Social Climbing For Marketers

Social Climbing For Marketers

 

Like it or not, social media sites like Facebook are here to stay for the foreseeable future and as Cillian Kieran argues, marketers had better get in on the act or suffer the consequences.

As a digital agency, we meet with clients that are frightened of social media due simply to too much hype and not enough clarification on what it is and how to leverage it valuably.

So what is ‘social media' exactly? Ultimately, social media is an umbrella term used a little too loosely to define many things that happen online. A good definition would be to say that social media is the combination of technology with social interaction and the creation of ‘content'. Here content is literally that - words, pictures, videos, audio and software.

Focus on the word ‘social'. Here social interaction is not technology - it's about conversations, sharing and engaging with others. It's what we all do with our friends every time we tell them a story about a night out or recommend a restaurant. This is fundamentally the act of being socially engaged with your peers and the world around you. People have always created this content, by taking photos, recording videos and sending them to friends and family.

What has changed is that technology has empowered people with tools that allow them to do this at lightning speed and with everyone, instead of just their friends. These tools are what we think of as social media. When we say tools we mean blogs, social networks, micro blogs and video sharing sites, to name a few.

Does People Talking Matter?

One could certainly question why this matters as we've always talked and shared things, but technology has changed how we do this. Traditionally, communication models were based on monologues. Everything from TV to press is one way communication - effectively shouting at our audience. This doesn't work anymore because, thanks to technology, consumers can now fast-forward ads and they read, watch and consume what their peers recommend, instead of what used to be programmed for them. In late 2009, 55% of people trusted an advertisement (all forms). However,  90% however trusted a recommendation from a peer. Based on this, we must look at a dialogue-based communications model - one that matches consumer behaviour.

In this new world, we have to gain respect by being honest, open and speaking our consumer's language. And I don't mean catchphrases, I mean speaking like human beings. This should not be treated as a method for communicating press releases - remember this isn't PR, this is social media so we can't send out samples and announce our product and expect everyone to engage with us.

How Does this Affect my Business?

So what's the real impact on brands and businesses? Well simply this - as we no longer have influence over what consumers watch, read or do, we have to create content and conversations that they (our consumer) like enough to share with each other and engage with us about. They're in the driving seat.

So what if you ignore it? Perhaps it will just go away. Nope, even right now, if you're in business and not engaging, you can assume that your audience is talking about you. That's the whole point, we're not in control of their conversations so if they choose to discuss a poor consumer experience in a shop or about a product they can and others will listen.

Okay, you're convinced it's worth a try. So what next? If you were out in a pub trying to chat to strangers, what would you do? You'd ask them questions and you'd listen, or at least that's what a good conversationalist does. So the first step is to get on social networks and listen to your audience, see how they talk, what they share and what really interests them. Then dive in and add to the conversation in a valuable way. That's the most important part of social media; listen to your audience and respond.

So Where's it Going Now?

The reason I offered to write this article now, is that social media is constantly shifting and the biggest player in this space; Facebook, are tinkering with and evolving their massively successful network on a nearly daily basis. However, each year they announce their big changes at F8; their official keynote conference. Fresh out of F8 this April are a raft of changes which will shift the web entirely into a socially-driven mechanism, as Facebook make a play to be at the centre of the web.

Below I'm going to take you through the key changes and how they'll affect our social strategies in the next 12 months.

An interesting statistic to put some context on how large an effect Facebook is having on the web, is that in March for the first time Facebook was the most visited web site in America - more visited than Google. This indicates a fundamental shift where consumers value social interaction over passive search engines. So with that in mind, what have Facebook changed that is going to drive this in the next 12 months?

Social Plugins

You're going to hear a lot about these. Social plugins are little widgets (or mini applications) that bring Facebook to the rest of the web. Bret Taylor, Product Director at Facebook says that they offer everyone "instant personalisation". What this really means is that once you login to Facebook, any site that you visit that has these social plugins installed, will instantly show you which of your friends have also visited this site, what they looked at and make recommendations on what you should check out, based on what they did.

Real world effect: By tying your friends' complete online experience to yours, sharing is now intrinsic to everything you'll do online. Word-of-mouth and user recommendation becomes even more powerful currency in winning our audience.

The ‘Like' Button

The ‘Like' button allows users to click a button to simply indicate if they like the content they're looking at. It can be anything from video to text and photos.

Real world effect: Someone reading an article on a news website will automatically see which of their friends have already ‘liked' the article, even if they themselves have never visited the site before.

Open Graph

Open Graph sounds truly complicated but what it really is, is a term Facebook have used to define the suite of technologies above that create a rich layer of your interests and habits to share with your friends.

Real world effect: A brand page, news article or video clip show up richly across Facebook, in users' profiles, in search and through news feeds. This network of information about your friends is their ‘Open Graph'.

Bringing this Data Together

Before, when you searched on Facebook, you searched for people or brands that had created pages. Now you can search for a restaurant that may have never been on Facebook before and doesn't have a fan page. However because your friend ate there yesterday and had such a great meal, they ‘liked' the restaurant's website using Facebook on their mobile phone while still at the restaurant. Now when you search for that restaurant, it shows up on Facebook as part of this Open Graph of shared experiences and information.

What Does this Lead to?

Ultimately brands no longer need to try to be on social networks - the public will put them there, whether we want it or not.

So we need to ensure that we understand this shift and provide them with content and experiences that they value enough to ‘like' and share with friends. We then need to be involved in these conversations ourselves by being truly human and not speaking in brand messages.

Summarising a Social Strategy

While we've highlighted the need to be in this space, it should be treated as an essential and growing part of the marketing mix - it's not a replacement for everything. But we will keep you posted on that.

A really important piece of advice however, is that we're all jumping into social media and creating conversations with fervour. We're all chatting with consumers, and as a result, think we've cracked it and we're measuring success on the number of fans our brand page has - this isn't a strategy, this is just a reaction.

Strategically, I'm a believer in digital being measurable and therein lies the reason it has been so successful in the past few years. It's not enough to talk and be excited that you have 5,000 fans. So as an example, we've outlined 5 basic steps below of how you should structure your social media communications strategy.

1. Create a Calendar of Communication

Yes, of course the actual messages you post on your feed should be ‘human', but that doesn't mean they should be ad hoc and reactive. Instead put in place a strict calendar of what you'll say and when. Separate this into brand messages (this should be very rare, if at all - it's not a place for press releases!) and into topical conversation around your brand's typical habits. So for example, recognise that your consumer may need your product/service in the build up to the weekend, and therefore you should engage in this lead up during the decision making. Follow up after the weekend with content/conversations that allow them to review their weekend's activities.

2. Benchmark Against Competitors

Remember this is all about measurement, so benchmark against other brands and not just on the number of ‘likes' or ‘fans'. Instead, monitor the number of responses or comments one of their posts receives as compared with yours. Use this weighting to generate an understanding of what types of content engage your consumer more, and create more of these communications.

3. Write Like a Human Being

Your content must be concise, well copy-written and feel like your brand, but it shouldn't be brand messaging. It should feel natural, human and genuine. People will instantly disengage with a brand that's giving a hard sell. If you can't write this way, get a specialist to do this for you - it's imperative for the success of your social strategy.

4. Don't be Obsessed with Your Fan Page

With the new changes in Facebook, the entire web will become social. It's not about your fan page anymore, and that's one of the reasons you shouldn't rely on number of fans as a pure measure of success. Number of ‘likes' and comments for each of your actions is more valuable, and this will happen on content across the web - not just within the confines of Facebook.

5. Facebook is not the web

Facebook is not a replacement for everything. Remember MySpace? That was big once too, and even now, we're saying that Facebook is passing out Google in traffic terms. Things will continue changing, it's the ability to be aware of these changes and not place all your digital eggs in one social basket. That will allow you to stay engaged with your audience.