where I talked about how Social Media has caused a lot of us in the industry to stop preaching the basics of web2.0 to our clients, primarily blogging.
As I mentioned earlier, I find myself debunking a lot of myths about Social Media with people that I talk to today, and this is probably partly my fault, I talk about it a lot. Probably because as long as I have been in this industry, no greater tool has come along for pushing content and building an audience, but losing sight of the fact that social media is a tool has given a lot of businesses the idea that they can just plug into it and boom! overnight success!! This is not the case.
Granted, having a presence in the social realm should be a top priority for any business, regardless. I always tell clients that the conversation is going on anyway, you may as well have a voice, but it’s the voice (aka your message) that needs to be right on target and where you focus your efforts.
As I watch clients sit there as we discuss social media I can’t help but notice their wide hopeful eyes, and misleading clients is something my partners and I would rather get stung by hornets than do, so we are cautious as we go into our spill to emphasize that it’s all going to come back to what they are already doing. If they are doing a terrible job promoting their brand right now, it’s going to be compounded by adding social media. They need to re-evaluate the basics before going into any type of social campaign…
I see this wide-eyed hopefulness that we have to debunk, or rain on, as one of the biggest byproducts of social media becoming a buzzword.
Cotton, you've brought up a very valuable idea in this post – an idea that is often overlooked in many of the discussions I've been in about social media. Because much of the “wide-eyed” zeal is promoted by social media specialists themselves, with the common mantra you note that a conversation is probably going on, anyway, so it's better to join it than not. But not too many zealots/evangelists (and I'm one) go on to point out to someone what you (and I) believe, that “If they are doing a terrible job promoting their brand right now, it’s going to be compounded by adding social media.”
But that's NOT to say that someone shouldn't jump into the social media space – and I don't think you were saying that. Re-evaluating the basics might be necessary before doing anything else. OR it just might be that adopting a specific tone or engagement strategy in social media MAY help…even if their basics are not up to snuff. Each case is different, as I'm sure you know. So while I agree that use of social media will not put lipstick on a pig, I'd hesitate to tell ALL pigs to wait to jump into the mud. : )
Patrick – Thanks for the comments. I agree, eventually all of the pigs have to get into the mud (love this analogy), but before any of my pigs (clients) jump into the mud pit, I want to make sure they have some skills to make them stand out instead of just being another muddy pig. LOL.
Something that I think has been neglected a lot today are some of the things that we learned pre-Web2.0, for instance, I think that if people can blog effectively and know how to put together an interesting enough ad campaign, they can lean on social media to really get their message to the masses and have great success. On the other hand, a competing brand with possibly an even better product with the exact same social following could roll out a less interesting campaign, with the same boring approach they have used for 20 years, and before you know it the people who were swept off their feet by the competitors campaign will be tweeting to their friends about how the other product or brand (inferior product) sucks. The success of social media campaigns today (as I see them) is heavily based on perception. I have been encouraging my clients to think outside the box, but not to abandon the basics at the same time. Just make sure they bring their A game because w/ social media it's always a packed house staring at you.
Thanks for the comments.