As social media’s importance in brand management becomes more and more apparent, I see a number of mistakes being made by many well-run organizations. I’ll address some of these errors over my next few blog posts.
Social media cannot be ignored
The first and most common mistake I see? Executive committees hiring interns in reaction to the revelation that social media cannot be ignored. My 16-year-old kid does Facebook, so let’s hire someone like him to get us on Facebook and Twitter—this seems to exemplify the thought process.
If your job is to manage social media, the importance of social media is apparent. However, if your job is to manage the brand and marketing strategy of a multi-million or multi-billion dollar company, whose success has been based on the ability to communicate effectively through print, radio, and TV—social media appears to be a nuisance that must be dealt with as inexpensively as possible.
Most ad execs are worried about sourcing traditional media as cost effectively and as efficiently as possible. They are agonizing about which agency to choose that can best represent their brand. They are shopping their vendors to ensure they are getting the best possible deal on traditional media production and placement. To them, social media is an annoying afterthought . . . why? Because it isn’t in the budget.
Don’t confuse value with cost
It’s easy to confuse the value of what you are doing with its cost; in other words, costs and value are not directly proportional. If your business spends $100 million a year on traditional marketing and PR and $5,000 on a summer intern for social media, it is reasonable to assume you should spend 0.005% ($5,000/$100,000,000) or six hours per year thinking about social media. However, social media can have a much greater impact (for better or worse) on your organization.
Ask HSBC, a bank serving customers all over the world, how social media destroyed their penalty-free checking program. Ask Zappos, the online shoe retailer, how social media helped define their company’s success.
Your brand is being defined by social media
Like it or not, your brand is being defined by what is happening in social media. You would never replace your ad agency with an intern. You would never hire an intern to source $100 million of ad buys. Why allow an intern to manage your presence in social media?
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Great points Jon. Companies have traditionally been slow to respond to trends in business that are not overly measurable. They either fail to recognize Social Media’s importance or worse, in my opinion, stick their foot into the water with one-way communication about their brand and fail to listen to the conversations already taking place.
Thanks Pete! You hit the nail on the head about one way communication. I think one of the most challenging things for companies to grasp is the notion that social media is not just another marketing channel for distributing their message… it requires joining a conversation instead of dictating one. It is hard to do, but the firms who get it are adding incredible value to their brand.
Nice post and pointing out HBC and Zappos in it. I think getting clients to not look at the dollar amount of what they are spending but see what the long term value can be of doing social media is important. Also getting them to understand they are being talked about online and being defined by what people are saying already is key.
As I told a potential gaming client this morning, it’s a marathon and not a sprint and we need to invest the time, money and people to reach your objectives and make sure we’re backed up by good research.