An article from
While brands still try hard to "crack the Social Media code," most seem to understand consumers no longer find the prospect of being friends with a brand more engaging than the single click it took to fan the brand page on Facebook. So why then are so many marketers planning to increase spending on social media ? Because they are clueless and at this point it's easier to follow the crowd than redefine marketing around consumer touch points.
I am so sick of all the hype and bull shit around social media. You'd think that social media is going to save brands and restore sales and make marketing relevant again. It just goes to show you that when marketers have to be more accountable for budgets they flee and follow others rather than lead and dig in their heels.
Nathaniel Perez has some guiding principles to help you get beyond tactical earned media generation and enable you to create richer and more successful "social movements" around brands.
You can shape the outcome, but can't prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.
From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial. Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive "in action". Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.
Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don't limit yourself... Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.
Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.
Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won't scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your "connectivity" step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.
Nicely said but I would say that getting people to talk about your brand is NOT enough today. You need to convert them to customers and to show management that your social media strategy is working (ROI). Will all this being said you still need to use social media as a business intelligence tool and to have a channel for customer feedback but please don't tell me it's going to save your brand.