Social Media Lessons of 2009 – We Need Re-Wiring…
Traditionally a time for clearing fluff from desk drawers and shelves, the week after Xmas also gives us some space to clear the mental decks for the year to come.
In Consultancy World this is an excuse for blog-list-mania. 50 Interweb trends for the next 10 years, that sort of thing. Well, you’ll be glad to know that this end of decade post isn’t fueled by a crystal ball. Instead, I thought it’d be more valuable to reflect on what C&M learned last year…
In a nut, the experiences of the past 12 months suggest that most of us marketeers could use a spot of re-wiring.
Here’s the view:
Marcoms teams need re-wiring. Social Media requires working practices and colleague relationships to be more social (small ‘s’) – particularly if you’re in the B2C space. It helps if a brand’s PR team is programmed to talk to its customer service team (and its ad team, its digital marketing team, its Social Media agency, and its CEO) – particularly when things go wrong.
Campaign planning needs re-wiring. Those Social Media campaigns that ‘fly by wire’ on their own, without a sensible level of integration with other marcoms activities – and without the backing of some senior agenda-setters within a brand – are likely to either fail, fall short or blow up …which is a great shame. We ought to be looking for sensible, methodical ways of establishing integrated value in Social Media, across a range of marketing disciplines – not dreaming up ill-researched, hair-brained schemes for demonstrating how easy it is to be ignored on YouTube and Facebook.
Production efforts need re-wiring. Good use of Social Media creates a different kind of marketing asset to the norm: direct customer relationships (via Twitter, Facebook, etc). By and large this is something that brands need to own, not lease. This means more internal resourcing and less outsourcing to partners …and agencies need to adapt to fit this model – because it’s cheaper and more valuable and effective for brands to be tweeting and managing Social communities themselves.
Measurement needs re-wiring. The quest for a magic Social Media metric is a red herring. We should be measuring our work within the context of more established and meaningful data sets than re-Tweets and ‘favouriting’. A set of tried and tested metrics for acquisition, PR/awareness, SEO, lead generation, etc, provides a better canvas for telling Social Media ROI stories and earning the right to do more integrated, sophisticated marketing work.
Our tool sets need re-wiring. If your Social Media goal is content/message distribution and the creation of conversations around your brand, then you need to look more closely at your technical platform. With some effort, a web site, a blog, a Twitter profile and a Facebook page can become connected over time, but the real aim ought to be creating a seamless presence on other people’s Interwebs – their Twitter, their Facebook, their LinkedIn, etc. The most direct, effective way of doing this is via technology. For example, widgets like Disqus help us to directly connect our content to the Social web. There are lots of them around, and the majority of them are free… but they need to be baked in at source (intelligently!).
Agencies need re-wiring. Being a good digital / PR agency in this context is less about traditional services like distribution, ‘pitching’, building branded microsites, bog standard link-building and display ads and more about providing a focus on good, solid training and enablement, research and planning, great (creative) content and strategic implementation. Essential skills are analytics and a thorough understanding of the mechanics of Social Media properties – i.e. proven experience of what will make any given strategy fly or die. We also need to be better business consultants if we’re to help brands execute some of the ideas outlined above in a measured, integrated fashion. (i.e. we either need to help our clients convince their bosses to do things differently, or we need to convince the bosses themselves.)
Finally, I think our brains also need a little re-wiring. To deliver smarter work we need to step away from the coalface, take stock, count to 10, and perhaps even sleep on things now and again …before commenting, tweeting, forming opinions, baking plans and setting sail.
Less haste, less waste, more integration, more quality output. Now, there’s some solid new year’s targets for you…
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UK Services
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Roger Warner, C&M
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