Social media: Small Slice of a Big Pie
3 Apr
There’s so much buzz around the term “social media” lately. People seem to be obsessed with social media, Facebook fans, Twitter followers and the “killing” of traditional media. People and brands have become obsessed with adopting social media as their sole marketing strategy. Unfortunately, people presume social media = solely the newest social network (ie: Twitter). What they sometimes don’t always know is that there is so much more to social media.
Social media is an essential part of marketing, but social media has many parts. Social networks are a small part of social media. As a brand, you ought to be learning and adopting social media into your marketing/communications/community outreach plan. Keep up with all the evolving web strategies but weave them into your traditional marketing/PR strategies when appropriate. Know how you can tie your social web presence together to effectively communicate with your online community. Make you sure you understand how social media also ties into customer service, SEM, SEO, content creation and even basic web development (amongst many other things). Simply starting a blog on WordPress.com will not be effective if the bigger picture isn’t considered. Starting a Twitter account and following everyone you think might be interested in your new product and calling that your “new media campaign” won’t cut it either.
Having an understanding of social media really is will enable you to set your goals and achieve results. Social media is a multi-faceted approach to B2C communications. If you know this and understand how your customers prefer to communicate with you, you’ll do great on the social web. Lastly, if you don’t have someone who is knowledgeable in social media or digital strategy, please hire someone. And by someone, I don’t mean a summer intern to tweet on your behalf or upload videos to your YouTube account.
