Social Media Part 3: "Gee, your hair smells terriffic!", and other things Social Media shouldn't be...

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and actually BE the thing that people are interested in”  Craig Davis, Global Creative Director, JWT

It’s time to take a look at what Social Marketing shouldn’t be.  First and foremost, it shouldn’t be an excuse to forget all the sound principles we’ve learnt as marketers.  Skills like distilling consumer insights and using such information for accurate targeting and content creation.  Skills like correct channel choice, channel mix and communication strategy.  

I ended the last post with the point that social marketing is the practice of exploiting online and mobile tools to achieve a communication or purchase outcome in the internet’s social networks.   I said that the viral nature and speed of social media platforms smash the social and communal conventions we are used to in the real world, performing at a speed and on a scale that is at once quite terrifying and bewildering.  And because of this, it is irresistible to people with an agenda. 

And heaven knows we marketers have an agenda.  We want reach and scale.  We want engagement. We want sales.  We want it all and we want it now.  And the thing about social media that’s causing such euphoria?  We get all of that at no apparent or significant cost.  It’s the magic bullet marketers have always yearned for.  But it’s also the new toy of marketing and like most new toys; is susceptible to frenetic and ecstatic overuse.

Yes, the platforms are mostly free to use.  Yes, (as P&G CEO Bob MacDonald Says) “it allows the little guy to get scale almost instantaneously”.  But the “costs nothing” nature of social media platforms really is way too good to be true.  

Effective communication with online tribes looks simple.  But disarmingly so.  If approached from the wrong angle or without planning, your incursion into online communities will smack strongly of a come-on by a showy player to a loose woman in a bar.  Without strong technical and content strategies, your attempts will be at best ostentatious; at worst heavy handed and obscene.  They will be to persuasive and enriching communication what the one night stand is to the formation of a healthy, long term union – fraught with sleazy pick up lines and fumbling attempts to consummate the relationship way sooner than is healthy.  In short, detrimental.

“Gee, your hair smells terrific”.  A distant cousin of "I can't believe it's not butter"

There are two simple reasons for this.  The first we’ve looked at: we’re won over by how “free” the platform is.  Second, we can’t kick the advertising bug.

In part 4 we’ll look at what social marketing should be...