Social media as a guiding principle
Posted: May 15, 2009 | Author: downwith30kb | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dialogue, facebook, social media, strategy planning, twitter |8 Comments »Its clear to everyone now that brands can derive benefit from engaging in social media but the important thing for a marketing team to ask themselves before embarking is “have we got anything worth talking about?”
The hard thing about social media isn’t getting marketers to sit up and pay attention to it, they all want to know how to take advantage of all of the hype, its actually executing which is the difficult part and that’s because often times the brand doesn’t have anything really worth talking about over social media. Its a lot like the difference between someone on Twitter telling you what they had for lunch versus someone actually giving you information that benefits you somehow (which is the yardstick through which participants on the medium are generally judged). If a brand wants success on social media it needs to have something worth talking about otherwise like the guy sitting in his office with his ham salad sandwich no one will care about what the brand has to say on Twitter, Facebook or Youtube and their foray into social media marketing will be a waste of time.
Its very well established that a dialogue communication model is superior to the broadcast model so going full circle in the context of the depth of social media penetration if a brand doesnt have something worthwhile talking about then really this is an indication that their marketing is somewhat off compass in terms of creating dialogue strategies and they should look instead to recalibrating and directing their strategy towards something that will yield something worth talking about.
In fact I would go so far as to say that if a brand doesn’t have anything worth talking about on social media like Twitter then they should rethink their entire strategy and select thinking, initiatives and ideas that ARE worth talking about. In this way the guiding principle of deciding on which directions and ideas to promote is based around the notion of whether or not its something worth discussing with and between consumers on social media.
[I'm working on a diagram here to show how this can all fall into a cycle of planning, executing, sharing and evaluating so please wtach this space.]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyhayes/2973684461/in/set-72157613331811096/
involve, create, discuss, promote, measure…
Thanks Gary I like your diagram. I am keen to develop a model that incorporates the question of whether or not the underlying communications strategy advocates dialogue over social media and how this can be a guiding principle for developing strategy. It might be a little ambitious but I’ll be sure to tell everyone if I think I’ve cracked it!
I don’t know that an entire strategy should be revised based on the fact that a brand/company doesn’t have something worth talking about. However, once you get into the execution stage, it can prove invaluable.
It is a bit of a departure for sure but I think that if a brand did revise its strategy based on this principle it would only improve its proximity to its consumer. It would gain more in the way of feedback and how the consumer views the company, its products/want they want from the product and develop greater engagement in communications with consumers.
Can you think of any downsides to this?
I think the more a strategy is based on consumer insights the better and ensuring everything is dialogue based to me puts the brand more in touch with its consumer and social media is a great avenue for this.
advertising is the price you pay for being boring… Andy Sernovitz
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