[Is] Social Media [A] Strategy?
This ‘social media strategy‘ thing, it’s been bothering me. Every brand seems to have or want one, yet I (a person who uses social media regularly) have only ever engaged with a product touting brand about three times in any of my many years of social media based activity. And I don’t think I am that abnormal when it comes to social media activity, if anything I’m more likely to engage due to my job. So, where are all the strategies? Or, more importantly, where are the ones that actually work?
Please help me out here if you can, I’m a little lost. What actually constitutes a social media strategy? And how does a social media strategy differ from a regular strategy? As in you don’t get a pub strategy in regular advertising, and most people I know spend more time in pubs than they do on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s important to decipher behavior in social media to make your communication more effective – but I don’t understand how that is specifically a social media strategy.
The best example of a ‘social media strategy’ I can think of is the Obama stuff. The problem I always have with using that as an example, in comparison to advertising a product, is that there aren’t that many products that are potentially going to run my country – so surely my potential to engage isn’t quite the same. Amongst the other successful social media work I can think of, and I can’t think of many, are Blendtec, Whopper Sacrifice and @DellOutlet – and I’d argue that neither of these are social media strategies – they’re just good ideas.
@DellOutlet is one of the biggest success stories/examples of a brand using social media. If you’re not familiar, @DellOutlet is a Twitter feed run by Dell that tweets exclusive discounts on Dell products. @DellOutlet currently has some 620,000+ followers and has sold about $2 million worth of stock after a year and a half of tweeting. Pretty good I hear them cry – but really, is it? Dell made some $61 billion in revenue last year, which kinda puts things in perspective, right?
Yes brands do have followers and fans, but these rarely amount to more than a 5 figure number and when you consider how many people are using social media, that’s cock all. It’s kinda like saying a 00.1 click through is good – it’s not, is it?
I guess what I am asking for is some examples. I constantly hear talk of social media strategy, yet I am lacking more than a handful of solid examples of it being more than a seeding plan. Yes, a seeding plan may well be a strategy, but that still relies on the thing you are seeding being good. Wouldn’t we all be better off concentrating on doing that?
Thoughts?
Comments
8 Responses to “[Is] Social Media [A] Strategy?”
Leave a Reply
@DellOutlet is a wonderful case study of social media strategies. It is considered one of the greatest success stories with the use of twitter…
I’m with you dude. At the moment social media strategies seem to be the ‘new’ emperor’s new clothes of marketing. In other words, a bit bullshitty.
Of course companies want people to talk about their product, or brand (in a nice way), they always have. But you’ve hit the nail on the head. People will engage in certain things (US election), these things are then held up as examples of successful social media marketing. But would you seriously expect people to be as engaged in whoever makes their floor cleaner? Or their toothpaste?
It seems to come down to the same old thing. You need to do something, or say something, that is significant and relevant or helpful – then people will be interested. Social media just seems to be another kind of media. Albeit a quite niche one.
An example might be the stuff we’re doing for the MPA with the ScreenThing site on Piczo. That is turning out to be one of the most successful commercial projects on piczo, and could be potentially held up as some clever social media strategy. But the reality is that it was just the most efficient way of reaching the audience. The key thing was still the content.
Sorry for rambling on fella. Yawn. Good post though.
The problem is, I think, that the majority of clients are blithering idiots with an appalling lack of knowledge, sensitivity and understanding of people and how they engage at any level with brands, products and services, throw the lunatic asylum of social media into this mix and you have a sort of intellectual meltdown resulting in quite frankly useless briefs and monumentally retarded expectations.
To be honest, this is the problem I have quietly kept to myself about internet advertising in general. I don’t think I have spotted a single ad relevant to me in all the years of my surfing. Either as advertisers we are really great at selling our own stuff to the client with a bit of BS or the ads are so f-ing amazingly good that I don’t ‘notice’ them when I am being sold to. Tricky one that.
Never mind, so long as recognition keeps coming along with the cheques
This is a good post, and i have to say i agree with you 100%.
Nobody wants to be chilling out with their friends only to have one of them constantly telling you about the benefits of Skittles. “You know what else is awesome… Skittles, especially the red ones, have you tasted the rainbow today?”. It just doesn’t work, the more we think of social media as being the same as social interaction we get some insights into why it’s so hard to gain any ground.
It only really seems to work when the conversation is truly organic. We’ve all stood around with our iPhones talking about the latest apps, the only real reason for this though is that Apple first of all made a great product, but secondly made a product that people genuinely care for and engage with, and then thirdly talking about it can actually benefit everyone in the conversation. If you consider social media simply engaging in a brand on your own terms, that’s a great example. When you align that with the Obama campaign it’s almost the same thing, Obama was a great candidate and he gave people a way to be heard, eventually that conversation could lead to some mutual benefit. He had a better idea of what people wanted, and they get the person who understands what they want.
This all comes down to exactly what you are saying, if there’s no product, or at least no good product, there’s no real social media extension. And if a company is only trying to “leverage” social media, and not engage actively in it, they won’t gain any ground. Then any strategy you have will either be eaten alive, or worse, just not even bothered with by the community.
Sorry for the rant!
Hooray! Rant is a good one Matt. Glad you agree.
Online social media is in it’s infancy and most brands have a long way to go before they figure out how to use it in ways that allows them to have relevant and meaningful conversations with their consumers. Everything we do online is an experiment. And for every success story like @Dell and the Obama campaign there are hundreds of botched attempts. We can blame it on the brands for not getting or we can blame it on the advertising agencies, digital shops, and so called experts who help them develop and execute their flawed strategies, but it’s just evolution.
During the dotcom gold rush, brands wanted in, advertising agencies and consultancies were happy to sell them some land and dynamite. Everyone wanted to get a job working on the interweb. People labeled themselves “Information Architects” and “Community Experts”, with little or no qualifications. just as we see so many “Social Media Experts” today. They built big portals and expected everyone to flock to them. We all know what happened next. When the smoke cleared, the bodies were counted, and the so called interweb experts had moved on to become financial, real-estate and mortgage experts a funny thing happened. Many brands and people who were not just in it to jump on the band wagon dusted themselves off and learned from the mess. They listened to their consumers, they found more relevant and meaningful ways to use the space.
The landscape changes so fast that brands have to constantly reinvent and adapt. If we try to apply all these labels, rules and standards we are just fighting progress. So all we can do is put stuff out there, learn from it, adapt and move on.
http://twitter.com/KeithCiampa
[...] Social media strategy ramble here. [...]