Social media but an element of Engagement

August 5th, 2009

Tim Harrap, very kindly pointed me to lessons learn’t in social media by Dirk Shaw, (Great name)

Its good sound advice, common sense and obviously hard won. My view however is that Engagement as a principal co-joins social media with other stuff. Product design, traditional media, architecture, in fact all touch points where someone ‘engages’ with a brand, an organisation, an entity. My fear is that, social media gets siloed off, like; digital is different to mobile, sales is different to brand awareness etc., And so, organisations perpetuate the problem of how a business gets heard, and in fact how a business becomes, and remains, attractive in a fragmented media universe. Anyone reading this blog knows that I recognise that recent communication tools and capabilities, redefine the power relationships between individuals, brands, organisations and society. And yes, that is driven by digital communication technologies. Yet I wonder how many really understand why ‘social media” is a phrase on the lips of everyone? Why are these tools universally deployed and used? Why is it that many Americans use the term social media for the fixed Internet, and are very often unable to accomodate mobile? Why is it that media is such a widely used term where it is in fact; cooperation and communication, and, the quality of that communication that counts?

Engagement as an idea, and a principal, was and is, about the blending of communication media, new and old. There is no online and offline, only, blended reality. Its 3 dimensional, and its all about people. How people connect, how people communicate, what they communicate about, how they judge the quality of that communicattion and how people, derive and create meaning for themselves in those very connections. Into this we interject, or introduce commerce, but, the nature of commerce changes at certain points within this more connected and engaged universe. Companies like spotify, ebay, Amazon, google, cyworld, world of warcraft, the eden project, and indeed apple – all understand that the business model must make sense within the context of that particulat type of engagement.

And this is something that even today few are prepared to truly engage with. However, these are Dirks salient thoughts…

He writes,

Activity alone does not yield results. You get what your measure.
When trying to prove the value of the social media things like retweets, followers and fans don’t mean much to executive management. When demonstrating value make to sure to show how you had an impact on business goals that were around long before social media.

Think of social media as part of the marketing mix. It is not a silo
When planning product launches or outreach programs don’t “bolt on” social media to a traditional approach. Plan an integrated cross channel experience and know the role of each touch with the customer and how they work together. Each tactic in the mix can move people thru the infamous funnel. But they must work together.

It’s not the job of one person.
For large brands simply assigning a single person to “own” social media is not scalable. This is akin to saying one person can sell, market, support and build new products. Social media cuts across the organization and in many cases interactions started on social networks may require internal collaboration to act on. Brands need to formalize processes for responding, collecting insights and measuring.

The power of the influencer.
Social media allows word to spread farther and faster to an even greater number of people than ever before. It is essential to first identify who is influencing the purchases and then nurturing these relationships thru interactions and sharing of company direction. What I learned was how little many of the influential’s actually knew about what we were doing, simply because we had never reached out and shared it.

The need for an attribution model to assign value social media.
This is one of the tougher lessons as it implies a certain level of sophistication measuring digital marketing activities. In the more complex sale such as enterprise software it is not as easy to simply track a click from a tweet thru purchase. There are several steps that happen in between ranging from viewing website, product demos and on site meetings. But supposing the initiation of the lead came from a social channel how does it get “credit”. Creating an attribution model for social activity will help when justifying additional investments.

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