Social Media Protocol: Utilizing Social Media Properly to Gain the Most Value from it.

Today I participated in a 90-minute online presentation sponsored by MarketingProfs.com titled Social Graces: Strategies to Take Your Social Media Marketing Beyond One-Off Tactics.

The program featured social media maven Greg Verdino who has seen first-hand how companies succeed and fail in this space. Greg thinks everyone should “take your social media activities from me-too tactics to key components of your marketing advantage.”

Here’s a brief summary I put together for you as a result of my participation -

Only the facts, please . . .

• It was stated that by 2012, online advertising would take up to 18% of an organizations marketing budget and Social Media would be allocated approximately 10% of that money.
• With regards to traditional advertising: “71% of consumers can’t remember the product or brand name after watching an ad.”
• Basically, we all know that ads are the guests at a cocktail party we try to avoid. (Who wants to be sold something that doesn’t interest them?)

We should look at Social Media consisting of three principles, which all involve more than one person to accomplish -

1. Community
2. Conversation
3. Partnership

There are new rules for communication that involve the key ‘buzz words’ we hear every day, but that are accurate. Things like responsiveness, authenticity, support community, humanization and partnership are just a few of the core effects that we must take into consideration when engaging in social media.

Five New Ways of Thinking

Harness the Power of Small Ideas (or Planting seeds for your brands future)

• No magic beans – Try a variety of things even though you may not succeed. They say “if you’re not failing, you’re not working”.
  

Connect the Dots

• 1, 2, 3, or more campaigns may be good, but if not integrated, they aren’t accomplishing the best results.
• Integrated Social Media means demonstrating, empowering, and involving the audience.

Every Touch is a Conversation Starter . . . so try not to screw it up!

• The world has changed, or “the square peg meets the round hole”
• Meaning: 0.2 marketing for a 2.0 world – or Doing the same old stuff and not realizing your target audience expect different things.

Amplify, Extend, & Enhance

• Using conversation – think about how to evolve conversation as a pathway to community.
• Social Media can be a megaphone in action, so be sure and recognize the power of course correction; you CAN turn haters into lovers.
• There is power buzzing around. Example: Dell lies. Dell sucks. – When Jeff Jarvis started blogging about his experience with Dell, it evolved into a reveloution against the electronics giant. Dell had no choice but to address the firestorm so they began an open online forum about consumer’s experiences and provided them a site to provide opinions and rate their products. Result: Dell now uses these sources to help build and improve product development, turning a negative into a positive.

Your ends should match your socks

• The public looks to us to provide value not just constantly distribute our messages to their blackberries or RSS feeds.
• You can learn a lot from others, but don’t make the mistake of duplicating the online efforts of another simply because they proved successful. Be innovative, create and test your own social media campaign.
• Remember: an online social media strategy that worked for one organization may not work for you.

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This Weeks' Thought: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

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