by Mark Ivey
Sometimes I walk away from a conference with as many questions as answers. Such was the case at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in SF. Great speakers, great content, great ideas– an idea-fest for social media types like me. But after the two day session ended, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why is this so hard? Why aren’t more companies getting it?
The answer is both simple and amazingly complex: It’s woven into the very fabric of the the way we think about marketing.
My company has worked with many companies the last three years on social media programs, from Fortune 100 giants to small shops, giving us ample experience to see how good intentions come up short in making the transition to the new marketing world. The mistakes usually fall into one or more of the following areas, the seven deadly blind spots of traditional marketers:
1) Not thinking like social media marketers: Social media is all about sharing, opening up, being transparent, providing real value to our customers. It’s about long-term relationships, not short-term campaigns. This doesn’t come naturally when you’re raised in corporate environments that emphasize management control techniques. We must give up control, take some risks and get out there. Social media consultant Chris Brogan says we need to “turn marketing into business conversations.”
2) Not connecting social media programs with the larger corporate strategy and other programs: Social media programs are too often set up as separate silo programs rather than an integral part of the company’s marketing and communications efforts. The best leaders weave these programs into programs across the company–including their product development, communications, marketing and customer service, and more.
3) Not really listening to customers: Social media is about listening to our customers. Conduct an audit. What are their needs? What are they missing? How are they using your product/service? Do an audit of your customers, understand what types of material, communications and engagement they would want from you. Create customer profiles. Then figure out how to reach them. Ex: start a community on Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and invite customers or join an existing one. Use these to ask your customers questions and pick their brains about your products, challenges, concerns.
4) Not listening to the market: How can you target your products/services if you don’t know your market? Think about your goals–what are you trying to monitor/achieve? What are your resources (small team, an intern, you?) You can set up a listening and monitoring program quickly, starting with Twitter, a powerful real-time search engine. Bigger companies will need to have a systematic way of monitoring comments around their brands but smaller companies can use free tools like Google Alerts, Backtype and FriendFeed to monitor discussions–and of course, search engines customized for Twitter.
5) Not trusting the employees: The old days where the company controlled employees’ content is long over–they’re conversing online whether companies condone it or not. Establish company guidelines but provide employees the tools and freedom to express themselves–and then step back. Let the conversation flow. Sure there’s some risk but the biggest risk is trying to bottle up your most powerful resource, your employees.
6) Not creating “social” content: Good content drives traffic, links, goodwill and much more. The problem is much of our content is in corporate-speak and brochure-ware that we slap on the web. Your content needs to be fresh, interesting, engaging, relevant to your audience–and “share-able” on social media sites.
Forget your message a few minutes and focus on your customers. Define your audience before you begin and understand what content they find interesting. Marketer Jason Falls suggests you ask yourself: “Where do they work, play, shop? What do they like for fun? What makes them want to buy things? What interests them?” Think like a publisher, not a marketer.
7) Not creating cool videos: See the trend? Videos need to be about the customers’ needs, interests, not your latest product overview. (If it is product oriented, design the video to show how it really helps the customer do their job.)
If you’re going for more mass mainstream audiences, think in terms of explosive video content. Video guru Tim Street suggests first creating a “spectacle” (ex: LonelyGirl15 on YouTube), then building a great story around it. Try to add emotional features and conflict to draw interest. If the YouTube style–shooting from the hip, edgy, etc–is a bit foreign, find a 20-something-year-old video hotshot to help.
No one expects to close the “gap” between traditional marketing and social media marketing overnight. But the promise land of social media may be closer than you think, if you can address some of these blind spots–and continue to be open to new ideas.
Social media is rapidly changing, and today’s hot platform could quickly become passe’. At the end of the day, we are only limited by our imagination–and ability to adapt to this ever changing and crazy business.
Tim O’Reilly captured it best in the Summit’s closing speech. If you want to use social media to turbo-charge your company’s marketing efforts, start with your customers first–and last. “Think ‘what impact do I want to have on the world. Then focus on creating value, helping others and your business will do well.”
Maybe the answers were there all along–I just had to look a little closer.
I don’t think *most* big companies know how to listen to their customers. They want to control everything, and letting a group of customers tell you what to do isn’t within their nature.
Hi Mark, I was also at that great, “idea-fest” last week and although the company I work for has been involved in social media for some time now, I think you nail it terms of why many other companies are still hesitant to join in the ‘conversation’ that is social media.
By the way, Charlene Li’s presentation, “Convincing the Curmudgeon,” also does a great job of spelling out how to sway those with objections to social media to become your biggest advocates. Her presentation is available at http://bit.ly/pVP5i
Mark, thanks for the post. To make you social marketing a success, you have to know where to find you customers. What types of social media and they involved in? It’s a test of how well you know your target market. Do they spend time of Facebook or are they more a twitter crowd? Then, yes, you must listen to them and respond. Social media is about being social! You’ve got to actually communicate with them in order to build stronger relationships with your audience. They need to feel that personal, emotional pull if they are going to continue being your customer.
Great post. Not connecting social media to the larger strategy is a huge issue. Too often, social media is in the experimental basement, running parallel to all the stuff the “big kids” are doing. That has to stop, because social media can have great impact on brand perception that even the high dollar traditional tactics. (See Domino’s)
Great post. I particularly like this bit:
“Social media programs are too often set up as separate silo programs rather than an integral part of the company’s marketing and communications efforts.”
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of job postings for the role of “Social Media Specialist.” It seems companies think they can just hire one person to handle all of their social media needs, when, in actuality, success comes from a concerted effort spread across the entire company. One individual can be the so-called “point person” but they can only do so much without the full support of corporate management.
Fantastic post and great overview of IMS!
To add to point 3, I think a key part of listening and figuring out how to reach customers is identifying where they’re talking. In what communities are you already being talked about? How can you add value to that conversation? And how can you make them feel valued, appreciated, smart and special? Step one – say thank you.
Enjoyed your post, thanks, Mark. As I was reading through your list, it seems like the majority of mistakes really apply to all aspects of marketing, no matter what degree of social, and even all aspects of running a business: It’s called customer-centricity. A customer-centric business will focus their activities (marketing and corporate) around the customer, listen and understand, and make that the focus point of their business. If they can’t do that the “traditional” way, they will sure fail with it “socially”. They don’t get it now, b/c they didn’t before.
@Britta_SF
Right now I’m often happy if a company just posts a video demonstration of there product.. most of what I buy is music gear.. and I’m starting to look at video gear.. and.. God, you’d think companies making video gear would be ahead of the curve on this.. but oh no..
But these are probably not examples of stuff that really needs to be viral in the conventional sense.. I mean its very niche.. maybe viral in that world.. which.. well is all about what you’re product actually does.
I’ve been thinking for the last 5 years or so that business.. is going to be reformated by social media. Change management is the big issues for business today, seems to me, and social media is kinda all about that. This really makes it a management issue.. how we organize how a business works.. and I don’t believe most business are really organized in a way to really take advantage of the social media space.. so I think we are going to see a lot of creative destruction moving forward.. with huge advantages to the little guy.. simply because being small makes managing change easier.
Great comments.
Eric–thanks for reminding me about Charlene’s nice presentation. I’ve started posting links to other conf. presentations on my blog, more to come.
Rob–I agree..and think a lot of companies–we just met with one today–know they must “do something” w/ social media. The quick approach might be hiring a “SM specialist” but it’s doomed to fail if it’s not integrated into a larger corp. strategy.
I agree with all the customer centric comments–it’s time to start listening.
True, many companies by their nature are not prone to this type of new marketing. But they will have to change–become more open, more transparent, more customer-focused–or face the consequences of the new world. The newspaper publishers are already learning a painful lesson of failing to get ahead of the curve. Matt touched on this on the last comment.
I think we’re still in the early stages of what will be major changes ushered in by social media, so it’s an exciting time to be in this space.
Thanks again for your time and comments.
What always surprises me is how many of these companies didn’t start thinking about this when the first books were written on the subject of listening to the customer, almost 20 years ago. As usual, there isn’t much that social media has discovered here.
Even academics were writing about this, for example, see:
Griffin, Abbie and Hauser, John, (1993). The Voice of the Customer. Marketing Science, 12(1): 1-27 (Winter).
Social media is the beginning method to start a campaign with it seems. You can collect a ton of info and potential “clients/customers” before you even launch a marketing campaign…then of course, you have to keep with the program. The only trouble I see is I never get away from my desk anymore…I heard there was a sketch on South Park about people being to out of shape from this syndrome! funny…that’s how I feel sometimes!If you’re a one person show, this is a lot of work! Kind of like before we had computers, email, fax, etc. 25 years ago I was typing press releases on an electric typewriter from a kitchen table!
I particularly agree with Britta’s comment that “the majority of mistakes really apply to all aspects of marketing, no matter what degree of social.” Silos are are systemic of organizations that incent their employees through competition, not collaboration.
Employee incentives, HR involvement & likely restructuring, and job performance accountability are necessary to get the various disciplines to function together collaboratively, in favor of the customer.
In large enterprises, the Program Management model is meant to promote this type of collaboration between the disciplines, but too often, Program Management has no real upper-management support or champion, and is functioning in name only. The result is a race to the finish line mentality, with each discipline operating independently of the others, with no true holistic understanding of what the customer needs from the product or service as a whole.
Social media implementation is really a mindset and process issue, rather than technology issue.
Companies have to adapt web 2.0 mindset, and really focus on conversations, rather than just conversions
Willy Lim
http://www.NetProfitQuest.com
This sounds great. I think I will give it a try.
Convincing large organizations to implement effective social marketing campaigns is going to be very difficult for a while. The biggest issue is that nobody knows who should be doing it as well. Social Marketing is a cross between Public Relations and Marketing. I also don’t recommend that companies outsource this effort because the person heading up this form of marketing should have a strong knowledge of the business as well as the authority to be a public voice. I know I would trust an outside firm to do that for our business.
Sorry, I mean I would not trust an outside firm.
Spot on Mark. I have a couple of tweeks to this. Most companies are not thinking interactive. They are still taking a broadcast approach to social media. i.e. “how do i make my message viral” But they really need to be monitoring, listening, engaging and enabling a shared voice influence around their brand.
If they can get past contolling the message and get into listening and engaging most companies will transcend challenges they have with social media
Great post. I agree with your observations. In terms of #7 I’m a fan of the FLIP Video camera which allows people to grab instant videos, clean them up easily, and post to YouTube. Think about the effect of giving a few to key staff or even customers using your product and see what they post…
Good advice Mark. However aren’t some of those already known even for the “old school” marketing? I would argue that “listen to your customers” and “listen to the market” have always been imprtant to do if you want to succeed in business. Also, “not trusting employees” is often the reason for not working organizations.
Nice summary though
Would be interesting, just once, to see social media “gurus” eat their own cooking and go listen to large companies who supposedly don’t “get it.” I think the previous commenter Todd was right that a lot of these tips are basic marketing, which means you must not think large companies know much of anything about marketing. Then how did they become large?
More importantly, if you were connecting deeply in your work with large companies, you will find, especially in the past year, they have had other priorities. And, try as you might to spin ROI, there’s been nothing compelling to learn from. (Skittles? laughable)
Enough backward-looking redundant discussion. How about a forward-looking post from all the experts, how social media can position a company for the rebound? Build on your video example, maybe. Not in generalities (“customer needs based”) but a real, instructive illustration.
Great stuff. At the ARF we have come to two conclusions: most marketers don’t know what a social media strategy even looks like and secondly, that listening is a big part of the redefinition of the research function. I have numerous posts on this, but the one that is best is “Research needs a seat at the social media table”–http://rubinson.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/106/