A Tweet does not a Community make…

So also, a Facebook fan page does not mean a social media strategy has been implemented.

But, these are just a few of the commonly misunderstood facts of the world of social media. What follows is a quick look at how some organizations and marketers get their equations all wrong around the concept of social media. This misunderstanding is what leads to a lot of players in the market believing that they are “with it” and have “got it” in terms of using social media in establishing a digital presence and spreading brand awareness.

Far from it.

They have, sadly to say, neither “got it” nor are “with it”. At best what they are really doing is using these channels as additional broadcast channels. Makes little sense considering that you already have far more established, much more effective and longer running channels for traditional broadcasting – adding a couple more online will merely add to the number of channels that are spewing out brand messages at people. If any of the online audience for some reason do not follow TV or print in any form, then they are the ones that would have benefit from receiving a brand message that they would have otherwise missed.

Its about Engagement.

The power of Social Media lies in providing platforms that will allow for the engagement of the various online communities in virally spreading your brand message, enable the creation of communities of brand loyalists, and leverage the power of online relationships that already exist across various social networks.
It is not an extension to TV, Radio or the print media that can be used as an additional channel to make announcements and broadcast messages. Sadly, that is what it ends up being used as, especially when those who have spent long years in traditional media step into the world of social media and make an attempt to incorporate it into their digital presence initiative.

What these enlightened folk do is sink in all effort into preparing a beautiful, flashy, dazzling brochure web site to which they will thoughtfully add on a couple of channels in an attempt to earn a claim to a “I’m Web 2.0 enabled and am completely social media savvy and am using it effectively in my overall marketing strategy” label. Part of this is true. The website and associated online broadcast channels will finally be a part of an overall marketing strategy. What is not true, however is that this makes them social media savvy and web 2.0 enabled as effectively and completely as they can be. This mainly happens as most learned folk do not understand Web 2.0 as a technology, or the ways of effectively using Social Media as an online marketing channel, or the power of leveraging online relationships in spreading brand awareness. So at the end of the day, what they end up doing is merely adding on additional channels for making announcements that will result in enhanced PR and nothing more.

Building a community is just the start. Engaging the community and leveraging the resulting relationships in these communities as well as in established social networks is the goal. There probably is no one way or any best way to do this. There are numerous best-practices and words of wisdom on methods and methodologies and choice of platforms for doing this floating around. What there is however a clear consensus on is the fact that engagement of your audience is paramount. And this is something that cannot be achieved by simply setting up a Twitter channel or a Facebook fan page and making sporadic/continuous announcements about your brand. Yeah, ok you have a great new PR channel, but that’s it.

So, then what is it really all about and how do you go about it?

As with any strategy implementation, you have to have a strategy framework and build a plan based on that. What this framework will streamline and help identify for you are the objectives of your exercise, who your target group is going to be and zero in on the channels that you need to use to implement your strategy.

Here is a presentation which attempts to capture the essence of a social media strategy framework and implementation. You will start out with identifying the people that you need to engage with. There is a very good Social Technographics profile that has been defined by Forrester Research which will help with identifying who should be your audience.What is social media? The company’s objectives need to be clearly identified so that you know what it is that you are trying to plan for. The strategy follows on from there once you have identified the audience and the company’s objectives. The strategy will comprise of what channels you will use and the manner in which they will be used in implementing your strategy. Finally, the technology identification will complete the picture in helping select what tools and platforms you will use to implement your identified social channels.
Again, there are many approach papers, methodologies and strategy implementation case studies floating out there on the world wide web. They would not have any commonly accepted way of doing things. But, like I said before, they all agree on one thing – you need to engage to succeed.

Here is an example presentation on formulating and implementing a Digital and New Media strategy using web 2.0 tools.
So have you come across any situations where you have had to deal with this kind of a scenario? It would be interesting to discuss and compare notes.

Please let me have your comments on this.

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