Marketing 2.0 - focus on the “SOCIAL” in social media
Many companies focus primarily on the “media” part of social media - should our CEO blog, do we need a blogging policy, do we need wikis for our customers, etc. That is why many marketing 2.0 strategies based on social media fail.
The most important aspect of social media is leveraging the social component within your relationships with customers and employees - not the media part. If you can get customers and employees to help you based on their social framework, then you will unleash a power that will be hard to stop. If you put the human back into your customer and employee relationships, then you will experience huge transformations in how people deal with you.
Just like you don’t start communities by looking at technology first, you should not embark in social media initiatives by looking at the media opportunities first - it’s all about letting the social element within relations flourish.
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May 27th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Short but sweet. Even only reading the first part, I reflected on the comment and immediately drew the association to an overfocus on technology — and there you did too.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I was just talking with someone the other day about how some businesses (including some newspapers) put all sorts of money into the “back end,” thus leaving very little for the community part. Then there’s all sorts of wringing of hands when the community becomes “uncivil.” Software only facilitates–it’s people, both inside and outside the organization, that make up the community.
May 27th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Picking up on tish’s comment, part of the educational process, for those of us offering technology solutions, has to involve being clear in telling companies that managing the social processes is going to take time, i.e. people, i.e. a budget provision, not just for the hardware and software. It will also require helping companies understand that the payoff is unlikely to be immediate, or at least immediately obvious. Very “campaign focused” companies, whether agencies or their clients, find this hard to grasp, except perhaps at a theoretical level.