Your product sales and customer loyalty will also not be improved anymore by paying high-minded consultants high fees to berate your previous marketing campaigns and insist that only their proprietary (read: excessively expensive) methodology will work for you. Your customers are rejecting that kind of manipulation.

Celebrity endoresements? Press releases? Interactive advertising? SEO? Still effective methods to get your website seen, to be sure. They’re nothing to dismiss in your efforts for website visibility. But you want *more* than just to be seen, right? You want customers who are loyal to your brand, even when other companies slash prices. You want customers who are so excited about your product that they tell their friends. And their friends, in turn, tell their friends. Ultimately, you want more sales, more consistently, with less expense on your part. You want the promise of Social Media Marketing. But leveraging Social Media to reach concrete business metrics is a mystery to most companies still.

Your customers ignore marketing messages and refuse to be manipulated — but that’s what traditional marketing is built on. So how do you use Social Media to reach your customers with the message they want to hear? The message they want to respond to?

I’ve consulted businesses in the area of social media strategy, and what follows are some of the most common (and easily solved) concerns about social media marketing I hear.

Mystery #1
“We created a blog and our own social media network, signed up for other popular networks and blast our specials to our “Friends” but our sales haven’t really improved. In fact, we sometimes even get hostile reactions to our offers. What gives? We’re just trying to help.”

Mystery #2
“We got celebrity endorsement for our product, set up a website with a blog, do SEO and PPC, but our online sales are still flat. The product really moves when customers who love the product tell their friends about it. We’re thinking of going into an MLM model.”

Mystery #3
“Social Media Marketing is a fad and it doesn’t bring in revenues. We’re just focusing on improving our search engine rankings, and we think that’s enough. We’re only getting into social media marketing because our strongest competitor is, and we have to stay competitive.”

In my next post, I’ll share some of the advice I gave the companies who made these mysterious statements above, and give some anecdotal results of improvements made when implementing a solid social media marketing strategy.

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There has been a lot of social media hype. And in the midst of which, a shift has taken place in the online world that some corporations are slow to adapt to. Traditional push marketing under the guise of pull marketing just doesn’t work with social media. Corporations need to understand the rules of social media marketing already.

It’s not a matter of simply throwing money at the social media scene, making a few blogs, writing shite articles — not blog posts, but articles — basically pushing their message on the social media scene and expecting it to monetize for them. It doesn’t work that way. Not anymore.

Enterprise needs to finally figure out that they don’t have control of their brand online. If they want to regain control of their brand, it’s not about the quick fix. They have to refocus and listen. It’s about taking time to find out who the influencers in their industry are, joining in with them, and becoming a viable part of a community. Then, and only then, by participating in the community will they have an opportunity to become an influencer themselves, to leverage the real relationships they’ve worked to develop, and truly meet the core needs/wants of their customers. Only then will they be able to manage any bad reputation buzz in social media networks by being a trusted community member that deals head on with negative customer experiences. Only then can they make a real difference in their customer’s experience with their company. And only then will they start to understand the power-sharing of their brand through social media.

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