How to get the most from social media with the least effort
New to social media? Mark Bower, the managing director of CoolPink has covers the key FAQs.
Q: How can social media increase a company’s brand exposure?
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!