SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT GOING TO SAVE YOUR BRAND

Richard Meyer

Let’s get this straight..

  Social media purists are telling me to forget marketing and think customer happiness (whuffie*)

Dollars are hard to come by

  But I am being asked to do more and show results for every dollar we spend.

And so are new FTE’s

  Going to my boss to ask for more FTE’s for social media, when it may not work, is some heavy lifting right now

Watch out !

What’s changed?

  Consumers decide which social media platforms are worthy of their time, not the platforms themselves.

  Consumers don’t trust advertising or businesses anymore.

  Consumers want more while spending less   Consumers now have a platform to tell brands what

they really think of their marketing and products.

Consumers now rule and control the message, not marketers

Ouch ! Can I do anything about it?

Yes you can but social media is not going to save your brand

Social media is part of a integrated marketing strategy

The reality of social media

  Consumers join social networks for a lot of reasons but nowhere do they say;

“I want to have a relationship with a brand today”

In fact

Awareness, even in social media, does not translate into conversion

More harsh realities

  Forget the bullshit about having a conversation with people via social media because the realities are;   the path of influence is not predictable

  a burst in traffic sent by an influential blog/event is not usually sustained

  our influences change frequently as do our needs

  influence can grow fast or slow, but can disappear fast or slow as well

  there is a big difference between ‘DISCOVERY’ and ‘BUYING DECISIONS’

OMG !?

  So even if my brand has hundreds of thousands of follower on a Facebook page it may not equal brand/business success (i.e. bottom line sales results) ?

?????? !!!!!!

But there is so much news around social media why not make the leap

  Social media is NOT a strategy; it is one tactic that you can use to both listen to and talk with your audience.

Therefore, before you leap

  You need to continue to use all the marketing channels that are relevant to your audience and stop trying to “sell them” so hard.

Don’t get downwind of the hype

  Sure all social media has to be people centric but at some point your efforts had better take that consumer and move him/her to a customer or else you’re farting in the wind.

Because a lot of companies are using social media

And they would have you believe it has been a success

But the reality is very different

  Gartner predicts that over half of companies that develop a social media campaign will fail, potentially having a negative effect on their brand

What’s really happening

In fact most don’t even know how to measure social media ROI

And a lot of barriers remain to implement effective SM programs

So where is the disconnect ?

  Consumers have become a lot more skeptical of interruption advertising.

  During an economic downturn, when customers are hard to come by, marketers will try anything to get new business.

  Some believe that happy customers mean more business and that social media can make customers happy but that is not true anymore. To a certain extent even happy customers are not loyal anymore.

Consumers have their own ides why they “friend” brands on social media

Then there is just plain

Sometimes we’re just too damn busy doing things that we really don’t have time to think about our brands marketing from a consumers point of view.

There are some lessons from early social media pioneers though   It’s not a department or

company that owns social media it’s the consumer.

  Getting people talking in existing communities is key, don’t try and recreate what’s worked.

  Some of the biggest opportunities in social media are for internal use to help empower employees and share ideas with one another.

And please ?

  If you decide to implement a social media marketing program use a FTE.

  Do you really want an “intern” to be the primary contact point for your brand?

Also remember that

  You can spend a lot of hours and hundred’s of thousands of dollars trying to make consumers happy but that does not necessarily mean that it will improve your bottom line business objectives (sales)

So before you even start thinking about social media ask… 1.  Is my target audience online and

using social media? 2.  Do they trust us? 3.  Can we give them a reason to

have a relationship with us that also meets business needs?

4.  Do we have the resources to both implement and measure social media tactics?

And don’t ignore other channels

  Social media is just one channel.

  It works best when it complements, not replaces, other channels

Also remember

  That the web is still evolving and some changes in how consumers use the Internet are likely to take place. Will Google’s Wave lead to the

decline of some social media portals?

In summary..

  Consumers rule   New marketing has to

acknowledge that consumers are in control but that doesn't mean that you should trash current marketing thinking.

  Marketing has to provide real results to the bottom line or it’s just farting in the wind.

  Social media is a tactic not a strategy and it alone is not going to save your brand.

About Rich….

  Consumer centric marketer   owner http://www.onlinestrategicsolutions.com/   BLOGGER

 http://richsblog.com  http://worldofdtcmarketing.com

  Passionate Internet marketing person who believes if you find a job you love you’ll never work another day in your life.