Thoughts on Social Media

Social media has emerged as one of the hottest marketing trends of the past ten years, dominating marketing conversations and often times leaving marketers scratching their heads.  While social media is clearly an imperative part of one's marketing strategy, it is not the end-all be-all holy grail solution to marketing.  Social media is an effective means of communicating to the world, but marketers must utilize social media as a two-way street in order to gain the most benefit.

Today, social media comes in nearly countless forms. Popular platforms include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, FlickR, Pinterest, Google Places, Yelp, and FourSquare... just to name a few. New platforms are born every day, and marketers must scrutinize the platform to ensure it fits into the marketing strategy of the company.

Marketers use social media to accomplish a number of goals.  I believe the most common goal is to raise awareness about a company through a cheap, easy, and instant channel.  Social media content serves a number of purposes through this goal - it helps keep top of mind mentality in a customer's mind while catering that mentality with particular messages.  Social media is also used for publicity and also is put in place for the coolness factor.  Consumers look to social media to get more information about a company or product, and they usually make judgements about a company based on the amount of participation within certain platforms.  One of the most important goals for social media is to drive conversations with customers.  Social media should engage customers and be relationships focused in order to be lasting and successful. Customers certainly view interactions as a relationships, so marketers must be diligent to keep that relationship strong and relevant.   Social media is also a measure of a company's performance and often a great source of feedback.  Yet another goal of social media is to increase a company's SEO (search engine optimization.) The more places a company shows up on the internet will often lead to higher rankings in searches.

Depending on the size and needs of a company, social media teams can be hired or outsourced. Their roles are to manage the company reputation, respond to posts/comments/feedback, demonstrate a pro-activeness in engaging with customers, and creating a relationship with customers.

As a marketer, I want to know the "who/what/when/where/why/how" about my customer. To be specific, I will use my own business as an example. I can gather this through traditional means such as focus groups, observation, purchase behaviors, feedback forms, etc... Or I can gather it pretty quickly via social media.  By "who," I mean who are the people that are connecting with my company.  I want to know demographics of people interested in my company: where are they from, what do they do, do they typically buy my type of product, how old are they, what hobbies do they have, etc. This information is important when I think about segmenting, targeting, and positioning my products.  Next is the "what," meaning what messages are they saying through social media.  The what is particularly important when I am looking for feedback, response, insights, and opinions.  The "when" of when are potential customers interacting with my company is also important. Are they frequently interacting, or did they do it in response to something else. "Where" is also important - are social media users interacting while they are at work, at home during more leisurely time, while waiting in line at the grocery store, etc. I believe the "where" component not only connects places and influences with my company, but also shows how truly engaged they are with my social media content. "Why" is one of the most important pieces of information I want to know, as it shows a deeper insight into the reason someone is connecting with my company.  Finally, "how" answers the questions of what platforms they are using, the means in which they found my company, and any additional behavioral insights that help me better understand the potential customer.

When I consider the information about my customers that I want to gather from social media, the most important things are customer interactions and customer feedback.  Customer interactions show how engaged individual people are with my company over social media - this is important because it demonstrates how relevant my company is in the scheme of their online attention and shows whether or not they care enough about my company to be engaged.  Customer feedback helps me determine a number of things. Some feedback can help demonstrate where I am efficient and inefficient along the value chain. For instance "you guys take forever to ship" and "you never have my size" are good operational indicators.  Obviously, I prefer the more positive feedback, but I think the former is more productive.  I also use customer feedback to learn things about my product I didn't know, such as different uses and applications.  For instance, I learned that my cleaning wipes are great to clean oven grease.  The customer interactions and feedback are great indicators of engagement and activity.

One of the hardest parts of utilizing social media is collecting and analyzing the desired information from users.  In order to gather data in a way that is insightful and meaningful, marketers should incorporate metrics into their social media marketing plan.  Without them, there is often too much data to analyze and the process can be overwhelming. There are actually a number of tools that can help, such as Google Analytics, Google Reader, Facebook Analytics, Bazaarvoice, Spredfast, etc.  These tools help aggregate data and help a marketer search for trends and gain insights. 

Social media is a powerful marketing tool, and it can do amazing things for a company.  However, marketers must be cognizant that social media is a two-way conversation in which the response from users and customers is and equally important part to the content sent out by a company.