There's not merely buzz but outright din surrounding social media and how "everyone" is using it to win hearts and minds, and maybe even help grow business. It's reaching the stage where a false sense of urgency has been created: Act now or choke on everyone else's dust.
The time is right to make your move. But take pause to reframe your thinking about social media—away from the tactical ("How do I use Facebook and Twitter?"), and toward the strategic ("What role can/should social media play in my business?"). Doing so will ensure that instead of adding to the noise you're positioning your organization to win.
Tactical decisions regarding specific social media channels merely scratch the surface, whereas social media can have an impact on brands, marketing, and ultimately your entire business.
Accordingly, forward-thinking marketers should be considering questions such as "How does social media affect our brand?" "What is its influence on business goals?" "How do we create an appropriate social-media strategy?"
Addressing those questions requires marketers to first develop their understanding of the context for social media as a means to guide their strategies and, ultimately, their supporting tactics.
The Dialogue's the Thing
Social media is more than just a community such as Facebook or a platform such as a blog. It's emblematic of broad behavioral and cultural changes in the way we engage with one another.
Therefore, it's less about creating marketing opportunities and more about engaging people, above and beyond marketing. It's less about "buying" a presence through a new advertising channel and more about "earning" consideration as your brand and customers (and influencers) interact. And it's less about a short-term campaign and more about a sustained capability that's only going to grow in importance.
We've gone from talking at customers with traditional advertising to Internet-enabled, one-on-one customer interactions to what we at Prophet call the "Network Era." In it, everyone stands to be connected, which amplifies the power of the individual's voice.
Such a new, connected environment has created an explosion in stakeholders and influencers, with the dialogue among them the connecting fiber. The impetus, therefore, is on smart marketers to focus on social media strategies that will increase the number of network relationships in the marketplace—and so the number of people who are talking about your brand.
It's the dialogue that's more important, then, and not so much what takes place on your "owned" social-media properties such as your Facebook page or Twitter account. It's the dialogue you earn—the community's Facebook and blog posts, Tweets, Yelp—that wields unprecedented influence and credibility over your brand and marketing.
And therein lies the challenge to marketers in devising effective social-media strategies: Social media can't be controlled, it can only be influenced.
So Go Ahead and Influence
That's what Dell discovered the hard way in the mid-2000s, when the brand underwent immense public scrutiny via social media channels, and half of the conversations were negative. Bloggers and other social-media pundits—not Dell—were controlling the perceptions and the standing of Dell's brand.
That led Dell to adopt a social media strategy of developing owned channels, such as blogs and Twitter, as a means of participating in the dialogue and having some influence over its direction. Its crowdsourcing initiatives also provided a platform for engaging audiences in product and service improvements, and encouraging positive conversations.
By 2007, the negative dialogue had been halved, and today Dell is among the best at participating in social media, in a way that has allowed it to even develop a direct business impact through Twitter.
To be an effective participant, you must first understand how your internal and external audiences and their influencers use social media. You then need to set a goal for what you hope to achieve through social media in the context of your overall customer-engagement strategy. From there, your challenge is to craft a presence that's not only authentic and engaging but also in the service your business goals.
The goal might be to acquire new customers or do a better job of retaining current ones, or both. Or to cut costs. Or to build a brand.
Strategy Before Business Objectives
Here are three businesses that devised effective social media strategies to tackle specific business objectives.
Intuit
In building a "persuasion engine," software company Intuit sought to engage current customers and use their influence to sway prospects to use its popular TurboTax program.
It created its own community of users—a forum where they shared tips and could give a thumbs up or down on the ensuing conversations—and encouraged them to share and connect via popular channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
Among the results: The top user answered 50,000 questions viewed by 5 million people. Intuit also found that encouraging users to post to Facebook when they'd finished their taxes generated a four-times-higher engagement rate than that of traditional banner ads.
Lenovo
PC manufacturer Lenovo used a similar idea, creating a community to foster peer-to-peer computer support. But its endgame was less one of customer acquisition and retention, and more one of lowering costs.
The discussion groups, which staff and technology partners also joined as active participants, did the trick: Lenovo call center volume declined 20% in the year after the discussion groups were instituted.
Ford
For US automaker Ford, the challenge was building a brand—that of the Ford Fiesta—and overcoming perceptions among the younger generation that "Ford" is synonymous with "old folks."
Understanding the importance of personal referrals to the target audience, the automaker enlisted a cadre of influencers, loaning them new Fiestas to try out and encouraging them to share their experiences via both a Ford-owned online community and Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other non-owned platforms.
The viral spread was tremendous and positive, with more than 10,000 reservations for the car and a 10% conversion rate as millions of social-media impressions were racked up.
Metrics and Testing
All three of those businesses designed social media initiatives to meet specific business objectives. They also grounded those initiatives in appropriate metrics to help gauge their success—a critical component of any marketing effort, but especially so in an arena that's evolving and still largely unfamiliar territory to many marketers.
Success metrics can be social media-oriented (impressions and referring links, for example), business-based (new customers or revenue generated), or brand-based (awareness or consideration).
In fact, although some metrics will be more important than others (depending on the program's objective), it's helpful (even critical) to integrate them to understand the full impact. That's because lower-level metrics, such as impressions, influence higher-level metrics, such as revenues or brand awareness, which is better explained to the rest of the organization.
In addition, marketers would be well-advised to test their social media initiatives on a small scale. Because social media allows quick changes and quick reactions to those changes, it is one of the easiest mediums to test and learn. Then you need to rely on metrics to inform the direction of strategy adjustments and wider rollouts.
It's Not Late Yet
For all the hoopla, the social media train has not yet left the station. This new world is fast changing, offering myriad exciting opportunities to connect with customers and build your business and brand.
The trick is to be smart about it: Understand the new paradigm, and be prepared to step away from traditions to seize its potential.
Listen to who's talking about your brand and the tenor of the conversation. Understand that social media has implications across silos—it's not just a marketing or PR thing.
A cross-functional task force that draws on your employees' passions and understands your business needs will be essential to an effective strategy. And don't worry about taking baby steps as you test and learn the waters for larger initiatives.
That's how you go from adding to the din to actually leading the dialogue.
Also contributing to this article were Matt Daniels and Gabriela Henault.
