It's the Ends, Not the Means

A quick Google search can, for the most part, allow anyone to find the most common social media best practices. Everything from knowing your audience and goals to developing strategies and social media policies is information that’s easily available.  Sometimes these best practices become company mandates, but a combination of limited staffing, time and knowledge can lead to stagnation and not moving forward because they're just not feasible.

Simply put, best practices are sometimes too much to ask, and they may not be best for the business.

Best Practices Exist for a Reason

Don’t get me wrong. Best practices belong and are important. A solid social media strategy allows marketers to be more effective because they understand how they’re going to take action versus throwing out tactics to see what sticks. Internal social media policies allow businesses to protect their online reputations.

If social media marketing could be described with one word, one worthy candidate would be agile. No organization has the same needs or the same path to accomplish those needs, and best practices can be molded to meet those needs.

Moldable Best Practices in Action

Aimee Roundtree spoke at SXSW in a panel I attended called Big Social Media Results at Small Organizations.  In her panel she discussed real results being seen by businesses using social media without best practices.

One example, included #RiotCleanup, a hashtage campaign following the London riots to get local businesses running again. The movement was intended to mobilize users, and it attracted 50,000 volunteers before the hashtag was created. Essentially, the campaign developed and the purpose took hold after action got started.

Another example was @AnimalGeneralHospital, which empowers employees to provide an inside look into the hospital. When asked what their strategy is, there isn’t one. The staff isn’t formally trained. It’s just empowered to share the hospital’s story.

Responsible for the Business, Not Best Practices

In the end, it comes down to knowing what the business needs, and using best practices to define how they apply to the end goal. The standard may not be set by what others are doing. Businesses should hold themselves to their own standards and ensure that all internal stakeholders’ expectations are met. Focus on the end goal first. How it is accomplished is secondary, and it may mean choosing the best practices that apply and tweaking the ones that don’t.

Marketing Without the Platform

Imagine Facebook, Twitter and all social channels have disappeared. Poof. They’re gone. That mindset would go a long ways in helping marketers develop social media strategies that achieve objectives that move the business forward.

Social Media Marketing Is About Action

Social media marketing isn’t about media at all. It’s about behavior—either amplifying it, encouraging it or making it spread. The reason marketers use social media platforms for marketers should be driven by the desire to influence consumer behavior in one direction or another.

That behavior might be sharing a brand or service with a colleague, discovering your brand’s content over someone else’s, contributing thoughts or ideas to make the business better and so on. All of these behaviors exist in the offline world. Social media’s potential is amplifying the reach these behaviors can have and the speed in which they reach others.

A Facebook Liker means nothing. Another follower on Twitter is worth $0.00. One more YouTube view does nothing for the business. It’s the behavior that these channels can drive that has business benefits.

Don’t Be Driven by Platforms

A social media marketer’s job isn’t to establish a brand’s presence across multiple online properties. Anyone can do that. The job of social media marketing is the same as any other marketing channel—affect consumer behavior. Our job is to tell the brand’s story to the people who will care about it through the right channels. Platforms don’t affect behavior.

Social Strategies Marketers Can Learn from Facebook's Timeline Rollout

Facebook’s rollout of Timeline as part of the profile redesign has been deliberate, well thought out and well-executed. The social network has had its fair share of user backlash as its undergone redesigns in the past, and this rollout will certainly have its fair share of complainers who are simply adverse to change of any kind. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the approach has been smart, and marketers can learn from it.

An Opt-In Rollout

The effort started with Facebook allowing users to turn the Timeline feature on in December. It adopted an opt-in strategy, allowing users to activate when and if they chose to. When activated Facebook gave users a 7-day preview period to edit their Timeline settings, delete/add content and tweak to their preferences before it went live to their social connections.

What Marketers Can Learn: Social media movements are created when users are given control. Marketers can’t control the message in the social space. The best we can do is put the message out there in the most compelling way through the right channel.

Creating a “Me Too” Movement

The combination of a slow rollout and an opt-in strategy was smart because it created a rift within the Facebook community between the hip, cool Timeline users and the old profile users.

You can say what you will about Timeline, but you can’t say it doesn’t look good. Once a user sees it, he or she likely wants it. Creating this rift within the community allows Facebook to create what’s essentially a cycle of jealousy. One set of users sees the Timeline being used by others, they want it and they find out how they can sign up too.

What Marketers Can Learn: An element of exclusivity can play an effective role in building consumer participation. Whether that exclusivity is real (providing an exclusive deal or access to a segment of users) or fabricated, which is exactly what Facebook did, people will want to participate if they feel they’re being given something others aren’t.

Making It About Them

Last week Facebook announced that the final rollout phase of Timeline is underway. Within the next few weeks all users will be using the Timeline, so people who aren’t using it yet soon will be.

As addressed above, there’s bound to be a degree of user frustration with the change, but Facebook aims to change this.

It’s worked to create the Timeline Movie Maker, an app that creates a dynamic and engaging video depiction of a user’s Timeline similar to the video Facebook used to introduce Timeline (below) but custom to the user.

The result is a one-minute video capturing a user’s Facebook life from photos they’ve taken, changes in relationship statuses, events attended, places visited and so on. Once it’s created, users have the ability to edit and tweak the music and content used.

Then the magic of sharing happens. Users can post a video that’s all about them and share it with their Facebook friends.

What Marketers Can Learn: The social web isn’t about brands. It’s about consumers, and brands happen to be there.

The motivation behind a consumer sharing a brand, product and service with a friend on Facebook isn’t to help a brand. It’s because they get something from it. Whether that’s pumping up their ego, feeling good about helping others or showcasing their personality by associating it with a brand, the more marketers can make sharing about the consumer and not the brand, the more successful an effort will be.

Avoid the Platform Rut

It’s hard to believe, but one of the first (or even first) questions brands ask themselves and their agencies when it comes to social media is, “What should we be doing on Facebook/ Twitter/ YouTube/ etc.?” Social media has become such a buzzword amongst marketing teams that the questions around should social media be used by the company, what do we want to get from it and so on don’t even get asked and often don’t get answered until it’s too late. Instead of taking a strategic approach, social media becomes a platform checklist of marketing to-do’s.

This week Tumblr, the blogging platform and community network, announced that it reaches 120 million people every month and receives 15 billion page views per month. Users spend an average of 81.6 minutes on the site each month, which pales in comparison to Facebook’s 379 minutes. Still, it’s significant and growing rapidly. Another niche and growing website is Pinterest, a content curation service, has users that spend an average of 72 minutes with it per month. Those are just two examples. Other, more niche social networks like Path, Instagram, Reddit and others are gaining traction, users and user attention. This is only the beginning.

The landscape is changing… constantly. We can’t be lazy and just accept that there are mandatories when it comes to social media marketing. There aren’t. Everything is custom to the brand, the audience and the online conversation.

Do you find yourself in a social media rut, doing the same thing as everyone else just because you feel like you have to?

Be Where You Can Be Strongest

eMarketer reports that 70% of US marketers plan to increase their presence across social media platforms in 2012. Perhaps, this means a new presence on one of the standard platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), but it also means that others will be putting a stake in the ground on other platforms.

It’s important to not spread your brand too thin across multiple platforms. The right approach is investing in where your brand has the most potential, whether that’s one platform or a few. Don’t spread resources out so thin if it means being present in several places but not finding success in any.

Insights Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought

What should be driving decisions, insights, often come too late. We start to look for them after a decision’s been made. For example, the decision is made to get on Facebook, a page is created and then the question is asked around what the brand should be doing there. This is working backwards.

We can’t make a platform work if it’s doomed to fail. The platform should have potential to connect the brand with its customers before marketers even get started.

Brands need to be experts on their customers, not social media platforms.

Let the customers do the work, reveal the insights and drive social media decisions. Follow them and anticipate their behavior by what you know about them. If they can’t get enough of your Facebook photos, there may be opportunity to get on Instagram or to create a board they can follow on Pinterest.

People will use the platforms that give them what they want. They’re not going to create profiles on these platforms just because they feel like they have to. Marketers shouldn’t either.

My PathWe’re Heading Toward Fragmentation

The answers are only going to get harder.

It seems that anyone and everyone is on Facebook. However, that’s not going to be the case forever. Many people are searching for alternatives. Facebook may be one of many platforms they use on a regular basis. However, other networks may be where they get more value. Path sets itself apart by being a more limited social network. You’re there to connect with the people you love, close family and friends. How many of us can say our Facebook connections are that tight? Path could be where people get more value.

The luxury of having a single platform to find just about anyone may be coming to an end. People are looking for alternatives and brands should too.

Strategic Experimentation

eMarketer released some numbers this week revealing that marketers see 2012 as being the year they move beyond social media experimentation. 37.1% of marketers see it happening in 2012, 14.6% see it happening in 2014 and 5.6% see it happening later than 2015.

The idea of “experimenting” is starting to lose its flavor, particularly because marketers are starting to establish their footing in the social media space. 68.5% said that their increased understanding of the benefits of social media is one factor that’s pushing them beyond social media experimentation. Increased budget allocation toward social media marketing is another reason.

All of this is good news. Social media marketing is becoming more formalized, sophisticated and responsible for achieving business objectives. However, the need to experiment will always be ingrained in social media marketing.

The Need to Experiment Will Never Fade.

This year we saw the rise of social media platforms like Quora, Google+, Pinterest, Empire Avenue and countless others. 2011 was like many years before it. New platforms rose, while others fell. Already established social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube evolved in how users can access them and brands can leverage them.

In this kind of environment experimentation is essential. The only way brands can understand the ins and outs, pros/cons and specific executional needs is to experiment. Social media marketers need to feel the need and have the freedom to play with new tools, create accounts, test and learn and so on in an effort to understand a constantly evolving landscape.

Social media marketing looks very different today than it did one year ago, and it will likely look very different one year from now when we look back on 2012. Platforms are constantly evolving, being created and being destroyed. User attention is fickle, and it shifts from platform to platform quickly. Just look at the very swift downfall of MySpace.

Marketers who fail to experiment will also fail to be at the forefront of the next great marketing opportunity.

Strategic Experimentation

It’s fantastic to see social media marketing start to establish its role within organizations with more definition. Still, marketers need to have the flexibility to explore and try new things.

Be an Anthropologist

Marketers need to try new platforms to see how people are using them. Identify how people share, what degree of connection users have with each other (are they close, personal relationships or more distant), the methods in which people gain and establish influence and so on. 

The point is marketers should understand the differences between platforms and how they are being used. The best way to do this is to log-on and join. Play as a consumer to then execute as a marketer.

Be a Marketer

Never dismiss a platform without looking at it first. At the moment, Facebook is the de facto social media marketing platform of choice, but it wasn’t six years ago. Today, Facebook is pretty saturated with brands, making every brand presence a little less important. What’s the next opportunity to really stand out. Get on new platforms and look at their potential.

Identify marketing opportunities. Can your brand pay for advertising? How does advertising work? How could your brand establish a presence here if it wanted to? What kind of people use the platform? Are they your customers, or could they be?

Every evolution in social media is an opportunity. Some are bigger than others, and some may not be opportunities right away. Experiment to find what will work, what won’t and what has the potential to in the future.

Experimentation Evolves Marketing

Before social media, customer service was relegated to telephones, the store, the mail and eventually email (which is social media in many ways), but today, social media allows us to use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and so on to scale customer service. Marketers can now identify in real-time how customers are responding to their decisions. The effect social media has had on marketing is paramount.

This isn’t going to stop. The only constant is change, and marketers that invest in the tried and true will be successful in the short-term, but the marketers who will be poised for success in the long-term will continue to invest in what works today and experiment with what may work tomorrow.

Failure Is An Option

Earlier this year Ford took a chance by putting their Ford Fiesta in the hands of an orange puppet named Doug. Rude, sexist and always ready with a quick comment, Doug's “off color” enough to make any brand shy away, but with Ford’s support Doug has developed a kind of cult following with people excitedly watching, laughing at and sharing his online videos, while learning about the Ford Fiesta along the way.

Ford took a chance with Doug. Only Ford knows what Doug has done for its business, but the key here is Ford wasn’t afraid to take a chance and try something even though they were a little uncomfortable. They didn’t go out to create a viral sensation or to achieve maximum ROI. They went out to try something new, and you can bet they’ve learned from it and are continuing to.

Failure Is Inevitable.

Even though social media has been on the tip of every marketer's tongue for years, it’s still a bit of an enigma. Marketers aren’t completely sure how to budget for it, who should own it or what to do. Naturally, there’s going to be a trial-and-error element because no right answers necessarily exist. It's not black and white.

Behind every successful social media case study is a series of failed attempts. Many experiments will fail before the magic bullet is found. Plan for success, but don’t be surprised if failure is the result. That’s how businesses grow and develop their social expertise.

Try Strategically.

This doesn’t mean brands should just throw ideas at a wall and see what sticks. Strategic direction is essential even in trial-and-error situations. Knowing where your audience is, what you’re going to to do and how is the only way to know you’re trying something worth trying and making a potential mistake you can learn from.

Mitigate failures by aligning internally on who is responsible for social media management and how company associates should or shouldn’t use social media to represent the company. Be honest with customers. They’ll see right through anything that isn’t authentic. Be honest to keep your customers on your side. If you make a mistake, admit it.

Fail Your Way to Success.

No one hits a home run on his or her first swing. It takes practice, a couple of singles and the inevitable strikeouts. The important thing to remember is to never take failure off the table. Being open to failure means you’ll be able to take the necessary risks to find what works. Go forth, and fail.