This week I was confronted by the reality of social media from a marketing department’s point of view.
I was presenting on social media to a team of 12 from this leisure group, which involved me bumbling my way through a PowerPoint prersentation.
I talked Nielsen statistics, review sites, blogs, Twitter and Four Square. And they at least appeared interested.
But their problem was identifying the resources to engage with the social media crowd.
The thing is with social media that one you start engaging you need to commit to it for good. If you start and then stop it just looks a bit crap. And you lose social cred.
It’s tough because the money and the resources have to come from somewhere and every marketing department has to control costs.
So the question was what to do without the big budgets to employ a dedicated social media manager?
The first thing I suggested is at least to have a policy on how the company treats social media. That defines who can engage on the behalf of the company in addition to many other items.
Importantly, it also should state that every staff member if they engage with any discussion about the company they need to identify themselves as staff.
The thing is there are plenty of well-meaning staff who anonymously engage on discussion forums, bulletin boards, review sites and blogs without declaring their interest.
There is every chance they will find out and one of those social media shit storm will ensue.
The final thing was to listen. Just because you aren’t engaging directly with customers many are still taking about you. Hopefully, the noise is mostly good. But there will be bad.
That bad noise needs to be taken on the chin. It is the most important market research you will ever have. Focus groups and surveys are flawed as by actually asking questions you are changing the response of the customer.
And if it gets very bad, clearly something has to change.
This week I was confronted by the reality of social media from a marketing department’s point of view.
I was presenting on social media to a team of 12 from this leisure group, which involved me bumbling my way through a PowerPoint prersentation.
I talked Nielsen statistics, review sites, blogs, Twitter and Four Square. And they at least appeared interested.
But their problem was identifying the resources to engage with the social media crowd.
The thing is with social media that one you start engaging you need to commit to it for good. If you start and then stop it just looks a bit crap. And you lose social cred.
It’s tough because the money and the resources have to come from somewhere and every marketing department has to control costs.
So the question was what to do without the big budgets to employ a dedicated social media manager?
The first thing I suggested is at least to have a policy on how the company treats social media. That defines who can engage on the behalf of the company in addition to many other items.
Importantly, it also should state that every staff member if they engage with any discussion about the company they need to identify themselves as staff.
The thing is there are plenty of well-meaning staff who anonymously engage on discussion forums, bulletin boards, review sites and blogs without declaring their interest.
There is every chance they will find out and one of those social media shit storm will ensue.
The final thing was to listen. Just because you aren’t engaging directly with customers many are still taking about you. Hopefully, the noise is mostly good. But there will be bad.
That bad noise needs to be taken on the chin. It is the most important market research you will ever have. Focus groups and surveys are flawed as by actually asking questions you are changing the response of the customer.
And if it gets very bad, clearly something has to change.
