Making the Case for Social Media
Friday, December 4, 2009 | 2 Comments
Tags: power of social media, social media advantages, social media ROI, social media strategy
Posted in: Guest Blogger, Social Media
It’s often the case that conversation revolves around the notion of brands coming to their agencies and saying, “We’ve got to be using Social Media!” The agency then calmly guides the brand through the steps. See, that was easy, wasn’t it?
But there are still many skeptics. Still many brands that aren’t sure they are ready to dip their toes in the water, let alone dive in headfirst. As a Social Media practitioner, what are you to do then? You know the value, but how do you make the case for Social Media? This issue was brought up by Radian6’s own Amber Naslund during a session at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City in mid-November. The resulting dialogue brought the issue into sharp relief as many in the room shared the frustrations and challenges they experienced regarding this very issue.
Let me be very blunt. If the senior management isn’t interested in it, doesn’t get it and doesn’t support it, you can pretty much forget about. It will be about as smooth as riding a giant piece of sandpaper down a gravel driveway while wearing a burlap sack. Sure, you could do it, but by the time you get to the end you’ll wonder why you even attempted it in the first place.
I really can’t stress this enough. Senior management buy in is critical. Without it, every tweet will be scrutinized; every blog post will be measured by some form of ROI; and every status update will need to go through four rounds of legal counsel. Or, they’ll just decide that “Social Media doesn’t work” because they didn’t see a spike in Q3 sales.
Ok, let’s move up the dial a little bit. How do you make the case for Social Media to a senior management group who is skeptical, but willing to give it a try? You start small, you start guerrilla and you work against a goal that scratches where senior management has an itch.
Here’s what I mean: Before pitching senior management on a Social Media strategy, work the organization horizontally (if you are internal). Or you may have to do a pilot project on the (real) cheap if you are an agency. Find someone sympathetic to the cause and do a little something with them. It doesn’t have to be a full blown initiative, just a little something. A Facebook page, a Flickr stream. Something manageable. But also, something that will yield results that senior management will take notice of. Are they freaked out about Customer Service costs? Then show them how you can solve via Twitter without those pricey call centers.
Now, when you are ready to speak with senior management you can show them the results of you inexpensive pilot program and the money it saved and / or revenue it generated. It won’t be a lot, but it will at least show them the potential. We have to remember that senior management has a different set of needs and challenges and we have to speak in a language that will resonate. Oftentimes that means a little less touchy feely and a little more bottom line.
2 Responses to “Making the Case for Social Media”
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pekkapuhakka (pekka puhakka) on December 14th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
RT @chrisramsey: Social media best practices by @Radian6 guest blogger @eyecube Making the Case for Social Media http://tinyurl.com/yahbq4t
Aaron on December 8th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Social Media Marketing is highly dangerous to brands and must NOT be embraced at all. Too many cooks spoil the broth! If you are ‘engaging’ in customers who mix business speak along with playful banter and perhaps rude comments, you are making your brand common as muck. Even seeing your brand logo along with potentially harmful comments on a twitter feed, blog, facebook page can tarnish a brand. Seeing customer complaints being posted on twitter is not good. Customer services depts speak to customers one on one without the world watching. Social media, just like the .COM bubble will burst with a catastrophic bang. People who have jumped onto the band wagon and are embracing social media are dancing with danger and damaging their brands. A brand is NOT about engaging with people on twitter. If you inteligently analyse what the MAJORITY of twitter feeds are about – it is merely internet ‘GURUS’ promoting some dodgy eBook via an equally dodgy looking one page sales-letter website. If you then look at twitter inteligently, you will find that millions of people are all talking millions of different things all at the same time – this causes a catastrophic information overload and achieves nothing. Social media does NOT improve productivity or sales at all. If you really look beneath the covers you will find that employee man/ woman hours are utterly wasted on facebook and twitter. Furthermore the ROI of twitter is no where near as high as the ROI of a traditional advertising campaign. This is because in the LONG -TERM (what really matters) – the brand will be damaged beyond repair. Engaging in social media is like making every one of your clients/ customers a brand manager – and when this happens it is a case of too many cooks spoil the broth or in this case – the brand!
I know I am being very controversial about not agreeing with the masses of people that are embracing social media–however, during the .com boom, the wise sage Warren Buffet disagreed with the masses of investment professionals around the world who were jumping on the bandwagon regarding the dot com boom – Warren Buffet never invested even one dime in the tech stocks of the dot com boom and he predicted the crash and it happened. Now, to give you a bit about my background, I have an elite MBA in Finance & Strategy with International Marketing and have worked for numerous Fortune 500 Co., as well as run an advertising agency. This does NOT make me an expert of any sort, but I do have a deep understanding of business and branding and corporate functions. It appears EVERYONE is trying to get something from nothing—this attitude in society caused the .com BUST—where investment bankers and MBAs and private equity firms were throwing money at any .com startup even if they had NO IDEA of HOW or WHEN they would generate revenue. The same attitude caused the current credit crunch crisis—trying to generate money out of nothing—thin air by living on CREDIT and not knowing HOW to pay it back. Similarly, SMM is free and people are trying to make it generate millions—there is a fundamental flaw in this business model that people cannot see. The main problem with the SMM model is the very nature of the fact that it allows everyone to comment on anything and everything—there is no longer any strategy or coherence in the message as you cannot coherently control millions of individuals with millions of opposing views.
SMM can:
1) Disintegrate a strong internal corporate culture by giving individuals too much power. Governments are elected by people to RUN the people and country to prevent ANARCHY! If you give PEOPLE all the power to have a referendum on EVERYTHING then you ruin the country and cause CHAOS. Similarly, if you give CUSTOMERS all the power to dictate what a brand should be, the multiple opposing views will cause brand anarchy and OPENLY annoy and anger people around the world at a rapid pace. Furthermore, it will cause employees to openly oppose internal corporate culture, openly challenge management strategy, cause openly shared silos and rifts and disintegrate corporate culture, which in turn can affect the brands values by affecting customer service, employee morale etc. This goes a LOT deeper than the internet ‘guru’/ work at home mom/ soccer mom mentality. SMM can damage brands beyond repair.
2) SMM is extremely time consuming and generates trickles of revenue compared to traditional main-stream media. SATELLITE, TV, RADIO, MAJOR NEWS/ MAGS, INTERNET ADS—these are the channels that even though are saturated, they have more consistency and enable more control over your message. The SECOND you hand over your brand message to the masses of un-qualified ‘brand specialists’ AKA the public, then you are going to cause chaos, confusion and mayhem. Imagine if the government said tomorrow, we are resigning and would like YOU the people to run the country! IT would end in utter chaos because people look up to LEADERS, but if you have NO BRAND LEADER and just millions of ‘followers’ trying to dictate what a brand should be—it makes millions of leaders, which causes disintegration and damage.
3) RISK! SMM can produce unprecedented amounts of risk to a brand. Not only is there the direct threat from competitors, and dissatisfied customers, but there also is the threat of data protection violations which can cause people to lose trust.
If you REALLY THINK about WHY in the past the peasants WORSHIPED ROYALTY, or in the present day WHY the masses WORSHIP CELEBRITIES—it is because of the perceived POWER! It is because they are JUST OUT OF REACH, it is because they cannot be touched—BUT—the second you remove that perception and you say, hey WE ARE JUST COMMON LIKE YOU—then the POWER goes out of the window… and with it goes the perception of being ELITE—and when that happens no one will want your brand anymore. If ROLEX advertised on the back of milk cartons no one would pay $5000 for it. THE CHANNEL is just as important as the message—and if you ‘advertise’ using SMM you can damage brand reputation.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg—I have written an in-depth thesis about all this backed up with evidence—it is controversial but highly engaging and interesting. Thanks for your comments and I hope this opens up a huge debate because I would love to learn from everyone out there too. Thanks!