How To Sabotage Your Social Marketing, #1: Hating the Medium
Admit it.
You don’t need yet another online medium. You don’t need something else to do a campaign for. To measure. To pay attention to. To justify. You don’t even use Facebook or Twitter, you don’t have a YouTube account, and you don’t share your photos on Flickr. All you want to do is go home at a reasonable hour, put your feet up, and watch some TV. Or go out and see a game. Or spend some time, like, face to face with real friends.
But someone "up there" has decided you absolutely, positively have to be in social media, and there’s no way around it. And there are no shortage of self-proclaimed social media gurus and agencies ready to tell you how big social media is, how important it is, how it will change everything we are.
How do you feel? Angry.
We understand. It’s just another thing for you and your overworked department to deal with. You just wish the whole social scene would go away. Life would be so much easier if you only had to worry about television and newspapers.
And when it comes to creating that shiny new social campaign, you’re really not thrilled. You’re primed to look for every little flaw in the program, to make every possible objection to derail it (and hopefully make it go away), and to make sure the results are as poor as possible. Needless to say, this isn’t a recipe for success.
Now, we’re not saying you have to put on a big fake smile and pretend to love social media marketing. But with social networks being bigger than email, according to Neilsen, you probably won’t be able to avoid it for long. Even on the B2B side.
So what do you do? Well, you start by keeping the complexity down. Don’t be swayed by big shiny gaming-widget-based campaigns with virtual currency and karma-based user leveling, no matter how uber-cool the agency says it is. Don’t go for a multifaceted, year-long campaign that requires an army of bloggers and direct links into your ERP system to make it work, even if the agency says it’s right in line with your business model.
No. Start simply. Did you know that Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn all offer inexpensive advertising that frequently outperforms AdWords due to their ability to micro-target? Did you know you could simply create a presence and start listening to what people have to say? There are many ways to dip your toe in, learn a bit, and then do more of what works.
Social marketing may be new, and it may seem scary, but it doesn’t have to be complex. There’s no need for hate. Just a healthy dose of pragmatism.
