How to get the most from social media with the least effort

Social media is an extremely interesting phenomenon, in that its

essentially just good old word of mouth but turbo charged via the

power of technology. Therefore, techniques that would have worked

well in a traditional media sense can often become extremely

effective social media campaigns. What you need more than anything to

get social working is something interesting to say! (For interesting

read genuinely interesting, funny, shocking, amazing, frightening,

etc, etc).

It’s extremely difficult to get social media working in any

meaningful way if there is nothing that people want to share about

your brand. So you have to create great content. Publish a report.

Hold an event. Pull off a stunt or a great new business coup. This is

where the world of social media blends with the world of PR quite

nicely. Anything that would have been a great PR piece is an ideal

starting point for a social media campaign. The challenge then is to

figure out how to best amplify the campaign via the various social

channels available to get maximum exposure.

Q: What is the best way to reach new customers through social media?

There is a saying within the social media community that it’s very

difficult to create a community from scratch, but there are existent

communities out there surrounding almost any topic or interest that

can be tapped into and exploited. That would be a great starting

point. But think laterally. If you manufacture pork pies or smoked

haddock there may not be a specific community of people blogging

about your exact product, but there are plenty of food lovers out

there and some very active discussions going on around all aspects of

food preparation, recipes, local produce etc. that could provide

great springboards for your initial forays into the social scene.

Q: Is social media just a tool for brand promotion or can it be used

in other ways?

In a lot of ways I’d probably suggest that brand promotion is

perhaps one of the more difficult things to pull off via social

media, or at least brand promotion in isolation. Social media is

fantastic for generating and sharing things like reviews,

testimonials and for keeping in touch with existing customers. Of

course there is an element of brand promotion in all of those

activities, but it’s a much deeper brand experience than just seeing

a piece of content and being entertained for a few seconds or

minutes. Often we are hoping that existing customers will share their

experiences – which is a very powerful way of winning new business,

but of course demands that the whole customer experience – from

start to finish – was good in the first place! This is why we say

that social goes all the way through the business. It shouldn’t

really be thought of as just a branding or even just a marketing

tool. It can be used as a customer service tool, a research tool and

can – and maybe will as we go forward – become one of the driving

forces helping us plan the look and feel of our entire businesses

around the actual (as opposed to perceived) needs of our customers!

Q: What are the potential pitfalls of social media?

I mentioned earlier that social media is a lot like word of mouth –

and they both come in two flavours! Take the old adage that a happy

customer tells maybe one or two people whilst a disgruntled or

disappointed customer tells 10-15. Now apply the kinds of

multiplication factors that technology can bring to the table and you

can see how this can go horribly wrong if you upset your lovely new

social media aware consumers! Case in point was the famous United

Airlines ‘United breaks guitars’ debacle. Whereby a deeply

disappointed United passenger decided to write a song about the fact

that United Airlines broke his guitar and were ‘reluctant’ to deal

with the matter. He then posted this song (complete with accompanying

video) on YouTube, where it received over 3 MILLION views in the

first 10 days (http://mashable.com/2009/07/15/united-breaks-guitars/)

and, as I sit typing this, has now reached 9,388,596 views in total.

That’s a lot of musicians not flying on United ever again!

Q: Don’t social media sites such as Facebook carry big risks in

terms of reputation – you could be exposed to very public criticism

of your products?

In short, yes. And there is nothing that you can do about it.

However, this is NOT a reason to stay clear of the social space –

far from it. What you need to understand is that, if you are creating

bad experiences and upsetting you customers, they ARE going to go

online and share this information on blogs, review sites, Facebook,

YouTube or wherever they can vent their spleen. The only difference

being you will be blissfully unaware about it…. Until it’s too late!

The key here is to be AWARE of what is being said about your brand

in these channels. First of all, listen. You can use social

monitoring tools these days to collate ‘mentions’ of your brand or

other key words or phrases across the social media spectrum. Once you

understand what the perception is currently, you have a chance to do

something about it. In some ways this could be THE single most

important use of social media for businesses – to monitor, listen to

and respond to chatter that already exists around the brand. This is

real time, 100% genuine customer feedback, and it’s all yours for a

lot less than the cost of one (usually ineffective and often

downright misleading) artificially staged customer focus group.

Q: How can you guard against feeding information to competitors?

That’s a very good question and one that’s not all that easy to

answer directly. Anything that you allow into the social space AND a

lot of what you don’t publish yourself but others do, is instantly

available to millions to share and distribute as they see fit.

I listened to Doug Gurr (CEO of ASDA) speak at a recent Multi Channel

Retail event about how social media leaves businesses nowhere to

hide. He envisaged a world of ‘total price and service

transparency’ driven by social sharing, reviews, price comparison

engines and customer testimonials.

In essence, if this really happens, it could change the way that

business thinks about marketing and brands completely. With playing

fields being levelled to such an extent, true value to the consumer

gets put right back at the heart of the organisation. If the product

isn’t the best in the market place you won’t be able to charge a

premium for it. If your service is second rate, then you will be

found out and no one will pay top dollar. The only way to go here is

once again to embrace the full impact of customer feedback and do

something about it – and quickly!

Never before have consumers had so much power to literally make or

break the reputations of businesses almost overnight. No amount of

traditional branding or positive PR is going to be able to stem the

flow of genuine feedback from real customers. This represents a huge

challenge to us all, but also, for those willing to tackle the issues

head on and make changes boldly, possibly the most cost effective and

exciting marketing tool at our disposal.

So there you have it, social media stripped down to it's bare

essentials – start making your connections grow and your business

will follow!

Mark Bower, is the managing director of CoolPink