Give Before You Get

Posted by Heidi Skinner / October 16, 2008 7:55 am 

“Make a Facebook Fan Page because it doesn’t cost anything. Create a YouTube Brand Channel to house your video assets – YouTube allows you to do it for free. Befriend 100 people on MySpace and create a Ning community because there are no fees…” If you’ve ever allowed yourself to say these things, please adjust your social media compass.

The expectation that social media tactics are free initiatives is a huge fallacy to both agencies and marketers. There are four reasons why a good influential marketing strategy should cost you money:

1. Focusing your scope costs money. Take the guess work out of social media by engaging a buzz monitoring tool. Before you decide on your brand’s approach, gain insight on the topics, tonality and volume of conversations around our brand before you get started. If not, you aren’t truly fishing where the fish are.

2. Creative development costs money. Don’t let your media planners decide on social placement without consulting the creative and technical teams – and vice versa. At Critical Mass, we’re changing the model to make sure the “how” and the “what” happen in tandem to make sure that we’re not hap-hazardly repurposing TV or traditional online media messaging. If content is the currency in this environment, we need invest in our message.

3. Getting people to talk to you costs money. Sites like Facebook and YouTube are so large that a great effort is needed to cut through the clutter. While standard banner buys aren’t the solution, a dedicated effort is needed to monitor and grow community-based conversations.

4. Tracking costs money. Because brand presence in social places has yet to be perfected, it’s imperative that we calculate risk, set benchmarks for both branding and quantitative study to be able to scale in the future.

Done correctly, influential marketing strategies aren’t cost-prohibitive, but we need to accept the fact that 100,000,000 new pieces of content are posted within the social sphere every week. To cut through the clutter, we need to start taking social media seriously. Be prepared to give before you get.

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  • http://blog.purevisibility.com/2008/07/osx-software-update-gives-you-only-inconvenient-choices/ Michael Beasley

    Right on. Acknowledging that using social media for marketing purposes does have a cost is important.

    To point #4, something that I’ve struggled with is that I don’t have a firm idea of what success looks like. I have ideas (how many people are following a blog, how many friends you have for your profile, etc.) but I’m still figuring out how to say “You spent X dollars and got y [metric]… therefore the project was a success.”

    Another big challenge I face (but not really the focus of your post) is making sure that there is a specific purpose to a social media effort rather than “Hey, we should be on MySpace! Other companies are doing it!”

  • http://www.insiteobjects.com Cristin

    Amen, sister. My company thinks I can immediately change focus overnight on marketing initiatives. Same holds true for the social media aspect. I literally gave myself days of headaches over searching through all that is available out there.

    I must admit, with all the chatter, there is a need to track and focus. Some of my best social work comes from maintaining memberships with my customers communities, and doing Web 2.0 initiatives like collective research papers, webinars, and open forums. It may not always lead to a sale but we have a fantastic reputation as knowledge experts who are willing to cross vendor lines to bring out the best information.

  • DevlinD

    Great post! It puts to rest the concept of “leveraging” social media for marketing where you expect to achieve great outcomes with little effort. You cannot “leverage” social media in that sense, you get out of it what you put in and technology doesn’t really change that. It just enables you to potentially get a lot better return because the tools make it seem like you are doing less.

    Unfortunately they still haven’t come up with AI that can effectively identify and engage influencers and hold intelligent conversations for you.

  • Heidi Skinner

    Hey, Michael-
    Success is a tough one to get a handle on. We’re finding it helpful to engage social monitoring technology to help us measure reach, affiliated topics and sentiment around our brands. Over time, collecting this data can show the impact of both offline advertising efforts, and influence marketing tactics. The technology also allows us to gauge our street cred. Have you used any, to-date? If so, I’d like to hear your opinion. It gets us closer to Devlin’s wish for AI and automation – That would be amazing.

  • http://redis4passion.com/2008/12/01/smart-is-as-a-smart-does/ smart is as a smart does. « Agents For Red

    [...] He doesn’t know it, but I’ve been silently stalking him for 8 months. Only online. On his blog… on twitter….So that’s not weird right? I’ve even started to follow the people he follows. [...]

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