6. Adver-social
In social media, many marketers are puzzled by how to gauge the quality of the results achieved by a campaign. One method that has proven to be especially relevant in reflecting a program's success is the social media "superfecta." The superfecta consists of sales results, Google results, third-party endorsements, and user-generated content delivered by real people carrying the message in unison to other forums, venues and, ultimately, to more consumers.
When you place your message in a controlled environment like an ad box, you lose the potential for any of these four elements to occur. Additionally, you eliminate the opportunity for search engine optimization to drive traffic back to your site, which results in both driving up the cost and lowering the results of the campaign, versus engaging in real interaction with your audience and the blogs they read. Tricks like asking questions or giving information in an ad unit on a blog may look social to you, but in reality, they lack real third-party endorsement and rarely spur customers to pass the information along to other venues and forums.
Unless going this route supports other elements in a rich social media program, betting your entire social campaign on something that is far less than social in nature, like an ad box, limits your ability to engage bloggers and the online community.
Takeaway: Buying advertising space on social media sites doesn't return a quarter of the value you could be getting. Further, the costs of the campaign drive up the ROI bar you need to justify it.
7. Social = Social
Not all social media platforms are the same, just like not all marketing is the same. However, like with marketing campaigns, it is important to fully consider your goals, objectives, and what your company is ready for before entering the social media space. This assessment will help you determine the right technologies, approaches, and platforms to use based on your goals and ability to follow through.
Despite the presence of a handful of successful examples, corporate blogs or online corporate communities are not right for everyone and require a long-term commitment. However, should you decide to pursue this route, identifying a way to interact with your audience -- not just putting up talking points and press releases -- is critical to your success. A lot of blogs and Twitter channels focus on customer complaints, forcing these outlets to become reactive instead of proactive. While blogs and Twitter are both great for handling these customer issues, exposing the company's "dirty laundry" to potential customers is not the best way to get new customers, and clearly shows how one size does not fit all when it comes to social media.
Also, how you interact with the blogging community requires a very good understanding of the value of bloggers and their readers, both big and small. Targeting just the big bloggers guarantees you will miss key vertical markets, and it has proven to produce much thinner coverage, since the bigger sites have more content to work with and often resort to quickie posts to generate more news items and discussion topics. In addition, many of the bigger sites pick up content from the smaller ones by linking to them and their deeper posts. And isn't such deep, knowledgeable vertical treatment really what your product deserves?
Have you really thought about these things before jumping in or running your campaign? Or if you had to do it all over again from scratch, would you do it the same way? Most people would say no.
Takeaway: Social media sites, people, and applications have vastly differing capabilities. Random, unplanned usage of these tactics will deliver poor results.
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