Social media is no longer new. Years of experimentation have yielded the indisputable facts that this medium, somewhat uniquely, can attract customer in-bound participation better than anything else. Despite the fact that it has been around for years, social media has still not been well exploited by the great majority of businesses and government. Chances are you are not taking good advantage of it.
Why? Two reasons. First, the value proposition has not been clearly understood and that has certainly changed in 2015. Recent surveys show that most marketing teams “get it” and will be increasing social media spend. Two, and perhaps more important, is that tactical execution is poor and has failed to support overall strategies for social media success.
In most companies, the social media effort consists of a part-time effort by one or two marketing marketing team members. They will post to a few properties such as FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIN. New content is generated perhaps once per week. The most important activity is responding positively to specific complaints or negative themed activity. Retweets often abound. Regular emails to other corporate contributors reminding them to “keep posting.”
In the final analysis, the bright folks on the marketing team were not hired to post to social media all day long – they were hired to work on a multiplicity of marketing tasks of which social media is just one. Those that have hired an intern or two to support outbound social media in perhaps more volume quickly discovered that productivity was not what they expected. Volume was offset by boredom. Productivity offset by the constant need for content marketing oversight and correction. You need to understand the product, key messages, value proposition, market space and competition to do a basic job of generating social content in volume.
The Blogosphere is similarly a lost opportunity. Marketing team members are constantly working within the company to generate blog content, but these contributions are rarely on time and often poorly written. Most of the time corporate marketing team members just don’t have the product expertise to generate enough blog content. Going back and forth to internal contributors can take a long time. We have seen customer blog cycles where it can take 4 – 6 weeks to interview a participant, “ghost write” the blog, and then get edits and approval. This is just to get one blog done. Just one corporate blog. Just one. Most of the time, contributors miss commitments to deliver content in a timely way, if at all.
Your public relations team continues to charge many thousands of dollars per month to deliver media placements. Have you noticed how a growing percentage of these media hits are not in traditional horizontal or industry vertical publications with branding you recognize? Has your public relations team told you that your received coverage in a blog you might not recognize? Notice how they count it almost as important as the leading industry publications. Why? Because traditional publishers continue to fall by the wayside. Many have abandoned print publications. This is the trend. They have to spend the same valuable cycles convincing bloggers to cover you. Unlike the online blog and social media world, you could not “comment” online and deliver your message in response. Many of these blogs are tremendously important to the industry. They have to spend the same effort to give the bloggers contributed articles for placement. Of course, the major publications support user generated content and commentary on posted articles. A few years ago, your public relations firm needed to place coverage to counter good press received by a competitor. Today, the tactics available are far broader and more varied. I prefer not to call this public relations. I think the term new media relations fits the service much better.
Video has also emerged. A savvy nine year old can get his or her message out by creating an MP4 video and posting it to YouTube. Yet how many video’s has your company really produced? One? Two? Innovators today can easily produce several PER MONTH. This provides the material to drive social media and the blogosphere.
Social media as a service (SMAASH) changes all of this. You now have the ability to extend your team to bring in the social media expertise you need to deliver your message through every potential. They can turn it up in volume. They move your message and your brand identity front and center with your target audience. They can programmatically drive the essential and vital content creation required to fuel it all. Social media as a service can take a small venture funded company, in a busy space, and project your message delivery and visibility in volume equal to or exceeding that of billion dollar competitors. Social media as a service can help you deliver your message with precision, volume and intensity previously unavailable to you and your marketing team. You can now own and dominate keywords, visibility, search engine optimization and convert new leads into great prospects. It is a new digital marketing world, moving at lightspeed, and you need a social media as a service strategy to optimize your success in your market segment.
