I was recently involved in a panel discussion on Social Media use at Marketing Magazine’s B2B Marketing Transformation Conference. What was clear from the questions asked and the feedback after the event, is that there is little understanding of the dynamics of social media strategies amongst many businesses who sell to other businesses.
Social media is a bandwagon and everyone seems to want to be on it, or feels under pressure to be a part of it, often without considering basic questions, such as whether their target audiences use social media, or what they expect to achieve by getting involved.
According to MyCustomer.com in a recent posting Six Social Media Lessons from 2012 social media adoption by Marketing is not necessarily translating to transformation of the enterprise to support the process changes that being a social business can engender.
And so to my 5 reasons:
1. Do you know what you’re trying to do with social media?
Marketing’s conversation about Social seems to focus on one of two tactics which are needed to execute a social media strategy, rather than the strategy itself – content and channel. Facebook pages, Blogs or YouTube videos may all be great content types; Twitter and LinkedIn may be great channels to certain communities – but be clear about how and why either of these matter and articulate it as part of your plan.
2. Do you know who is going to be involved?
Social media is not the preserve of Marketing. Even if it starts out with just a WordPress Blog that is hosted, written and maintained by your PR company, it will evolve. Once you create content you will want to distribute it and not just rely on a search engine finding you by accident. So you will start tweeting, creating a LinkedIn page and so on, which will then begin to create interaction with your target audience – social has begun! So you need to think about who will respond to that interaction, what you will do next and how you begin to extend your community of followers. This means you need a social media policy, you need people monitoring and reacting to posts, tweeting and generally engaging – all of which means more targeted content is needed.
None of this is bad, but it requires resource, a plan, process and organisation from the outset. Be prepared.
3. Do you know how you will measure success?
eConsultancy recently reported that many businesses don’t know how social is being measured in their company. The research, conducted by YouGov, surveyed over 600 people at senior manager level or above and showed proving the ROI of social media was the main obstacle to businesses becoming more social. In Marketing, we like ‘Likes’ and Followers and Google +1s and Views. We like our Blog to come up high in Google rankings and show how the social media channel is creating links back to our Website. These are all good indicators of engagement with the content. However, we also need to show the relationship between these metrics and conversion to sales opportunities if we are to be able to justify investment in a long term strategy.
4. Where will you find the skills?
A recent Blog asked ‘So what is the laundry list of skills B2B Marketing managers have to source in the newly enabled inbound marketing world?’ which is an important question to ask in this new inbound digital world. It lists content creation (everyone is currently infatuated with ‘content marketing’ – haven’t we always had content?) lead nurturing and marketing automation. I happen to agree with these but they are not the 4P’s are they?
If you are a large company, you may be able to recruit social media ‘experts’ along with your Web Manager and SEO experts who can execute a coordinated digital strategy. If you are a small company then your marketing department may be a digital marketing manager who is just trying things out in a low risk way. However, many companies are attempting to develop appropriate skills in their direct marketing and field marketing teams. So it is even more important to understand your long term plan.
5. How will you manage the fall-out of your first negative social comment?
Because it’s out there. Someone somewhere will always hold a grudge and you’re giving them an opportunity to tell you what it is. How will you respond? If, like many, you want to use social media for service and support questions to reduce costs and enable customer self-service , then the risks are higher. To be a social business you need to re engineer processes around the customer – to become truly customer-centric.
There is a brave new world awaiting us in Marketing and social is at its heart. So maybe the next Conference on Marketing Transformation will spend some more time on looking at how we transform Marketing.