By Laura Morris
We’ve been really busy the last few days presenting results of the Social Media Opportunity Diagnostic to member companies. Two things strike me about these conversations:
- An enormous amount of risk aversion to investing in social media: Having a Facebook page doesn’t mean you’re investing in social media. Real investment means not just money, but people, time and political capital. Many marketers veer away from conversations about ROI and default to not thinking about it until they have to. Even a simple test & control experiment would be a great place to start.
- Low levels of understanding (or acceptance) about the creative power of the medium: Are you thinking carefully about how social media could be used to move customers through the purchase funnel? Or how to use social media to compress the purchase cycle altogether? One company I spoke with was thinking innovatively about using Twitter as a pre-sales tool, to get a specific segment of customers interested in a new product they were launching before the sales person’s visit.
The pressure to show immediate ROI is stifling innovative use of social media. Many companies are defaulting to some dangerous combination of a Facebook page, Twitter account or You Tube without thinking through the implications on their brand and customer experience. One marketer I spoke with works on a luxury brand and is struggling with how their exclusivity could be balanced (or compromised) with the open nature of social media – did they want to go invitation-only like Mercedes-Benz? Or create a fan page on Facebook a la Versace? How should they even start to make that evaluation? (for a great post on luxury brands and social marketing see here).
See my colleague’s post on using social media to take your brand places your competitors can’t follow, or have a look at how one movie studio is using social media + locality to build demand in a creative way.
Additionally, MLC members can listen to a replay of the Council’s webinar, Building Your Social Media Strategy, for ideas on how to boost the strategic impact of your social media experiments.
Related posts:
- The Social Media Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making
- With Social Experience, Be Different…in a Way That Few Can Follow
- Nothing to Lose But Your Chains: Touchpoint Planning in the Social (Media) Revolution
- Paranormal Marketing: How Social Media Created an Indie Hit
- Be a Better Listener: Three Things You Should Be Paying Attention to Online
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