4. Social prostitution
The main motivation behind launching a social media campaign is to achieve a key component for driving sales -- third-party endorsements. If you try to deceive, your audience will find out. Much like in romantic relationships, the benefit of creating legitimate relationships comes from the growth and connection you develop with your significant other, which, in this case, is your audience.
Eliminating these relationship components from your social media campaign by paying bloggers (pay-per-post) to do your bidding is one way to show the world you cannot be trusted, even if you disclose that the content is sponsored. Remember, it is called "social" media and thus requires that you be genuinely social to get real results.
Should the threat of honest assessment in social media prove greater than the potential benefits of engaging your audience in an honest conversation about your products, brands, or company? Remember our previous point: If someone's going to say something bad about you online, odds are they already are.
If you are considering paying for blog posts, ask yourself these two questions:
- Why do you think you need to pay someone to talk about your product? Is it that bad? In other words, will honest assessments hurt us as a company or brand?
- What are you going to do about the backlash when people start questioning your product or motivation for pay-for-post when they find out? (And eventually they will.)
Takeaway: Money isn't the best social currency; relationships and knowledge are.
5. Social is PR
Social media is too big for one department. By defining social media in a purely public relations or communications capacity, it limits the scope of your campaign. Keep in mind that in employing social media, there are functionalities and benefits to other departments (e.g. product development, service and support, research), so include those departments as ways to deepen and continue your engagement with consumers. Your audience wants to know more about you than just what you're selling; they want to know about what you do, who does it, and how you do it.
One way to ensure you avoid the pitfall of operating social media in a silo is to ask yourself who else in the organization should participate, and how else can you leverage your social presence beyond just product launches and news events?
Takeaway: PR is great for news and launches, but social media creates the ongoing and sustained interest between news and launches.
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