Social media is only one way to connect to customer and should be treated as a vehicle, not a program. There, I said it. I know it is heresy, but it is the truth.
I was talking with a lot of colleagues and friends in the 30 something range and found that social media for them was more effort than it produced. They were too busy to tweet. They didn’t get much value from Facebook other than keeping up with a small group of friends they couldn’t see all the time. The rest of the time Facebook was annoying and they didn’t frequent it, and now the privacy issues made it even less desireable. LinkedIn was mostly a way to maintain a contact database with professional colleagues. YouTube was entertainment. What they did use religiously was email and texting. Two things I got out of this were:
1) These 30 somethings were successful professionals with decision make authority and spending capacity both personally and professionally. Social media has only limited value to them.
2) Social media was hype and comprised only a portion of their communication and social time. It did not fundamentally change the way they were communicating with friends and colleagues.
One of the things I see companies and marketers do when they get the social media bug is to approach social media as a separate program. This really misses the point. Marketers have a multitude of communication vehicles available and instead of thinking about the best way to converse with customers, they think about what is the best new shiny method they can use and focus all their energy there. Teams are even split by vehicle (social media, email, search, web, online display, etc) making marketers experts in a narrow band of communication. What’s the point in that? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be thought of as a great marketer building relationships and business. I don’t want to be known only for my ability to communicate in 140 characters.
We all know the social media avenues available to us so why over analyze at this point. Most of us have used them personally and its either become our sole means of touching the world or, on the other hand, we are burnt out or driven out by the social media outlets and the ‘why did I friend this person?’. In many ways, social media just is and we don’t think about it much anymore. This is where marketing needs to be. We shouldn’t think about social media anymore, we should just use it.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Who are my customers?
- How do my customers learn about what I provide?
- Where do my customers go to learn about what I provide?
- What vehicle provides the best venue to show my value?
- What level of trust do my customers have with my product and brand?
Notice that there is not one mention of social media or any other marketing vehicle. It is all about how to market your company and product the best way to get people interested and to purchase. Social media may just be that venue either as a leading component, an aspect, or not at all. It may also depend on the research and decision cycle of the customer for your product. The key is how you position.
The way to make social media work is through discipline and integration with our existing communication vehicles. Treating it as its own separate effort will not get you the biggest benefits and return on investment and effort you could. You need a varied tool kit for marketing that includes social media in it. It provides lift, it doesn’t provide all.
