Social Media - Fire, Aim, Ready

Dur­ing a meal with a client the other day, she men­tioned that a divi­sion in her com­pany was deploy­ing a task force to develop a social media strat­egy. Whilst I under­stood the sen­ti­ment, I explained that this seemed like the wrong thing to do. I was obvi­ously accused of heresy and ignor­ing the most impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion in mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions since Johannes Guten­burg devel­oped the print­ing press in 15th Cen­tury. After all, which self-respecting com­pany doesn’t have a fully defined social media strategy?

Let me explain. Back in the bub­bly days at the end of the last mil­len­nium, every­body was talk­ing about how to define and adopt a new media strat­egy. These days, nobody would con­sider a new media strat­egy, but instead how dig­i­tal should be used as part of a broader mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan. It’s the same with social media.

Don’t think about engag­ing with your cus­tomers in social silos or hav­ing a knee jerk reac­tion to your CMO say­ing “we need a Face­book fan page”. Look at first under­stand­ing your tar­get audi­ence and what you want to achieve through your com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This should then help you to define your com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy. It’s only at this point that you’ll be able to define which mar­ket­ing chan­nels to use and whether social plat­forms are even rel­e­vant within this plan.

Reas­sur­ingly, a work­shop at our recent Social Media Hud­dle made me realise that we’re now at a point where many of our tech­nol­ogy clients are truly start­ing to inte­grate social media into their mar­ket­ing plans. By doing this, they’re now able to add higher lev­els of engage­ment, col­lab­o­ra­tion and cre­ate dia­logue with their prospects, cus­tomers and chan­nel through social plat­forms. With­out los­ing sight of the fact that these activ­i­ties are part of a broader mar­ket­ing mix, involv­ing paid media, search and more tra­di­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehicles.