Every so often, I’ll talk to a company or two that utterly and completely reaffirms my belief that some large companies are still very fuzzy on the true meaning of social media.
Here are some examples that help illustrate this stance…
Hugo: So have you thought about the specific success metrics that your organization will use to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts? (branding, mentions, inbound links, traffic, leads, transactions, etc…)
Company: Don’t worry about that, just tell us about your capabilities.
Moral of the Story: Any social media marketer worth their weight will want to think through the business ramifications of any and all initiatives before diving into all the fancy bells and whistles.
Hugo: We offer social media monitoring services as well as analytics reporting to ensure that we’re tracking the results of your efforts both externally and within your own site(s)
Company: Yeah, we’re going to look into that down the line, but right now we just want to start building stuff out. We’ll worry about monitoring and tracking later.
Moral of the Story: As is the case with virtually all online marketing channels, if you’re not benchmarking and monitoring key metrics from the get go, you will likely end up spending a lot of time and money with little return on investment and little business intelligence to carry forth into future endeavors.
Hugo: We believe that one of the key factors in any social media initiative is one-to-one engagement and outreach with key influencers for your particular market segment. Engaging with these folks and providing real value to the community will lead to cultivating of brand ambassadors and word-of-mouth promotion opportunities.
Company: Yeah, that’s great. Now can you talk to us about what cool Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc… applications and web portals you can build out for us and about the media dollars you’ll pump into the channel? We want to be the next skittles.com.
Moral of the Story: Web site and application development can pay huge dividends in the social media space, but most folks will real experience will tell you that the real success story is when a brand engages within users in a transparent and organic way. Social media is not necessarily about spending tons of money on web dev and media. It’s about talking and making meaningful human connections.
That’s why it’s called social media…
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This is hilarious and true at the same time. Great job Hugo.