This morning the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Use Social Media to Bond With Customers“by Kelly K. Spors. The article discusses a few ways to use social media tools and offers a layman’s explanation of how to get started with social media.
“The best way to figure out what value social-media tools can have for your business is to try them out. You usually just go to a site and sign up for a free account. And most offer quick tutorials.”
I definitely agree with this point, the best way to get involved in social media is to go out and just experiment. However, that is not the full battle. If you just go experiment with youtube by putting up a few company videos only to find that they get little traffic, does that mean youtube is a horrible social media platform? Well, not necessarily. While I do think it is important to go out and experiment with various social media strategies I think it also very important to understand why you are getting involved in social media. Not only that, but you need to be clever with how you want to reach your users. Putting up videos, updating twitter 10x a day, writing a blog, etc. does not mean that you are going to be successful in social media.
Maybe you want to offer discounts or special promotions through twitter, why not give you the first 100 blog comm enters special access to a feature, how about starting a charity campaign where you donate $1 for every view your video gets on youtube? Of course these are just a few of many way that you can use social media, but the point is you have to be clever.
The Wall Street Journal article makes it sound as though all you need to do is experiment with a platform, build usage by letting all of your contacts know about your social media profile, and just keep your content fresh. Well it is not just that easy. I’m not saying you need a whole process or some in depth 50 page strategy and marketing plan. I’m just saying that you need to think of something clever that will make your users want to engage with you. It’s about managing expectations. You don’t want to just go out and create a bunch of social media profiles and then get upset when nobody is interested in them. YOU have to make them interested. Offer something of value, perhaps even something behind the scenes.
The Wall Street Journal article is not a bad one, it just misses the whole point on being clever and creative with how you reach your users and misses the synergy between all of the social media platforms. Social media is a collective, if you user several platform you need to connect them.
Again, be clever and be creative!
What do you think of the Wall Street Journal article? What other advice would you give to companies looking to get involved with social media?
Thanks for reading
Hi there-
I am actually quoted in the article :), but I agree with you 100%. We help our clients come up with a social media strategy, just like you would for any other marketing or PR campaign. Even better is if you can do some research first to determine if your clients are using these tools and if so, which ones?
We then definitely try to help them be creative, instead of just blogging for the sake of blogging or putting up a page on MySpace and never visiting it again. The businesses who will be successful online are the ones who think about what their audience wants and then tries to deliver some truly informative and entertaining content that meets those needs, yet still positions the company positively. And of course does it in the right forum.
Great post!
Other than Lynn’s sage advice the rest of the article was pretty terrible. It’s like starting a home improvement project with only a vague outline of what you want and a random selection of tools. You’ll spend a lot of time at it, but probably won’t get an elegantly crafted bathroom at the end of the day!
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