Maybe what we need is a little deconstruction.
At Monday’s Social Fresh conference in St. Louis, I was delighted to join Sarah Evans, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, and Zena Weist on the closing panel discussion. During the session, an audience question got me fired up (no surprise, as the Social Fresh attendees were a very smart, engaged group).
A very nice woman (I wish I’d been able to get her name, if you know who it was please leave a comment) asked about discussing the merits of social media participation with a boss who believed it was a fad.
First of all, faddishness doesn’t invalidate. Sure, the Pet Rock was a fad, but it also made $15 million in six months ($56 million in today’s dollars).
Second, the social media tools and destinations will inevitably change, but considering 83% of online Americans are active in social media, and there are 425 million people with Facebook accounts, I think we’re past the lava lamp stage.
But third, and most importantly, conversations about “social media” are amorphous, and largely pointless.
Meaning Less
In our zest and zeal, our warm embrace of the transformative power of social communication, we’ve thrown everything we can think of into a bucket, and slapped the “social media” label on it. Our natural desire for compartmentalization and shorthand has caused us to kill the value of “social media” as a descriptor.
You’ll perhaps remember that “social media” was originally coined to reference user-generated content. And our modern definition of “social media” still includes that component. Problematically, however, the “social media” moniker is now also used to describe a great many things, similar only in that they are online, and involve some form of interaction between customer and company.
The difficulty in telling your boss that social media isn’t a fad is magnified substantially by the fact that you and she may be looking at social media through entirely different prisms.
We’d all be much better off if we stopped lumping everything under the social media, and instead focused more on the SPECIFIC outcomes that socialization of business can produce.
5 Primary Ways to Use Social Media
If you’re focused primarily on prospective customers and building awareness there are two options:
1. Social PR & Influencer Outreach
Using social connectivity to introduce your company or products to influencers. In some cases these are members of the media. In other cases, they are the new influencers, bloggers and taste-makers. In either event, your job in this circumstance is to create conversation.
2. Social Campaigns & Apps (social media marketing)
In this approach, you’re using contests, promotions, offers, and self-contained applications and widgets to promote your company or product. Couponing on Facebook, “make us a haiku and win” contests, and most branded iPhone apps fall into this category.
If you seek to straddle the line and reach both prospective (via search) and current customers, here’s your program:
3. Content Marketing & Thought Leadership
Most often used in a B2B scenario, you create and distribute free information snacks so you can sell paid meals down the road. Most blogging, video content, Slideshare presentations, Squidoo lenses and content marketing of that type fits into this category.
If you’re considering “social media” as a way to build loyalty among your existing customers, moving them from a relationship rooted in transactions to a symbiotic relationship anchored in advocacy, there are dual alternatives:
4. Brand Communities
Take your best customers – the 1% that really give a damn about you – and activate them. Bring them together, give them assignments, ask them for input, and turn them into a volunteer marketing army. Certainly, brand communities like My Starbucks Idea and Fiskateers are successful in this arena – and we’ll soon see many more companies using their Facebook fan pages in this fashion.
5. Social CRM
The new telephone. “Social media” will change customer service more acutely than it will change marketing. Social CRM (customer relationship management) is the emerging discipline of providing personalized helpful, meaningful service and support using social channels like Twitter (and increasingly, Facebook).
Whatchew Talking Bout?
If you’re talking to your boss about social media, and she’s thinking social campaigns and apps, and you’re thinking social CRM, you’re not even having the same conversation.
I’m not about to banish “social media” from Convince & Convert. I’m not courageous enough to swim against a tide of 110,000 global searches per month on Google for “social media”.
But, will you commit to at least drilling a bit deeper, and talking about 5 ways to use it – in addition to the generic, all-encompassing “social media” Frankenstein we’ve collectively created?
About Jay Baer
Jay,
I believe that giving structure and names for new ideas and concepts are essential to facilitating a meaningful conversation â especially when those objects are mere shadows and still forming. Not to get to fru-fru, but makes me think of Platoâs Allegory of the Cave. Absent ârealityâ, we still seek and perceive to understand from what IS visible, mere shadow, reflection or what not. I digress a bit, to get back on trackâ¦
Iâm one of the âaudience membersâ of the current stagecraft called Social Media, so my observations may be a little more naïve. Of all the conversations that Iâm reading/listening to, a consistent voice seems to whisper over all the buzz: Social Media is a new tool â itâs not new concept. I think what may make the Old School uncomfortable is that we are engaging in new evolutions of Advertising, Marketing and Sales USING Social Media⦠it isnât necessarily a new craft per se, just like TV was to Radio â different but the same. Weâve spent the past 2 decades gaga over technology, and lately with this tool called social media seems to have opened up another paradox of fundamental questions. Its vastness and fantastic viral nature is taking us zooming back DOWN to the hyper-local⦠I mean right down to the virtual chat over the backyard fence! Weâre connecting and reaching out in more intimate/public ways than ever before â albeit with a huge public lens focused upon it at the same time.
I personally love the customized, personal, connected feeling the new Social Media tools have enabled in my personal life. Iâm playing and learning the tools and approached it on this familiar level and consistently asking myself, how do we translate this to commerce? The village baker was our neighbor, friend, AND merchant. No different now.
One other thing new Social Media seems to also be borrowing from fundamental social patterns is the etiquettes of more personal (versus anonymous mass media) interaction: including, not barging into a party talking all about me. Itâs more politely accepted to come, listen, and learn the room; give first, then one receives. Itâs back to being humans again. What do you think?
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