Perspectives & Strategy

According to Lawrence Perry “Social media marketing takes time. If you want to experience success in it- you must treat it as a full-time endeavour and commit time and effort to it“. I would tend to agree and feel that there are three key elements necessary for successful business implementation of Social Media: Collaboration; Rapid & effective intervention; and Developing a revenue opportunity.

“No one has ever experienced overnight success in social media marketing” says Perry. I agree and here are some reasons why:

◊ Too many Guru’s, Evangelists exists, yet many have done little more than use Facebook

◊ The “social media strategists” come from traditional PR or Marketing background and most have used Facebook a couple of times.

◊ They have no consistent approach to present.

◊ Their firm has added social media as an additional service.

◊ Their networks don’t show that they are widely connected and are active in the Social Media space. Their LinkedIn account has not been updated since 2005.

◊ Should you Google them by name, it is difficult to find them.

◊ They don’t have an active blog with weekly posts.

◊ They operate a pay-per-post payment structure

I do thank Peter Shankman and Sarah Evans for providing some of the ideas behind these reasons. Yet as a new person in this space I am one person who is currently proving himself. My background is IT. I have been delivering solutions focused towards both Finance and Marketing elements of corporations for over 20 years. To me there is a massive intersection between Social Media and the ability to measure the results (through Business Intelligence).  Being laid off just before this recession started has allowed to research the development of Social Media. I will never claim to be a marketing expert, although my partner (a brand specialist) keeps telling others that I am. Currently I am working with three small businesses to help them define their Social Media strategy. Each are sewing the seeds to great things.

Social Media differs greatly from traditional PR and marketing. The traditional mode for marketing is to push a message, yet leveraging Social Media it is essential to build trust as a marketing tool. Sure Twitter is a cheap way to advertise, but advertise on there too long and people will stop following you, or worse block you. You cannot use Social Media for ‘push’ marketing other than to advertise on Social Media sites like Facebook and MySpace in the traditional mode.

Dell learnt this lesson when they got involved with Social Media they answer questions in their area of expertise. They are involved in the media and will leverage the media to build trust. on the other-hand CNN has over 150,000 followers yet follows 17 people. They leverage the media for push messages associated with traditional news media, yet I have seen a few occasions where CNN have been ‘late to the party’ when it comes to publishing the news. On one occasion the BBC had published a story about an event in the USA 4 hours before CNN did. CNN is guilty of not listening to the twitter stream.

One IT company I recently advised snagged a lucrative maintenance contract through the use of Twitter, being active on the channel and being the expert in their area. Being the expert in the Social Media involves offering advice to others for free.

One thing that is certain as we go into a new world is that Social Media is not simply about getting involved with Twitter and Facebook, or building you own blog. These elements must be done, but you must have the tools to perform Social Media Intelligence. This is one topic that I intend to return to in the future.