2. Social command and control
Social media is not about control, it's about cooperation and engagement. Being truly engaged in social media means opening up to what others have to say about you and engaging them in an open, genuine conversation around your offerings.
Many companies just post canned corporate messages, regurgitated press releases, or talking points on their own blogs, Facebook profiles, YouTube pages, and so forth. This is simply advancing the same propaganda via another vehicle -- continuing to force-feed your messages to the market, not truly participating in social media.
Further, if you enter the social media space as a way to pacify concerns that someone is going to say something bad about your company, campaign, or brand, simply do a search on Google. If there are consumers, competitors, and the like who are going to speak poorly of you, the odds are they already are and won't respond well to a canned talking-points approach to social media. A wise MBA marketing professor once said, "You can't out-market a bad product." If you are going down this road, ask yourself why you feel your brand can't stand up to a truly interactive dialogue with customers?
Takeaway: What someone says about you is more important than what you say about yourself.
3. Social is the content and the campaign
Social media is about intersecting with people doing what is in their best interest, not yours or your company's. Requiring people to upload content that benefits only you and your brand is a recipe for disaster. When Sheraton (like many other brands) launched a user-generated content campaign to drive awareness, there was a clear disconnect between the idea and the result. In response to the call-to-action, only 703 videos were uploaded. However, most of these came from people not in the key target markets for Sheraton. With this poor targeting and response, the campaign saw minimal return.
This may be hard to swallow for some brands, but -- believe it or not -- customers are not waiting for your next campaign to create a video for you. In fact, only about 10 percent of the population enters contests. Those who will participate are motivated by the ease-of-entry, like simply giving basic information (not creating a video) or skill-based (creative content judged on merit) components of the campaign. A great counter-example to this is the "Win $57,000 make a commercial for Heinz Ketchup" campaign, which included a prize that was big enough to justify the effort.
The real question to ask yourself is what do you want from your customers? Heinz wanted a new crowd-sourced commercial to use in its campaign; Sheraton needed people doing the wave to get content for its microsite. Do you recognize the difference?
Takeaway: People are already motivated to do many different things. By identifying where their motivation intersects with yours, you can avoid creating a contrived campaign. However, if you are ready and able to compensate people for their effort, the likelihood of participation goes up exponentially.
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