Social Media Spin

Image by Lud­wig Gatzke via Flickr

Do you have social net­work pro­files that you just can’t seem to keep up with? If so, I’ve got a lit­tle story to tell you. A recent client of mine, a small cor­po­ra­tion, once had an employee who cre­ated social net­work pro­files all over the inter­net. This employee finally moved on to other things after 2 years, but left the CEO with no idea exactly where the company’s social net­work pro­files were reg­is­tered, or how to man­age them.

Here’s how it all started. This cor­po­ra­tion is very human­is­tic and com­mu­nica­tive, but since it’s also a startup, funds are tight and they hired interns to take care of the ‘non-​​critical’ social media mar­ket­ing. They def­i­nitely had a lot on their plate and didn’t really know where to start, so they took the scat­ter­graph approach and cre­ated pro­files at as many social net­works as they could find. I know some of you are already start­ing to feel the pain…

After a cou­ple of years of this, they were see­ing no results and brought me in to work with their team. I started by look­ing at all of their social net­work pro­files. I used a social media mon­i­tor­ing and analy­sis tool to find out exactly what was hap­pen­ing with their brand, and the kind of com­mu­niques their employee had put on social networks.

What I found is that in almost 2 years, most of their social net­work pro­files were aban­doned. There was some spotty engage­ment in Face­book and a busi­ness com­mu­nity, but for the most part, as far as these social net­works could tell, the com­pany might as well be out of busi­ness for all the inter­ac­tion it had with the com­mu­ni­ties it was a mem­ber of.

But what’s the real cost to a com­pany of keep­ing these social pro­files active? Or more specif­i­cally, what’s the cost of allow­ing them to go dormant?

In work­ing with this client, we iden­ti­fied 3 spe­cific dif­fi­cul­ties aban­doned social net­work pro­files caused for this company:

1. Missed Oppor­tu­ni­ties: This com­pany was proac­tive in their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, and included their Face­book, LinkedIn and Twit­ter pro­files on their busi­ness cards. But they didn’t include social media in their com­mu­ni­ca­tions strat­egy, and there­fore lost busi­ness due to their lack of engage­ment. In a very uncom­fort­able meet­ing one day, we read the com­ments cus­tomers left for them in var­i­ous social net­works when they first reg­is­tered. When these ques­tions went unan­swered, there was a quick drop in inter­est, and as expected, no addi­tional cus­tomer communication.
2. Sul­lied Rep­u­ta­tion: As much as the CEO thought the com­pany was doing busi­ness the Web 2.0 way, the employee in charge of social media was really unclear about his role. Cor­po­rate social media is more about cus­tomer ser­vice and com­mu­ni­ca­tion than it is about shar­ing news arti­cles in Digg and Red­dit.  2 years after the ini­tial social net­work pro­file cre­ation, we found that this employee thought social media mar­ket­ing meant that he should spend his time favorit­ing funny arti­cles in Red­dit and Digg than pro­vid­ing solid cus­tomer ser­vice in social net­works and com­mu­nity build­ing through the blog.
3. Expense: This small cor­po­ra­tion couldn’t han­dle their social media man­age­ment in-​​house because they weren’t sure if all of the company-​​branded pro­files out there were really theirs or not. They had a lot of cleanup to do and real­ized that hir­ing a pro to work with their team was the only way to fix it. As we worked through the mess, we found even more issues that were a bit eas­ier to deal with, but their loss in pro­duc­tiv­ity and money was significant.

In my expe­ri­ence of work­ing with com­pa­nies ready to develop and imple­ment social media, social media lit­er­acy is crit­i­cal to suc­cess. This list defines the ABCs of social media literacy:

• Assess­ment: Always start with an assess­ment of your company’s social media readi­ness before you jump in. An assess­ment should build on the foun­da­tion of your busi­ness objec­tives and com­pany culture. You’ll want to assess your strengths and weak­nesses in Lead­er­ship, Inno­va­tion, Engage­ment. You’ll need to ascer­tain the com­pet­i­tive land­scape and learn if other com­pa­nies in your indus­try are suc­cess­fully using social media in their cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions and marketing.
• Buzz: Do your research. Find out what peo­ple are say­ing about your busi­ness or prod­ucts, and find out what they’re also say­ing about your com­peti­tors. It’s easy to let this project engulf you, so break it down with tools. Some pop­u­lar ones are Google Alerts, Techrigy, and Radian6.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion: The real value in social media for busi­ness lies in how it’s bro­ken down com­mu­ni­ca­tion bar­ri­ers between cus­tomers and com­pa­nies. The lat­est tools and trends, the lat­est apps, and every­thing that peo­ple are talk­ing about indi­cates how people’s pref­er­ences for how they want to com­mu­ni­cate is shift­ing. It’s your job to stay fairly updated on these things. You’ll notice that a “social media cam­paign” is not at all sim­i­lar to a tra­di­tional media cam­paign. You can’t just give it to the agency and for­get about it. Don’t stay cur­rent, stay ahead.