Social Media Mistakes & How to Fix Them Part 1

Understandably, we all look at things through the lens of our experiences. A direct marketer said recently, “social media is really just email on steroids,” while former “mad man” Donnie Deutsch called social “just another media channel.” This mistaken impression leads to a “push” mentality that rarely results in social engagement. If you must look for a parallel, think of social media as a first cousin of customer service, pointing you towards the requisite “listen first” approach adopted by social standouts like American Express.

One senior marketing exec told the author of Facebook for Dummies Paul Dunay that she was absolute thrilled to have hired a “twintern” to take care of her brand’s Twitter account. A startled Dunay reflected later on his blog, “When did it become okay to just give anyone off the street the keys to one of the most important assets you have … your Brand!” While we too love interns for monitoring and reporting, we don’t rely on them to lead the conversation, preferring to leave this task to seasoned professionals.

Perhaps because it’s so easy to set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, many brands did just that, without much foresight. Many of these pages languish sadly like falling trees with no one there to listen. Savvy marketers are taking a more disciplined approach, defining process, resources and expectations for both employees and your customers. In the past few months, Dell, Gatorade and Virgin Media have made headlines by establishing “social media command centers” that reflect the need to treat social media as a strategically guided weapon.

With only 23% of companies having a strategic plan in place for social in 2010 (MarketingSherpa), its not surprising that success is rarely defined at the beginning. Ironically, defining success in social media isn’t hard, even if you are just focused on customer acquisition and retention, two things among many social can do in measurably effective ways. Kinaxis, a Canada-based supply chain management company, has used a combination of blogging and community building to nearly triple web traffic, more than triple leads capture and retain customers at an astonishingly high rate.

Because social media often starts as a sub-set of one department, the programs reflect the biases and/or limitations of their originators. Ideally, social media initiatives should be lead by an individual or team that can rise above a particular department and then tap into all the requisite disciplines. Twelpforce, the groundbreaking Twitter-based help desk from BestBuy, provides a great example of how these cross-disciplined programs can work. In its first year, the Twelpforce responded to over 42,000 customer inquiries at a remarkably low cost per interaction tapping into marketing, IT, sales and customer service resources.